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The wisdom of Father Brown

by G. K. Chesterton · English · Gutenberg #223 · 418,941 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The wisdom of Father Brown

Author: G. K. Chesterton


        
Release date: February 1, 1995 [eBook #223]
                Most recently updated: September 24, 2026

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/223

Credits: Produced by Martin Ward, and David Widger


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




THE WISDOM OF FATHER BROWN

By G. K. Chesterton



To

LUCIAN OLDERSHAW



CONTENTS


     1.  The Absence of Mr Glass
     2.  The Paradise of Thieves
     3.  The Duel of Dr Hirsch
     4.  The Man in the Passage
     5.  The Mistake of the Machine
     6.  The Head of Caesar
     7.  The Purple Wig
     8.  The Perishing of the Pendragons
     9.  The God of the Gongs
     10. The Salad of Colonel Cray
     11. The Strange Crime of John Boulnois
     12. The Fairy Tale of Father Brown





ONE -- The Absence of Mr Glass


THE consulting-rooms of Dr Orion Hood, the eminent criminologist and
specialist in certain moral disorders, lay along the sea-front at
Scarborough, in a series of very large and well-lighted french windows,
which showed the North Sea like one endless outer wall of blue-green
marble. In such a place the sea had something of the monotony of a
blue-green dado: for the chambers themselves were ruled throughout by a
terrible tidiness not unlike the terrible tidiness of the sea. It must
not be supposed that Dr Hood’s apartments excluded luxury, or even
poetry. These things were there, in their place; but one felt that they
were never allowed out of their place. Luxury was there: there stood
upon a special table eight or ten boxes of the best cigars; but they
were built upon a plan so that the strongest were always nearest the
wall and the mildest nearest the window. A tantalus containing three
kinds of spirit, all of a liqueur excellence, stood always on this table
of luxury; but the fanciful have asserted that the whisky, brandy, and
rum seemed always to stand at the same level. Poetry was there: the
left-hand corner of the room was lined with as complete a set of
English classics as the right hand could show of English and foreign
physiologists. But if one took a volume of Chaucer or Shelley from that
rank, its absence irritated the mind like a gap in a man’s front teeth.
One could not say the books were never read; probably they were, but
there was a sense of their being chained to their places, like the
Bibles in the old churches. Dr Hood treated his private book-shelf as
if it were a public library. And if this strict scientific intangibility
steeped even the shelves laden with lyrics and ballads and the tables
laden with drink and tobacco, it goes without saying that yet more
of such heathen holiness protected the other shelves that held the
specialist’s library, and the other tables that sustained the frail and
even fairylike instruments of chemistry or mechanics.

Dr Hood paced the length of his string of apartments, bounded--as the
boys’ geographies say--on the east by the North Sea and on the west by
the serried ranks of his sociological and criminologist library. He was
clad in an artist’s velvet, but with none of an artist’s negligence; his
hair was heavily shot with grey, but growing thick and healthy; his face
was lean, but sanguine and expectant. Everything about him and his room
indicated something at once rigid and restless, like that great northern
sea by which (on pure principles of hygiene) he had built his home.

Fate, being in a funny mood, pushed the door open and introduced into
those long, strict, sea-flanked apartments one who was perhaps the most
startling opposite of them and their master. In answer to a curt but
civil summons, the door opened inwards and there shambled into the room
a shapeless little figure, which seemed to find its own hat and umbrella
as unmanageable as a mass of luggage. The umbrella was a black and
prosaic bundle long past repair; the hat was a broad-curved black hat,
clerical but not common in England; the man was the very embodiment of
all that is homely and helpless.

The doctor regarded the new-comer with a restrained astonishment, not
unlike that he would have shown if some huge but obviously harmless
sea-beast had crawled into his room. The new-comer regarded the doctor
with that beaming but breathless geniality which characterizes a
corpulent charwoman who has just managed to stuff herself into an
omnibus. It is a rich confusion of social self-congratulation and bodily
disarray. His hat tumbled to the carpet, his heavy umbrella slipped
between his knees with a thud; he reached after the one and ducked
after the other, but with an unimpaired smile on his round face spoke
simultaneously as follows:

“My name is Brown. Pray excuse me. I’ve come about that business of the
MacNabs. I have heard, you often help people out of such troubles. Pray
excuse me if I am wrong.”

By this time he had sprawlingly recovered the hat, and made an odd
little bobbing bow over it, as if setting everything quite right.

“I hardly understand you,” replied the scientist, with a cold intensity
of manner. “I fear you have mistaken the chambers. I am Dr Hood, and my
work is almost entirely literary and educational. It is true that I have
sometimes been consulted by the police in cases of peculiar difficulty
and importance, but--”

“Oh, this is of the greatest importance,” broke in the little man called
Brown. “Why, her mother won’t let them get engaged.” And he leaned back
in his chair in radiant rationality.

The brows of Dr Hood were drawn down darkly, but the eyes under them
were bright with something that might be anger or might be amusement.
“And still,” he said, “I do not quite understand.”

“You see, they want to get married,” said the man with the clerical hat.
“Maggie MacNab and young Todhunter want to get married. Now, what can be
more important than that?”

The great Orion Hood’s scientific triumphs had deprived him of many
things--some said of his health, others of his God; but they had not
wholly despoiled him of his sense of the absurd. At the last plea of the
ingenuous priest a chuckle broke out of him from inside, and he threw
himself into an arm-chair in an ironical attitude of the consulting
physician.

“Mr Brown,” he said gravely, “it is quite fourteen and a half years
since I was personally asked to test a personal problem: then it was
the case of an attempt to poison the French President at a Lord Mayor’s
Banquet. It is now, I understand, a question of whether some friend of
yours called Maggie is a suitable fiancee for some friend of hers called
Todhunter. Well, Mr Brown, I am a sportsman. I will take it on. I will
give the MacNab family my best advice, as good as I gave the French
Republic and the King of England--no, better: fourteen years better. I
have nothing else to do this afternoon. Tell me your story.”

The little clergyman called Brown thanked him with unquestionable
warmth, but still with a queer kind of simplicity. It was rather as
if he were thanking a stranger in a smoking-room for some trouble in
passing the matches, than as if he were (as he was) practically thanking
the Curator of Kew Gardens for coming with him into a field to find a
four-leaved clover. With scarcely a semi-colon after his hearty thanks,
the little man began his recital:

“I told you my name was Brown; well, that’s the fact, and I’m the
priest of the little Catholic Church I dare say you’ve seen beyond those
straggly streets, where the town ends towards the north. In the last and
straggliest of those streets which runs along the sea like a sea-wall
there is a very honest but rather sharp-tempered member of my flock, a
widow called MacNab. She has one daughter, and she lets lodgings, and
between her and the daughter, and between her and the lodgers--well, I
dare say there is a great deal to be said on both sides. At present she
has only one lodger, the young man called Todhunter; but he has given
more trouble than all the rest, for he wants to marry the young woman of
the house.”

“And the young woman of the house,” asked Dr Hood, with huge and silent
amusement, “what does she want?”

“Why, she wants to marry him,” cried Father Brown, sitting up eagerly.
“That is just the awful complication.”

“It is indeed a hideous enigma,” said Dr Hood.

“This young James Todhunter,” continued the cleric, “is a very decent
man so far as I know; but then nobody knows very much. He is a bright,
brownish little fellow, agile like a monkey, clean-shaven like an actor,
and obliging like a born courtier. He seems to have quite a pocketful of
money, but nobody knows what his trade is. Mrs MacNab, therefore (being
of a pessimistic turn), is quite sure it is something dreadful, and
probably connected with dynamite. The dynamite must be of a shy and
noiseless sort, for the poor fellow only shuts himself up for several
hours of the day and studies something behind a locked door. He declares
his privacy is temporary and justified, and promises to explain before
the wedding. That is all that anyone knows for certain, but Mrs MacNab
will tell you a great deal more than even she is certain of. You know
how the tales grow like grass on such a patch of ignorance as that.
There are tales of two voices heard talking in the room; though, when
the door is opened, Todhunter is always found alone. There are tales of
a mysterious tall man in a silk hat, who once came out of the sea-mists
and apparently out of the sea, stepping softly across the sandy fields
and through the small back garden at twilight, till he was heard talking
to the lodger at his open window. The colloquy seemed to end in a
quarrel. Todhunter dashed down his window with violence, and the man in
the high hat melted into the sea-fog again. This story is told by the
family with the fiercest mystification; but I really think Mrs MacNab
prefers her own original tale: that the Other Man (or whatever it is)
crawls out every night from the big box in the corner, which is kept
locked all day. You see, therefore, how this sealed door of Todhunter’s
is treated as the gate of all the fancies and monstrosities of the
‘Thousand and One Nights’. And yet there is the little fellow in his
respectable black jacket, as punctual and innocent as a parlour clock.
He pays his rent to the tick; he is practically a teetotaller; he is
tirelessly kind with the younger children, and can keep them amused
for a day on end; and, last and most urgent of all, he has made himself
equally popular with the eldest daughter, who is ready to go to church
with him tomorrow.”

A man warmly concerned with any large theories has always a relish
for applying them to any triviality. The great specialist having
condescended to the priest’s simplicity, condescended expansively. He
settled himself with comfort in his arm-chair and began to talk in the
tone of a somewhat absent-minded lecturer:

“Even in a minute instance, it is best to look first to the main
tendencies of Nature. A particular flower may not be dead in early
winter, but the flowers are dying; a particular pebble may never be
wetted with the tide, but the tide is coming in. To the scientific eye
all human history is a series of collective movements, destructions or
migrations, like the massacre of flies in winter or the return of birds
in spring. Now the root fact in all history is Race. Race produces
religion; Race produces legal and ethical wars. There is no stronger
case than that of the wild, unworldly and perishing stock which we
commonly call the Celts, of whom your friends the MacNabs are specimens.
Small, swarthy, and of this dreamy and drifting blood, they accept
easily the superstitious explanation of any incidents, just as they
still accept (you will excuse me for saying) that superstitious
explanation of all incidents which you and your Church represent. It is
not remarkable that such people, with the sea moaning behind them
and the Church (excuse me again) droning in front of them, should put
fantastic features into what are probably plain events. You, with your
small parochial responsibilities, see only this particular Mrs MacNab,
terrified with this particular tale of two voices and a tall man out of
the sea. But the man with the scientific imagination sees, as it
were, the whole clans of MacNab scattered over the whole world, in its
ultimate average as uniform as a tribe of birds. He sees thousands
of Mrs MacNabs, in thousands of houses, dropping their little drop of
morbidity in the tea-cups of their friends; he sees--”

Before the scientist could conclude his sentence, another and more
impatient summons sounded from without; someone with swishing skirts was
marshalled hurriedly down the corridor, and the door opened on a young
girl, decently dressed but disordered and red-hot with haste. She had
sea-blown blonde hair, and would have been entirely beautiful if her
cheek-bones had not been, in the Scotch manner, a little high in relief
as well as in colour. Her apology was almost as abrupt as a command.

“I’m sorry to interrupt you, sir,” she said, “but I had to follow Father
Brown at once; it’s nothing less than life or death.”

Father Brown began to get to his feet in some disorder. “Why, what has
happened, Maggie?” he said.

“James has been murdered, for all I can make out,” answered the girl,
still breathing hard from her rush. “That man Glass has been with him
again; I heard them talking through the door quite plain. Two separate
voices: for James speaks low, with a burr, and the other voice was high
and quavery.”

“That man Glass?” repeated the priest in some perplexity.

“I know his name is Glass,” answered the girl, in great impatience.
“I heard it through the door. They were quarrelling--about money, I
think--for I heard James say again and again, ‘That’s right, Mr Glass,’
or ‘No, Mr Glass,’ and then, ‘Two or three, Mr Glass.’ But we’re talking
too much; you must come at once, and there may be time yet.”

“But time for what?” asked Dr Hood, who had been studying the young
lady with marked interest. “What is there about Mr Glass and his money
troubles that should impel such urgency?”

“I tried to break down the door and couldn’t,” answered the girl
shortly, “Then I ran to the back-yard, and managed to climb on to the
window-sill that looks into the room. It was all dim, and seemed to be
empty, but I swear I saw James lying huddled up in a corner, as if he
were drugged or strangled.”

“This is very serious,” said Father Brown, gathering his errant hat and
umbrella and standing up; “in point of fact I was just putting your case
before this gentleman, and his view--”

“Has been largely altered,” said the scientist gravely. “I do not think
this young lady is so Celtic as I had supposed. As I have nothing else
to do, I will put on my hat and stroll down town with you.”

In a few minutes all three were approaching the dreary tail of the
MacNabs’ street: the girl with the stern and breathless stride of the
mountaineer, the criminologist with a lounging grace (which was
not without a certain leopard-like swiftness), and the priest at an
energetic trot entirely devoid of distinction. The aspect of this edge
of the town was not entirely without justification for the doctor’s
hints about desolate moods and environments. The scattered houses stood
farther and farther apart in a broken string along the seashore; the
afternoon was closing with a premature and partly lurid twilight; the
sea was of an inky purple and murmuring ominously. In the scrappy
back garden of the MacNabs which ran down towards the sand, two black,
barren-looking trees stood up like demon hands held up in astonishment,
and as Mrs MacNab ran down the street to meet them with lean hands
similarly spread, and her fierce face in shadow, she was a little like a
demon herself. The doctor and the priest made scant reply to her shrill
reiterations of her daughter’s story, with more disturbing details
of her own, to the divided vows of vengeance against Mr Glass for
murdering, and against Mr Todhunter for being murdered, or against
the latter for having dared to want to marry her daughter, and for not
having lived to do it. They passed through the narrow passage in the
front of the house until they came to the lodger’s door at the back,
and there Dr Hood, with the trick of an old detective, put his shoulder
sharply to the panel and burst in the door.

It opened on a scene of silent catastrophe. No one seeing it, even for a
flash, could doubt that the room had been the theatre of some thrilling
collision between two, or perhaps more, persons. Playing-cards lay
littered across the table or fluttered about the floor as if a game had
been interrupted. Two wine glasses stood ready for wine on a side-table,
but a third lay smashed in a star of crystal upon the carpet. A few feet
from it lay what looked like a long knife or short sword, straight, but
with an ornamental and pictured handle, its dull blade just caught a
grey glint from the dreary window behind, which showed the black trees
against the leaden level of the sea. Towards the opposite corner of
the room was rolled a gentleman’s silk top hat, as if it had just been
knocked off his head; so much so, indeed, that one almost looked to see
it still rolling. And in the corner behind it, thrown like a sack of
potatoes, but corded like a railway trunk, lay Mr James Todhunter,
with a scarf across his mouth, and six or seven ropes knotted round his
elbows and ankles. His brown eyes were alive and shifted alertly.

Dr Orion Hood paused for one instant on the doormat and drank in the
whole scene of voiceless violence. Then he stepped swiftly across the
carpet, picked up the tall silk hat, and gravely put it upon the head
of the yet pinioned Todhunter. It was so much too large for him that it
almost slipped down on to his shoulders.

“Mr Glass’s hat,” said the doctor, returning with it and peering into
the inside with a pocket lens. “How to explain the absence of Mr Glass
and the presence of Mr Glass’s hat? For Mr Glass is not a careless man
with his clothes. That hat is of a stylish shape and systematically
brushed and burnished, though not very new. An old dandy, I should
think.”

“But, good heavens!” called out Miss MacNab, “aren’t you going to untie
the man first?”

“I say ‘old’ with intention, though not with certainty” continued the
expositor; “my reason for it might seem a little far-fetched. The hair
of human beings falls out in very varying degrees, but almost always
falls out slightly, and with the lens I should see the tiny hairs in a
hat recently worn. It has none, which leads me to guess that Mr Glass is
bald. Now when this is taken with the high-pitched and querulous
voice which Miss MacNab described so vividly (patience, my dear lady,
patience), when we take the hairless head together with the tone common
in senile anger, I should think we may deduce some advance in years.
Nevertheless, he was probably vigorous, and he was almost certainly
tall. I might rely in some degree on the story of his previous
appearance at the window, as a tall man in a silk hat, but I think I
have more exact indication. This wineglass has been smashed all over
the place, but one of its splinters lies on the high bracket beside the
mantelpiece. No such fragment could have fallen there if the vessel
had been smashed in the hand of a comparatively short man like Mr
Todhunter.”

“By the way,” said Father Brown, “might it not be as well to untie Mr
Todhunter?”

“Our lesson from the drinking-vessels does not end here,” proceeded the
specialist. “I may say at once that it is possible that the man Glass
was bald or nervous through dissipation rather than age. Mr Todhunter,
as has been remarked, is a quiet thrifty gentleman, essentially an
abstainer. These cards and wine-cups are no part of his normal habit;
they have been produced for a particular companion. But, as it
happens, we may go farther. Mr Todhunter may or may not possess this
wine-service, but there is no appearance of his possessing any wine.
What, then, were these vessels to contain? I would at once suggest
some brandy or whisky, perhaps of a luxurious sort, from a flask in the
pocket of Mr Glass. We have thus something like a picture of the man, or
at least of the type: tall, elderly, fashionable, but somewhat frayed,
certainly fond of play and strong waters, perhaps rather too fond of
them. Mr Glass is a gentleman not unknown on the fringes of society.”

“Look here,” cried the young woman, “if you don’t let me pass to untie
him I’ll run outside and scream for the police.”

“I should not advise you, Miss MacNab,” said Dr Hood gravely, “to be
in any hurry to fetch the police. Father Brown, I seriously ask you to
compose your flock, for their sakes, not for mine. Well, we have seen
something of the figure and quality of Mr Glass; what are the chief
facts known of Mr Todhunter? They are substantially three: that he is
economical, that he is more or less wealthy, and that he has a secret.
Now, surely it is obvious that there are the three chief marks of the
kind of man who is blackmailed. And surely it is equally obvious that
the faded finery, the profligate habits, and the shrill irritation of Mr
Glass are the unmistakable marks of the kind of man who blackmails him.
We have the two typical figures of a tragedy of hush money: on the one
hand, the respectable man with a mystery; on the other, the West-end
vulture with a scent for a mystery. These two men have met here today
and have quarrelled, using blows and a bare weapon.”

“Are you going to take those ropes off?” asked the girl stubbornly.

Dr Hood replaced the silk hat carefully on the side table, and went
across to the captive. He studied him intently, even moving him a little
and half-turning him round by the shoulders, but he only answered:

“No; I think these ropes will do very well till your friends the police
bring the handcuffs.”

Father Brown, who had been looking dully at the carpet, lifted his round
face and said: “What do you mean?”

The man of science had picked up the peculiar dagger-sword from the
carpet and was examining it intently as he answered:

“Because you find Mr Todhunter tied up,” he said, “you all jump to the
conclusion that Mr Glass had tied him up; and then, I suppose, escaped.
There are four objections to this: First, why should a gentleman so
dressy as our friend Glass leave his hat behind him, if he left of his
own free will? Second,” he continued, moving towards the window, “this
is the only exit, and it is locked on the inside. Third, this blade
here has a tiny touch of blood at the point, but there is no wound on Mr
Todhunter. Mr Glass took that wound away with him, dead or alive. Add
to all this primary probability. It is much more likely that the
blackmailed person would try to kill his incubus, rather than that the
blackmailer would try to kill the goose that lays his golden egg. There,
I think, we have a pretty complete story.”

“But the ropes?” inquired the priest, whose eyes had remained open with
a rather vacant admiration.

“Ah, the ropes,” said the expert with a singular intonation. “Miss
MacNab very much wanted to know why I did not set Mr Todhunter free from
his ropes. Well, I will tell her. I did not do it because Mr Todhunter
can set himself free from them at any minute he chooses.”

“What?” cried the audience on quite different notes of astonishment.

“I have looked at all the knots on Mr Todhunter,” reiterated Hood
quietly. “I happen to know something about knots; they are quite a
branch of criminal science. Every one of those knots he has made himself
and could loosen himself; not one of them would have been made by an
enemy really trying to pinion him. The whole of this affair of the
ropes is a clever fake, to make us think him the victim of the struggle
instead of the wretched Glass, whose corpse may be hidden in the garden
or stuffed up the chimney.”

There was a rather depressed silence; the room was darkening, the
sea-blighted boughs of the garden trees looked leaner and blacker than
ever, yet they seemed to have come nearer to the window. One could
almost fancy they were sea-monsters like krakens or cuttlefish, writhing
polypi who had crawled up from the sea to see the end of this tragedy,
even as he, the villain and victim of it, the terrible man in the tall
hat, had once crawled up from the sea. For the whole air was dense with
the morbidity of blackmail, which is the most morbid of human things,
because it is a crime concealing a crime; a black plaster on a blacker
wound.

The face of the little Catholic priest, which was commonly complacent
and even comic, had suddenly become knotted with a curious frown. It
was not the blank curiosity of his first innocence. It was rather that
creative curiosity which comes when a man has the beginnings of an idea.
“Say it again, please,” he said in a simple, bothered manner; “do you
mean that Todhunter can tie himself up all alone and untie himself all
alone?”

“That is what I mean,” said the doctor.

“Jerusalem!” ejaculated Brown suddenly, “I wonder if it could possibly
be that!”

He scuttled across the room rather like a rabbit, and peered with quite
a new impulsiveness into the partially-covered face of the captive. Then
he turned his own rather fatuous face to the company. “Yes, that’s it!”
 he cried in a certain excitement. “Can’t you see it in the man’s face?
Why, look at his eyes!”

Both the Professor and the girl followed the direction of his glance.
And though the broad black scarf completely masked the lower half of
Todhunter’s visage, they did grow conscious of something struggling and
intense about the upper part of it.

“His eyes do look queer,” cried the young woman, strongly moved. “You
brutes; I believe it’s hurting him!”

“Not that, I think,” said Dr Hood; “the eyes have certainly a singular
expression. But I should interpret those transverse wrinkles as
expressing rather such slight psychological abnormality--”

“Oh, bosh!” cried Father Brown: “can’t you see he’s laughing?”

“Laughing!” repeated the doctor, with a start; “but what on earth can he
be laughing at?”

“Well,” replied the Reverend Brown apologetically, “not to put too fine
a point on it, I think he is laughing at you. And indeed, I’m a little
inclined to laugh at myself, now I know about it.”

“Now you know about what?” asked Hood, in some exasperation.

“Now I know,” replied the priest, “the profession of Mr Todhunter.”

He shuffled about the room, looking at one object after another with
what seemed to be a vacant stare, and then invariably bursting into an
equally vacant laugh, a highly irritating process for those who had to
watch it. He laughed very much over the hat, still more uproariously
over the broken glass, but the blood on the sword point sent him
into mortal convulsions of amusement. Then he turned to the fuming
specialist.

“Dr Hood,” he cried enthusiastically, “you are a great poet! You have
called an uncreated being out of the void. How much more godlike that is
than if you had only ferreted out the mere facts! Indeed, the mere facts
are rather commonplace and comic by comparison.”

“I have no notion what you are talking about,” said Dr Hood rather
haughtily; “my facts are all inevitable, though necessarily incomplete.
A place may be permitted to intuition, perhaps (or poetry if you prefer
the term), but only because the corresponding details cannot as yet be
ascertained. In the absence of Mr Glass--”

“That’s it, that’s it,” said the little priest, nodding quite eagerly,
“that’s the first idea to get fixed; the absence of Mr Glass. He is so
extremely absent. I suppose,” he added reflectively, “that there was
never anybody so absent as Mr Glass.”

“Do you mean he is absent from the town?” demanded the doctor.

“I mean he is absent from everywhere,” answered Father Brown; “he is
absent from the Nature of Things, so to speak.”

“Do you seriously mean,” said the specialist with a smile, “that there
is no such person?”

The priest made a sign of assent. “It does seem a pity,” he said.

Orion Hood broke into a contemptuous laugh. “Well,” he said, “before
we go on to the hundred and one other evidences, let us take the first
proof we found; the first fact we fell over when we fell into this room.
If there is no Mr Glass, whose hat is this?”

“It is Mr Todhunter’s,” replied Father Brown.

“But it doesn’t fit him,” cried Hood impatiently. “He couldn’t possibly
wear it!”

Father Brown shook his head with ineffable mildness. “I never said he
could wear it,” he answered. “I said it was his hat. Or, if you insist
on a shade of difference, a hat that is his.”

“And what is the shade of difference?” asked the criminologist with a
slight sneer.

“My good sir,” cried the mild little man, with his first movement akin
to impatience, “if you will walk down the street to the nearest hatter’s
shop, you will see that there is, in common speech, a difference between
a man’s hat and the hats that are his.”

“But a hatter,” protested Hood, “can get money out of his stock of new
hats. What could Todhunter get out of this one old hat?”

“Rabbits,” replied Father Brown promptly.

“What?” cried Dr Hood.

“Rabbits, ribbons, sweetmeats, goldfish, rolls of coloured paper,” said
the reverend gentleman with rapidity. “Didn’t you see it all when
you found out the faked ropes? It’s just the same with the sword.
Mr Todhunter hasn’t got a scratch on him, as you say; but he’s got a
scratch in him, if you follow me.”

“Do you mean inside Mr Todhunter’s clothes?” inquired Mrs MacNab
sternly.

“I do not mean inside Mr Todhunter’s clothes,” said Father Brown. “I
mean inside Mr Todhunter.”

“Well, what in the name of Bedlam do you mean?”

“Mr Todhunter,” explained Father Brown placidly, “is learning to be a
professional conjurer, as well as juggler, ventriloquist, and expert in
the rope trick. The conjuring explains the hat. It is without traces
of hair, not because it is worn by the prematurely bald Mr Glass, but
because it has never been worn by anybody. The juggling explains the
three glasses, which Todhunter was teaching himself to throw up and
catch in rotation. But, being only at the stage of practice, he smashed
one glass against the ceiling. And the juggling also explains the sword,
which it was Mr Todhunter’s professional pride and duty to swallow.
But, again, being at the stage of practice, he very slightly grazed the
inside of his throat with the weapon. Hence he has a wound inside him,
which I am sure (from the expression on his face) is not a serious
one. He was also practising the trick of a release from ropes, like the
Davenport Brothers, and he was just about to free himself when we all
burst into the room. The cards, of course, are for card tricks, and they
are scattered on the floor because he had just been practising one of
those dodges of sending them flying through the air. He merely kept his
trade secret, because he had to keep his tricks secret, like any other
conjurer. But the mere fact of an idler in a top hat having once
looked in at his back window, and been driven away by him with great
indignation, was enough to set us all on a wrong track of romance, and
make us imagine his whole life overshadowed by the silk-hatted spectre
of Mr Glass.”

“But what about the two voices?” asked Maggie, staring.

“Have you never heard a ventriloquist?” asked Father Brown. “Don’t you
know they speak first in their natural voice, and then answer themselves
in just that shrill, squeaky, unnatural voice that you heard?”

There was a long silence, and Dr Hood regarded the little man who
had spoken with a dark and attentive smile. “You are certainly a very
ingenious person,” he said; “it could not have been done better in a
book. But there is just one part of Mr Glass you have not succeeded in
explaining away, and that is his name. Miss MacNab distinctly heard him
so addressed by Mr Todhunter.”

The Rev. Mr Brown broke into a rather childish giggle. “Well, that,”
 he said, “that’s the silliest part of the whole silly story. When our
juggling friend here threw up the three glasses in turn, he counted
them aloud as he caught them, and also commented aloud when he failed to
catch them. What he really said was: ‘One, two and three--missed a glass
one, two--missed a glass.’ And so on.”

There was a second of stillness in the room, and then everyone with
one accord burst out laughing. As they did so the figure in the corner
complacently uncoiled all the ropes and let them fall with a flourish.
Then, advancing into the middle of the room with a bow, he produced
from his pocket a big bill printed in blue and red, which announced that
ZALADIN, the World’s Greatest Conjurer, Contortionist, Ventriloquist and
Human Kangaroo would be ready with an entirely new series of Tricks
at the Empire Pavilion, Scarborough, on Monday next at eight o’clock
precisely.





TWO. -- The Paradise of Thieves


THE great Muscari, most original of the young Tuscan poets,
walked swiftly into his favourite restaurant, which overlooked the
Mediterranean, was covered by an awning and fenced by little lemon and
orange trees. Waiters in white aprons were already laying out on white
tables the insignia of an early and elegant lunch; and this seemed to
increase a satisfaction that already touched the top of swagger. Muscari
had an eagle nose like Dante; his hair and neckerchief were dark and
flowing; he carried a black cloak, and might almost have carried a black
mask, so much did he bear with him a sort of Venetian melodrama. He
acted as if a troubadour had still a definite social office, like a
bishop. He went as near as his century permitted to walking the world
literally like Don Juan, with rapier and guitar.

For he never travelled without a case of swords, with which he had
fought many brilliant duels, or without a corresponding case for his
mandolin, with which he had actually serenaded Miss Ethel Harrogate, the
highly conventional daughter of a Yorkshire banker on a holiday. Yet he
was neither a charlatan nor a child; but a hot, logical Latin who liked
a certain thing and was it. His poetry was as straightforward as anyone
else’s prose. He desired fame or wine or the beauty of women with
a torrid directness inconceivable among the cloudy ideals or cloudy
compromises of the north; to vaguer races his intensity smelt of danger
or even crime. Like fire or the sea, he was too simple to be trusted.

The banker and his beautiful English daughter were staying at the hotel
attached to Muscari’s restaurant; that was why it was his favourite
restaurant. A glance flashed around the room told him at once, however,
that the English party had not descended. The restaurant was glittering,
but still comparatively empty. Two priests were talking at a table in
a corner, but Muscari (an ardent Catholic) took no more notice of them
than of a couple of crows. But from a yet farther seat, partly concealed
behind a dwarf tree golden with oranges, there rose and advanced towards
the poet a person whose costume was the most aggressively opposite to
his own.

This figure was clad in tweeds of a piebald check, with a pink tie, a
sharp collar and protuberant yellow boots. He contrived, in the
true tradition of ‘Arry at Margate, to look at once startling and
commonplace. But as the Cockney apparition drew nearer, Muscari was
astounded to observe that the head was distinctly different from the
body. It was an Italian head: fuzzy, swarthy and very vivacious, that
rose abruptly out of the standing collar like cardboard and the comic
pink tie. In fact it was a head he knew. He recognized it, above all
the dire erection of English holiday array, as the face of an old but
forgotten friend name Ezza. This youth had been a prodigy at college,
and European fame was promised him when he was barely fifteen; but when
he appeared in the world he failed, first publicly as a dramatist and a
demagogue, and then privately for years on end as an actor, a traveller,
a commission agent or a journalist. Muscari had known him last behind
the footlights; he was but too well attuned to the excitements of that
profession, and it was believed that some moral calamity had swallowed
him up.

“Ezza!” cried the poet, rising and shaking hands in a pleasant
astonishment. “Well, I’ve seen you in many costumes in the green room;
but I never expected to see you dressed up as an Englishman.”

“This,” answered Ezza gravely, “is not the costume of an Englishman, but
of the Italian of the future.”

“In that case,” remarked Muscari, “I confess I prefer the Italian of the
past.”

“That is your old mistake, Muscari,” said the man in tweeds, shaking
his head; “and the mistake of Italy. In the sixteenth century we Tuscans
made the morning: we had the newest steel, the newest carving, the
newest chemistry. Why should we not now have the newest factories, the
newest motors, the newest finance--the newest clothes?”

“Because they are not worth having,” answered Muscari. “You cannot make
Italians really progressive; they are too intelligent. Men who see the
short cut to good living will never go by the new elaborate roads.”

“Well, to me Marconi, or D’Annunzio, is the star of Italy” said the
other. “That is why I have become a Futurist--and a courier.”

“A courier!” cried Muscari, laughing. “Is that the last of your list of
trades? And whom are you conducting?”

“Oh, a man of the name of Harrogate, and his family, I believe.”

“Not the banker in this hotel?” inquired the poet, with some eagerness.

“That’s the man,” answered the courier.

“Does it pay well?” asked the troubadour innocently.

“It will pay me,” said Ezza, with a very enigmatic smile. “But I am a
rather curious sort of courier.” Then, as if changing the subject, he
said abruptly: “He has a daughter--and a son.”

“The daughter is divine,” affirmed Muscari, “the father and son are, I
suppose, human. But granted his harmless qualities doesn’t that banker
strike you as a splendid instance of my argument? Harrogate has millions
in his safes, and I have--the hole in my pocket. But you daren’t
say--you can’t say--that he’s cleverer than I, or bolder than I, or even
more energetic. He’s not clever, he’s got eyes like blue buttons; he’s
not energetic, he moves from chair to chair like a paralytic. He’s a
conscientious, kindly old blockhead; but he’s got money simply because
he collects money, as a boy collects stamps. You’re too strong-minded
for business, Ezza. You won’t get on. To be clever enough to get all
that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.”

“I’m stupid enough for that,” said Ezza gloomily. “But I should suggest
a suspension of your critique of the banker, for here he comes.”

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

Miss Harrogate was specially radiant and ready for conversation on this
occasion; and her family had fallen into the easier Continental habit,
allowing the stranger Muscari and even the courier Ezza to share their
table and their talk. In Ethel Harrogate conventionality crowned itself
with a perfection and splendour of its own. Proud of her father’s
prosperity, fond of fashionable pleasures, a fond daughter but an arrant
flirt, she was all these things with a sort of golden good-nature that
made her very pride pleasing and her worldly respectability a fresh and
hearty thing.

They were in an eddy of excitement about some alleged peril in the
mountain path they were to attempt that week. The danger was not from
rock and avalanche, but from something yet more romantic. Ethel had
been earnestly assured that brigands, the true cut-throats of the modern
legend, still haunted that ridge and held that pass of the Apennines.

“They say,” she cried, with the awful relish of a schoolgirl, “that
all that country isn’t ruled by the King of Italy, but by the King of
Thieves. Who is the King of Thieves?”

“A great man,” replied Muscari, “worthy to rank with your own Robin
Hood, signorina. Montano, the King of Thieves, was first heard of in the
mountains some ten years ago, when people said brigands were extinct.
But his wild authority spread with the swiftness of a silent revolution.
Men found his fierce proclamations nailed in every mountain village; his
sentinels, gun in hand, in every mountain ravine. Six times the Italian
Government tried to dislodge him, and was defeated in six pitched
battles as if by Napoleon.”

“Now that sort of thing,” observed the banker weightily, “would never
be allowed in England; perhaps, after all, we had better choose another
route. But the courier thought it perfectly safe.”

“It is perfectly safe,” said the courier contemptuously. “I have been
over it twenty times. There may have been some old jailbird called a
King in the time of our grandmothers; but he belongs to history if not
to fable. Brigandage is utterly stamped out.”

“It can never be utterly stamped out,” Muscari answered; “because armed
revolt is a recreation natural to southerners. Our peasants are like
their mountains, rich in grace and green gaiety, but with the fires
beneath. There is a point of human despair where the northern poor take
to drink--and our own poor take to daggers.”

“A poet is privileged,” replied Ezza, with a sneer. “If Signor Muscari
were English he would still be looking for highwaymen in Wandsworth.
Believe me, there is no more danger of being captured in Italy than of
being scalped in Boston.”

“Then you propose to attempt it?” asked Mr Harrogate, frowning.

“Oh, it sounds rather dreadful,” cried the girl, turning her glorious
eyes on Muscari. “Do you really think the pass is dangerous?”

Muscari threw back his black mane. “I know it is dangerous:” he said. “I
am crossing it tomorrow.”

The young Harrogate was left behind for a moment emptying a glass of
white wine and lighting a cigarette, as the beauty retired with the
banker, the courier and the poet, distributing peals of silvery satire.
At about the same instant the two priests in the corner rose; the
taller, a white-haired Italian, taking his leave. The shorter priest
turned and walked towards the banker’s son, and the latter was
astonished to realize that though a Roman priest the man was an
Englishman. He vaguely remembered meeting him at the social crushes
of some of his Catholic friends. But the man spoke before his memories
could collect themselves.

“Mr Frank Harrogate, I think,” he said. “I have had an introduction, but
I do not mean to presume on it. The odd thing I have to say will come
far better from a stranger. Mr Harrogate, I say one word and go: take
care of your sister in her great sorrow.”

Even for Frank’s truly fraternal indifference the radiance and derision
of his sister still seemed to sparkle and ring; he could hear her
laughter still from the garden of the hotel, and he stared at his sombre
adviser in puzzledom.

“Do you mean the brigands?” he asked; and then, remembering a vague fear
of his own, “or can you be thinking of Muscari?”

“One is never thinking of the real sorrow,” said the strange priest.
“One can only be kind when it comes.”

And he passed promptly from the room, leaving the other almost with his
mouth open.

A day or two afterwards a coach containing the company was really
crawling and staggering up the spurs of the menacing mountain range.
Between Ezza’s cheery denial of the danger and Muscari’s boisterous
defiance of it, the financial family were firm in their original
purpose; and Muscari made his mountain journey coincide with theirs. A
more surprising feature was the appearance at the coast-town station of
the little priest of the restaurant; he alleged merely that business
led him also to cross the mountains of the midland. But young Harrogate
could not but connect his presence with the mystical fears and warnings
of yesterday.

The coach was a kind of commodious wagonette, invented by the modernist
talent of the courier, who dominated the expedition with his scientific
activity and breezy wit. The theory of danger from thieves was banished
from thought and speech; though so far conceded in formal act that some
slight protection was employed. The courier and the young banker carried
loaded revolvers, and Muscari (with much boyish gratification) buckled
on a kind of cutlass under his black cloak.

He had planted his person at a flying leap next to the lovely
Englishwoman; on the other side of her sat the priest, whose name was
Brown and who was fortunately a silent individual; the courier and the
father and son were on the banc behind. Muscari was in towering spirits,
seriously believing in the peril, and his talk to Ethel might well have
made her think him a maniac. But there was something in the crazy and
gorgeous ascent, amid crags like peaks loaded with woods like orchards,
that dragged her spirit up alone with his into purple preposterous
heavens with wheeling suns. The white road climbed like a white cat;
it spanned sunless chasms like a tight-rope; it was flung round far-off
headlands like a lasso.

And yet, however high they went, the desert still blossomed like the
rose. The fields were burnished in sun and wind with the colour of
kingfisher and parrot and humming-bird, the hues of a hundred flowering
flowers. There are no lovelier meadows and woodlands than the English,
no nobler crests or chasms than those of Snowdon and Glencoe. But
Ethel Harrogate had never before seen the southern parks tilted on the
splintered northern peaks; the gorge of Glencoe laden with the fruits
of Kent. There was nothing here of that chill and desolation that in
Britain one associates with high and wild scenery. It was rather like a
mosaic palace, rent with earthquakes; or like a Dutch tulip garden blown
to the stars with dynamite.

“It’s like Kew Gardens on Beachy Head,” said Ethel.

“It is our secret,” answered he, “the secret of the volcano; that is
also the secret of the revolution--that a thing can be violent and yet
fruitful.”

“You are rather violent yourself,” and she smiled at him.

“And yet rather fruitless,” he admitted; “if I die tonight I die
unmarried and a fool.”

“It is not my fault if you have come,” she said after a difficult
silence.

“It is never your fault,” answered Muscari; “it was not your fault that
Troy fell.”

As they spoke they came under overwhelming cliffs that spread almost
like wings above a corner of peculiar peril. Shocked by the big shadow
on the narrow ledge, the horses stirred doubtfully. The driver leapt to
the earth to hold their heads, and they became ungovernable. One horse
reared up to his full height--the titanic and terrifying height of
a horse when he becomes a biped. It was just enough to alter the
equilibrium; the whole coach heeled over like a ship and crashed through
the fringe of bushes over the cliff. Muscari threw an arm round Ethel,
who clung to him, and shouted aloud. It was for such moments that he
lived.

At the moment when the gorgeous mountain walls went round the poet’s
head like a purple windmill a thing happened which was superficially
even more startling. The elderly and lethargic banker sprang erect in
the coach and leapt over the precipice before the tilted vehicle could
take him there. In the first flash it looked as wild as suicide; but in
the second it was as sensible as a safe investment. The Yorkshireman had
evidently more promptitude, as well as more sagacity, than Muscari had
given him credit for; for he landed in a lap of land which might
have been specially padded with turf and clover to receive him. As
it happened, indeed, the whole company were equally lucky, if less
dignified in their form of ejection. Immediately under this abrupt turn
of the road was a grassy and flowery hollow like a sunken meadow; a
sort of green velvet pocket in the long, green, trailing garments of
the hills. Into this they were all tipped or tumbled with little damage,
save that their smallest baggage and even the contents of their pockets
were scattered in the grass around them. The wrecked coach still hung
above, entangled in the tough hedge, and the horses plunged painfully
down the slope. The first to sit up was the little priest, who scratched
his head with a face of foolish wonder. Frank Harrogate heard him say to
himself: “Now why on earth have we fallen just here?”

He blinked at the litter around him, and recovered his own very clumsy
umbrella. Beyond it lay the broad sombrero fallen from the head of
Muscari, and beside it a sealed business letter which, after a glance
at the address, he returned to the elder Harrogate. On the other side of
him the grass partly hid Miss Ethel’s sunshade, and just beyond it lay a
curious little glass bottle hardly two inches long. The priest picked it
up; in a quick, unobtrusive manner he uncorked and sniffed it, and his
heavy face turned the colour of clay.

“Heaven deliver us!” he muttered; “it can’t be hers! Has her sorrow come
on her already?” He slipped it into his own waistcoat pocket. “I think
I’m justified,” he said, “till I know a little more.”

He gazed painfully at the girl, at that moment being raised out of the
flowers by Muscari, who was saying: “We have fallen into heaven; it is
a sign. Mortals climb up and they fall down; but it is only gods and
goddesses who can fall upwards.”

And indeed she rose out of the sea of colours so beautiful and happy
a vision that the priest felt his suspicion shaken and shifted. “After
all,” he thought, “perhaps the poison isn’t hers; perhaps it’s one of
Muscari’s melodramatic tricks.”

Muscari set the lady lightly on her feet, made her an absurdly
theatrical bow, and then, drawing his cutlass, hacked hard at the taut
reins of the horses, so that they scrambled to their feet and stood
in the grass trembling. When he had done so, a most remarkable thing
occurred. A very quiet man, very poorly dressed and extremely sunburnt,
came out of the bushes and took hold of the horses’ heads. He had a
queer-shaped knife, very broad and crooked, buckled on his belt; there
was nothing else remarkable about him, except his sudden and silent
appearance. The poet asked him who he was, and he did not answer.

Looking around him at the confused and startled group in the hollow,
Muscari then perceived that another tanned and tattered man, with a
short gun under his arm, was looking at them from the ledge just below,
leaning his elbows on the edge of the turf. Then he looked up at the
road from which they had fallen and saw, looking down on them, the
muzzles of four other carbines and four other brown faces with bright
but quite motionless eyes.

“The brigands!” cried Muscari, with a kind of monstrous gaiety. “This
was a trap. Ezza, if you will oblige me by shooting the coachman first,
we can cut our way out yet. There are only six of them.”

“The coachman,” said Ezza, who was standing grimly with his hands in his
pockets, “happens to be a servant of Mr Harrogate’s.”

“Then shoot him all the more,” cried the poet impatiently; “he was
bribed to upset his master. Then put the lady in the middle, and we will
break the line up there--with a rush.”

And, wading in wild grass and flowers, he advanced fearlessly on the
four carbines; but finding that no one followed except young Harrogate,
he turned, brandishing his cutlass to wave the others on. He beheld
the courier still standing slightly astride in the centre of the grassy
ring, his hands in his pockets; and his lean, ironical Italian face
seemed to grow longer and longer in the evening light.

“You thought, Muscari, I was the failure among our schoolfellows,” he
said, “and you thought you were the success. But I have succeeded more
than you and fill a bigger place in history. I have been acting epics
while you have been writing them.”

“Come on, I tell you!” thundered Muscari from above. “Will you stand
there talking nonsense about yourself with a woman to save and three
strong men to help you? What do you call yourself?”

“I call myself Montano,” cried the strange courier in a voice equally
loud and full. “I am the King of Thieves, and I welcome you all to my
summer palace.”

And even as he spoke five more silent men with weapons ready came out of
the bushes, and looked towards him for their orders. One of them held a
large paper in his hand.

“This pretty little nest where we are all picnicking,” went on the
courier-brigand, with the same easy yet sinister smile, “is, together
with some caves underneath it, known by the name of the Paradise of
Thieves. It is my principal stronghold on these hills; for (as you have
doubtless noticed) the eyrie is invisible both from the road above and
from the valley below. It is something better than impregnable; it is
unnoticeable. Here I mostly live, and here I shall certainly die, if
the gendarmes ever track me here. I am not the kind of criminal that
‘reserves his defence,’ but the better kind that reserves his last
bullet.”

All were staring at him thunderstruck and still, except Father Brown,
who heaved a huge sigh as of relief and fingered the little phial in his
pocket. “Thank God!” he muttered; “that’s much more probable. The poison
belongs to this robber-chief, of course. He carries it so that he may
never be captured, like Cato.”

The King of Thieves was, however, continuing his address with the same
kind of dangerous politeness. “It only remains for me,” he said,
“to explain to my guests the social conditions upon which I have the
pleasure of entertaining them. I need not expound the quaint old ritual
of ransom, which it is incumbent upon me to keep up; and even this only
applies to a part of the company. The Reverend Father Brown and the
celebrated Signor Muscari I shall release tomorrow at dawn and escort
to my outposts. Poets and priests, if you will pardon my simplicity
of speech, never have any money. And so (since it is impossible to
get anything out of them), let us, seize the opportunity to show our
admiration for classic literature and our reverence for Holy Church.”

He paused with an unpleasing smile; and Father Brown blinked repeatedly
at him, and seemed suddenly to be listening with great attention. The
brigand captain took the large paper from the attendant brigand and,
glancing over it, continued: “My other intentions are clearly set forth
in this public document, which I will hand round in a moment; and which
after that will be posted on a tree by every village in the valley, and
every cross-road in the hills. I will not weary you with the verbalism,
since you will be able to check it; the substance of my proclamation is
this: I announce first that I have captured the English millionaire, the
colossus of finance, Mr Samuel Harrogate. I next announce that I have
found on his person notes and bonds for two thousand pounds, which he
has given up to me. Now since it would be really immoral to announce
such a thing to a credulous public if it had not occurred, I suggest it
should occur without further delay. I suggest that Mr Harrogate senior
should now give me the two thousand pounds in his pocket.”

The banker looked at him under lowering brows, red-faced and sulky, but
seemingly cowed. That leap from the failing carriage seemed to have used
up his last virility. He had held back in a hang-dog style when his son
and Muscari had made a bold movement to break out of the brigand
trap. And now his red and trembling hand went reluctantly to his
breast-pocket, and passed a bundle of papers and envelopes to the
brigand.

“Excellent!” cried that outlaw gaily; “so far we are all cosy. I resume
the points of my proclamation, so soon to be published to all Italy.
The third item is that of ransom. I am asking from the friends of the
Harrogate family a ransom of three thousand pounds, which I am sure
is almost insulting to that family in its moderate estimate of their
importance. Who would not pay triple this sum for another day’s
association with such a domestic circle? I will not conceal from you
that the document ends with certain legal phrases about the unpleasant
things that may happen if the money is not paid; but meanwhile, ladies
and gentlemen, let me assure you that I am comfortably off here
for accommodation, wine and cigars, and bid you for the present a
sportsman-like welcome to the luxuries of the Paradise of Thieves.”

All the time that he had been speaking, the dubious-looking men with
carbines and dirty slouch hats had been gathering silently in such
preponderating numbers that even Muscari was compelled to recognize his
sally with the sword as hopeless. He glanced around him; but the girl
had already gone over to soothe and comfort her father, for her natural
affection for his person was as strong or stronger than her somewhat
snobbish pride in his success. Muscari, with the illogicality of a
lover, admired this filial devotion, and yet was irritated by it.
He slapped his sword back in the scabbard and went and flung himself
somewhat sulkily on one of the green banks. The priest sat down within
a yard or two, and Muscari turned his aquiline nose on him in an
instantaneous irritation.

“Well,” said the poet tartly, “do people still think me too romantic?
Are there, I wonder, any brigands left in the mountains?”

“There may be,” said Father Brown agnostically.

“What do you mean?” asked the other sharply.

“I mean I am puzzled,” replied the priest. “I am puzzled about Ezza or
Montano, or whatever his name is. He seems to me much more inexplicable
as a brigand even than he was as a courier.”

“But in what way?” persisted his companion. “Santa Maria! I should have
thought the brigand was plain enough.”

“I find three curious difficulties,” said the priest in a quiet voice.
“I should like to have your opinion on them. First of all I must tell
you I was lunching in that restaurant at the seaside. As four of you
left the room, you and Miss Harrogate went ahead, talking and laughing;
the banker and the courier came behind, speaking sparely and rather low.
But I could not help hearing Ezza say these words--‘Well, let her have
a little fun; you know the blow may smash her any minute.’ Mr Harrogate
answered nothing; so the words must have had some meaning. On the
impulse of the moment I warned her brother that she might be in peril;
I said nothing of its nature, for I did not know. But if it meant
this capture in the hills, the thing is nonsense. Why should the
brigand-courier warn his patron, even by a hint, when it was his whole
purpose to lure him into the mountain-mousetrap? It could not have
meant that. But if not, what is this disaster, known both to courier and
banker, which hangs over Miss Harrogate’s head?”

“Disaster to Miss Harrogate!” ejaculated the poet, sitting up with some
ferocity. “Explain yourself; go on.”

“All my riddles, however, revolve round our bandit chief,” resumed the
priest reflectively. “And here is the second of them. Why did he put
so prominently in his demand for ransom the fact that he had taken two
thousand pounds from his victim on the spot? It had no faintest tendency
to evoke the ransom. Quite the other way, in fact. Harrogate’s friends
would be far likelier to fear for his fate if they thought the thieves
were poor and desperate. Yet the spoliation on the spot was emphasized
and even put first in the demand. Why should Ezza Montano want so
specially to tell all Europe that he had picked the pocket before he
levied the blackmail?”

“I cannot imagine,” said Muscari, rubbing up his black hair for once
with an unaffected gesture. “You may think you enlighten me, but you are
leading me deeper in the dark. What may be the third objection to the
King of the Thieves?” “The third objection,” said Father Brown, still
in meditation, “is this bank we are sitting on. Why does our
brigand-courier call this his chief fortress and the Paradise of
Thieves? It is certainly a soft spot to fall on and a sweet spot to look
at. It is also quite true, as he says, that it is invisible from valley
and peak, and is therefore a hiding-place. But it is not a fortress. It
never could be a fortress. I think it would be the worst fortress in the
world. For it is actually commanded from above by the common high-road
across the mountains--the very place where the police would most
probably pass. Why, five shabby short guns held us helpless here about
half an hour ago. The quarter of a company of any kind of soldiers could
have blown us over the precipice. Whatever is the meaning of this odd
little nook of grass and flowers, it is not an entrenched position. It
is something else; it has some other strange sort of importance; some
value that I do not understand. It is more like an accidental theatre or
a natural green-room; it is like the scene for some romantic comedy; it
is like....”

As the little priest’s words lengthened and lost themselves in a dull
and dreamy sincerity, Muscari, whose animal senses were alert and
impatient, heard a new noise in the mountains. Even for him the sound
was as yet very small and faint; but he could have sworn the evening
breeze bore with it something like the pulsation of horses’ hoofs and a
distant hallooing.

At the same moment, and long before the vibration had touched the
less-experienced English ears, Montano the brigand ran up the bank above
them and stood in the broken hedge, steadying himself against a tree and
peering down the road. He was a strange figure as he stood there, for he
had assumed a flapped fantastic hat and swinging baldric and cutlass in
his capacity of bandit king, but the bright prosaic tweed of the courier
showed through in patches all over him.

The next moment he turned his olive, sneering face and made a movement
with his hand. The brigands scattered at the signal, not in confusion,
but in what was evidently a kind of guerrilla discipline. Instead of
occupying the road along the ridge, they sprinkled themselves along the
side of it behind the trees and the hedge, as if watching unseen for an
enemy. The noise beyond grew stronger, beginning to shake the mountain
road, and a voice could be clearly heard calling out orders. The
brigands swayed and huddled, cursing and whispering, and the evening
air was full of little metallic noises as they cocked their pistols, or
loosened their knives, or trailed their scabbards over the stones. Then
the noises from both quarters seemed to meet on the road above; branches
broke, horses neighed, men cried out.

“A rescue!” cried Muscari, springing to his feet and waving his hat;
“the gendarmes are on them! Now for freedom and a blow for it! Now to
be rebels against robbers! Come, don’t let us leave everything to
the police; that is so dreadfully modern. Fall on the rear of these
ruffians. The gendarmes are rescuing us; come, friends, let us rescue
the gendarmes!”

And throwing his hat over the trees, he drew his cutlass once more and
began to escalade the slope up to the road. Frank Harrogate jumped up
and ran across to help him, revolver in hand, but was astounded to hear
himself imperatively recalled by the raucous voice of his father, who
seemed to be in great agitation.

“I won’t have it,” said the banker in a choking voice; “I command you
not to interfere.”

“But, father,” said Frank very warmly, “an Italian gentleman has led the
way. You wouldn’t have it said that the English hung back.”

“It is useless,” said the older man, who was trembling violently, “it is
useless. We must submit to our lot.”

Father Brown looked at the banker; then he put his hand instinctively as
if on his heart, but really on the little bottle of poison; and a great
light came into his face like the light of the revelation of death.

Muscari meanwhile, without waiting for support, had crested the bank
up to the road, and struck the brigand king heavily on the shoulder,
causing him to stagger and swing round. Montano also had his cutlass
unsheathed, and Muscari, without further speech, sent a slash at his
head which he was compelled to catch and parry. But even as the two
short blades crossed and clashed the King of Thieves deliberately
dropped his point and laughed.

“What’s the good, old man?” he said in spirited Italian slang; “this
damned farce will soon be over.”

“What do you mean, you shuffler?” panted the fire-eating poet. “Is your
courage a sham as well as your honesty?”

“Everything about me is a sham,” responded the ex-courier in complete
good humour. “I am an actor; and if I ever had a private character, I
have forgotten it. I am no more a genuine brigand than I am a genuine
courier. I am only a bundle of masks, and you can’t fight a duel
with that.” And he laughed with boyish pleasure and fell into his old
straddling attitude, with his back to the skirmish up the road.

Darkness was deepening under the mountain walls, and it was not easy to
discern much of the progress of the struggle, save that tall men were
pushing their horses’ muzzles through a clinging crowd of brigands,
who seemed more inclined to harass and hustle the invaders than to kill
them. It was more like a town crowd preventing the passage of the police
than anything the poet had ever pictured as the last stand of doomed and
outlawed men of blood. Just as he was rolling his eyes in bewilderment
he felt a touch on his elbow, and found the odd little priest standing
there like a small Noah with a large hat, and requesting the favour of a
word or two.

“Signor Muscari,” said the cleric, “in this queer crisis personalities
may be pardoned. I may tell you without offence of a way in which you
will do more good than by helping the gendarmes, who are bound to break
through in any case. You will permit me the impertinent intimacy, but do
you care about that girl? Care enough to marry her and make her a good
husband, I mean?”

“Yes,” said the poet quite simply.

“Does she care about you?”

“I think so,” was the equally grave reply.

“Then go over there and offer yourself,” said the priest: “offer her
everything you can; offer her heaven and earth if you’ve got them. The
time is short.”

“Why?” asked the astonished man of letters.

“Because,” said Father Brown, “her Doom is coming up the road.”

“Nothing is coming up the road,” argued Muscari, “except the rescue.”

“Well, you go over there,” said his adviser, “and be ready to rescue her
from the rescue.”

Almost as he spoke the hedges were broken all along the ridge by a rush
of the escaping brigands. They dived into bushes and thick grass
like defeated men pursued; and the great cocked hats of the mounted
gendarmerie were seen passing along above the broken hedge. Another
order was given; there was a noise of dismounting, and a tall officer
with cocked hat, a grey imperial, and a paper in his hand appeared
in the gap that was the gate of the Paradise of Thieves. There was a
momentary silence, broken in an extraordinary way by the banker, who
cried out in a hoarse and strangled voice: “Robbed! I’ve been robbed!”

“Why, that was hours ago,” cried his son in astonishment: “when you were
robbed of two thousand pounds.”

“Not of two thousand pounds,” said the financier, with an abrupt and
terrible composure, “only of a small bottle.”

The policeman with the grey imperial was striding across the green
hollow. Encountering the King of the Thieves in his path, he clapped him
on the shoulder with something between a caress and a buffet and gave
him a push that sent him staggering away. “You’ll get into trouble,
too,” he said, “if you play these tricks.”

Again to Muscari’s artistic eye it seemed scarcely like the capture of
a great outlaw at bay. Passing on, the policeman halted before the
Harrogate group and said: “Samuel Harrogate, I arrest you in the name
of the law for embezzlement of the funds of the Hull and Huddersfield
Bank.”

The great banker nodded with an odd air of business assent, seemed to
reflect a moment, and before they could interpose took a half turn and
a step that brought him to the edge of the outer mountain wall. Then,
flinging up his hands, he leapt exactly as he leapt out of the coach.
But this time he did not fall into a little meadow just beneath; he fell
a thousand feet below, to become a wreck of bones in the valley.

The anger of the Italian policeman, which he expressed volubly to Father
Brown, was largely mixed with admiration. “It was like him to escape us
at last,” he said. “He was a great brigand if you like. This last
trick of his I believe to be absolutely unprecedented. He fled with
the company’s money to Italy, and actually got himself captured by sham
brigands in his own pay, so as to explain both the disappearance of
the money and the disappearance of himself. That demand for ransom was
really taken seriously by most of the police. But for years he’s been
doing things as good as that, quite as good as that. He will be a
serious loss to his family.”

Muscari was leading away the unhappy daughter, who held hard to him, as
she did for many a year after. But even in that tragic wreck he could
not help having a smile and a hand of half-mocking friendship for the
indefensible Ezza Montano. “And where are you going next?” he asked him
over his shoulder.

“Birmingham,” answered the actor, puffing a cigarette. “Didn’t I tell
you I was a Futurist? I really do believe in those things if I believe
in anything. Change, bustle and new things every morning. I am going to
Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Hull, Huddersfield, Glasgow, Chicago--in
short, to enlightened, energetic, civilized society!”

“In short,” said Muscari, “to the real Paradise of Thieves.”





THREE -- The Duel of Dr Hirsch


M. MAURICE BRUN and M. Armand Armagnac were crossing the sunlit Champs
Elysee with a kind of vivacious respectability. They were both short,
brisk and bold. They both had black beards that did not seem to belong
to their faces, after the strange French fashion which makes real hair
look like artificial. M. Brun had a dark wedge of beard apparently
affixed under his lower lip. M. Armagnac, by way of a change, had two
beards; one sticking out from each corner of his emphatic chin. They
were both young. They were both atheists, with a depressing fixity of
outlook but great mobility of exposition. They were both pupils of the
great Dr Hirsch, scientist, publicist and moralist.

M. Brun had become prominent by his proposal that the common expression
“Adieu” should be obliterated from all the French classics, and a slight
fine imposed for its use in private life. “Then,” he said, “the very
name of your imagined God will have echoed for the last time in the ear
of man.” M. Armagnac specialized rather in a resistance to militarism,
and wished the chorus of the Marseillaise altered from “Aux armes,
citoyens” to “Aux greves, citoyens”. But his antimilitarism was of a
peculiar and Gallic sort. An eminent and very wealthy English Quaker,
who had come to see him to arrange for the disarmament of the whole
planet, was rather distressed by Armagnac’s proposal that (by way of
beginning) the soldiers should shoot their officers.

And indeed it was in this regard that the two men differed most from
their leader and father in philosophy. Dr Hirsch, though born in France
and covered with the most triumphant favours of French education, was
temperamentally of another type--mild, dreamy, humane; and, despite his
sceptical system, not devoid of transcendentalism. He was, in short,
more like a German than a Frenchman; and much as they admired him,
something in the subconsciousness of these Gauls was irritated at his
pleading for peace in so peaceful a manner. To their party throughout
Europe, however, Paul Hirsch was a saint of science. His large and
daring cosmic theories advertised his austere life and innocent, if
somewhat frigid, morality; he held something of the position of Darwin
doubled with the position of Tolstoy. But he was neither an anarchist
nor an antipatriot; his views on disarmament were moderate and
evolutionary--the Republican Government put considerable confidence in
him as to various chemical improvements. He had lately even discovered
a noiseless explosive, the secret of which the Government was carefully
guarding.

His house stood in a handsome street near the Elysee--a street which in
that strong summer seemed almost as full of foliage as the park itself;
a row of chestnuts shattered the sunshine, interrupted only in one place
where a large cafe ran out into the street. Almost opposite to this
were the white and green blinds of the great scientist’s house, an iron
balcony, also painted green, running along in front of the first-floor
windows. Beneath this was the entrance into a kind of court, gay with
shrubs and tiles, into which the two Frenchmen passed in animated talk.

The door was opened to them by the doctor’s old servant, Simon, who
might very well have passed for a doctor himself, having a strict suit
of black, spectacles, grey hair, and a confidential manner. In fact, he
was a far more presentable man of science than his master, Dr Hirsch,
who was a forked radish of a fellow, with just enough bulb of a head to
make his body insignificant. With all the gravity of a great physician
handling a prescription, Simon handed a letter to M. Armagnac. That
gentleman ripped it up with a racial impatience, and rapidly read the
following:

I cannot come down to speak to you. There is a man in this house whom I
refuse to meet. He is a Chauvinist officer, Dubosc. He is sitting on the
stairs. He has been kicking the furniture about in all the other rooms;
I have locked myself in my study, opposite that cafe. If you love me,
go over to the cafe and wait at one of the tables outside. I will try
to send him over to you. I want you to answer him and deal with him. I
cannot meet him myself. I cannot: I will not.

There is going to be another Dreyfus case.

P. HIRSCH



M. Armagnac looked at M. Brun. M. Brun borrowed the letter, read it, and
looked at M. Armagnac. Then both betook themselves briskly to one of the
little tables under the chestnuts opposite, where they procured two tall
glasses of horrible green absinthe, which they could drink apparently in
any weather and at any time. Otherwise the cafe seemed empty, except
for one soldier drinking coffee at one table, and at another a large man
drinking a small syrup and a priest drinking nothing.

Maurice Brun cleared his throat and said: “Of course we must help the
master in every way, but--”

There was an abrupt silence, and Armagnac said: “He may have excellent
reasons for not meeting the man himself, but--”

Before either could complete a sentence, it was evident that the invader
had been expelled from the house opposite. The shrubs under the archway
swayed and burst apart, as that unwelcome guest was shot out of them
like a cannon-ball.

He was a sturdy figure in a small and tilted Tyrolean felt hat, a
figure that had indeed something generally Tyrolean about it. The man’s
shoulders were big and broad, but his legs were neat and active in
knee-breeches and knitted stockings. His face was brown like a nut; he
had very bright and restless brown eyes; his dark hair was brushed
back stiffly in front and cropped close behind, outlining a square and
powerful skull; and he had a huge black moustache like the horns of a
bison. Such a substantial head is generally based on a bull neck; but
this was hidden by a big coloured scarf, swathed round up the man’s ears
and falling in front inside his jacket like a sort of fancy waistcoat.
It was a scarf of strong dead colours, dark red and old gold and purple,
probably of Oriental fabrication. Altogether the man had something a
shade barbaric about him; more like a Hungarian squire than an ordinary
French officer. His French, however, was obviously that of a native;
and his French patriotism was so impulsive as to be slightly absurd.
His first act when he burst out of the archway was to call in a clarion
voice down the street: “Are there any Frenchmen here?” as if he were
calling for Christians in Mecca.

Armagnac and Brun instantly stood up; but they were too late. Men
were already running from the street corners; there was a small but
ever-clustering crowd. With the prompt French instinct for the politics
of the street, the man with the black moustache had already run across
to a corner of the cafe, sprung on one of the tables, and seizing a
branch of chestnut to steady himself, shouted as Camille Desmoulins once
shouted when he scattered the oak-leaves among the populace.

“Frenchmen!” he volleyed; “I cannot speak! God help me, that is why I
am speaking! The fellows in their filthy parliaments who learn to
speak also learn to be silent--silent as that spy cowering in the house
opposite! Silent as he is when I beat on his bedroom door! Silent as he
is now, though he hears my voice across this street and shakes where he
sits! Oh, they can be silent eloquently--the politicians! But the time
has come when we that cannot speak must speak. You are betrayed to the
Prussians. Betrayed at this moment. Betrayed by that man. I am Jules
Dubosc, Colonel of Artillery, Belfort. We caught a German spy in the
Vosges yesterday, and a paper was found on him--a paper I hold in my
hand. Oh, they tried to hush it up; but I took it direct to the man who
wrote it--the man in that house! It is in his hand. It is signed with
his initials. It is a direction for finding the secret of this new
Noiseless Powder. Hirsch invented it; Hirsch wrote this note about it.
This note is in German, and was found in a German’s pocket. ‘Tell the
man the formula for powder is in grey envelope in first drawer to the
left of Secretary’s desk, War Office, in red ink. He must be careful.
P.H.’”

He rattled short sentences like a quick-firing gun, but he was plainly
the sort of man who is either mad or right. The mass of the crowd
was Nationalist, and already in threatening uproar; and a minority of
equally angry Intellectuals, led by Armagnac and Brun, only made the
majority more militant.

“If this is a military secret,” shouted Brun, “why do you yell about it
in the street?”

“I will tell you why I do!” roared Dubosc above the roaring crowd. “I
went to this man in straight and civil style. If he had any explanation
it could have been given in complete confidence. He refuses to explain.
He refers me to two strangers in a cafe as to two flunkeys. He has
thrown me out of the house, but I am going back into it, with the people
of Paris behind me!”

A shout seemed to shake the very facade of mansions and two stones flew,
one breaking a window above the balcony. The indignant Colonel plunged
once more under the archway and was heard crying and thundering inside.
Every instant the human sea grew wider and wider; it surged up against
the rails and steps of the traitor’s house; it was already certain that
the place would be burst into like the Bastille, when the broken french
window opened and Dr Hirsch came out on the balcony. For an instant
the fury half turned to laughter; for he was an absurd figure in such
a scene. His long bare neck and sloping shoulders were the shape of a
champagne bottle, but that was the only festive thing about him. His
coat hung on him as on a peg; he wore his carrot-coloured hair long
and weedy; his cheeks and chin were fully fringed with one of those
irritating beards that begin far from the mouth. He was very pale, and
he wore blue spectacles.

Livid as he was, he spoke with a sort of prim decision, so that the mob
fell silent in the middle of his third sentence.

“...only two things to say to you now. The first is to my foes, the
second to my friends. To my foes I say: It is true I will not meet M.
Dubosc, though he is storming outside this very room. It is true I have
asked two other men to confront him for me. And I will tell you why!
Because I will not and must not see him--because it would be against all
rules of dignity and honour to see him. Before I am triumphantly cleared
before a court, there is another arbitration this gentleman owes me as a
gentleman, and in referring him to my seconds I am strictly--”

Armagnac and Brun were waving their hats wildly, and even the Doctor’s
enemies roared applause at this unexpected defiance. Once more a few
sentences were inaudible, but they could hear him say: “To my friends--I
myself should always prefer weapons purely intellectual, and to these
an evolved humanity will certainly confine itself. But our own most
precious truth is the fundamental force of matter and heredity. My books
are successful; my theories are unrefuted; but I suffer in politics
from a prejudice almost physical in the French. I cannot speak like
Clemenceau and Deroulede, for their words are like echoes of their
pistols. The French ask for a duellist as the English ask for a
sportsman. Well, I give my proofs: I will pay this barbaric bribe, and
then go back to reason for the rest of my life.”

Two men were instantly found in the crowd itself to offer their services
to Colonel Dubosc, who came out presently, satisfied. One was the common
soldier with the coffee, who said simply: “I will act for you, sir. I
am the Duc de Valognes.” The other was the big man, whom his friend the
priest sought at first to dissuade; and then walked away alone.

In the early evening a light dinner was spread at the back of the Cafe
Charlemagne. Though unroofed by any glass or gilt plaster, the guests
were nearly all under a delicate and irregular roof of leaves; for the
ornamental trees stood so thick around and among the tables as to give
something of the dimness and the dazzle of a small orchard. At one of
the central tables a very stumpy little priest sat in complete solitude,
and applied himself to a pile of whitebait with the gravest sort of
enjoyment. His daily living being very plain, he had a peculiar taste
for sudden and isolated luxuries; he was an abstemious epicure. He did
not lift his eyes from his plate, round which red pepper, lemons, brown
bread and butter, etc., were rigidly ranked, until a tall shadow fell
across the table, and his friend Flambeau sat down opposite. Flambeau
was gloomy.

“I’m afraid I must chuck this business,” said he heavily. “I’m all on
the side of the French soldiers like Dubosc, and I’m all against the
French atheists like Hirsch; but it seems to me in this case we’ve made
a mistake. The Duke and I thought it as well to investigate the charge,
and I must say I’m glad we did.”

“Is the paper a forgery, then?” asked the priest

“That’s just the odd thing,” replied Flambeau. “It’s exactly like
Hirsch’s writing, and nobody can point out any mistake in it. But it
wasn’t written by Hirsch. If he’s a French patriot he didn’t write it,
because it gives information to Germany. And if he’s a German spy he
didn’t write it, well--because it doesn’t give information to Germany.”

“You mean the information is wrong?” asked Father Brown.

“Wrong,” replied the other, “and wrong exactly where Dr Hirsch would
have been right--about the hiding-place of his own secret formula in his
own official department. By favour of Hirsch and the authorities, the
Duke and I have actually been allowed to inspect the secret drawer at
the War Office where the Hirsch formula is kept. We are the only people
who have ever known it, except the inventor himself and the Minister for
War; but the Minister permitted it to save Hirsch from fighting. After
that we really can’t support Dubosc if his revelation is a mare’s nest.”

“And it is?” asked Father Brown.

“It is,” said his friend gloomily. “It is a clumsy forgery by somebody
who knew nothing of the real hiding-place. It says the paper is in the
cupboard on the right of the Secretary’s desk. As a fact the cupboard
with the secret drawer is some way to the left of the desk. It says
the grey envelope contains a long document written in red ink. It isn’t
written in red ink, but in ordinary black ink. It’s manifestly absurd to
say that Hirsch can have made a mistake about a paper that nobody knew
of but himself; or can have tried to help a foreign thief by telling him
to fumble in the wrong drawer. I think we must chuck it up and apologize
to old Carrots.”

Father Brown seemed to cogitate; he lifted a little whitebait on his
fork. “You are sure the grey envelope was in the left cupboard?” he
asked.

“Positive,” replied Flambeau. “The grey envelope--it was a white
envelope really--was--”

Father Brown put down the small silver fish and the fork and stared
across at his companion. “What?” he asked, in an altered voice.

“Well, what?” repeated Flambeau, eating heartily.

“It was not grey,” said the priest. “Flambeau, you frighten me.”

“What the deuce are you frightened of?”

“I’m frightened of a white envelope,” said the other seriously, “If it
had only just been grey! Hang it all, it might as well have been grey.
But if it was white, the whole business is black. The Doctor has been
dabbling in some of the old brimstone after all.”

“But I tell you he couldn’t have written such a note!” cried Flambeau.
“The note is utterly wrong about the facts. And innocent or guilty, Dr
Hirsch knew all about the facts.”

“The man who wrote that note knew all about the facts,” said his
clerical companion soberly. “He could never have got ‘em so wrong
without knowing about ‘em. You have to know an awful lot to be wrong on
every subject--like the devil.”

“Do you mean--?”

“I mean a man telling lies on chance would have told some of the truth,”
 said his friend firmly. “Suppose someone sent you to find a house with
a green door and a blue blind, with a front garden but no back garden,
with a dog but no cat, and where they drank coffee but not tea. You
would say if you found no such house that it was all made up. But I say
no. I say if you found a house where the door was blue and the blind
green, where there was a back garden and no front garden, where cats
were common and dogs instantly shot, where tea was drunk in quarts and
coffee forbidden--then you would know you had found the house. The man
must have known that particular house to be so accurately inaccurate.”

“But what could it mean?” demanded the diner opposite.

“I can’t conceive,” said Brown; “I don’t understand this Hirsch affair
at all. As long as it was only the left drawer instead of the right, and
red ink instead of black, I thought it must be the chance blunders of a
forger, as you say. But three is a mystical number; it finishes things.
It finishes this. That the direction about the drawer, the colour of
ink, the colour of envelope, should none of them be right by accident,
that can’t be a coincidence. It wasn’t.”

“What was it, then? Treason?” asked Flambeau, resuming his dinner.

“I don’t know that either,” answered Brown, with a face of blank
bewilderment. “The only thing I can think of.... Well, I never
understood that Dreyfus case. I can always grasp moral evidence easier
than the other sorts. I go by a man’s eyes and voice, don’t you know,
and whether his family seems happy, and by what subjects he chooses--and
avoids. Well, I was puzzled in the Dreyfus case. Not by the horrible
things imputed both ways; I know (though it’s not modern to say so) that
human nature in the highest places is still capable of being Cenci or
Borgia. No--, what puzzled me was the sincerity of both parties. I don’t
mean the political parties; the rank and file are always roughly
honest, and often duped. I mean the persons of the play. I mean the
conspirators, if they were conspirators. I mean the traitor, if he was a
traitor. I mean the men who must have known the truth. Now Dreyfus
went on like a man who knew he was a wronged man. And yet the French
statesmen and soldiers went on as if they knew he wasn’t a wronged man
but simply a wrong ‘un. I don’t mean they behaved well; I mean they
behaved as if they were sure. I can’t describe these things; I know what
I mean.”

“I wish I did,” said his friend. “And what has it to do with old
Hirsch?”

“Suppose a person in a position of trust,” went on the priest, “began to
give the enemy information because it was false information. Suppose
he even thought he was saving his country by misleading the foreigner.
Suppose this brought him into spy circles, and little loans were made
to him, and little ties tied on to him. Suppose he kept up his
contradictory position in a confused way by never telling the foreign
spies the truth, but letting it more and more be guessed. The better
part of him (what was left of it) would still say: ‘I have not helped
the enemy; I said it was the left drawer.’ The meaner part of him would
already be saying: ‘But they may have the sense to see that means the
right.’ I think it is psychologically possible--in an enlightened age,
you know.”

“It may be psychologically possible,” answered Flambeau, “and it
certainly would explain Dreyfus being certain he was wronged and his
judges being sure he was guilty. But it won’t wash historically, because
Dreyfus’s document (if it was his document) was literally correct.”

“I wasn’t thinking of Dreyfus,” said Father Brown.

Silence had sunk around them with the emptying of the tables; it was
already late, though the sunlight still clung to everything, as if
accidentally entangled in the trees. In the stillness Flambeau shifted
his seat sharply--making an isolated and echoing noise--and threw his
elbow over the angle of it. “Well,” he said, rather harshly, “if Hirsch
is not better than a timid treason-monger...”

“You mustn’t be too hard on them,” said Father Brown gently. “It’s not
entirely their fault; but they have no instincts. I mean those things
that make a woman refuse to dance with a man or a man to touch an
investment. They’ve been taught that it’s all a matter of degree.”

“Anyhow,” cried Flambeau impatiently, “he’s not a patch on my principal;
and I shall go through with it. Old Dubosc may be a bit mad, but he’s a
sort of patriot after all.”

Father Brown continued to consume whitebait.

Something in the stolid way he did so caused Flambeau’s fierce black
eyes to ramble over his companion afresh. “What’s the matter with you?”
 Flambeau demanded. “Dubosc’s all right in that way. You don’t doubt
him?”

“My friend,” said the small priest, laying down his knife and fork in a
kind of cold despair, “I doubt everything. Everything, I mean, that has
happened today. I doubt the whole story, though it has been acted before
my face. I doubt every sight that my eyes have seen since morning. There
is something in this business quite different from the ordinary police
mystery where one man is more or less lying and the other man more or
less telling the truth. Here both men.... Well! I’ve told you the only
theory I can think of that could satisfy anybody. It doesn’t satisfy
me.”

“Nor me either,” replied Flambeau frowning, while the other went on
eating fish with an air of entire resignation. “If all you can suggest
is that notion of a message conveyed by contraries, I call it uncommonly
clever, but...well, what would you call it?”

“I should call it thin,” said the priest promptly. “I should call it
uncommonly thin. But that’s the queer thing about the whole business.
The lie is like a schoolboy’s. There are only three versions, Dubosc’s
and Hirsch’s and that fancy of mine. Either that note was written by
a French officer to ruin a French official; or it was written by the
French official to help German officers; or it was written by the French
official to mislead German officers. Very well. You’d expect a secret
paper passing between such people, officials or officers, to look
quite different from that. You’d expect, probably a cipher, certainly
abbreviations; most certainly scientific and strictly professional
terms. But this thing’s elaborately simple, like a penny dreadful: ‘In
the purple grotto you will find the golden casket.’ It looks as if... as
if it were meant to be seen through at once.”

Almost before they could take it in a short figure in French uniform
had walked up to their table like the wind, and sat down with a sort of
thump.

“I have extraordinary news,” said the Duc de Valognes. “I have just come
from this Colonel of ours. He is packing up to leave the country, and he
asks us to make his excuses sur le terrain.”

“What?” cried Flambeau, with an incredulity quite
frightful--“apologize?”

“Yes,” said the Duke gruffly; “then and there--before everybody--when
the swords are drawn. And you and I have to do it while he is leaving
the country.”

“But what can this mean?” cried Flambeau. “He can’t be afraid of that
little Hirsch! Confound it!” he cried, in a kind of rational rage;
“nobody could be afraid of Hirsch!”

“I believe it’s some plot!” snapped Valognes--“some plot of the Jews and
Freemasons. It’s meant to work up glory for Hirsch...”

The face of Father Brown was commonplace, but curiously contented; it
could shine with ignorance as well as with knowledge. But there was
always one flash when the foolish mask fell, and the wise mask fitted
itself in its place; and Flambeau, who knew his friend, knew that his
friend had suddenly understood. Brown said nothing, but finished his
plate of fish.

“Where did you last see our precious Colonel?” asked Flambeau,
irritably.

“He’s round at the Hotel Saint Louis by the Elysee, where we drove with
him. He’s packing up, I tell you.”

“Will he be there still, do you think?” asked Flambeau, frowning at the
table.

“I don’t think he can get away yet,” replied the Duke; “he’s packing to
go a long journey...”

“No,” said Father Brown, quite simply, but suddenly standing up, “for a
very short journey. For one of the shortest, in fact. But we may still
be in time to catch him if we go there in a motor-cab.”

Nothing more could be got out of him until the cab swept round the
corner by the Hotel Saint Louis, where they got out, and he led the
party up a side lane already in deep shadow with the growing dusk. Once,
when the Duke impatiently asked whether Hirsch was guilty of treason or
not, he answered rather absently: “No; only of ambition--like Caesar.”
 Then he somewhat inconsequently added: “He lives a very lonely life; he
has had to do everything for himself.”

“Well, if he’s ambitious, he ought to be satisfied now,” said Flambeau
rather bitterly. “All Paris will cheer him now our cursed Colonel has
turned tail.”

“Don’t talk so loud,” said Father Brown, lowering his voice, “your
cursed Colonel is just in front.”

The other two started and shrank farther back into the shadow of the
wall, for the sturdy figure of their runaway principal could indeed be
seen shuffling along in the twilight in front, a bag in each hand. He
looked much the same as when they first saw him, except that he had
changed his picturesque mountaineering knickers for a conventional pair
of trousers. It was clear he was already escaping from the hotel.

The lane down which they followed him was one of those that seem to
be at the back of things, and look like the wrong side of the stage
scenery. A colourless, continuous wall ran down one flank of it,
interrupted at intervals by dull-hued and dirt-stained doors, all shut
fast and featureless save for the chalk scribbles of some passing
gamin. The tops of trees, mostly rather depressing evergreens, showed
at intervals over the top of the wall, and beyond them in the grey and
purple gloaming could be seen the back of some long terrace of tall
Parisian houses, really comparatively close, but somehow looking as
inaccessible as a range of marble mountains. On the other side of the
lane ran the high gilt railings of a gloomy park.

Flambeau was looking round him in rather a weird way. “Do you know,” he
said, “there is something about this place that--”

“Hullo!” called out the Duke sharply; “that fellow’s disappeared.
Vanished, like a blasted fairy!”

“He has a key,” explained their clerical friend. “He’s only gone into
one of these garden doors,” and as he spoke they heard one of the dull
wooden doors close again with a click in front of them.

Flambeau strode up to the door thus shut almost in his face, and stood
in front of it for a moment, biting his black moustache in a fury of
curiosity. Then he threw up his long arms and swung himself aloft like
a monkey and stood on the top of the wall, his enormous figure dark
against the purple sky, like the dark tree-tops.

The Duke looked at the priest. “Dubosc’s escape is more elaborate than
we thought,” he said; “but I suppose he is escaping from France.”

“He is escaping from everywhere,” answered Father Brown.

Valognes’s eyes brightened, but his voice sank. “Do you mean suicide?”
 he asked.

“You will not find his body,” replied the other.

A kind of cry came from Flambeau on the wall above. “My God,” he
exclaimed in French, “I know what this place is now! Why, it’s the back
of the street where old Hirsch lives. I thought I could recognize the
back of a house as well as the back of a man.”

“And Dubosc’s gone in there!” cried the Duke, smiting his hip. “Why,
they’ll meet after all!” And with sudden Gallic vivacity he hopped up on
the wall beside Flambeau and sat there positively kicking his legs with
excitement. The priest alone remained below, leaning against the wall,
with his back to the whole theatre of events, and looking wistfully
across to the park palings and the twinkling, twilit trees.

The Duke, however stimulated, had the instincts of an aristocrat, and
desired rather to stare at the house than to spy on it; but Flambeau,
who had the instincts of a burglar (and a detective), had already swung
himself from the wall into the fork of a straggling tree from which he
could crawl quite close to the only illuminated window in the back of
the high dark house. A red blind had been pulled down over the light,
but pulled crookedly, so that it gaped on one side, and by risking his
neck along a branch that looked as treacherous as a twig, Flambeau
could just see Colonel Dubosc walking about in a brilliantly-lighted and
luxurious bedroom. But close as Flambeau was to the house, he heard the
words of his colleagues by the wall, and repeated them in a low voice.

“Yes, they will meet now after all!”

“They will never meet,” said Father Brown. “Hirsch was right when he
said that in such an affair the principals must not meet. Have you
read a queer psychological story by Henry James, of two persons who so
perpetually missed meeting each other by accident that they began to
feel quite frightened of each other, and to think it was fate? This is
something of the kind, but more curious.”

“There are people in Paris who will cure them of such morbid fancies,”
 said Valognes vindictively. “They will jolly well have to meet if we
capture them and force them to fight.”

“They will not meet on the Day of Judgement,” said the priest. “If God
Almighty held the truncheon of the lists, if St Michael blew the trumpet
for the swords to cross--even then, if one of them stood ready, the
other would not come.”

“Oh, what does all this mysticism mean?” cried the Duc de Valognes,
impatiently; “why on earth shouldn’t they meet like other people?”

“They are the opposite of each other,” said Father Brown, with a queer
kind of smile. “They contradict each other. They cancel out, so to
speak.”

He continued to gaze at the darkening trees opposite, but Valognes
turned his head sharply at a suppressed exclamation from Flambeau. That
investigator, peering into the lighted room, had just seen the Colonel,
after a pace or two, proceed to take his coat off. Flambeau’s first
thought was that this really looked like a fight; but he soon dropped
the thought for another. The solidity and squareness of Dubosc’s chest
and shoulders was all a powerful piece of padding and came off with his
coat. In his shirt and trousers he was a comparatively slim gentleman,
who walked across the bedroom to the bathroom with no more pugnacious
purpose than that of washing himself. He bent over a basin, dried his
dripping hands and face on a towel, and turned again so that the strong
light fell on his face. His brown complexion had gone, his big black
moustache had gone; he--was clean-shaven and very pate. Nothing remained
of the Colonel but his bright, hawk-like, brown eyes. Under the wall
Father Brown was going on in heavy meditation, as if to himself.

“It is all just like what I was saying to Flambeau. These opposites
won’t do. They don’t work. They don’t fight. If it’s white instead of
black, and solid instead of liquid, and so on all along the line--then
there’s something wrong, Monsieur, there’s something wrong. One of these
men is fair and the other dark, one stout and the other slim, one strong
and the other weak. One has a moustache and no beard, so you can’t see
his mouth; the other has a beard and no moustache, so you can’t see his
chin. One has hair cropped to his skull, but a scarf to hide his neck;
the other has low shirt-collars, but long hair to bide his skull. It’s
all too neat and correct, Monsieur, and there’s something wrong. Things
made so opposite are things that cannot quarrel. Wherever the one
sticks out the other sinks in. Like a face and a mask, like a lock and a
key...”

Flambeau was peering into the house with a visage as white as a sheet.
The occupant of the room was standing with his back to him, but in front
of a looking-glass, and had already fitted round his face a sort
of framework of rank red hair, hanging disordered from the head and
clinging round the jaws and chin while leaving the mocking mouth
uncovered. Seen thus in the glass the white face looked like the face of
Judas laughing horribly and surrounded by capering flames of hell. For
a spasm Flambeau saw the fierce, red-brown eyes dancing, then they were
covered with a pair of blue spectacles. Slipping on a loose black coat,
the figure vanished towards the front of the house. A few moments later
a roar of popular applause from the street beyond announced that Dr
Hirsch had once more appeared upon the balcony.





FOUR -- The Man in the Passage


TWO men appeared simultaneously at the two ends of a sort of passage
running along the side of the Apollo Theatre in the Adelphi. The evening
daylight in the streets was large and luminous, opalescent and empty.
The passage was comparatively long and dark, so each man could see the
other as a mere black silhouette at the other end. Nevertheless, each
man knew the other, even in that inky outline; for they were both men of
striking appearance and they hated each other.

The covered passage opened at one end on one of the steep streets of the
Adelphi, and at the other on a terrace overlooking the sunset-coloured
river. One side of the passage was a blank wall, for the building it
supported was an old unsuccessful theatre restaurant, now shut up. The
other side of the passage contained two doors, one at each end. Neither
was what was commonly called the stage door; they were a sort of special
and private stage doors used by very special performers, and in this
case by the star actor and actress in the Shakespearean performance of
the day. Persons of that eminence often like to have such private exits
and entrances, for meeting friends or avoiding them.

The two men in question were certainly two such friends, men who
evidently knew the doors and counted on their opening, for each
approached the door at the upper end with equal coolness and confidence.
Not, however, with equal speed; but the man who walked fast was the man
from the other end of the tunnel, so they both arrived before the secret
stage door almost at the same instant. They saluted each other with
civility, and waited a moment before one of them, the sharper walker who
seemed to have the shorter patience, knocked at the door.

In this and everything else each man was opposite and neither could
be called inferior. As private persons both were handsome, capable and
popular. As public persons, both were in the first public rank. But
everything about them, from their glory to their good looks, was of a
diverse and incomparable kind. Sir Wilson Seymour was the kind of man
whose importance is known to everybody who knows. The more you mixed
with the innermost ring in every polity or profession, the more often
you met Sir Wilson Seymour. He was the one intelligent man on twenty
unintelligent committees--on every sort of subject, from the reform of
the Royal Academy to the project of bimetallism for Greater Britain.
In the Arts especially he was omnipotent. He was so unique that nobody
could quite decide whether he was a great aristocrat who had taken up
Art, or a great artist whom the aristocrats had taken up. But you could
not meet him for five minutes without realizing that you had really been
ruled by him all your life.

His appearance was “distinguished” in exactly the same sense; it was at
once conventional and unique. Fashion could have found no fault with his
high silk hat--, yet it was unlike anyone else’s hat--a little higher,
perhaps, and adding something to his natural height. His tall, slender
figure had a slight stoop yet it looked the reverse of feeble. His hair
was silver-grey, but he did not look old; it was worn longer than the
common yet he did not look effeminate; it was curly but it did not
look curled. His carefully pointed beard made him look more manly and
militant than otherwise, as it does in those old admirals of Velazquez
with whose dark portraits his house was hung. His grey gloves were a
shade bluer, his silver-knobbed cane a shade longer than scores of
such gloves and canes flapped and flourished about the theatres and the
restaurants.

The other man was not so tall, yet would have struck nobody as short,
but merely as strong and handsome. His hair also was curly, but fair and
cropped close to a strong, massive head--the sort of head you break a
door with, as Chaucer said of the Miller’s. His military moustache and
the carriage of his shoulders showed him a soldier, but he had a pair
of those peculiar frank and piercing blue eyes which are more common in
sailors. His face was somewhat square, his jaw was square, his shoulders
were square, even his jacket was square. Indeed, in the wild school
of caricature then current, Mr Max Beerbohm had represented him as a
proposition in the fourth book of Euclid.

For he also was a public man, though with quite another sort of success.
You did not have to be in the best society to have heard of Captain
Cutler, of the siege of Hong-Kong, and the great march across China. You
could not get away from hearing of him wherever you were; his portrait
was on every other postcard; his maps and battles in every other
illustrated paper; songs in his honour in every other music-hall turn or
on every other barrel-organ. His fame, though probably more temporary,
was ten times more wide, popular and spontaneous than the other man’s.
In thousands of English homes he appeared enormous above England, like
Nelson. Yet he had infinitely less power in England than Sir Wilson
Seymour.

The door was opened to them by an aged servant or “dresser”, whose
broken-down face and figure and black shabby coat and trousers
contrasted queerly with the glittering interior of the great actress’s
dressing-room. It was fitted and filled with looking-glasses at every
angle of refraction, so that they looked like the hundred facets of one
huge diamond--if one could get inside a diamond. The other features of
luxury, a few flowers, a few coloured cushions, a few scraps of stage
costume, were multiplied by all the mirrors into the madness of the
Arabian Nights, and danced and changed places perpetually as the
shuffling attendant shifted a mirror outwards or shot one back against
the wall.

They both spoke to the dingy dresser by name, calling him Parkinson, and
asking for the lady as Miss Aurora Rome. Parkinson said she was in the
other room, but he would go and tell her. A shade crossed the brow of
both visitors; for the other room was the private room of the great
actor with whom Miss Aurora was performing, and she was of the kind that
does not inflame admiration without inflaming jealousy. In about half
a minute, however, the inner door opened, and she entered as she always
did, even in private life, so that the very silence seemed to be a roar
of applause, and one well-deserved. She was clad in a somewhat strange
garb of peacock green and peacock blue satins, that gleamed like blue
and green metals, such as delight children and aesthetes, and her heavy,
hot brown hair framed one of those magic faces which are dangerous to
all men, but especially to boys and to men growing grey. In company with
her male colleague, the great American actor, Isidore Bruno, she was
producing a particularly poetical and fantastic interpretation of
Midsummer Night’s Dream: in which the artistic prominence was given
to Oberon and Titania, or in other words to Bruno and herself. Set in
dreamy and exquisite scenery, and moving in mystical dances, the
green costume, like burnished beetle-wings, expressed all the elusive
individuality of an elfin queen. But when personally confronted in what
was still broad daylight, a man looked only at the woman’s face.

She greeted both men with the beaming and baffling smile which kept so
many males at the same just dangerous distance from her. She accepted
some flowers from Cutler, which were as tropical and expensive as his
victories; and another sort of present from Sir Wilson Seymour, offered
later on and more nonchalantly by that gentleman. For it was against
his breeding to show eagerness, and against his conventional
unconventionality to give anything so obvious as flowers. He had picked
up a trifle, he said, which was rather a curiosity, it was an ancient
Greek dagger of the Mycenaean Epoch, and might well have been worn in
the time of Theseus and Hippolyta. It was made of brass like all the
Heroic weapons, but, oddly enough, sharp enough to prick anyone still.
He had really been attracted to it by the leaf-like shape; it was as
perfect as a Greek vase. If it was of any interest to Miss Rome or could
come in anywhere in the play, he hoped she would--

The inner door burst open and a big figure appeared, who was more of
a contrast to the explanatory Seymour than even Captain Cutler. Nearly
six-foot-six, and of more than theatrical thews and muscles, Isidore
Bruno, in the gorgeous leopard skin and golden-brown garments of Oberon,
looked like a barbaric god. He leaned on a sort of hunting-spear, which
across a theatre looked a slight, silvery wand, but which in the small
and comparatively crowded room looked as plain as a pike-staff--and as
menacing. His vivid black eyes rolled volcanically, his bronzed
face, handsome as it was, showed at that moment a combination of
high cheekbones with set white teeth, which recalled certain American
conjectures about his origin in the Southern plantations.

“Aurora,” he began, in that deep voice like a drum of passion that had
moved so many audiences, “will you--”

He stopped indecisively because a sixth figure had suddenly presented
itself just inside the doorway--a figure so incongruous in the scene as
to be almost comic. It was a very short man in the black uniform of
the Roman secular clergy, and looking (especially in such a presence as
Bruno’s and Aurora’s) rather like the wooden Noah out of an ark. He
did not, however, seem conscious of any contrast, but said with dull
civility: “I believe Miss Rome sent for me.”

A shrewd observer might have remarked that the emotional temperature
rather rose at so unemotional an interruption. The detachment of a
professional celibate seemed to reveal to the others that they stood
round the woman as a ring of amorous rivals; just as a stranger coming
in with frost on his coat will reveal that a room is like a furnace. The
presence of the one man who did not care about her increased Miss Rome’s
sense that everybody else was in love with her, and each in a somewhat
dangerous way: the actor with all the appetite of a savage and a spoilt
child; the soldier with all the simple selfishness of a man of will
rather than mind; Sir Wilson with that daily hardening concentration
with which old Hedonists take to a hobby; nay, even the abject
Parkinson, who had known her before her triumphs, and who followed her
about the room with eyes or feet, with the dumb fascination of a dog.

A shrewd person might also have noted a yet odder thing. The man like a
black wooden Noah (who was not wholly without shrewdness) noted it with
a considerable but contained amusement. It was evident that the great
Aurora, though by no means indifferent to the admiration of the other
sex, wanted at this moment to get rid of all the men who admired her and
be left alone with the man who did not--did not admire her in that
sense at least; for the little priest did admire and even enjoy the
firm feminine diplomacy with which she set about her task. There was,
perhaps, only one thing that Aurora Rome was clever about, and that was
one half of humanity--the other half. The little priest watched, like a
Napoleonic campaign, the swift precision of her policy for expelling all
while banishing none. Bruno, the big actor, was so babyish that it
was easy to send him off in brute sulks, banging the door. Cutler, the
British officer, was pachydermatous to ideas, but punctilious about
behaviour. He would ignore all hints, but he would die rather than
ignore a definite commission from a lady. As to old Seymour, he had to
be treated differently; he had to be left to the last. The only way to
move him was to appeal to him in confidence as an old friend, to let him
into the secret of the clearance. The priest did really admire Miss Rome
as she achieved all these three objects in one selected action.

She went across to Captain Cutler and said in her sweetest manner:
“I shall value all these flowers, because they must be your favourite
flowers. But they won’t be complete, you know, without my favourite
flower. Do go over to that shop round the corner and get me some
lilies-of-the-valley, and then it will be quite lovely.”

The first object of her diplomacy, the exit of the enraged Bruno, was at
once achieved. He had already handed his spear in a lordly style, like
a sceptre, to the piteous Parkinson, and was about to assume one of
the cushioned seats like a throne. But at this open appeal to his rival
there glowed in his opal eyeballs all the sensitive insolence of the
slave; he knotted his enormous brown fists for an instant, and then,
dashing open the door, disappeared into his own apartments beyond. But
meanwhile Miss Rome’s experiment in mobilizing the British Army had not
succeeded so simply as seemed probable. Cutler had indeed risen stiffly
and suddenly, and walked towards the door, hatless, as if at a word of
command. But perhaps there was something ostentatiously elegant about
the languid figure of Seymour leaning against one of the looking-glasses
that brought him up short at the entrance, turning his head this way and
that like a bewildered bulldog.

“I must show this stupid man where to go,” said Aurora in a whisper to
Seymour, and ran out to the threshold to speed the parting guest.

Seymour seemed to be listening, elegant and unconscious as was his
posture, and he seemed relieved when he heard the lady call out some
last instructions to the Captain, and then turn sharply and run laughing
down the passage towards the other end, the end on the terrace above the
Thames. Yet a second or two after Seymour’s brow darkened again. A man
in his position has so many rivals, and he remembered that at the other
end of the passage was the corresponding entrance to Bruno’s private
room. He did not lose his dignity; he said some civil words to Father
Brown about the revival of Byzantine architecture in the Westminster
Cathedral, and then, quite naturally, strolled out himself into the
upper end of the passage. Father Brown and Parkinson were left
alone, and they were neither of them men with a taste for superfluous
conversation. The dresser went round the room, pulling out
looking-glasses and pushing them in again, his dingy dark coat and
trousers looking all the more dismal since he was still holding the
festive fairy spear of King Oberon. Every time he pulled out the frame
of a new glass, a new black figure of Father Brown appeared; the absurd
glass chamber was full of Father Browns, upside down in the air like
angels, turning somersaults like acrobats, turning their backs to
everybody like very rude persons.

Father Brown seemed quite unconscious of this cloud of witnesses, but
followed Parkinson with an idly attentive eye till he took himself
and his absurd spear into the farther room of Bruno. Then he abandoned
himself to such abstract meditations as always amused him--calculating
the angles of the mirrors, the angles of each refraction, the angle at
which each must fit into the wall...when he heard a strong but strangled
cry.

He sprang to his feet and stood rigidly listening. At the same instant
Sir Wilson Seymour burst back into the room, white as ivory. “Who’s that
man in the passage?” he cried. “Where’s that dagger of mine?”

Before Father Brown could turn in his heavy boots Seymour was plunging
about the room looking for the weapon. And before he could possibly
find that weapon or any other, a brisk running of feet broke upon the
pavement outside, and the square face of Cutler was thrust into the
same doorway. He was still grotesquely grasping a bunch of
lilies-of-the-valley. “What’s this?” he cried. “What’s that creature
down the passage? Is this some of your tricks?”

“My tricks!” hissed his pale rival, and made a stride towards him.

In the instant of time in which all this happened Father Brown stepped
out into the top of the passage, looked down it, and at once walked
briskly towards what he saw.

At this the other two men dropped their quarrel and darted after him,
Cutler calling out: “What are you doing? Who are you?”

“My name is Brown,” said the priest sadly, as he bent over something
and straightened himself again. “Miss Rome sent for me, and I came as
quickly as I could. I have come too late.”

The three men looked down, and in one of them at least the life died in
that late light of afternoon. It ran along the passage like a path of
gold, and in the midst of it Aurora Rome lay lustrous in her robes of
green and gold, with her dead face turned upwards. Her dress was torn
away as in a struggle, leaving the right shoulder bare, but the wound
from which the blood was welling was on the other side. The brass dagger
lay flat and gleaming a yard or so away.

There was a blank stillness for a measurable time, so that they could
hear far off a flower-girl’s laugh outside Charing Cross, and someone
whistling furiously for a taxicab in one of the streets off the Strand.
Then the Captain, with a movement so sudden that it might have been
passion or play-acting, took Sir Wilson Seymour by the throat.

Seymour looked at him steadily without either fight or fear. “You need
not kill me,” he said in a voice quite cold; “I shall do that on my own
account.”

The Captain’s hand hesitated and dropped; and the other added with the
same icy candour: “If I find I haven’t the nerve to do it with that
dagger I can do it in a month with drink.”

“Drink isn’t good enough for me,” replied Cutler, “but I’ll have blood
for this before I die. Not yours--but I think I know whose.”

And before the others could appreciate his intention he snatched up the
dagger, sprang at the other door at the lower end of the passage, burst
it open, bolt and all, and confronted Bruno in his dressing-room. As he
did so, old Parkinson tottered in his wavering way out of the door
and caught sight of the corpse lying in the passage. He moved shakily
towards it; looked at it weakly with a working face; then moved shakily
back into the dressing-room again, and sat down suddenly on one of
the richly cushioned chairs. Father Brown instantly ran across to him,
taking no notice of Cutler and the colossal actor, though the room
already rang with their blows and they began to struggle for the dagger.
Seymour, who retained some practical sense, was whistling for the police
at the end of the passage.

When the police arrived it was to tear the two men from an almost
ape-like grapple; and, after a few formal inquiries, to arrest Isidore
Bruno upon a charge of murder, brought against him by his furious
opponent. The idea that the great national hero of the hour had arrested
a wrongdoer with his own hand doubtless had its weight with the police,
who are not without elements of the journalist. They treated Cutler with
a certain solemn attention, and pointed out that he had got a slight
slash on the hand. Even as Cutler bore him back across tilted chair and
table, Bruno had twisted the dagger out of his grasp and disabled him
just below the wrist. The injury was really slight, but till he was
removed from the room the half-savage prisoner stared at the running
blood with a steady smile.

“Looks a cannibal sort of chap, don’t he?” said the constable
confidentially to Cutler.

Cutler made no answer, but said sharply a moment after: “We must attend
to the...the death...” and his voice escaped from articulation.

“The two deaths,” came in the voice of the priest from the farther side
of the room. “This poor fellow was gone when I got across to him.” And
he stood looking down at old Parkinson, who sat in a black huddle on the
gorgeous chair. He also had paid his tribute, not without eloquence, to
the woman who had died.

The silence was first broken by Cutler, who seemed not untouched by a
rough tenderness. “I wish I was him,” he said huskily. “I remember he
used to watch her wherever she walked more than--anybody. She was his
air, and he’s dried up. He’s just dead.”

“We are all dead,” said Seymour in a strange voice, looking down the
road.

They took leave of Father Brown at the corner of the road, with some
random apologies for any rudeness they might have shown. Both their
faces were tragic, but also cryptic.

The mind of the little priest was always a rabbit-warren of wild
thoughts that jumped too quickly for him to catch them. Like the white
tail of a rabbit he had the vanishing thought that he was certain of
their grief, but not so certain of their innocence.

“We had better all be going,” said Seymour heavily; “we have done all we
can to help.”

“Will you understand my motives,” asked Father Brown quietly, “if I say
you have done all you can to hurt?”

They both started as if guiltily, and Cutler said sharply: “To hurt
whom?”

“To hurt yourselves,” answered the priest. “I would not add to your
troubles if it weren’t common justice to warn you. You’ve done nearly
everything you could do to hang yourselves, if this actor should be
acquitted. They’ll be sure to subpoena me; I shall be bound to say that
after the cry was heard each of you rushed into the room in a wild state
and began quarrelling about a dagger. As far as my words on oath can go,
you might either of you have done it. You hurt yourselves with that; and
then Captain Cutler must have hurt himself with the dagger.”

“Hurt myself!” exclaimed the Captain, with contempt. “A silly little
scratch.”

“Which drew blood,” replied the priest, nodding. “We know there’s blood
on the brass now. And so we shall never know whether there was blood on
it before.”

There was a silence; and then Seymour said, with an emphasis quite alien
to his daily accent: “But I saw a man in the passage.”

“I know you did,” answered the cleric Brown with a face of wood, “so did
Captain Cutler. That’s what seems so improbable.”

Before either could make sufficient sense of it even to answer, Father
Brown had politely excused himself and gone stumping up the road with
his stumpy old umbrella.

As modern newspapers are conducted, the most honest and most important
news is the police news. If it be true that in the twentieth century
more space is given to murder than to politics, it is for the excellent
reason that murder is a more serious subject. But even this would hardly
explain the enormous omnipresence and widely distributed detail of “The
Bruno Case,” or “The Passage Mystery,” in the Press of London and the
provinces. So vast was the excitement that for some weeks the
Press really told the truth; and the reports of examination and
cross-examination, if interminable, even if intolerable are at least
reliable. The true reason, of course, was the coincidence of persons.
The victim was a popular actress; the accused was a popular actor; and
the accused had been caught red-handed, as it were, by the most popular
soldier of the patriotic season. In those extraordinary circumstances
the Press was paralysed into probity and accuracy; and the rest of this
somewhat singular business can practically be recorded from reports of
Bruno’s trial.

The trial was presided over by Mr Justice Monkhouse, one of those
who are jeered at as humorous judges, but who are generally much more
serious than the serious judges, for their levity comes from a living
impatience of professional solemnity; while the serious judge is really
filled with frivolity, because he is filled with vanity. All the chief
actors being of a worldly importance, the barristers were well balanced;
the prosecutor for the Crown was Sir Walter Cowdray, a heavy, but
weighty advocate of the sort that knows how to seem English and
trustworthy, and how to be rhetorical with reluctance. The prisoner was
defended by Mr Patrick Butler, K.C., who was mistaken for a mere flaneur
by those who misunderstood the Irish character--and those who had not
been examined by him. The medical evidence involved no contradictions,
the doctor, whom Seymour had summoned on the spot, agreeing with the
eminent surgeon who had later examined the body. Aurora Rome had been
stabbed with some sharp instrument such as a knife or dagger; some
instrument, at least, of which the blade was short. The wound was just
over the heart, and she had died instantly. When the doctor first saw
her she could hardly have been dead for twenty minutes. Therefore when
Father Brown found her she could hardly have been dead for three.

Some official detective evidence followed, chiefly concerned with the
presence or absence of any proof of a struggle; the only suggestion of
this was the tearing of the dress at the shoulder, and this did not seem
to fit in particularly well with the direction and finality of the blow.
When these details had been supplied, though not explained, the first of
the important witnesses was called.

Sir Wilson Seymour gave evidence as he did everything else that he did
at all--not only well, but perfectly. Though himself much more of
a public man than the judge, he conveyed exactly the fine shade of
self-effacement before the King’s justice; and though everyone looked at
him as they would at the Prime Minister or the Archbishop of Canterbury,
they could have said nothing of his part in it but that it was that of a
private gentleman, with an accent on the noun. He was also refreshingly
lucid, as he was on the committees. He had been calling on Miss Rome at
the theatre; he had met Captain Cutler there; they had been joined for
a short time by the accused, who had then returned to his own
dressing-room; they had then been joined by a Roman Catholic priest, who
asked for the deceased lady and said his name was Brown. Miss Rome had
then gone just outside the theatre to the entrance of the passage, in
order to point out to Captain Cutler a flower-shop at which he was to
buy her some more flowers; and the witness had remained in the room,
exchanging a few words with the priest. He had then distinctly heard the
deceased, having sent the Captain on his errand, turn round laughing
and run down the passage towards its other end, where was the prisoner’s
dressing-room. In idle curiosity as to the rapid movement of his
friends, he had strolled out to the head of the passage himself and
looked down it towards the prisoner’s door. Did he see anything in the
passage? Yes; he saw something in the passage.

Sir Walter Cowdray allowed an impressive interval, during which the
witness looked down, and for all his usual composure seemed to have more
than his usual pallor. Then the barrister said in a lower voice, which
seemed at once sympathetic and creepy: “Did you see it distinctly?”

Sir Wilson Seymour, however moved, had his excellent brains in full
working-order. “Very distinctly as regards its outline, but quite
indistinctly, indeed not at all, as regards the details inside the
outline. The passage is of such length that anyone in the middle of it
appears quite black against the light at the other end.” The witness
lowered his steady eyes once more and added: “I had noticed the fact
before, when Captain Cutler first entered it.” There was another
silence, and the judge leaned forward and made a note.

“Well,” said Sir Walter patiently, “what was the outline like? Was it,
for instance, like the figure of the murdered woman?”

“Not in the least,” answered Seymour quietly.

“What did it look like to you?”

“It looked to me,” replied the witness, “like a tall man.”

Everyone in court kept his eyes riveted on his pen, or his
umbrella-handle, or his book, or his boots or whatever he happened to be
looking at. They seemed to be holding their eyes away from the prisoner
by main force; but they felt his figure in the dock, and they felt it
as gigantic. Tall as Bruno was to the eye, he seemed to swell taller and
taller when an eyes had been torn away from him.

Cowdray was resuming his seat with his solemn face, smoothing his
black silk robes, and white silk whiskers. Sir Wilson was leaving the
witness-box, after a few final particulars to which there were many
other witnesses, when the counsel for the defence sprang up and stopped
him.

“I shall only detain you a moment,” said Mr Butler, who was a
rustic-looking person with red eyebrows and an expression of partial
slumber. “Will you tell his lordship how you knew it was a man?”

A faint, refined smile seemed to pass over Seymour’s features. “I’m
afraid it is the vulgar test of trousers,” he said. “When I saw daylight
between the long legs I was sure it was a man, after all.”

Butler’s sleepy eyes opened as suddenly as some silent explosion. “After
all!” he repeated slowly. “So you did think at first it was a woman?”

Seymour looked troubled for the first time. “It is hardly a point of
fact,” he said, “but if his lordship would like me to answer for my
impression, of course I shall do so. There was something about the thing
that was not exactly a woman and yet was not quite a man; somehow the
curves were different. And it had something that looked like long hair.”

“Thank you,” said Mr Butler, K.C., and sat down suddenly, as if he had
got what he wanted.

Captain Cutler was a far less plausible and composed witness than Sir
Wilson, but his account of the opening incidents was solidly the same.
He described the return of Bruno to his dressing-room, the dispatching
of himself to buy a bunch of lilies-of-the-valley, his return to the
upper end of the passage, the thing he saw in the passage, his suspicion
of Seymour, and his struggle with Bruno. But he could give little
artistic assistance about the black figure that he and Seymour had seen.
Asked about its outline, he said he was no art critic--with a somewhat
too obvious sneer at Seymour. Asked if it was a man or a woman, he said
it looked more like a beast--with a too obvious snarl at the prisoner.
But the man was plainly shaken with sorrow and sincere anger, and
Cowdray quickly excused him from confirming facts that were already
fairly clear.

The defending counsel also was again brief in his cross-examination;
although (as was his custom) even in being brief, he seemed to take a
long time about it. “You used a rather remarkable expression,” he said,
looking at Cutler sleepily. “What do you mean by saying that it looked
more like a beast than a man or a woman?”

Cutler seemed seriously agitated. “Perhaps I oughtn’t to have said
that,” he said; “but when the brute has huge humped shoulders like a
chimpanzee, and bristles sticking out of its head like a pig--”

Mr Butler cut short his curious impatience in the middle. “Never mind
whether its hair was like a pig’s,” he said, “was it like a woman’s?”

“A woman’s!” cried the soldier. “Great Scott, no!”

“The last witness said it was,” commented the counsel, with unscrupulous
swiftness. “And did the figure have any of those serpentine and
semi-feminine curves to which eloquent allusion has been made? No? No
feminine curves? The figure, if I understand you, was rather heavy and
square than otherwise?”

“He may have been bending forward,” said Cutler, in a hoarse and rather
faint voice.

“Or again, he may not,” said Mr Butler, and sat down suddenly for the
second time.

The third, witness called by Sir Walter Cowdray was the little Catholic
clergyman, so little, compared with the others, that his head seemed
hardly to come above the box, so that it was like cross-examining a
child. But unfortunately Sir Walter had somehow got it into his head
(mostly by some ramifications of his family’s religion) that Father
Brown was on the side of the prisoner, because the prisoner was wicked
and foreign and even partly black. Therefore he took Father Brown up
sharply whenever that proud pontiff tried to explain anything; and told
him to answer yes or no, and tell the plain facts without any jesuitry.
When Father Brown began, in his simplicity, to say who he thought the
man in the passage was, the barrister told him that he did not want his
theories.

“A black shape was seen in the passage. And you say you saw the black
shape. Well, what shape was it?”

Father Brown blinked as under rebuke; but he had long known the literal
nature of obedience. “The shape,” he said, “was short and thick, but had
two sharp, black projections curved upwards on each side of the head or
top, rather like horns, and--”

“Oh! the devil with horns, no doubt,” ejaculated Cowdray, sitting down
in triumphant jocularity. “It was the devil come to eat Protestants.”

“No,” said the priest dispassionately; “I know who it was.”

Those in court had been wrought up to an irrational, but real sense of
some monstrosity. They had forgotten the figure in the dock and thought
only of the figure in the passage. And the figure in the passage,
described by three capable and respectable men who had all seen it, was
a shifting nightmare: one called it a woman, and the other a beast, and
the other a devil....

The judge was looking at Father Brown with level and piercing eyes.
“You are a most extraordinary witness,” he said; “but there is something
about you that makes me think you are trying to tell the truth. Well,
who was the man you saw in the passage?”

“He was myself,” said Father Brown.

Butler, K.C., sprang to his feet in an extraordinary stillness, and said
quite calmly: “Your lordship will allow me to cross-examine?” And then,
without stopping, he shot at Brown the apparently disconnected question:
“You have heard about this dagger; you know the experts say the crime
was committed with a short blade?”

“A short blade,” assented Brown, nodding solemnly like an owl, “but a
very long hilt.”

Before the audience could quite dismiss the idea that the priest had
really seen himself doing murder with a short dagger with a long hilt
(which seemed somehow to make it more horrible), he had himself hurried
on to explain.

“I mean daggers aren’t the only things with short blades. Spears
have short blades. And spears catch at the end of the steel just like
daggers, if they’re that sort of fancy spear they had in theatres; like
the spear poor old Parkinson killed his wife with, just when she’d sent
for me to settle their family troubles--and I came just too late, God
forgive me! But he died penitent--he just died of being penitent. He
couldn’t bear what he’d done.”

The general impression in court was that the little priest, who was
gobbling away, had literally gone mad in the box. But the judge still
looked at him with bright and steady eyes of interest; and the counsel
for the defence went on with his questions unperturbed.

“If Parkinson did it with that pantomime spear,” said Butler, “he
must have thrust from four yards away. How do you account for signs of
struggle, like the dress dragged off the shoulder?” He had slipped into
treating his mere witness as an expert; but no one noticed it now.

“The poor lady’s dress was torn,” said the witness, “because it was
caught in a panel that slid to just behind her. She struggled to free
herself, and as she did so Parkinson came out of the prisoner’s room and
lunged with the spear.”

“A panel?” repeated the barrister in a curious voice.

“It was a looking-glass on the other side,” explained Father Brown.
“When I was in the dressing-room I noticed that some of them could
probably be slid out into the passage.”

There was another vast and unnatural silence, and this time it was the
judge who spoke. “So you really mean that when you looked down that
passage, the man you saw was yourself--in a mirror?”

“Yes, my lord; that was what I was trying to say,” said Brown, “but they
asked me for the shape; and our hats have corners just like horns, and
so I--”

The judge leaned forward, his old eyes yet more brilliant, and said
in specially distinct tones: “Do you really mean to say that when Sir
Wilson Seymour saw that wild what-you-call-him with curves and a woman’s
hair and a man’s trousers, what he saw was Sir Wilson Seymour?”

“Yes, my lord,” said Father Brown.

“And you mean to say that when Captain Cutler saw that chimpanzee with
humped shoulders and hog’s bristles, he simply saw himself?”

“Yes, my lord.”

The judge leaned back in his chair with a luxuriance in which it was
hard to separate the cynicism and the admiration. “And can you tell us
why,” he asked, “you should know your own figure in a looking-glass,
when two such distinguished men don’t?”

Father Brown blinked even more painfully than before; then he stammered:
“Really, my lord, I don’t know unless it’s because I don’t look at it so
often.”





FIVE -- The Mistake of the Machine


FLAMBEAU and his friend the priest were sitting in the Temple Gardens
about sunset; and their neighbourhood or some such accidental influence
had turned their talk to matters of legal process. From the problem
of the licence in cross-examination, their talk strayed to Roman and
mediaeval torture, to the examining magistrate in France and the Third
Degree in America.

“I’ve been reading,” said Flambeau, “of this new psychometric method
they talk about so much, especially in America. You know what I mean;
they put a pulsometer on a man’s wrist and judge by how his heart goes
at the pronunciation of certain words. What do you think of it?”

“I think it very interesting,” replied Father Brown; “it reminds me
of that interesting idea in the Dark Ages that blood would flow from a
corpse if the murderer touched it.”

“Do you really mean,” demanded his friend, “that you think the two
methods equally valuable?”

“I think them equally valueless,” replied Brown. “Blood flows, fast or
slow, in dead folk or living, for so many more million reasons than we
can ever know. Blood will have to flow very funnily; blood will have
to flow up the Matterhorn, before I will take it as a sign that I am to
shed it.”

“The method,” remarked the other, “has been guaranteed by some of the
greatest American men of science.”

“What sentimentalists men of science are!” exclaimed Father Brown, “and
how much more sentimental must American men of science be! Who but a
Yankee would think of proving anything from heart-throbs? Why, they must
be as sentimental as a man who thinks a woman is in love with him if she
blushes. That’s a test from the circulation of the blood, discovered by
the immortal Harvey; and a jolly rotten test, too.”

“But surely,” insisted Flambeau, “it might point pretty straight at
something or other.”

“There’s a disadvantage in a stick pointing straight,” answered the
other. “What is it? Why, the other end of the stick always points the
opposite way. It depends whether you get hold of the stick by the right
end. I saw the thing done once and I’ve never believed in it since.” And
he proceeded to tell the story of his disillusionment.

It happened nearly twenty years before, when he was chaplain to his
co-religionists in a prison in Chicago--where the Irish population
displayed a capacity both for crime and penitence which kept him
tolerably busy. The official second-in-command under the Governor was an
ex-detective named Greywood Usher, a cadaverous, careful-spoken Yankee
philosopher, occasionally varying a very rigid visage with an odd
apologetic grimace. He liked Father Brown in a slightly patronizing way;
and Father Brown liked him, though he heartily disliked his theories.
His theories were extremely complicated and were held with extreme
simplicity.

One evening he had sent for the priest, who, according to his custom,
took a seat in silence at a table piled and littered with papers, and
waited. The official selected from the papers a scrap of newspaper
cutting, which he handed across to the cleric, who read it gravely. It
appeared to be an extract from one of the pinkest of American Society
papers, and ran as follows:

“Society’s brightest widower is once more on the Freak Dinner stunt. All
our exclusive citizens will recall the Perambulator Parade Dinner, in
which Last-Trick Todd, at his palatial home at Pilgrim’s Pond, caused so
many of our prominent debutantes to look even younger than their years.
Equally elegant and more miscellaneous and large-hearted in social
outlook was Last-Trick’s show the year previous, the popular Cannibal
Crush Lunch, at which the confections handed round were sarcastically
moulded in the forms of human arms and legs, and during which more than
one of our gayest mental gymnasts was heard offering to eat his partner.
The witticism which will inspire this evening is as yet in Mr Todd’s
pretty reticent intellect, or locked in the jewelled bosoms of our
city’s gayest leaders; but there is talk of a pretty parody of the
simple manners and customs at the other end of Society’s scale. This
would be all the more telling, as hospitable Todd is entertaining in
Lord Falconroy, the famous traveller, a true-blooded aristocrat fresh
from England’s oak-groves. Lord Falconroy’s travels began before his
ancient feudal title was resurrected, he was in the Republic in his
youth, and fashion murmurs a sly reason for his return. Miss Etta Todd
is one of our deep-souled New Yorkers, and comes into an income of
nearly twelve hundred million dollars.”

“Well,” asked Usher, “does that interest you?”

“Why, words rather fail me,” answered Father Brown. “I cannot think at
this moment of anything in this world that would interest me less. And,
unless the just anger of the Republic is at last going to electrocute
journalists for writing like that, I don’t quite see why it should
interest you either.”

“Ah!” said Mr Usher dryly, and handing across another scrap of
newspaper. “Well, does that interest you?”

The paragraph was headed “Savage Murder of a Warder. Convict Escapes,”
 and ran: “Just before dawn this morning a shout for help was heard
in the Convict Settlement at Sequah in this State. The authorities,
hurrying in the direction of the cry, found the corpse of the warder who
patrols the top of the north wall of the prison, the steepest and most
difficult exit, for which one man has always been found sufficient. The
unfortunate officer had, however, been hurled from the high wall, his
brains beaten out as with a club, and his gun was missing. Further
inquiries showed that one of the cells was empty; it had been occupied
by a rather sullen ruffian giving his name as Oscar Rian. He was only
temporarily detained for some comparatively trivial assault; but he
gave everyone the impression of a man with a black past and a dangerous
future. Finally, when daylight had fully revealed the scene of
murder, it was found that he had written on the wall above the body a
fragmentary sentence, apparently with a finger dipped in blood: ‘This
was self-defence and he had the gun. I meant no harm to him or any man
but one. I am keeping the bullet for Pilgrim’s Pond--O.R.’ A man must
have used most fiendish treachery or most savage and amazing bodily
daring to have stormed such a wall in spite of an armed man.”

“Well, the literary style is somewhat improved,” admitted the priest
cheerfully, “but still I don’t see what I can do for you. I should cut
a poor figure, with my short legs, running about this State after an
athletic assassin of that sort. I doubt whether anybody could find him.
The convict settlement at Sequah is thirty miles from here; the country
between is wild and tangled enough, and the country beyond, where he
will surely have the sense to go, is a perfect no-man’s land tumbling
away to the prairies. He may be in any hole or up any tree.”

“He isn’t in any hole,” said the governor; “he isn’t up any tree.”

“Why, how do you know?” asked Father Brown, blinking.

“Would you like to speak to him?” inquired Usher.

Father Brown opened his innocent eyes wide. “He is here?” he exclaimed.
“Why, how did your men get hold of him?”

“I got hold of him myself,” drawled the American, rising and lazily
stretching his lanky legs before the fire. “I got hold of him with the
crooked end of a walking-stick. Don’t look so surprised. I really did.
You know I sometimes take a turn in the country lanes outside this
dismal place; well, I was walking early this evening up a steep lane
with dark hedges and grey-looking ploughed fields on both sides; and a
young moon was up and silvering the road. By the light of it I saw a man
running across the field towards the road; running with his body bent
and at a good mile-race trot. He appeared to be much exhausted; but when
he came to the thick black hedge he went through it as if it were made
of spiders’ webs;--or rather (for I heard the strong branches breaking
and snapping like bayonets) as if he himself were made of stone. In the
instant in which he appeared up against the moon, crossing the road, I
slung my hooked cane at his legs, tripping him and bringing him down.
Then I blew my whistle long and loud, and our fellows came running up to
secure him.”

“It would have been rather awkward,” remarked Brown, “if you had found
he was a popular athlete practising a mile race.”

“He was not,” said Usher grimly. “We soon found out who he was; but I
had guessed it with the first glint of the moon on him.”

“You thought it was the runaway convict,” observed the priest simply,
“because you had read in the newspaper cutting that morning that a
convict had run away.”

“I had somewhat better grounds,” replied the governor coolly. “I pass
over the first as too simple to be emphasized--I mean that fashionable
athletes do not run across ploughed fields or scratch their eyes out
in bramble hedges. Nor do they run all doubled up like a crouching dog.
There were more decisive details to a fairly well-trained eye. The man
was clad in coarse and ragged clothes, but they were something more
than merely coarse and ragged. They were so ill-fitting as to be quite
grotesque; even as he appeared in black outline against the moonrise,
the coat-collar in which his head was buried made him look like a
hunchback, and the long loose sleeves looked as if he had no hands. It
at once occurred to me that he had somehow managed to change his convict
clothes for some confederate’s clothes which did not fit him. Second,
there was a pretty stiff wind against which he was running; so that I
must have seen the streaky look of blowing hair, if the hair had not
been very short. Then I remembered that beyond these ploughed fields
he was crossing lay Pilgrim’s Pond, for which (you will remember) the
convict was keeping his bullet; and I sent my walking-stick flying.”

“A brilliant piece of rapid deduction,” said Father Brown; “but had he
got a gun?”

As Usher stopped abruptly in his walk the priest added apologetically:
“I’ve been told a bullet is not half so useful without it.”

“He had no gun,” said the other gravely; “but that was doubtless due to
some very natural mischance or change of plans. Probably the same policy
that made him change the clothes made him drop the gun; he began to
repent the coat he had left behind him in the blood of his victim.”

“Well, that is possible enough,” answered the priest.

“And it’s hardly worth speculating on,” said Usher, turning to some
other papers, “for we know it’s the man by this time.”

His clerical friend asked faintly: “But how?” And Greywood Usher threw
down the newspapers and took up the two press-cuttings again.

“Well, since you are so obstinate,” he said, “let’s begin at the
beginning. You will notice that these two cuttings have only one thing
in common, which is the mention of Pilgrim’s Pond, the estate, as
you know, of the millionaire Ireton Todd. You also know that he is a
remarkable character; one of those that rose on stepping-stones--”

“Of our dead selves to higher things,” assented his companion. “Yes; I
know that. Petroleum, I think.”

“Anyhow,” said Usher, “Last-Trick Todd counts for a great deal in this
rum affair.”

He stretched himself once more before the fire and continued talking in
his expansive, radiantly explanatory style.

“To begin with, on the face of it, there is no mystery here at all. It
is not mysterious, it is not even odd, that a jailbird should take his
gun to Pilgrim’s Pond. Our people aren’t like the English, who will
forgive a man for being rich if he throws away money on hospitals or
horses. Last-Trick Todd has made himself big by his own considerable
abilities; and there’s no doubt that many of those on whom he has shown
his abilities would like to show theirs on him with a shot-gun. Todd
might easily get dropped by some man he’d never even heard of; some
labourer he’d locked out, or some clerk in a business he’d busted.
Last-Trick is a man of mental endowments and a high public character;
but in this country the relations of employers and employed are
considerably strained.

“That’s how the whole thing looks supposing this Rian made for Pilgrim’s
Pond to kill Todd. So it looked to me, till another little discovery
woke up what I have of the detective in me. When I had my prisoner safe,
I picked up my cane again and strolled down the two or three turns of
country road that brought me to one of the side entrances of Todd’s
grounds, the one nearest to the pool or lake after which the place
is named. It was some two hours ago, about seven by this time; the
moonlight was more luminous, and I could see the long white streaks
of it lying on the mysterious mere with its grey, greasy, half-liquid
shores in which they say our fathers used to make witches walk until
they sank. I’d forgotten the exact tale; but you know the place I mean;
it lies north of Todd’s house towards the wilderness, and has two queer
wrinkled trees, so dismal that they look more like huge fungoids than
decent foliage. As I stood peering at this misty pool, I fancied I saw
the faint figure of a man moving from the house towards it, but it was
all too dim and distant for one to be certain of the fact, and still
less of the details. Besides, my attention was very sharply arrested by
something much closer. I crouched behind the fence which ran not more
than two hundred yards from one wing of the great mansion, and which was
fortunately split in places, as if specially for the application of a
cautious eye. A door had opened in the dark bulk of the left wing, and a
figure appeared black against the illuminated interior--a muffled figure
bending forward, evidently peering out into the night. It closed the
door behind it, and I saw it was carrying a lantern, which threw a patch
of imperfect light on the dress and figure of the wearer. It seemed to
be the figure of a woman, wrapped up in a ragged cloak and evidently
disguised to avoid notice; there was something very strange both about
the rags and the furtiveness in a person coming out of those rooms lined
with gold. She took cautiously the curved garden path which brought her
within half a hundred yards of me--, then she stood up for an instant on
the terrace of turf that looks towards the slimy lake, and holding her
flaming lantern above her head she deliberately swung it three times to
and fro as for a signal. As she swung it the second time a flicker of
its light fell for a moment on her own face, a face that I knew. She
was unnaturally pale, and her head was bundled in her borrowed plebeian
shawl; but I am certain it was Etta Todd, the millionaire’s daughter.

“She retraced her steps in equal secrecy and the door closed behind her
again. I was about to climb the fence and follow, when I realized that
the detective fever that had lured me into the adventure was rather
undignified; and that in a more authoritative capacity I already held
all the cards in my hand. I was just turning away when a new noise broke
on the night. A window was thrown up in one of the upper floors, but
just round the corner of the house so that I could not see it; and a
voice of terrible distinctness was heard shouting across the dark garden
to know where Lord Falconroy was, for he was missing from every room in
the house. There was no mistaking that voice. I have heard it on many a
political platform or meeting of directors; it was Ireton Todd himself.
Some of the others seemed to have gone to the lower windows or on to the
steps, and were calling up to him that Falconroy had gone for a stroll
down to the Pilgrim’s Pond an hour before, and could not be traced
since. Then Todd cried ‘Mighty Murder!’ and shut down the window
violently; and I could hear him plunging down the stairs inside.
Repossessing myself of my former and wiser purpose, I whipped out of the
way of the general search that must follow; and returned here not later
than eight o’clock.

“I now ask you to recall that little Society paragraph which seemed to
you so painfully lacking in interest. If the convict was not keeping
the shot for Todd, as he evidently wasn’t, it is most likely that he was
keeping it for Lord Falconroy; and it looks as if he had delivered the
goods. No more handy place to shoot a man than in the curious geological
surroundings of that pool, where a body thrown down would sink through
thick slime to a depth practically unknown. Let us suppose, then, that
our friend with the cropped hair came to kill Falconroy and not Todd.
But, as I have pointed out, there are many reasons why people in America
might want to kill Todd. There is no reason why anybody in America
should want to kill an English lord newly landed, except for the
one reason mentioned in the pink paper--that the lord is paying his
attentions to the millionaire’s daughter. Our crop-haired friend,
despite his ill-fitting clothes, must be an aspiring lover.

“I know the notion will seem to you jarring and even comic; but that’s
because you are English. It sounds to you like saying the Archbishop of
Canterbury’s daughter will be married in St George’s, Hanover Square,
to a crossing-sweeper on ticket-of-leave. You don’t do justice to the
climbing and aspiring power of our more remarkable citizens. You see a
good-looking grey-haired man in evening-dress with a sort of authority
about him, you know he is a pillar of the State, and you fancy he had
a father. You are in error. You do not realize that a comparatively few
years ago he may have been in a tenement or (quite likely) in a jail.
You don’t allow for our national buoyancy and uplift. Many of our
most influential citizens have not only risen recently, but risen
comparatively late in life. Todd’s daughter was fully eighteen when her
father first made his pile; so there isn’t really anything impossible in
her having a hanger-on in low life; or even in her hanging on to him, as
I think she must be doing, to judge by the lantern business. If so, the
hand that held the lantern may not be unconnected with the hand that
held the gun. This case, sir, will make a noise.”

“Well,” said the priest patiently, “and what did you do next?”

“I reckon you’ll be shocked,” replied Greywood Usher, “as I know you
don’t cotton to the march of science in these matters. I am given a good
deal of discretion here, and perhaps take a little more than I’m given;
and I thought it was an excellent opportunity to test that Psychometric
Machine I told you about. Now, in my opinion, that machine can’t lie.”

“No machine can lie,” said Father Brown; “nor can it tell the truth.”

“It did in this case, as I’ll show you,” went on Usher positively.
“I sat the man in the ill-fitting clothes in a comfortable chair, and
simply wrote words on a blackboard; and the machine simply recorded the
variations of his pulse; and I simply observed his manner. The trick is
to introduce some word connected with the supposed crime in a list of
words connected with something quite different, yet a list in which it
occurs quite naturally. Thus I wrote ‘heron’ and ‘eagle’ and ‘owl’, and
when I wrote ‘falcon’ he was tremendously agitated; and when I began to
make an ‘r’ at the end of the word, that machine just bounded. Who else
in this republic has any reason to jump at the name of a newly-arrived
Englishman like Falconroy except the man who’s shot him? Isn’t that
better evidence than a lot of gabble from witnesses--if the evidence of
a reliable machine?”

“You always forget,” observed his companion, “that the reliable machine
always has to be worked by an unreliable machine.”

“Why, what do you mean?” asked the detective.

“I mean Man,” said Father Brown, “the most unreliable machine I know of.
I don’t want to be rude; and I don’t think you will consider Man to be
an offensive or inaccurate description of yourself. You say you observed
his manner; but how do you know you observed it right? You say the
words have to come in a natural way; but how do you know that you did it
naturally? How do you know, if you come to that, that he did not observe
your manner? Who is to prove that you were not tremendously agitated?
There was no machine tied on to your pulse.”

“I tell you,” cried the American in the utmost excitement, “I was as
cool as a cucumber.”

“Criminals also can be as cool as cucumbers,” said Brown with a smile.
“And almost as cool as you.”

“Well, this one wasn’t,” said Usher, throwing the papers about. “Oh, you
make me tired!”

“I’m sorry,” said the other. “I only point out what seems a reasonable
possibility. If you could tell by his manner when the word that might
hang him had come, why shouldn’t he tell from your manner that the word
that might hang him was coming? I should ask for more than words myself
before I hanged anybody.”

Usher smote the table and rose in a sort of angry triumph.

“And that,” he cried, “is just what I’m going to give you. I tried the
machine first just in order to test the thing in other ways afterwards
and the machine, sir, is right.”

He paused a moment and resumed with less excitement. “I rather want
to insist, if it comes to that, that so far I had very little to go on
except the scientific experiment. There was really nothing against the
man at all. His clothes were ill-fitting, as I’ve said, but they were
rather better, if anything, than those of the submerged class to which
he evidently belonged. Moreover, under all the stains of his plunging
through ploughed fields or bursting through dusty hedges, the man was
comparatively clean. This might mean, of course, that he had only just
broken prison; but it reminded me more of the desperate decency of
the comparatively respectable poor. His demeanour was, I am bound to
confess, quite in accordance with theirs. He was silent and dignified as
they are; he seemed to have a big, but buried, grievance, as they do.
He professed total ignorance of the crime and the whole question; and
showed nothing but a sullen impatience for something sensible that might
come to take him out of his meaningless scrape. He asked me more than
once if he could telephone for a lawyer who had helped him a long time
ago in a trade dispute, and in every sense acted as you would expect an
innocent man to act. There was nothing against him in the world except
that little finger on the dial that pointed to the change of his pulse.

“Then, sir, the machine was on its trial; and the machine was right.
By the time I came with him out of the private room into the vestibule
where all sorts of other people were awaiting examination, I think
he had already more or less made up his mind to clear things up by
something like a confession. He turned to me and began to say in a low
voice: ‘Oh, I can’t stick this any more. If you must know all about
me--’

“At the same instant one of the poor women sitting on the long bench
stood up, screaming aloud and pointing at him with her finger. I have
never in my life heard anything more demoniacally distinct. Her lean
finger seemed to pick him out as if it were a pea-shooter. Though the
word was a mere howl, every syllable was as clear as a separate stroke
on the clock.

“‘Drugger Davis!’ she shouted. ‘They’ve got Drugger Davis!’

“Among the wretched women, mostly thieves and streetwalkers, twenty
faces were turned, gaping with glee and hate. If I had never heard the
words, I should have known by the very shock upon his features that
the so-called Oscar Rian had heard his real name. But I’m not quite so
ignorant, you may be surprised to hear. Drugger Davis was one of the
most terrible and depraved criminals that ever baffled our police. It is
certain he had done murder more than once long before his last exploit
with the warder. But he was never entirely fixed for it, curiously
enough because he did it in the same manner as those milder--or
meaner--crimes for which he was fixed pretty often. He was a handsome,
well-bred-looking brute, as he still is, to some extent; and he used
mostly to go about with barmaids or shop-girls and do them out of their
money. Very often, though, he went a good deal farther; and they were
found drugged with cigarettes or chocolates and their whole property
missing. Then came one case where the girl was found dead; but
deliberation could not quite be proved, and, what was more practical
still, the criminal could not be found. I heard a rumour of his having
reappeared somewhere in the opposite character this time, lending money
instead of borrowing it; but still to such poor widows as he might
personally fascinate, but still with the same bad result for them. Well,
there is your innocent man, and there is his innocent record. Even,
since then, four criminals and three warders have identified him and
confirmed the story. Now what have you got to say to my poor little
machine after that? Hasn’t the machine done for him? Or do you prefer to
say that the woman and I have done for him?”

“As to what you’ve done for him,” replied Father Brown, rising and
shaking himself in a floppy way, “you’ve saved him from the electrical
chair. I don’t think they can kill Drugger Davis on that old vague story
of the poison; and as for the convict who killed the warder, I suppose
it’s obvious that you haven’t got him. Mr Davis is innocent of that
crime, at any rate.”

“What do you mean?” demanded the other. “Why should he be innocent of
that crime?”

“Why, bless us all!” cried the small man in one of his rare moments of
animation, “why, because he’s guilty of the other crimes! I don’t know
what you people are made of. You seem to think that all sins are kept
together in a bag. You talk as if a miser on Monday were always a
spendthrift on Tuesday. You tell me this man you have here spent weeks
and months wheedling needy women out of small sums of money; that he
used a drug at the best, and a poison at the worst; that he turned up
afterwards as the lowest kind of moneylender, and cheated most poor
people in the same patient and pacific style. Let it be granted--let us
admit, for the sake of argument, that he did all this. If that is so, I
will tell you what he didn’t do. He didn’t storm a spiked wall against a
man with a loaded gun. He didn’t write on the wall with his own hand, to
say he had done it. He didn’t stop to state that his justification was
self-defence. He didn’t explain that he had no quarrel with the poor
warder. He didn’t name the house of the rich man to which he was going
with the gun. He didn’t write his own, initials in a man’s blood. Saints
alive! Can’t you see the whole character is different, in good and evil?
Why, you don’t seem to be like I am a bit. One would think you’d never
had any vices of your own.”

The amazed American had already parted his lips in protest when the
door of his private and official room was hammered and rattled in an
unceremonious way to which he was totally unaccustomed.

The door flew open. The moment before Greywood Usher had been coming to
the conclusion that Father Brown might possibly be mad. The moment after
he began to think he was mad himself. There burst and fell into his
private room a man in the filthiest rags, with a greasy squash hat still
askew on his head, and a shabby green shade shoved up from one of his
eyes, both of which were glaring like a tiger’s. The rest of his face
was almost undiscoverable, being masked with a matted beard and whiskers
through which the nose could barely thrust itself, and further buried in
a squalid red scarf or handkerchief. Mr Usher prided himself on having
seen most of the roughest specimens in the State, but he thought he had
never seen such a baboon dressed as a scarecrow as this. But, above all,
he had never in all his placid scientific existence heard a man like
that speak to him first.

“See here, old man Usher,” shouted the being in the red handkerchief,
“I’m getting tired. Don’t you try any of your hide-and-seek on me; I
don’t get fooled any. Leave go of my guests, and I’ll let up on the
fancy clockwork. Keep him here for a split instant and you’ll feel
pretty mean. I reckon I’m not a man with no pull.”

The eminent Usher was regarding the bellowing monster with an amazement
which had dried up all other sentiments. The mere shock to his eyes had
rendered his ears, almost useless. At last he rang a bell with a hand
of violence. While the bell was still strong and pealing, the voice of
Father Brown fell soft but distinct.

“I have a suggestion to make,” he said, “but it seems a little
confusing. I don’t know this gentleman--but--but I think I know
him. Now, you know him--you know him quite well--but you don’t know
him--naturally. Sounds paradoxical, I know.”

“I reckon the Cosmos is cracked,” said Usher, and fell asprawl in his
round office chair.

“Now, see here,” vociferated the stranger, striking the table, but
speaking in a voice that was all the more mysterious because it was
comparatively mild and rational though still resounding. “I won’t let
you in. I want--”

“Who in hell are you?” yelled Usher, suddenly sitting up straight.

“I think the gentleman’s name is Todd,” said the priest.

Then he picked up the pink slip of newspaper.

“I fear you don’t read the Society papers properly,” he said, and began
to read out in a monotonous voice, “‘Or locked in the jewelled bosoms of
our city’s gayest leaders; but there is talk of a pretty parody of the
manners and customs of the other end of Society’s scale.’ There’s been
a big Slum Dinner up at Pilgrim’s Pond tonight; and a man, one of the
guests, disappeared. Mr Ireton Todd is a good host, and has tracked him
here, without even waiting to take off his fancy-dress.”

“What man do you mean?”

“I mean the man with comically ill-fitting clothes you saw running
across the ploughed field. Hadn’t you better go and investigate him? He
will be rather impatient to get back to his champagne, from which he ran
away in such a hurry, when the convict with the gun hove in sight.”

“Do you seriously mean--” began the official.

“Why, look here, Mr Usher,” said Father Brown quietly, “you said the
machine couldn’t make a mistake; and in one sense it didn’t. But the
other machine did; the machine that worked it. You assumed that the
man in rags jumped at the name of Lord Falconroy, because he was Lord
Falconroy’s murderer. He jumped at the name of Lord Falconroy because he
is Lord Falconroy.”

“Then why the blazes didn’t he say so?” demanded the staring Usher.

“He felt his plight and recent panic were hardly patrician,” replied
the priest, “so he tried to keep the name back at first. But he was
just going to tell it you, when”--and Father Brown looked down at his
boots--“when a woman found another name for him.”

“But you can’t be so mad as to say,” said Greywood Usher, very white,
“that Lord Falconroy was Drugger Davis.”

The priest looked at him very earnestly, but with a baffling and
undecipherable face.

“I am not saying anything about it,” he said. “I leave all the rest to
you. Your pink paper says that the title was recently revived for him;
but those papers are very unreliable. It says he was in the States in
youth; but the whole story seems very strange. Davis and Falconroy are
both pretty considerable cowards, but so are lots of other men. I would
not hang a dog on my own opinion about this. But I think,” he went on
softly and reflectively, “I think you Americans are too modest. I think
you idealize the English aristocracy--even in assuming it to be so
aristocratic. You see a good-looking Englishman in evening-dress; you
know he’s in the House of Lords; and you fancy he has a father. You
don’t allow for our national buoyancy and uplift. Many of our most
influential noblemen have not only risen recently, but--”

“Oh, stop it!” cried Greywood Usher, wringing one lean hand in
impatience against a shade of irony in the other’s face.

“Don’t stay talking to this lunatic!” cried Todd brutally. “Take me to
my friend.”

Next morning Father Brown appeared with the same demure expression,
carrying yet another piece of pink newspaper.

“I’m afraid you neglect the fashionable press rather,” he said, “but
this cutting may interest you.”

Usher read the headlines, “Last-Trick’s Strayed Revellers: Mirthful
Incident near Pilgrim’s Pond.” The paragraph went on: “A laughable
occurrence took place outside Wilkinson’s Motor Garage last night.
A policeman on duty had his attention drawn by larrikins to a man
in prison dress who was stepping with considerable coolness into the
steering-seat of a pretty high-toned Panhard; he was accompanied by a
girl wrapped in a ragged shawl. On the police interfering, the young
woman threw back the shawl, and all recognized Millionaire Todd’s
daughter, who had just come from the Slum Freak Dinner at the Pond,
where all the choicest guests were in a similar deshabille. She and the
gentleman who had donned prison uniform were going for the customary
joy-ride.”

Under the pink slip Mr Usher found a strip of a later paper, headed,
“Astounding Escape of Millionaire’s Daughter with Convict. She had
Arranged Freak Dinner. Now Safe in--”

Mr Greenwood Usher lifted his eyes, but Father Brown was gone.





SIX -- The Head of Caesar


THERE is somewhere in Brompton or Kensington an interminable avenue of
tall houses, rich but largely empty, that looks like a terrace of tombs.
The very steps up to the dark front doors seem as steep as the side of
pyramids; one would hesitate to knock at the door, lest it should be
opened by a mummy. But a yet more depressing feature in the grey facade
is its telescopic length and changeless continuity. The pilgrim walking
down it begins to think he will never come to a break or a corner; but
there is one exception--a very small one, but hailed by the pilgrim
almost with a shout. There is a sort of mews between two of the tall
mansions, a mere slit like the crack of a door by comparison with
the street, but just large enough to permit a pigmy ale-house or
eating-house, still allowed by the rich to their stable-servants, to
stand in the angle. There is something cheery in its very dinginess,
and something free and elfin in its very insignificance. At the feet of
those grey stone giants it looks like a lighted house of dwarfs.

Anyone passing the place during a certain autumn evening, itself almost
fairylike, might have seen a hand pull aside the red half-blind which
(along with some large white lettering) half hid the interior from the
street, and a face peer out not unlike a rather innocent goblin’s. It
was, in fact, the face of one with the harmless human name of Brown,
formerly priest of Cobhole in Essex, and now working in London. His
friend, Flambeau, a semi-official investigator, was sitting opposite
him, making his last notes of a case he had cleared up in the
neighbourhood. They were sitting at a small table, close up to the
window, when the priest pulled the curtain back and looked out. He
waited till a stranger in the street had passed the window, to let the
curtain fall into its place again. Then his round eyes rolled to the
large white lettering on the window above his head, and then strayed to
the next table, at which sat only a navvy with beer and cheese, and a
young girl with red hair and a glass of milk. Then (seeing his friend
put away the pocket-book), he said softly:

“If you’ve got ten minutes, I wish you’d follow that man with the false
nose.”

Flambeau looked up in surprise; but the girl with the red hair also
looked up, and with something that was stronger than astonishment. She
was simply and even loosely dressed in light brown sacking stuff;
but she was a lady, and even, on a second glance, a rather needlessly
haughty one. “The man with the false nose!” repeated Flambeau. “Who’s
he?”

“I haven’t a notion,” answered Father Brown. “I want you to find out;
I ask it as a favour. He went down there”--and he jerked his thumb over
his shoulder in one of his undistinguished gestures--“and can’t have
passed three lamp-posts yet. I only want to know the direction.”

Flambeau gazed at his friend for some time, with an expression between
perplexity and amusement; and then, rising from the table; squeezed his
huge form out of the little door of the dwarf tavern, and melted into
the twilight.

Father Brown took a small book out of his pocket and began to read
steadily; he betrayed no consciousness of the fact that the red-haired
lady had left her own table and sat down opposite him. At last she
leaned over and said in a low, strong voice: “Why do you say that? How
do you know it’s false?”

He lifted his rather heavy eyelids, which fluttered in considerable
embarrassment. Then his dubious eye roamed again to the white lettering
on the glass front of the public-house. The young woman’s eyes followed
his, and rested there also, but in pure puzzledom.

“No,” said Father Brown, answering her thoughts. “It doesn’t say ‘Sela’,
like the thing in the Psalms; I read it like that myself when I was
wool-gathering just now; it says ‘Ales.’”

“Well?” inquired the staring young lady. “What does it matter what it
says?”

His ruminating eye roved to the girl’s light canvas sleeve, round the
wrist of which ran a very slight thread of artistic pattern, just enough
to distinguish it from a working-dress of a common woman and make it
more like the working-dress of a lady art-student. He seemed to find
much food for thought in this; but his reply was very slow and hesitant.
“You see, madam,” he said, “from outside the place looks--well, it is a
perfectly decent place--but ladies like you don’t--don’t generally think
so. They never go into such places from choice, except--”

“Well?” she repeated.

“Except an unfortunate few who don’t go in to drink milk.”

“You are a most singular person,” said the young lady. “What is your
object in all this?”

“Not to trouble you about it,” he replied, very gently. “Only to arm
myself with knowledge enough to help you, if ever you freely ask my
help.”

“But why should I need help?”

He continued his dreamy monologue. “You couldn’t have come in to see
protegees, humble friends, that sort of thing, or you’d have gone
through into the parlour... and you couldn’t have come in because
you were ill, or you’d have spoken to the woman of the place, who’s
obviously respectable... besides, you don’t look ill in that way, but
only unhappy.... This street is the only original long lane that has
no turning; and the houses on both sides are shut up.... I could only
suppose that you’d seen somebody coming whom you didn’t want to meet;
and found the public-house was the only shelter in this wilderness
of stone.... I don’t think I went beyond the licence of a stranger
in glancing at the only man who passed immediately after.... And as I
thought he looked like the wrong sort... and you looked like the right
sort.... I held myself ready to help if he annoyed you; that is all.
As for my friend, he’ll be back soon; and he certainly can’t find out
anything by stumping down a road like this.... I didn’t think he could.”

“Then why did you send him out?” she cried, leaning forward with yet
warmer curiosity. She had the proud, impetuous face that goes with
reddish colouring, and a Roman nose, as it did in Marie Antoinette.

He looked at her steadily for the first time, and said: “Because I hoped
you would speak to me.”

She looked back at him for some time with a heated face, in which there
hung a red shadow of anger; then, despite her anxieties, humour broke
out of her eyes and the corners of her mouth, and she answered almost
grimly: “Well, if you’re so keen on my conversation, perhaps you’ll
answer my question.” After a pause she added: “I had the honour to ask
you why you thought the man’s nose was false.”

“The wax always spots like that just a little in this weather,” answered
Father Brown with entire simplicity.

“But it’s such a crooked nose,” remonstrated the red-haired girl.

The priest smiled in his turn. “I don’t say it’s the sort of nose one
would wear out of mere foppery,” he admitted. “This man, I think, wears
it because his real nose is so much nicer.”

“But why?” she insisted.

“What is the nursery-rhyme?” observed Brown absent-mindedly. “There was
a crooked man and he went a crooked mile.... That man, I fancy, has gone
a very crooked road--by following his nose.”

“Why, what’s he done?” she demanded, rather shakily.

“I don’t want to force your confidence by a hair,” said Father Brown,
very quietly. “But I think you could tell me more about that than I can
tell you.”

The girl sprang to her feet and stood quite quietly, but with clenched
hands, like one about to stride away; then her hands loosened slowly,
and she sat down again. “You are more of a mystery than all the others,”
 she said desperately, “but I feel there might be a heart in your
mystery.”

“What we all dread most,” said the priest in a low voice, “is a maze
with no centre. That is why atheism is only a nightmare.” “I will tell
you everything,” said the red-haired girl doggedly, “except why I am
telling you; and that I don’t know.”

She picked at the darned table-cloth and went on: “You look as if you
knew what isn’t snobbery as well as what is; and when I say that ours
is a good old family, you’ll understand it is a necessary part of the
story; indeed, my chief danger is in my brother’s high-and-dry notions,
noblesse oblige and all that. Well, my name is Christabel Carstairs; and
my father was that Colonel Carstairs you’ve probably heard of, who made
the famous Carstairs Collection of Roman coins. I could never describe
my father to you; the nearest I can say is that he was very like a Roman
coin himself. He was as handsome and as genuine and as valuable and as
metallic and as out-of-date. He was prouder of his Collection than of
his coat-of-arms--nobody could say more than that. His extraordinary
character came out most in his will. He had two sons and one daughter.
He quarrelled with one son, my brother Giles, and sent him to Australia
on a small allowance. He then made a will leaving the Carstairs
Collection, actually with a yet smaller allowance, to my brother Arthur.
He meant it as a reward, as the highest honour he could offer, in
acknowledgement of Arthur’s loyalty and rectitude and the distinctions
he had already gained in mathematics and economics at Cambridge. He left
me practically all his pretty large fortune; and I am sure he meant it
in contempt.

“Arthur, you may say, might well complain of this; but Arthur is my
father over again. Though he had some differences with my father in
early youth, no sooner had he taken over the Collection than he became
like a pagan priest dedicated to a temple. He mixed up these Roman
halfpence with the honour of the Carstairs family in the same stiff,
idolatrous way as his father before him. He acted as if Roman money
must be guarded by all the Roman virtues. He took no pleasures; he spent
nothing on himself; he lived for the Collection. Often he would not
trouble to dress for his simple meals; but pattered about among the
corded brown-paper parcels (which no one else was allowed to touch) in
an old brown dressing-gown. With its rope and tassel and his pale, thin,
refined face, it made him look like an old ascetic monk. Every now
and then, though, he would appear dressed like a decidedly fashionable
gentleman; but that was only when he went up to the London sales or
shops to make an addition to the Carstairs Collection.

“Now, if you’ve known any young people, you won’t be shocked if I say
that I got into rather a low frame of mind with all this; the frame of
mind in which one begins to say that the Ancient Romans were all very
well in their way. I’m not like my brother Arthur; I can’t help enjoying
enjoyment. I got a lot of romance and rubbish where I got my red hair,
from the other side of the family. Poor Giles was the same; and I think
the atmosphere of coins might count in excuse for him; though he really
did wrong and nearly went to prison. But he didn’t behave any worse than
I did; as you shall hear.

“I come now to the silly part of the story. I think a man as clever as
you can guess the sort of thing that would begin to relieve the monotony
for an unruly girl of seventeen placed in such a position. But I am so
rattled with more dreadful things that I can hardly read my own feeling;
and don’t know whether I despise it now as a flirtation or bear it as a
broken heart. We lived then at a little seaside watering-place in South
Wales, and a retired sea-captain living a few doors off had a son about
five years older than myself, who had been a friend of Giles before he
went to the Colonies. His name does not affect my tale; but I tell you
it was Philip Hawker, because I am telling you everything. We used to
go shrimping together, and said and thought we were in love with each
other; at least he certainly said he was, and I certainly thought I was.
If I tell you he had bronzed curly hair and a falconish sort of face,
bronzed by the sea also, it’s not for his sake, I assure you, but for
the story; for it was the cause of a very curious coincidence.

“One summer afternoon, when I had promised to go shrimping along
the sands with Philip, I was waiting rather impatiently in the front
drawing-room, watching Arthur handle some packets of coins he had just
purchased and slowly shunt them, one or two at a time, into his own dark
study and museum which was at the back of the house. As soon as I heard
the heavy door close on him finally, I made a bolt for my shrimping-net
and tam-o’-shanter and was just going to slip out, when I saw that my
brother had left behind him one coin that lay gleaming on the long bench
by the window. It was a bronze coin, and the colour, combined with the
exact curve of the Roman nose and something in the very lift of the
long, wiry neck, made the head of Caesar on it the almost precise
portrait of Philip Hawker. Then I suddenly remembered Giles telling
Philip of a coin that was like him, and Philip wishing he had it.
Perhaps you can fancy the wild, foolish thoughts with which my head went
round; I felt as if I had had a gift from the fairies. It seemed to me
that if I could only run away with this, and give it to Philip like a
wild sort of wedding-ring, it would be a bond between us for ever; I
felt a thousand such things at once. Then there yawned under me, like
the pit, the enormous, awful notion of what I was doing; above all, the
unbearable thought, which was like touching hot iron, of what Arthur
would think of it. A Carstairs a thief; and a thief of the Carstairs
treasure! I believe my brother could see me burned like a witch for such
a thing, But then, the very thought of such fanatical cruelty heightened
my old hatred of his dingy old antiquarian fussiness and my longing for
the youth and liberty that called to me from the sea. Outside was strong
sunlight with a wind; and a yellow head of some broom or gorse in the
garden rapped against the glass of the window. I thought of that living
and growing gold calling to me from all the heaths of the world--and
then of that dead, dull gold and bronze and brass of my brother’s
growing dustier and dustier as life went by. Nature and the Carstairs
Collection had come to grips at last.

“Nature is older than the Carstairs Collection. As I ran down the
streets to the sea, the coin clenched tight in my fist, I felt all the
Roman Empire on my back as well as the Carstairs pedigree. It was not
only the old lion argent that was roaring in my ear, but all the eagles
of the Caesars seemed flapping and screaming in pursuit of me. And yet
my heart rose higher and higher like a child’s kite, until I came over
the loose, dry sand-hills and to the flat, wet sands, where Philip stood
already up to his ankles in the shallow shining water, some hundred
yards out to sea. There was a great red sunset; and the long stretch of
low water, hardly rising over the ankle for half a mile, was like a lake
of ruby flame. It was not till I had torn off my shoes and stockings and
waded to where he stood, which was well away from the dry land, that I
turned and looked round. We were quite alone in a circle of sea-water
and wet sand, and I gave him the head of Caesar.

“At the very instant I had a shock of fancy: that a man far away on
the sand-hills was looking at me intently. I must have felt immediately
after that it was a mere leap of unreasonable nerves; for the man was
only a dark dot in the distance, and I could only just see that he was
standing quite still and gazing, with his head a little on one side.
There was no earthly logical evidence that he was looking at me; he
might have been looking at a ship, or the sunset, or the sea-gulls,
or at any of the people who still strayed here and there on the shore
between us. Nevertheless, whatever my start sprang from was prophetic;
for, as I gazed, he started walking briskly in a bee-line towards us
across the wide wet sands. As he drew nearer and nearer I saw that
he was dark and bearded, and that his eyes were marked with dark
spectacles. He was dressed poorly but respectably in black, from the old
black top hat on his head to the solid black boots on his feet. In spite
of these he walked straight into the sea without a flash of hesitation,
and came on at me with the steadiness of a travelling bullet.

“I can’t tell you the sense of monstrosity and miracle I had when he
thus silently burst the barrier between land and water. It was as if he
had walked straight off a cliff and still marched steadily in mid-air.
It was as if a house had flown up into the sky or a man’s head had
fallen off. He was only wetting his boots; but he seemed to be a demon
disregarding a law of Nature. If he had hesitated an instant at the
water’s edge it would have been nothing. As it was, he seemed to look so
much at me alone as not to notice the ocean. Philip was some yards away
with his back to me, bending over his net. The stranger came on till
he stood within two yards of me, the water washing half-way up to
his knees. Then he said, with a clearly modulated and rather mincing
articulation: ‘Would it discommode you to contribute elsewhere a coin
with a somewhat different superscription?’

“With one exception there was nothing definably abnormal about him. His
tinted glasses were not really opaque, but of a blue kind common enough,
nor were the eyes behind them shifty, but regarded me steadily. His dark
beard was not really long or wild--, but he looked rather hairy, because
the beard began very high up in his face, just under the cheek-bones.
His complexion was neither sallow nor livid, but on the contrary rather
clear and youthful; yet this gave a pink-and-white wax look which
somehow (I don’t know why) rather increased the horror. The only oddity
one could fix was that his nose, which was otherwise of a good shape,
was just slightly turned sideways at the tip; as if, when it was soft,
it had been tapped on one side with a toy hammer. The thing was hardly
a deformity; yet I cannot tell you what a living nightmare it was to
me. As he stood there in the sunset-stained water he affected me as some
hellish sea-monster just risen roaring out of a sea like blood. I don’t
know why a touch on the nose should affect my imagination so much. I
think it seemed as if he could move his nose like a finger. And as if he
had just that moment moved it.

“‘Any little assistance,’ he continued with the same queer, priggish
accent, ‘that may obviate the necessity of my communicating with the
family.’

“Then it rushed over me that I was being blackmailed for the theft of
the bronze piece; and all my merely superstitious fears and doubts were
swallowed up in one overpowering, practical question. How could he
have found out? I had stolen the thing suddenly and on impulse; I was
certainly alone; for I always made sure of being unobserved when I
slipped out to see Philip in this way. I had not, to all appearance,
been followed in the street; and if I had, they could not ‘X-ray’ the
coin in my closed hand. The man standing on the sand-hills could no more
have seen what I gave Philip than shoot a fly in one eye, like the man
in the fairy-tale.

“‘Philip,’ I cried helplessly, ‘ask this man what he wants.’

“When Philip lifted his head at last from mending his net he looked
rather red, as if sulky or ashamed; but it may have been only the
exertion of stooping and the red evening light; I may have only had
another of the morbid fancies that seemed to be dancing about me. He
merely said gruffly to the man: ‘You clear out of this.’ And, motioning
me to follow, set off wading shoreward without paying further attention
to him. He stepped on to a stone breakwater that ran out from among the
roots of the sand-hills, and so struck homeward, perhaps thinking our
incubus would find it less easy to walk on such rough stones, green and
slippery with seaweed, than we, who were young and used to it. But my
persecutor walked as daintily as he talked; and he still followed
me, picking his way and picking his phrases. I heard his delicate,
detestable voice appealing to me over my shoulder, until at last, when
we had crested the sand-hills, Philip’s patience (which was by no means
so conspicuous on most occasions) seemed to snap. He turned suddenly,
saying, ‘Go back. I can’t talk to you now.’ And as the man hovered and
opened his mouth, Philip struck him a buffet on it that sent him flying
from the top of the tallest sand-hill to the bottom. I saw him crawling
out below, covered with sand.

“This stroke comforted me somehow, though it might well increase my
peril; but Philip showed none of his usual elation at his own prowess.
Though as affectionate as ever, he still seemed cast down; and before
I could ask him anything fully, he parted with me at his own gate,
with two remarks that struck me as strange. He said that, all things
considered, I ought to put the coin back in the Collection; but that
he himself would keep it ‘for the present’. And then he added quite
suddenly and irrelevantly: ‘You know Giles is back from Australia?’”

The door of the tavern opened and the gigantic shadow of the
investigator Flambeau fell across the table. Father Brown presented him
to the lady in his own slight, persuasive style of speech, mentioning
his knowledge and sympathy in such cases; and almost without knowing,
the girl was soon reiterating her story to two listeners. But Flambeau,
as he bowed and sat down, handed the priest a small slip of paper. Brown
accepted it with some surprise and read on it: “Cab to Wagga Wagga, 379,
Mafeking Avenue, Putney.” The girl was going on with her story.

“I went up the steep street to my own house with my head in a whirl; it
had not begun to clear when I came to the doorstep, on which I found a
milk-can--and the man with the twisted nose. The milk-can told me the
servants were all out; for, of course, Arthur, browsing about in his
brown dressing-gown in a brown study, would not hear or answer a bell.
Thus there was no one to help me in the house, except my brother, whose
help must be my ruin. In desperation I thrust two shillings into the
horrid thing’s hand, and told him to call again in a few days, when I
had thought it out. He went off sulking, but more sheepishly than I had
expected--perhaps he had been shaken by his fall--and I watched the
star of sand splashed on his back receding down the road with a horrid
vindictive pleasure. He turned a corner some six houses down.

“Then I let myself in, made myself some tea, and tried to think it out.
I sat at the drawing-room window looking on to the garden, which still
glowed with the last full evening light. But I was too distracted and
dreamy to look at the lawns and flower-pots and flower-beds with any
concentration. So I took the shock the more sharply because I’d seen it
so slowly.

“The man or monster I’d sent away was standing quite still in the middle
of the garden. Oh, we’ve all read a lot about pale-faced phantoms in the
dark; but this was more dreadful than anything of that kind could ever
be. Because, though he cast a long evening shadow, he still stood in
warm sunlight. And because his face was not pale, but had that waxen
bloom still upon it that belongs to a barber’s dummy. He stood quite
still, with his face towards me; and I can’t tell you how horrid
he looked among the tulips and all those tall, gaudy, almost
hothouse-looking flowers. It looked as if we’d stuck up a waxwork
instead of a statue in the centre of our garden.

“Yet almost the instant he saw me move in the window he turned and ran
out of the garden by the back gate, which stood open and by which he had
undoubtedly entered. This renewed timidity on his part was so different
from the impudence with which he had walked into the sea, that I felt
vaguely comforted. I fancied, perhaps, that he feared confronting Arthur
more than I knew. Anyhow, I settled down at last, and had a quiet
dinner alone (for it was against the rules to disturb Arthur when he was
rearranging the museum), and, my thoughts, a little released, fled to
Philip and lost themselves, I suppose. Anyhow, I was looking blankly,
but rather pleasantly than otherwise, at another window, uncurtained,
but by this time black as a slate with the final night-fall. It seemed
to me that something like a snail was on the outside of the window-pane.
But when I stared harder, it was more like a man’s thumb pressed on the
pane; it had that curled look that a thumb has. With my fear and courage
re-awakened together, I rushed at the window and then recoiled with a
strangled scream that any man but Arthur must have heard.

“For it was not a thumb, any more than it was a snail. It was the tip
of a crooked nose, crushed against the glass; it looked white with
the pressure; and the staring face and eyes behind it were at first
invisible and afterwards grey like a ghost. I slammed the shutters
together somehow, rushed up to my room and locked myself in. But, even
as I passed, I could swear I saw a second black window with something on
it that was like a snail.

“It might be best to go to Arthur after all. If the thing was crawling
close all around the house like a cat, it might have purposes worse even
than blackmail. My brother might cast me out and curse me for ever, but
he was a gentleman, and would defend me on the spot. After ten minutes’
curious thinking, I went down, knocked on the door and then went in: to
see the last and worst sight.

“My brother’s chair was empty, and he was obviously out. But the man
with the crooked nose was sitting waiting for his return, with his hat
still insolently on his head, and actually reading one of my brother’s
books under my brother’s lamp. His face was composed and occupied, but
his nose-tip still had the air of being the most mobile part of his
face, as if it had just turned from left to right like an elephant’s
proboscis. I had thought him poisonous enough while he was pursuing and
watching me; but I think his unconsciousness of my presence was more
frightful still.

“I think I screamed loud and long; but that doesn’t matter. What I did
next does matter: I gave him all the money I had, including a good deal
in paper which, though it was mine, I dare say I had no right to touch.
He went off at last, with hateful, tactful regrets all in long words;
and I sat down, feeling ruined in every sense. And yet I was saved that
very night by a pure accident. Arthur had gone off suddenly to London,
as he so often did, for bargains; and returned, late but radiant, having
nearly secured a treasure that was an added splendour even to the
family Collection. He was so resplendent that I was almost emboldened to
confess the abstraction of the lesser gem--, but he bore down all other
topics with his over-powering projects. Because the bargain might still
misfire any moment, he insisted on my packing at once and going up
with him to lodgings he had already taken in Fulham, to be near the
curio-shop in question. Thus in spite of myself, I fled from my foe
almost in the dead of night--but from Philip also.... My brother was
often at the South Kensington Museum, and, in order to make some sort of
secondary life for myself, I paid for a few lessons at the Art Schools.
I was coming back from them this evening, when I saw the abomination of
desolation walking alive down the long straight street and the rest is
as this gentleman has said.

“I’ve got only one thing to say. I don’t deserve to be helped; and I
don’t question or complain of my punishment; it is just, it ought to
have happened. But I still question, with bursting brains, how it can
have happened. Am I punished by miracle? or how can anyone but Philip
and myself know I gave him a tiny coin 

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