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Chapter NINE The God of the Gongs
IT was one of those chilly and empty afternoons in early winter, when the daylight is silver
rather than gold and pewter rather than silver. If it was dreary in a hundred bleak offices
and yawning drawing-rooms, it was drearier still along the edges of the flat Essex coast,
where the monotony was the more inhuman for being broken at very long intervals by a lamp-post
that looked less civilized than a tree, or a tree that looked more ugly than a lamp-post.
A light fall of snow had half-melted into a few strips, also looking leaden rather than
silver, when it had been fixed again by the seal of
frost; no fresh snow had fallen, but a ribbon of the old snow ran along the very margin
of the coast, so as to parallel the pale ribbon of the foam. The line of the sea looked frozen
in the very vividness of its violet-blue, like the vein of a frozen finger. For miles
and miles, forward and back, there was no breathing soul, save two pedestrians, walking
at a brisk pace, though one had much longer legs and took much longer strides than the
other. It did not seem a very appropriate place or
time for a holiday, but Father Brown had few holidays, and had to take them when he could,
and he always preferred, if possible, to take them in company with his old friend Flambeau,
ex-criminal and ex-detective. The priest had had a fancy for visiting his old parish at
Cobhole, and was going north-eastward along the coast. After walking a mile or two farther,
they found that the shore was beginning to be formally embanked, so as to form something
like a parade; the ugly lamp-posts became less few and far between and more ornamental,
though quite equally ugly. Half a mile farther on Father Brown was puzzled
first by little labyrinths of flowerless flower-pots, covered with the low, flat, quiet-coloured
plants that look less like a garden than a tessellated pavement, between weak curly paths
studded with seats with curly backs. He faintly sniffed the atmosphere of a certain sort of
seaside town that he did not specially care about, and, looking ahead along the parade
by the sea, he saw something that put the matter beyond a doubt. In the grey distance
the big bandstand of a watering-place stood up like a giant mushroom with six legs.
"I suppose," said Father Brown, turning up his coat-collar and drawing a woollen scarf
rather closer round his neck, "that we are approaching a pleasure resort." "I fear,"
answered Flambeau, "a pleasure resort to which few people just now have the pleasure of resorting.
They try to revive these places in the winter, but it never succeeds except with Brighton
and the old ones. This must be Seawood, I think--Lord Pooley's experiment; he had the
Sicilian Singers down at Christmas, and there's talk about holding one of the great glove-fights
here. They had come under the big bandstand, and
the priest was looking up at it with a curiosity that had something rather odd about it, his
head a little on one side, like a bird's. It was the conventional, rather *** kind
of *** for its purpose: a flattened dome or canopy, gilt here and there, and lifted
on six slender pillars of painted wood, the whole being raised about five feet above the
parade on a round wooden platform like a drum. But there was something fantastic about the
snow combined with something artificial about the gold that haunted Flambeau as well as
his friend with some association he could not capture, but which he knew was at once
artistic and alien. "I've got it," he said at last. "It's Japanese.
It's like those fanciful Japanese prints, where the snow on the mountain looks like
sugar, and the gilt on the pagodas is like gilt on gingerbread. It looks just like a
little pagan temple." "Yes," said Father Brown. "Let's have a look at the god." And with an
agility hardly to be expected of him, he hopped up on to the raised platform. "Oh, very well,"
said Flambeau, laughing; and the next instant his own towering figure was visible on that
quaint elevation. Slight as was the difference of height, it
gave in those level wastes a sense of seeing yet farther and farther across land and sea.
Inland the little wintry gardens faded into a confused grey copse; beyond that, in the
distance, were long low barns of a lonely farmhouse, and beyond that nothing but the
long East Anglian plains. Seawards there was no sail or sign of life save a few seagulls:
and even they looked like the last snowflakes, and seemed to float rather than fly. Flambeau
turned abruptly at an exclamation behind him. It seemed to come from lower down than might
have been expected, and to be addressed to his heels rather than his head. He instantly
held out his hand, but he could hardly help laughing at what he saw. For some reason or
other the platform had given way under Father Brown, and the unfortunate little man had
dropped through to the level of the parade. He was just tall enough, or short enough,
for his head alone to stick out of the hole in the broken wood, looking like St John the
Baptist's head on a charger. The face wore a disconcerted expression, as did, perhaps,
that of St John the Baptist. In a moment he began to laugh a little. "This
wood must be rotten," said Flambeau. "Though it seems odd it should bear me, and you go
through the weak place. Let me help you out." But the little priest was looking rather curiously
at the corners and edges of the wood alleged to be rotten, and there was a sort of trouble
on his brow. "Come along," cried Flambeau impatiently, still with his big brown hand
extended. "Don't you want to get out?" The priest was holding a splinter of the broken
wood between his finger and thumb, and did not immediately reply.
At last he said thoughtfully: "Want to get out? Why, no. I rather think I want to get
in." And he dived into the darkness under the wooden floor so abruptly as to knock off
his big curved clerical hat and leave it lying on the boards above, without any clerical
head in it. Flambeau looked once more inland and out to sea, and once more could see nothing
but seas as wintry as the snow, and snows as level as the sea. There came a scurrying
noise behind him, and the little priest came scrambling out of the hole faster than he
had fallen in. His face was no longer disconcerted, but rather resolute, and, perhaps only through
the reflections of the snow, a trifle paler than usual.
"Well?" asked his tall friend. "Have you found the god of the temple?" "No," answered Father
Brown. "I have found what was sometimes more important. The Sacrifice." "What the devil
do you mean?" cried Flambeau, quite alarmed. Father Brown did not answer. He was staring,
with a knot in his forehead, at the landscape; and he suddenly pointed at it. "What's that
house over there?" he asked. Following his finger, Flambeau saw for the first time the
corners of a building nearer than the farmhouse, but screened for the most part with a fringe
of trees. It was not a large building, and stood well
back from the shore--, but a glint of ornament on it suggested that it was part of the same
watering-place scheme of decoration as the bandstand, the little gardens and the curly-backed
iron seats. Father Brown jumped off the bandstand, his friend following; and as they walked in
the direction indicated the trees fell away to right and left, and they saw a small, rather
flashy hotel, such as is common in resorts--the hotel of the Saloon Bar rather than the Bar
Parlour. Almost the whole frontage was of gilt plaster and figured glass,
and between that grey seascape and the grey, witch-like trees, its gimcrack quality had
something spectral in its melancholy. They both felt vaguely that if any food or drink
were offered at such a hostelry, it would be the paste-board ham and empty mug of the
pantomime. In this, however, they were not altogether confirmed. As they drew nearer
and nearer to the place they saw in front of the buffet, which was apparently closed,
one of the iron garden-seats with curly backs that had adorned the gardens, but much longer,
running almost the whole length of the frontage. Presumably, it was placed so that visitors
might sit there and look at the sea, but one hardly expected to find anyone doing it in
such weather. Nevertheless, just in front of the extreme end of the iron seat stood
a small round restaurant table, and on this stood a small bottle of Chablis and a plate
of almonds and raisins. Behind the table and on the seat sat a dark-haired young man, bareheaded,
and gazing at the sea in a state of almost astonishing immobility. But though he might
have been a waxwork when they were within four yards of him,
he jumped up like a jack-in-the-box when they came within three, and said in a deferential,
though not undignified, manner: "Will you step inside, gentlemen? I have no staff at
present, but I can get you anything simple myself." "Much obliged," said Flambeau. "So
you are the proprietor?" "Yes," said the dark man, dropping back a little into his motionless
manner. "My waiters are all Italians, you see, and I thought it only fair they should
see their countryman beat the black, if he really can do it. You know the great fight
between Malvoli and *** Ned is coming off after all?"
"I'm afraid we can't wait to trouble your hospitality seriously," said Father Brown.
"But my friend would be glad of a glass of sherry, I'm sure, to keep out the cold and
drink success to the Latin champion." Flambeau did not understand the sherry, but he did
not object to it in the least. He could only say amiably: "Oh, thank you very much." "Sherry,
sir--certainly," said their host, turning to his hostel. "Excuse me if I detain you
a few minutes. As I told you, I have no staff--" And he went towards the black windows of his
shuttered and unlighted inn. "Oh, it doesn't really matter," began Flambeau,
but the man turned to reassure him. "I have the keys," he said. "I could find my way in
the dark." "I didn't mean--" began Father Brown. He was interrupted by a bellowing human
voice that came out of the bowels of the uninhabited hotel. It thundered some foreign name loudly
but inaudibly, and the hotel proprietor moved more sharply towards it than he had done for
Flambeau's sherry. As instant evidence proved, the proprietor had told, then and after, nothing
but the literal truth. But both Flambeau and Father Brown have often
confessed that, in all their (often outrageous) adventures, nothing had so chilled their blood
as that voice of an ogre, sounding suddenly out of a silent and empty inn. "My cook!"
cried the proprietor hastily. "I had forgotten my cook. He will be starting presently. Sherry,
sir?" And, sure enough, there appeared in the doorway a big white bulk with white cap
and white apron, as befits a cook, but with the needless emphasis of a black face. Flambeau
had often heard that negroes made good cooks. But somehow something in the contrast of colour
and caste increased his surprise that the hotel proprietor should answer the call of
the cook, and not the cook the call of the proprietor. But he reflected that head cooks
are proverbially arrogant; and, besides, the host had come back with the sherry, and that
was the great thing. "I rather wonder," said Father Brown, "that there are so few people
about the beach, when this big fight is coming on after all. We only met one man for miles."
The hotel proprietor shrugged his shoulders. "They come from the other end of the town,
you see--from the station, three miles from here. They are only interested in the sport,
and will stop in hotels for the night only. After all, it is hardly weather for
basking on the shore." "Or on the seat," said Flambeau, and pointed to the little table.
"I have to keep a look-out," said the man with the motionless face. He was a quiet,
well-featured fellow, rather sallow; his dark clothes had nothing distinctive about them,
except that his black necktie was worn rather high, like a stock, and secured by a gold
pin with some grotesque head to it. Nor was there anything notable in the face,
except something that was probably a mere nervous trick--a habit of opening one eye
more narrowly than the other, giving the impression that the other was larger, or was, perhaps,
artificial. The silence that ensued was broken by their host saying quietly: "Whereabouts
did you meet the one man on your march?" "Curiously enough," answered the priest, "close by here--just
by that bandstand." Flambeau, who had sat on the long iron seat to finish his sherry,
put it down and rose to his feet, staring at his friend in amazement. He opened his
mouth to speak, and then shut it again. "Curious," said the dark-haired man thoughtfully.
"What was he like?" "It was rather dark when I saw him," began Father Brown, "but he was--"
As has been said, the hotel-keeper can be proved to have told the precise truth. His
phrase that the cook was starting presently was fulfilled to the letter, for the cook
came out, pulling his gloves on, even as they spoke. But he was a very different figure
from the confused mass of white and black that had appeared for an instant in the doorway.
He was buttoned and buckled up to his bursting eyeballs in the most brilliant fashion.
A tall black hat was tilted on his broad black head--a hat of the sort that the French wit
has compared to eight mirrors. But somehow the black man was like the black hat. He also
was black, and yet his glossy skin flung back the light at eight angles or more. It is needless
to say that he wore white spats and a white slip inside his waistcoat. The red flower
stood up in his buttonhole aggressively, as if it had suddenly grown there. And in the
way he carried his cane in one hand and his cigar in the other there was a certain attitude-an
attitude we must always remember when we talk of racial prejudices: something innocent and
insolent--the cake walk. "Sometimes," said Flambeau, looking after
him, "I'm not surprised that they lynch them." "I am never surprised," said Father Brown,
"at any work of hell. But as I was saying," he resumed, as the ***, still ostentatiously
pulling on his yellow gloves, betook himself briskly towards the watering-place, a ***
music-hall figure against that grey and frosty scene--"as I was saying, I couldn't describe
the man very minutely, but he had a flourish and old-fashioned whiskers and moustachios,
dark or dyed, as in the pictures of foreign financiers, round his neck was wrapped a long
purple scarf that thrashed out in the wind as he walked.
It was fixed at the throat rather in the way that nurses fix children's comforters with
a safety-pin. Only this," added the priest, gazing placidly out to sea, "was not a safety-pin."
The man sitting on the long iron bench was also gazing placidly out to sea. Now he was
once more in repose. Flambeau felt quite certain that one of his eyes was naturally larger
than the other. Both were now well opened, and he could almost fancy the left eye grew
larger as he gazed. "It was a very long gold pin, and had the carved head of a monkey or
some such thing," continued the cleric; "and it was fixed in a rather odd way--he wore
pince-nez and a broad black--" The motionless man continued to gaze at the
sea, and the eyes in his head might have belonged to two different men. Then he made a movement
of blinding swiftness. Father Brown had his back to him, and in that flash might have
fallen dead on his face. Flambeau had no weapon, but his large brown hands were resting on
the end of the long iron seat. His shoulders abruptly altered their shape, and he heaved
the whole huge thing high over his head, like a headsman's axe about to fall. The mere height
of the thing, as he held it vertical, looked like a long iron ladder by which he was inviting
men to climb towards the stars. But the long shadow, in the level evening
light, looked like a giant brandishing the Eiffel Tower. It was the shock of that shadow,
before the shock of the iron crash, that made the
stranger quail and dodge, and then dart into his inn, leaving the flat and shining dagger
he had dropped exactly where it had fallen. "We must get away from here instantly," cried
Flambeau, flinging the huge seat away with furious indifference on the beach. He caught
the little priest by the elbow and ran him down a grey perspective of barren back garden,
at the end of which there was a closed back garden door.
Flambeau bent over it an instant in violent silence, and then said: "The door is locked."
As he spoke a black feather from one of the ornamental firs fell, brushing the brim of
his hat. It startled him more than the small and distant detonation that had come just
before. Then came another distant detonation, and the door he was trying to open shook under
the bullet buried in it. Flambeau's shoulders again filled out and altered suddenly. Three
hinges and a lock burst at the same instant, and he went out into the empty path behind,
carrying the great garden door with him, as Samson carried the gates of Gaza.
Then he flung the garden gate over the garden wall, just as a third shot picked up a spurt
of snow and dust behind his heel. Without ceremony he snatched up the little priest,
slung him astraddle on his shoulders, and went racing towards Seawood as fast as his
long legs could carry him. It was not until nearly two miles farther on that he set his
small companion down. It had hardly been a dignified escape, in spite of the classic
model of Anchises, but Father Brown's face only wore a broad grin. "Well," said Flambeau,
after an impatient silence, as they resumed their more conventional *** through the
streets on the edge of the town, where no outrage need be feared,
"I don't know what all this means, but I take it I may trust my own eyes that you never
met the man you have so accurately described." "I did meet him in a way," Brown said, biting
his finger rather nervously--"I did really. And it was too dark to see him properly, because
it was under that bandstand affair. But I'm afraid I didn't describe him so very accurately
after all, for his pince-nez was broken under him, and the long gold pin wasn't stuck through
his purple scarf but through his heart." "And I suppose," said the other in a lower voice,
"that glass-eyed guy had something to do with it."
"I had hoped he had only a little," answered Brown in a rather troubled voice, "and I may
have been wrong in what I did. I acted on impulse. But I fear this business has deep
roots and dark." They walked on through some streets in silence. The yellow lamps were
beginning to be lit in the cold blue twilight, and they were evidently approaching the more
central parts of the town. Highly coloured bills announcing the glove-fight between ***
Ned and Malvoli were slapped about the walls. "Well," said Flambeau, "I never murdered anyone,
even in my criminal days, but I can almost sympathize with anyone doing
it in such a dreary place. Of all God-forsaken dustbins
of Nature, I think the most heart-breaking are places like that bandstand, that were
meant to be festive and are forlorn. I can fancy a morbid man feeling he must kill his
rival in the solitude and irony of such a scene. I remember once taking a *** in your
glorious Surrey hills, thinking of nothing but gorse and skylarks, when I came out on
a vast circle of land, and over me lifted a vast, voiceless structure, tier
above tier of seats, as huge as a Roman Amphitheatre and as empty as a new letter-rack.
A bird sailed in heaven over it. It was the Grand Stand at Epsom. And I felt that non
one would ever be happy there again." "It's odd you should mention Epsom," said the priest.
"Do you remember what was called the Sutton Mystery, because two suspected men--ice-cream
men, I think--happened to live at Sutton? They were eventually released. A man was found
strangled, it was said, on the Downs round that part. As a fact, I know (from an Irish
policeman who is a friend of mine) that he was found close up to the Epsom Grand Stand--in
fact, only hidden by one of the lower doors being pushed back."
"That is ***," assented Flambeau. "But it rather confirms my view that such pleasure
places look awfully lonely out of season, or the man wouldn't have been murdered there."
"I'm not so sure he--" began Brown, and stopped. "Not so sure he was murdered?" queried his
companion. "Not so sure he was murdered out of the season," answered the little priest,
with simplicity. "Don't you think there's something rather tricky about this solitude,
Flambeau? Do you feel sure a wise murderer would always want the spot to be lonely? It's
very, very seldom a man is quite alone. And, short of that, the more alone he is,
the more certain he is to be seen. No; I think there must be some other--Why, here we are
at the Pavilion or Palace, or whatever they call it." They had emerged on a small square,
brilliantly lighted, of which the principal building was gay with gilding, gaudy with
posters, and flanked with two giant photographs of Malvoli and *** Ned. "Hallo!" cried
Flambeau in great surprise, as his clerical friend stumped straight up the broad steps.
"I didn't know pugilism was your latest hobby. Are you going to see the fight?"
"I don't think there will be any fight," replied Father Brown.
They passed rapidly through ante-rooms and inner rooms; they passed through the hall
of combat itself, raised, roped, and padded with innumerable seats and boxes, and still
the cleric did not look round or pause till he came to a clerk at a desk outside a door
marked "Committee". There he stopped and asked to see Lord Pooley. The attendant observed
that his lordship was very busy, as the fight was coming on soon, but Father Brown had a
good-tempered tedium of reiteration for which the official mind is generally not prepared.
In a few moments the rather baffled Flambeau found himself in the presence of a man who
was still shouting directions to another man going out of the room. "Be careful, you know,
about the ropes after the fourth--Well, and what do you want, I wonder!" Lord Pooley was
a gentleman, and, like most of the few remaining to our race, was worried--especially about
money. He was half grey and half flaxen, and he had the eyes of fever and a high-bridged,
frost-bitten nose. Only a word," said Father Brown. "I have come to prevent a man being
killed." Lord Pooley bounded off his chair as if a
spring had flung him from it. "I'm damned if I'll stand any more of this!" he cried.
"You and your committees and parsons and petitions! Weren't there parsons in the old days, when
they fought without gloves? Now they're fighting with the regulation gloves, and there's not
the rag of a possibility of either of the boxers being killed." "I didn't mean either
of the boxers," said the little priest. "Well, well, well!" said the nobleman, with a touch
of frosty humour. "Who's going to be killed? The referee?" "I don't know who's going to
be killed," replied Father Brown, with a reflective stare.
"If I did I shouldn't have to spoil your pleasure. I could simply get him to escape. I never
could see anything wrong about prize-fights. As it is, I must ask you to announce that
the fight is off for the present." "Anything else?" jeered the gentleman with feverish
eyes. "And what do you say to the two thousand people who have come to see it?" "I say there
will be one thousand nine-hundred and ninety-nine of them left alive when they have seen it,"
said Father Brown. Lord Pooley looked at Flambeau. "Is your friend mad?" he asked. "Far from
it," was the reply. "And look here," resumed Pooley in his restless
way, "it's worse than that. A whole pack of Italians have turned up to back Malvoli--swarthy,
savage fellows of some country, anyhow. You know what these Mediterranean races are like.
If I send out word that it's off we shall have Malvoli storming in here at the head
of a whole Corsican clan." "My lord, it is a matter of life and death," said the priest.
"Ring your bell. Give your message. And see whether it is Malvoli who answers." The nobleman
struck the bell on the table with an odd air of new curiosity.
He said to the clerk who appeared almost instantly in the doorway: "I have a serious announcement
to make to the audience shortly. Meanwhile, would you kindly tell the two champions that
the fight will have to be put off." The clerk stared for some seconds as if at a demon and
vanished. "What authority have you for what you say?" asked Lord Pooley abruptly. "Whom
did you consult?" "I consulted a bandstand," said Father Brown, scratching his head. "But,
no, I'm wrong; I consulted a book, too. I picked it up on a bookstall in London--very
cheap, too." He had taken out of his pocket a small, stout,
leather-bound volume, and Flambeau, looking over his shoulder, could see that it was some
book of old travels, and had a leaf turned down for reference. "'The only form in which
Voodoo--'" began Father Brown, reading aloud. "In which what?" inquired his lordship. "'In
which Voodoo,'" repeated the reader, almost with relish, "'is widely organized outside
Jamaica itself is in the form known as the Monkey, or the God of the Gongs, which is
powerful in many parts of the two American continents, especially among half-breeds,
many of whom look exactly like white men. It differs from most other forms of devil-worship
and human sacrifice in the fact that the blood is not shed formally on the altar, but by
a sort of assassination among the crowd. The gongs beat with a deafening din as the doors
of the shrine open and the monkey-god is revealed; almost the whole congregation rivet ecstatic
eyes on him. But after--'" The door of the room was flung open, and the fashionable ***
stood framed in it, his eyeballs rolling, his silk hat still insolently tilted on his
head. "Huh!" he cried, showing his apish teeth. "What this? Huh! Huh! You steal a coloured
gentleman's prize--prize his already--yo' think yo' jes' save that white 'Talian trash--"
"The matter is only deferred," said the nobleman quietly. "I will be with you to explain in
a minute or two." "Who you to--" shouted *** Ned, beginning to storm. "My name is Pooley,"
replied the other, with a creditable coolness. "I am the organizing secretary, and I advise
you just now to leave the room." "Who this fellow?" demanded the dark champion, pointing
to the priest disdainfully. "My name is Brown," was the reply. "And I advise you just now
to leave the country." The prize-fighter stood glaring for a few
seconds, and then, rather to the surprise of Flambeau and the others, strode out, sending
the door to with a crash behind him. "Well," asked Father Brown rubbing his dusty hair
up, "what do you think of Leonardo da Vinci? A beautiful Italian head." "Look here," said
Lord Pooley, "I've taken a considerable responsibility, on your bare word. I think you ought to tell
me more about this." "You are quite right, my lord," answered Brown. "And it won't take
long to tell." He put the little leather book in his overcoat pocket.
"I think we know all that this can tell us, but you shall look at it to see if I'm right.
That *** who has just swaggered out is one of the most dangerous men on earth, for he
has the brains of a European, with the instincts of a cannibal. He has turned what was clean,
common-sense butchery among his fellow-barbarians into a very modern and scientific secret society
of assassins. He doesn't know I know it, nor, for the matter of that, that I can't prove
it." There was a silence, and the little man went on. "But if I want to *** somebody,
will it really be the best plan to make sure I'm alone with him?"
Lord Pooley's eyes recovered their frosty twinkle as he looked at the little clergyman.
He only said: "If you want to *** somebody, I should advise it." Father Brown shook his
head, like a murderer of much riper experience. "So Flambeau said," he replied, with a sigh.
"But consider. The more a man feels lonely the less he can be sure he is alone. It must
mean empty spaces round him, and they are just what make him obvious. Have you never
seen one ploughman from the heights, or one shepherd from the valleys? Have you never
walked along a cliff, and seen one man walking along the sands?
Didn't you know when he's killed a crab, and wouldn't you have known if it had been a creditor?
No! No! No! For an intelligent murderer, such as you or I might be, it is an impossible
plan to make sure that nobody is looking at you." "But what other plan is there?" "There
is only one," said the priest. "To make sure that everybody is looking at something else.
A man is throttled close by the big stand at Epsom. Anybody might have seen it done
while the stand stood empty—any *** under the hedges or motorist among the hills.
But nobody would have seen it when the stand was crowded and the whole ring roaring, when
the favourite was coming in first--or wasn't. The twisting of a neck-cloth, the thrusting
of a body behind a door could be done in an instant--so long as it was that instant. It
was the same, of course," he continued turning to Flambeau, "with that poor fellow under
the bandstand. He was dropped through the hole (it wasn't an accidental hole) just at
some very dramatic moment of the entertainment, when the bow of some great violinist or the
voice of some great singer opened or came to its climax.
And here, of course, when the knock-out blow came--it would not be the only one. That is
the little trick *** Ned has adopted from his old God of Gongs." "By the way, Malvoli--"
Pooley began. "Malvoli," said the priest, "has nothing to do with it. I dare say he
has some Italians with him, but our amiable friends are not Italians. They are octoroons
and African half-bloods of various shades, but I fear we English think all foreigners
are much the same so long as they are dark and dirty.
Also," he added, with a smile, "I fear the English decline to draw any fine distinction
between the moral character produced by my religion and that which blooms out of Voodoo."
The blaze of the spring season had burst upon Seawood, littering its foreshore with famines
and bathing-machines, with nomadic preachers and *** minstrels, before the two friends
saw it again, and long before the storm of pursuit after the strange secret society had
died away. Almost on every hand the secret of their purpose perished with them. The man
of the hotel was found drifting dead on the sea like so much seaweed;
his right eye was closed in peace, but his left eye was wide open, and glistened like
glass in the moon. *** Ned had been overtaken a mile or two away, and murdered three policemen
with his closed left hand. The remaining officer was surprised--nay, pained—and the ***
got away. But this was enough to set all the English papers in a flame, and for a month
or two the main purpose of the British Empire was to prevent the buck *** (who was so
in both senses) escaping by any English port. Persons of a figure remotely reconcilable
with his were subjected to quite extraordinary inquisitions, made to scrub their faces before
going on board ship, as if each white complexion were made up like a mask, of greasepaint.
Every *** in England was put under special regulations and made to report himself; the
outgoing ships would no more have taken a *** than a basilisk. For people had found
out how fearful and vast and silent was the force of the savage secret society, and by
the time Flambeau and Father Brown were leaning on the parade parapet in April, the Black
Man meant in England almost what he once meant in Scotland.
"He must still be in England," observed Flambeau, "and horridly well hidden, too. They must
have found him at the ports if he had only whitened his face." "You see, he is really
a clever man," said Father Brown apologetically. "And I'm sure he wouldn't whiten his face."
"Well, but what would he do?" "I think," said Father Brown, "he would blacken his face."
Flambeau, leaning motionless on the parapet, laughed and said: "My dear fellow!" Father
Brown, also leaning motionless on the parapet, moved one finger for an instant into the direction
of the soot-masked *** singing on the sands.
Chapter TEN The Salad of Colonel Cray
FATHER BROWN was walking home from Mass on a white weird morning when the mists were
slowly lifting--one of those mornings when the very element of light appears as something
mysterious and new. The scattered trees outlined themselves more and more out of the vapour,
as if they were first drawn in grey chalk and then in charcoal. At yet more distant
intervals appeared the houses upon the broken fringe of the suburb; their outlines became
clearer and clearer until he recognized many in which he had chance acquaintances, and
many more the names of whose owners he knew. But all the windows and doors were sealed;
none of the people were of the sort that would be up at such a time, or still less on such
an errand. But as he passed under the shadow of one handsome villa with verandas and wide
ornate gardens, he heard a noise that made him almost involuntarily stop. It was the
unmistakable noise of a pistol or carbine or some light firearm discharged; but it was
not this that puzzled him most. The first full noise was immediately followed by a series
of fainter noises--as he counted them, about six.
He supposed it must be the echo; but the odd thing was that the echo was not in the least
like the original sound. It was not like anything else that he could think of; the three things
nearest to it seemed to be the noise made by siphons of soda-water, one of the many
noises made by an animal, and the noise made by a person attempting to conceal laughter.
None of which seemed to make much sense. Father Brown was made of two men. There was a man
of action, who was as modest as a primrose and as punctual as a clock; who went his small
round of duties and never dreamed of altering it.
There was also a man of reflection, who was much simpler but much stronger, who could
not easily be stopped; whose thought was always (in the only intelligent sense of the words)
free thought. He could not help, even unconsciously, asking himself all the questions that there
were to be asked, and answering as many of them as he could; all that went on like his
breathing or circulation. But he never consciously carried his actions outside the sphere of
his own duty; and in this case the two attitudes were aptly tested.
He was just about to resume his trudge in the twilight, telling himself it was no affair
of his, but instinctively twisting and untwisting twenty theories about what the odd noises
might mean. Then the grey sky-line brightened into silver, and in the broadening light he
realized that he had been to the house which belonged to an Anglo-Indian Major named Putnam;
and that the Major had a native cook from Malta who was of his communion. He also began
to remember that pistol-shots are sometimes serious things; accompanied with consequences
with which he was legitimately concerned. He turned back and went in at the garden gate,
making for the front door. Half-way down one side of the house stood out a projection like
a very low shed; it was, as he afterwards discovered, a large dustbin. Round the corner
of this came a figure, at first a mere shadow in the haze, apparently bending and peering
about. Then, coming nearer, it solidified into a figure that was, indeed, rather unusually
solid. Major Putnam was a bald-headed, bull-necked man, short and very broad, with one of those
rather apoplectic faces that are produced by a prolonged attempt to combine the oriental
climate with the occidental luxuries. But the face was a good-humoured one, and
even now, though evidently puzzled and inquisitive, wore a kind of innocent grin. He had a large
palm-leaf hat on the back of his head (suggesting a halo that was by no means appropriate to
the face), but otherwise he was clad only in a very vivid suit of striped scarlet and
yellow pyjamas; which, though glowing enough to behold, must have been, on a fresh morning,
pretty chilly to wear. He had evidently come out of his house in a hurry, and the priest
was not surprised when he called out without further ceremony: "Did you hear that noise?"
"Yes," answered Father Brown; "I thought I had better look in, in case anything was the
matter." The Major looked at him rather queerly with his good-humoured gooseberry eyes. "What
do you think the noise was?" he asked. "It sounded like a gun or something," replied
the other, with some hesitation; "but it seemed to have a singular sort of echo." The Major
was still looking at him quietly, but with protruding eyes, when the front door was flung
open, releasing a flood of gaslight on the face of the fading mist; and another figure
in pajamas sprang or tumbled out into the garden.
The figure was much longer, leaner, and more athletic; the pyjamas, though equally tropical,
were comparatively tasteful, being of white with a light lemon-yellow stripe. The man
was haggard, but handsome, more sunburned than the other; he had an aquiline profile
and rather deep-sunken eyes, and a slight air of oddity arising from the combination
of coal-black hair with a much lighter moustache. All this Father Brown absorbed in detail more
at leisure. For the moment he only saw one thing about the man; which was the revolver
in his hand. "Cray!" exclaimed the Major, staring at him; "did you fire that shot?"
"Yes, I did," retorted the black-haired gentleman hotly; "and so would you in my place. If you
were chased everywhere by devils and nearly--" The Major seemed to intervene rather hurriedly.
"This is my friend Father Brown," he said. And then to Brown: "I don't know whether you've
met Colonel Cray of the Royal Artillery." "I have heard of him, of course," said the
priest innocently. "Did you--did you hit anything?" "I thought so," answered Cray with gravity.
"Did he--" asked Major Putnam in a lowered voice, "did he fall or cry out, or anything?
"Colonel Cray was regarding his host with a strange and steady stare.
"I'll tell you exactly what he did," he said. "He sneezed." Father Brown's hand went half-way
to his head, with the gesture of a man remembering somebody's name. He knew now what it was that
was neither soda-water nor the snorting of a dog. "Well," *** the staring Major,
"I never heard before that a service revolver was a thing to be sneezed at." "Nor I," said
Father Brown faintly. "It's lucky you didn't turn your artillery on him or you might have
given him quite a bad cold." Then, after a bewildered pause, he said: "Was it a burglar?"
"Let us go inside," said Major Putnam, rather sharply, and led the way into his house.
The interior exhibited a paradox often to be marked in such morning hours: that the
rooms seemed brighter than the sky outside; even after the Major had turned out the one
gaslight in the front hall. Father Brown was surprised to see the whole dining-table set
out as for a festive meal, with napkins in their rings, and wine-glasses of some six
unnecessary shapes set beside every plate. It was common enough, at that time of the
morning, to find the remains of a banquet over-night; but to find it freshly spread
so early was unusual. While he stood wavering in the hall Major Putnam rushed past him and
sent a raging eye over the whole oblong of the tablecloth.
At last he spoke, spluttering: "All the silver gone!" he gasped. "Fish-knives and forks gone.
Old cruet-stand gone. Even the old silver cream-jug gone. And now, Father Brown, I am
ready to answer your question of whether it was a burglar." "They're simply a blind,"
said Cray stubbornly. "I know better than you why people persecute this house; I know
better than you why--" The Major patted him on the shoulder with a gesture almost peculiar
to the soothing of a sick child, and said: "It was a burglar. Obviously it was a burglar."
"A burglar with a bad cold," observed Father Brown, "that might assist you to trace him
in the neighborhood." The Major shook his head in a sombre manner.
"He must be far beyond trace now, I fear," he said. Then, as the restless man with the
revolver turned again towards the door in the garden, he added in a husky, confidential
voice: "I doubt whether I should send for the police, for fear my friend here has been
a little too free with his bullets, and got on the wrong side of the law. He's lived in
very wild places; and, to be frank with you, I think he sometimes fancies things." "I think
you once told me," said Brown, "that he believes some Indian secret society is pursuing him."
Major Putnam nodded, but at the same time shrugged his shoulders.
"I suppose we'd better follow him outside," he said. "I don't want any more--shall we
say, sneezing?" They passed out into the morning light, which was now even tinged with sunshine,
and saw Colonel Cray's tall figure bent almost double, minutely examining the condition of
gravel and grass. While the Major strolled unobtrusively towards him, the priest took
an equally indolent turn, which took him round the next corner of the house to within a yard
or two of the projecting dustbin. He stood regarding this dismal object for some minute
and a half--, then he stepped towards it, lifted the lid and put his head inside.
Dust and other discoloring matter shook upwards as he did so; but Father Brown never observed
his own appearance, whatever else he observed. He remained thus for a measurable period,
as if engaged in some mysterious prayers. Then he came out again, with some ashes on
his hair, and walked unconcernedly away. By the time he came round to the garden door
again he found a group there which seemed to roll away morbidities as the sunlight had
already rolled away the mists. It was in no way rationally reassuring; it was simply broadly
comic, like a cluster of Dickens's characters. Major Putnam had managed to slip inside and
plunge into a proper shirt and trousers, with a crimson cummerbund, and a light square jacket
over all; thus normally set off, his red festive face seemed bursting with a commonplace cordiality.
He was indeed emphatic, but then he was talking to his cook--the swarthy son of Malta, whose
lean, yellow and rather careworn face contrasted quaintly with his snow-white cap and costume.
The cook might well be careworn, for cookery was the Major's hobby. He was one of those
amateurs who always know more than the professional. The only other person he even admitted to
be a judge of an omelette was his friend Cray--and as Brown remembered this, he turned to look
for the other officer. In the new presence of daylight and people clothed and in their
right mind, the sight of him was rather a shock. The taller and more elegant man was
still in his night-garb, with tousled black hair, and now crawling about the garden on
his hands and knees, still looking for traces of the burglar; and now and again, to all
appearance, striking the ground with his hand in anger at not finding him. Seeing him thus
quadrupedal in the grass, the priest raised his eyebrows rather sadly;
and for the first time guessed that "fancies things" might be an euphemism. The third item
in the group of the cook and the epicure was also known to Father Brown; it was Audrey
Watson, the Major's ward and housekeeper; and at this moment, to judge by her apron,
tucked-up sleeves and resolute manner, much more the housekeeper than the ward. "It serves
you right," she was saying: "I always told you not to have that old-fashioned cruet-stand."
"I prefer it," said Putnam, placably. "I'm old-fashioned myself; and the things keep
together." "And vanish together, as you see," she retorted.
"Well, if you are not going to bother about the burglar, I shouldn't bother about the
lunch. It's Sunday, and we can't send for vinegar and all that in the town; and you
Indian gentlemen can't enjoy what you call a dinner without a lot of hot things. I wish
to goodness now you hadn't asked Cousin Oliver to take me to the musical service. It isn't
over till half-past twelve, and the Colonel has to leave by then. I don't believe you
men can manage alone." "Oh yes, we can, my dear," said the Major, looking at her very
amiably. "Marco has all the sauces, and we've often
done ourselves well in very rough places, as you might know by now. And it's time you
had a treat, Audrey; you mustn't be a housekeeper every hour of the day; and I know you want
to hear the music." "I want to go to church," she said, with rather severe eyes. She was
one of those handsome women who will always be handsome, because the beauty is not in
an air or a tint, but in the very structure of the head and features. But though she was
not yet middle-aged and her auburn hair was of a Titianesque fullness in form and colour,
there was a look in her mouth and around her eyes which suggested that some sorrows wasted
her, as winds waste at last the edges of a Greek temple. For indeed the little domestic
difficulty of which she was now speaking so decisively was rather comic than tragic. Father
Brown gathered, from the course of the conversation, that Cray, the other gourmet, had to leave
before the usual lunch-time; but that Putnam, his host, not to be done out of a final feast
with an old crony, had arranged for a special dejeuner to be set out and consumed in the
course of the morning, while Audrey and other graver persons were at morning service.
She was going there under the escort of a relative and old friend of hers, Dr Oliver
Oman, who, though a scientific man of a somewhat bitter type, was enthusiastic for music, and
would go even to church to get it. There was nothing in all this that could conceivably
concern the tragedy in Miss Watson's face; and by a half conscious instinct, Father Brown
turned again to the seeming lunatic grubbing about in the grass. When he strolled across
to him, the black, unbrushed head was lifted abruptly, as if in some surprise at his continued
presence. And indeed, Father Brown, for reasons best
known to himself, had lingered much longer than politeness required; or even, in the
ordinary sense, permitted. "Well!" cried Cray, with wild eyes. "I suppose you think I'm mad,
like the rest?" "I have considered the thesis," answered the little man, composedly. "And
I incline to think you are not." "What do you mean?" snapped Cray quite savagely. "Real
madmen," explained Father Brown, "always encourage their own morbidity. They never strive against
it. But you are trying to find traces of the burglar; even when there aren't any.
You are struggling against it. You want what no madman ever wants." "And what is that?"
"You want to be proved wrong," said Brown. During the last words Cray had sprung or staggered
to his feet and was regarding the cleric with agitated eyes. "By hell, but that is a true
word!" he cried. "They are all at me here that the fellow was only after the silver--as
if I shouldn't be only too pleased to think so! She's been at me," and he tossed his tousled
black head towards Audrey, but the other had no need of the direction, "she's been at me
today about how cruel I was to shoot a poor harmless house-breaker,
and how I have the devil in me against poor harmless natives. But I was a good-natured
man once--as good-natured as Putnam." After a pause he said: "Look here, I've never seen
you before; but you shall judge of the whole story. Old Putnam and I were friends in the
same mess; but, owing to some accidents on the Afghan border, I got my command much sooner
than most men; only we were both invalided home for a bit. I was engaged to Audrey out
there; and we all travelled back together. But on the journey back things happened. Curious
things. The result of them was that Putnam wants it
broken off, and even Audrey keeps it hanging on--and I know what they mean. I know what
they think I am. So do you. "Well, these are the facts. The last day we were in an Indian
city I asked Putnam if I could get some Trichinopoli
cigars, he directed me to a little place opposite his lodgings. I have since found he was quite
right; but 'opposite' is a dangerous word when one decent house stands opposite five
or six squalid ones; and I must have mistaken the door.
It opened with difficulty, and then only on darkness; but as I turned back, the door behind
me sank back and settled into its place with a noise as of innumerable bolts. There was
nothing to do but to walk forward; which I did through passage after passage, pitch-dark.
Then I came to a flight of steps, and then to a blind door, secured by a latch of elaborate
Eastern ironwork, which I could only trace by touch, but which I loosened at last. I
came out again upon gloom, which was half turned into a greenish twilight by a multitude
of small but steady lamps below. They showed merely the feet or fringes of
some huge and empty architecture. Just in front of me was something that looked like
a mountain. I confess I nearly fell on the great stone platform on which I had emerged,
to realize that it was an idol. And worst of all, an idol with its back to me. "It was
hardly half human, I guessed; to judge by the small squat head, and still more by a
thing like a tail or extra limb turned up behind and pointing, like a loathsome large
finger, at some symbol graven in the centre of the vast stone back. I had begun, in the
dim light, to guess at the hieroglyphic, not without horror, when a more horrible thing
happened. A door opened silently in the temple wall
behind me and a man came out, with a brown face and a black coat. He had a carved smile
on his face, of copper flesh and ivory teeth; but I think the most hateful thing about him
was that he was in European dress. I was prepared, I think, for shrouded priests or naked fakirs.
But this seemed to say that the devilry was over all the earth. As indeed I found it to
be. "'If you had only seen the Monkey's Feet,' he said, smiling steadily, and without other
preface, 'we should have been very gentle--you would only be tortured and die. If you had
seen the Monkey's Face, still we should be very moderate, very tolerant--you would only
be tortured and live. But as you have seen the Monkey's Tail, we
must pronounce the worst sentence, which is--Go Free.' "When he said the words I heard the
elaborate iron latch with which I had struggled, automatically unlock itself: and then, far
down the dark passages I had passed, I heard the heavy street-door shifting its own bolts
backwards. "'It is vain to ask for mercy; you must go free,' said the smiling man. 'Henceforth
a hair shall slay you like a sword, and a breath shall bite you like an adder; weapons
shall come against you out of nowhere; and you shall die many times.
And with that he was swallowed once more in the wall behind; and I went out into the street."
Cray paused; and Father Brown unaffectedly sat down on the lawn and began to pick daisies.
Then the soldier continued: "Putnam, of course, with his jolly common sense, pooh-poohed all
my fears; and from that time dates his doubt of my mental balance. Well, I'll simply tell
you, in the fewest words, the three things that have happened since; and you shall judge
which of us is right. "The first happened in an Indian village on the edge of the jungle,
but hundreds of miles from the temple, or town, or type of tribes and customs where
the curse had been put on me. I woke in black midnight, and lay thinking of nothing in particular,
when I felt a faint tickling thing, like a thread or a hair, trailed across my throat.
I shrank back out of its way, and could not help thinking of the words in the temple.
But when I got up and sought lights and a mirror, the line across my neck was a line
of blood. "The second happened in a lodging in Port Said, later, on our journey home together.
It was a jumble of tavern and curiosity-shop; and though there was nothing there remotely
suggesting the cult of the Monkey, it is, of course, possible that some of its images
or talismans were in such a place. Its curse was there, anyhow. I woke again in the dark
with a sensation that could not be put in colder or more literal words than that a breath
bit like an adder. Existence was an agony of extinction; I dashed my head against walls
until I dashed it against a window; and fell rather than jumped into the garden below.
Putnam, poor fellow, who had called the other thing a chance scratch,
was bound to take seriously the fact of finding me half insensible on the grass at dawn. But
I fear it was my mental state he took seriously; and not my story. "The third happened in Malta.
We were in a fortress there; and as it happened our bedrooms overlooked the open sea, which
almost came up to our window-sills, save for a flat white outer wall as bare as the sea.
I woke up again; but it was not dark. There was a full moon, as I walked to the window;
I could have seen a bird on the bare battlement, or a sail on the horizon. What I did see was
a sort of stick or branch circling, self-supported, in the empty sky.
It flew straight in at my window and smashed the lamp beside the pillow I had just quitted.
It was one of those ***-shaped war-clubs some Eastern tribes use. But it had
come from no human hand." Father Brown threw away a daisy-chain he was making, and rose
with a wistful look. "Has Major Putnam," he asked, "got any Eastern curios, idols, weapons
and so on, from which one might get a hint?" "Plenty of those, though not much use, I fear,"
replied Cray; "but by all means come into his study." As they entered they passed Miss
Watson buttoning her gloves for church, and heard the voice of Putnam downstairs still
giving a lecture on cookery to the cook. In the Major's study and den of curios they came
suddenly on a third party, silk-hatted and dressed for the street, who was poring over
an open book on the smoking-table--a book which he dropped rather guiltily, and turned.
Cray introduced him civilly enough, as Dr Oman, but he showed such disfavour in his
very face that Brown guessed the two men, whether Audrey knew it or not, were rivals.
Nor was the priest wholly unsympathetic with the prejudice.
Dr Oman was a very well-dressed gentleman indeed; well-featured, though almost dark
enough for an Asiatic. But Father Brown had to tell himself sharply that one should be
in charity even with those who wax their pointed beards, who have small gloved hands, and who
speak with perfectly modulated voices. Cray seemed to find something specially irritating
in the small prayer-book in Oman's dark-gloved hand. "I didn't know that was in your line,"
he said rather rudely. Oman laughed mildly, but without offence. "This is more so, I know,"
he said, laying his hand on the big book he had dropped, "a dictionary of drugs and such
things. But it's rather too large to take to church."
Then he closed the larger book, and there seemed again the faintest touch of hurry and
embarrassment. "I suppose," said the priest, who seemed anxious to change the subject,
"all these spears and things are from India?" "From everywhere," answered the doctor. "Putnam
is an old soldier, and has been in Mexico and Australia, and the Cannibal Islands for
all I know." "I hope it was not in the Cannibal Islands," said Brown, "that he learnt the
art of cookery." And he ran his eyes over the stew-pots or other strange utensils on
the wall. At this moment the jolly subject of their
conversation thrust his laughing, lobsterish face into the room. "Come along, Cray," he
cried. "Your lunch is just coming in. And the bells are ringing for those who want to
go to church." Cray slipped upstairs to change; Dr Oman and Miss Watson betook themselves
solemnly down the street, with a string of other churchgoers; but Father Brown noticed
that the doctor twice looked back and scrutinized the house; and even came back to the corner
of the street to look at it again. The priest looked puzzled. "He can't have been at the
dustbin," he muttered. "Not in those clothes. Or was he there earlier today?" Father Brown,
touching other people, was as sensitive as a barometer; but today he seemed about as
sensitive as a rhinoceros. By no social law, rigid or implied, could he be supposed to
linger round the lunch of the Anglo-Indian friends; but he lingered, covering his position
with torrents of amusing but quite needless conversation. He was the more puzzling because
he did not seem to want any lunch. As one after another of the most exquisitely balanced
kedgerees of curries, accompanied with their appropriate vintages, were laid before the
other two, "That's what I've always been afraid would
happen. That's why I always carry a cruet-stand about with me. I'm so fond of salads." And
to the amazement of the two men he took a pepper-pot out of his waistcoat pocket and
put it on the table. "I wonder why the burglar wanted mustard, too," he went on, taking a
mustard-pot from another pocket. "A mustard plaster, I suppose. And vinegar"--and producing
that condiment--"haven't I heard something about vinegar and brown paper? As for oil,
which I think I put in my left--" His garrulity was an instant arrested; for
lifting his eyes, he saw what no one else saw--the black figure
of Dr Oman standing on the sunlit lawn and looking steadily into the room. Before he
could quite recover himself Cray had cloven in. "You're an astounding card," he said,
staring. "I shall come and hear your sermons, if they're as amusing as your manners." His
voice changed a little, and he leaned back in his chair. "Oh, there are sermons in a
cruet-stand, too," said Father Brown, quite gravely. "Have you heard of faith like a grain
of mustard-seed; or charity that anoints with oil? And as for vinegar, can any soldiers
forget that solitary soldier, who, when the sun was darkened--"
Colonel Cray leaned forward a little and clutched the tablecloth. Father Brown, who was making
the salad, tipped two spoonfuls of the mustard into the tumbler of water beside him; stood
up and said in a new, loud and sudden voice--"Drink that!" At the same moment the motionless doctor
in the garden came running, and bursting open a window cried: "Am I wanted? Has he been
poisoned?" "Pretty near," said Brown, with the shadow of a smile; for the emetic had
very suddenly taken effect. And Cray lay in a deck-chair, gasping as for life, but alive.
Major Putnam had sprung up, his purple face mottled.
"A crime!" he cried hoarsely. "I will go for the police!" The priest could hear him dragging
down his palm-leaf hat from the peg and tumbling out of the front door; he heard the garden
gate slam. But he only stood looking at Cray; and after a silence said quietly: "I shall
not talk to you much; but I will tell you what you want to know. There is no curse on
you. The Temple of the Monkey was either a coincidence or a part of the trick; the trick
was the trick of a white man. There is only one weapon that will bring blood with that
mere feathery touch: a razor held by a white man.
And there is only one kind of club that can be thrown out of a window, turn in mid-air
and come back to the window next to it: the Australian boomerang. You'll see some of them
in the Major's study." With that he went outside and spoke for a moment to the doctor. The
moment after, Audrey Watson came rushing into the house and fell on her knees beside Cray's
chair. He could not hear what they said to each other; but their faces moved with amazement,
not unhappiness. The doctor and the priest walked slowly towards the garden gate. "I
suppose the Major was in love with her, too," he said with a sigh;
and when the other nodded, observed: "You were very generous, doctor. You did a fine
thing. But what made you suspect?" "A very small thing," said Oman; "but it kept me restless
in church till I came back to see that all was well. That book on his table was a work
on poisons; and was put down open at the place where it stated that a certain Indian poison,
though deadly and difficult to trace, was particularly easily reversible by the use
of the commonest emetics. I suppose he read that at the last moment--" "And remembered
that there were emetics in the cruet-stand," said Father Brown exactly.
He threw the cruet in the dustbin--where I found it, along with other silver--for the
sake of a burglary blind. But if you look at that pepper-pot I put on the table, you'll
see a small hole. That's where Cray's bullet struck, shaking up the pepper and making the
criminal sneeze." There was a silence. Then Dr Oman said grimly: "The Major is a long
time looking for the police." "Or the police in looking for the Major?" said the priest.
"Well, good-bye." Chapter ELEVEN
The Strange Crime of John Boulnois MR CALHOUN KIDD was a very young gentleman
with a very old face, a face dried up with its own eagerness, framed in blue-black hair
and a black butterfly tie. He was the emissary in England of the colossal American daily
called the Western Sun--also humorously described as the "Rising Sunset". This was in allusion
to a great journalistic declaration (attributed to Mr Kidd himself) that "he guessed the sun
would rise in the west yet, if American citizens did a bit more hustling." Those, however,
who mock American journalism from the standpoint of somewhat mellower traditions forget a certain
paradox which partly redeems it. For while the journalism of the States permits
a pantomimic vulgarity long past anything English, it also shows a real excitement about
the most earnest mental problems, of which English papers are innocent, or rather incapable.
The Sun was full of the most solemn matters treated in the most farcical way. William
James figured there as well as "Weary Willie," and pragmatists alternated with pugilists
in the long procession of its portraits. Thus, when a very unobtrusive Oxford man named John
Boulnois wrote in a very unreadable review called the Natural Philosophy Quarterly a
series of articles on alleged weak points in Darwinian evolution,
it fluttered no corner of the English papers; though Boulnois's theory (which was that of
a comparatively stationary universe visited occasionally by convulsions of change) had
some rather faddy fashionableness at Oxford, and got so far as to be named "Catastrophism".
But many American papers seized on the challenge as a great event; and the Sun threw the shadow
of Mr Boulnois quite gigantically across its pages. By the paradox already noted, articles
of valuable intelligence and enthusiasm were presented with headlines apparently written
by an illiterate maniac, headlines such as "Darwin Chews Dirt; Critic
Boulnois says He Jumps the Shocks"--or "Keep Catastrophic, says Thinker Boulnois." And
Mr Calhoun Kidd, of the Western Sun, was bidden to take his butterfly tie and lugubrious visage
down to the little house outside Oxford where Thinker Boulnois lived in happy ignorance
of such a title. That fated philosopher had consented, in a somewhat dazed manner, to
receive the interviewer, and had named the hour of nine that evening.
The last of a summer sunset clung about Cumnor and the low wooded hills; the romantic Yankee
was both doubtful of his road and inquisitive about his surroundings; and seeing the door
of a genuine feudal old-country inn, The Champion Arms, standing open, he went in to make inquiries.
In the bar parlour he rang the bell, and had to wait some little time for a reply to it.
The only other person present was a lean man with close red hair and loose, horsey-looking
clothes, who was drinking very bad whisky, but smoking a very good cigar. The whisky,
of course, was the choice brand of The Champion Arms; the cigar he had probably brought with
him from London. Nothing could be more different than his cynical
negligence from the dapper dryness of the young American; but something in his pencil
and open notebook, and perhaps in the expression of his alert blue eye, caused Kidd to guess,
correctly, that he was a brother journalist. "Could you do me the favour," asked Kidd,
with the courtesy of his nation, "of directing me to the Grey Cottage, where Mr Boulnois
lives, as I understand?" "It's a few yards down the road," said the red-haired man, removing
his cigar; "I shall be passing it myself in a minute, but I'm going on to Pendragon Park
to try and see the fun." "What is Pen dragon Park?" asked Calhoun Kidd.
"Sir Claude Champion's place--haven't you come down for that, too?" asked the other
pressman, looking up. "You're a journalist, aren't you?" "I have come to see Mr Boulnois,"
said Kidd. "I've come to see Mrs Boulnois," replied the other. "But I shan't catch her
at home." And he laughed rather unpleasantly. "Are you interested in Catastrophism?" asked
the wondering Yankee. "I'm interested in catastrophes; and there are going to be some, replied his
companion gloomily. "Mine's a filthy trade, and I never pretend
it isn't." With that he spat on the floor; yet somehow
in the very act and instant one could realize that the man had been brought up as a gentleman.
The American pressman considered him with more attention. His face was pale and dissipated,
with the promise of formidable passions yet to be loosed; but it was a clever and sensitive
face; his clothes were coarse and careless, but he had a good seal ring on one of his
long, thin fingers. His name, which came out in the course of talk, was James Dalroy; he
was the son of a bankrupt Irish landlord, and attached to a pink paper which he heartily
despised, called Smart Society, in the capacity of reporter and of something painfully like
a spy. Smart Society, I regret to say, felt none of that interest in Boulnois on Darwin
which was such a credit to the head and hearts of the Western Sun. Dalroy had come down,
it seemed, to snuff up the scent of a scandal which might very well end in the Divorce Court,
but which was at present hovering between Grey Cottage and Pendragon Park. Sir Claude
Champion was known to the readers of the Western Sun as well as Mr Boulnois.
So were the Pope and the Derby Winner; but the idea of their intimate acquaintanceship
would have struck Kidd as equally incongruous. He had heard of (and written about, nay, falsely
pretended to know) Sir Claude Champion, as "one of the brightest and wealthiest of England's
Upper Ten"; as the great sportsman who raced yachts round the world; as the great traveller
who wrote books about the Himalayas, as the politician who swept constituencies with a
startling sort of Tory Democracy, and as the great dabbler in art, music, literature, and,
above all, acting. Sir Claude was really magnificent in other
than American eyes. There was something of the Renascence Prince about his omnivorous
culture and restless publicity--, he was not only a great amateur, but an ardent one. There
was in him none of that antiquarian frivolity that we convey by the word "dilettante". That
faultless falcon profile with purple-black Italian eye, which had been snap-shotted so
often both for Smart Society and the Western Sun, gave everyone the impression of a man
eaten by ambition as by a fire, or even a disease.
But though Kidd knew a great deal about Sir Claude—a great deal more, in fact, than
there was to know--it would never have crossed his wildest dreams to connect so showy an
aristocrat with the newly-unearthed founder of Catastrophism, or to guess that Sir Claude
Champion and John Boulnois could be intimate friends. Such, according to Dalroy's account,
was nevertheless the fact. The two had hunted in couples at school and college, and, though
their social destinies had been very different (for Champion was a great landlord and almost
a millionaire, while Boulnois was a poor scholar and, until just
lately, an unknown one), they still kept in very close touch with each other. Indeed,
Boulnois's cottage stood just outside the gates of Pendragon Park. But whether the two
men could be friends much longer was becoming a dark and ugly question. A year or two before,
Boulnois had married a beautiful and not unsuccessful actress, to whom he was devoted in his own
shy and ponderous style; and the proximity of the household to Champion's had given that
flighty celebrity opportunities for behaving in a way that could not but cause painful
and rather base excitement. Sir Claude had carried the arts of publicity
to perfection; and he seemed to take a crazy pleasure in being equally ostentatious in
an intrigue that could do him no sort of honour. Footmen from Pendragon were perpetually leaving
bouquets for Mrs Boulnois; carriages and motor-cars were perpetually calling at the cottage for
Mrs Boulnois; balls and masquerades perpetually filled the grounds in which the baronet paraded
Mrs Boulnois, like the Queen of Love and Beauty at a tournament. That very evening, marked
by Mr Kidd for the exposition of Catastrophism, had been marked by Sir Claude Champion for
an open-air rendering of Romeo and Juliet, in which he was to play Romeo to a Juliet
it was needless to name. "I don't think it can go on without a smash," said the young
man with red hair, getting up and shaking himself. "Old Boulnois may be squared--or
he may be square. But if he's square he's thick--what you might call cubic. But I don't
believe it's possible." "He is a man of grand intellectual powers,"
said Calhoun Kidd in a deep voice. "Yes," answered Dalroy; "but even a man of grand
intellectual powers can't be such a blighted fool as all that.
Must you be going on? I shall be following myself in a minute or two." But Calhoun Kidd,
having finished a milk and soda, betook himself smartly up the road towards the Grey Cottage,
leaving his cynical informant to his whisky and tobacco. The last of the daylight had
faded; the skies were of a dark, green-grey, like slate, studded here and there with a
star, but lighter on the left side of the sky, with the promise of a rising moon. The
Grey Cottage, which stood entrenched, as it were, in a square of stiff, high thorn-hedges,
was so close under the pines and palisades of the Park that Kidd at first mistook it
for the Park Lodge. Finding the name on the narrow wooden gate,
however, and seeing by his watch that the hour of the "Thinker's" appointment had just
struck, he went in and knocked at the front door. Inside the garden hedge, he could see
that the house, though unpretentious enough, was larger and more luxurious than it looked
at first, and was quite a different kind of place from a porter's lodge. A dog-kennel
and a beehive stood outside, like symbols of old English country-life; the moon was
rising behind a plantation of prosperous pear trees,
the dog that came out of the kennel was reverend-looking and reluctant to bark; and the plain, elderly
man-servant who opened the door was brief but dignified. "Mr Boulnois asked me to offer
his apologies, sir," he said, "but he has been obliged to go out suddenly." "But see
here, I had an appointment," said the interviewer, with a rising voice. "Do you know where he
went to?" "To Pendragon Park, sir," said the servant, rather somberly, and began to close
the door. Kidd started a little. "Did he go with Mrs--with the rest of the party?" he
asked rather vaguely. "No, sir," said the man shortly; "he stayed
behind, and then went out alone." And he shut the door, brutally, but with an air of duty
not done. The American, that curious compound of impudence and sensitiveness, was annoyed.
He felt a strong desire to hustle them all along a bit and teach them business habits;
the hoary old dog and the grizzled, heavy-faced old butler with his prehistoric shirt-front,
and the drowsy old moon, and above all the scatter-brained old philosopher who couldn't
keep an appointment. "If that's the way he goes on he deserves to lose his wife's purest
devotion," said Mr Calhoun Kidd. "But perhaps he's gone over to make a row.
In that case I reckon a man from the Western Sun will be on the spot." And turning the
corner by the open lodge-gates, he set off, stumping up the long avenue of black pine-woods
that pointed in abrupt perspective towards the inner gardens of Pendragon Park. The trees
were as black and orderly as plumes upon a hearse; there were still a few stars. He was
a man with more literary than direct natural associations; the word "Ravenswood" came into
his head repeatedly. It was partly the raven colour of the pine-woods;
but partly also an indescribable atmosphere almost described in Scott's great tragedy;
the smell of something that died in the eighteenth century; the smell of dank gardens and broken
urns, of wrongs that will never now be righted; of something that is none the less incurably
sad because it is strangely unreal. More than once, as he went up that strange, black road
of tragic artifice, he stopped, startled, thinking he heard steps in front of him. He
could see nothing in front but the twin sombre walls of pine and the wedge of starlit sky
above them. At first he thought he must have fancied it or been mocked by a mere echo of
his own ***. But as he went on he was more and more inclined
to conclude, with the remains of his reason, that there really were other feet upon the
road. He thought hazily of ghosts; and was surprised how swiftly he could see the image
of an appropriate and local ghost, one with a face as white as Pierrot's, but patched
with black. The apex of the triangle of dark-blue sky was growing brighter and bluer, but he
did not realize as yet that this was because he was coming nearer to the lights of the
great house and garden. He only felt that the atmosphere was growing more intense, there
was in the sadness more violence and secrecy- -more--he hesitated for the word, and then
said it with a jerk of laughter--Catastrophism. More pines, more pathway slid past him, and
then he stood rooted as by a blast of magic. It is vain to say that he felt as if he had
got into a dream; but this time he felt quite certain that he had got into a book. For we
human beings are used to inappropriate things; we are accustomed to the clatter of the incongruous;
it is a tune to which we can go to sleep. If one appropriate thing happens, it wakes
us up like the pang of a perfect chord. Something happened such as would have happened in such
a place in a forgotten tale. Over the black pine-wood came flying and flashing
in the moon a naked sword--such a slender and sparkling rapier as may have fought many
an unjust duel in that ancient park. It fell on the pathway far in front of him and lay
there glistening like a large needle. He ran like a hare and bent to look at it. Seen at
close quarters it had rather a showy look: the big red jewels in the hilt and guard were
a little dubious. But there were other red drops upon the blade which were not dubious.
He looked round wildly in the direction from which the dazzling missile had come, and saw
that at this point the sable facade of fir and pine was interrupted by a smaller road
at right angles; which, when he turned it, brought him in full
view of the long, lighted house, with a lake and fountains in front of it. Nevertheless,
he did not look at this, having something more interesting to look at. Above him, at
the angle of the steep green bank of the terraced garden, was one of those small picturesque
surprises common in the old landscape gardening; a kind of small round hill or dome of grass,
like a giant mole-hill, ringed and crowned with three concentric fences of roses, and
having a sundial in the highest point in the centre. Kidd could see the finger of the dial
stand up dark against the sky like the dorsal fin of a shark and the vain moonlight clinging
to that idle clock. But he saw something else clinging to it also,
for one wild moment--the figure of a man. Though he saw it there only for a moment,
though it was outlandish and incredible in costume, being clad from neck to heel in tight
crimson, with glints of gold, yet he knew in one flash of moonlight who it was. That
white face flung up to heaven, clean-shaven and so unnaturally young, like Byron with
a Roman nose, those black curls already grizzled--he had seen the thousand public portraits of
Sir Claude Champion. The wild red figure reeled an instant against the sundial;
The next it had rolled down the steep bank and lay at the American's feet, faintly moving
one arm. A gaudy, unnatural gold ornament on the arm suddenly reminded Kidd of Romeo
and Juliet; of course the tight crimson suit was part of the play. But there was a long
red stain down the bank from which the man had rolled--that was no part of the play.
He had been run through the body. Mr Calhoun Kidd shouted and shouted again. Once more
he seemed to hear phantasmal footsteps, and started to find another figure already near
him. He knew the figure, and yet it terrified him.
The dissipated youth who had called himself Dalroy had a horribly quiet way with him;
if Boulnois failed to keep appointments that had been made, Dalroy had a sinister air of
keeping appointments that hadn't. The moonlight discolored everything, against Dalroy's red
hair his wan face looked not so much white as pale green. All this morbid impressionism
must be Kidd's excuse for having cried out, brutally and beyond all reason: "Did you do
this, you devil?" James Dalroy smiled his unpleasing smile; but before he could speak,
the fallen figure made another movement of the arm, waving vaguely towards the place
where the sword fell; then came a moan, and then it managed to speak.
"Boulnois.... Boulnois, I say.... Boulnois did it... jealous of me...he was jealous,
he was, he was..." Kidd bent his head down to hear more, and just managed to catch the
words: "Boulnois...with my own sword...he threw it..." Again the failing hand waved
towards the sword, and then fell rigid with a thud. In Kidd rose from its depth all that
acrid humour that is the strange salt of the seriousness of his race. "See here," he said
sharply and with command, "you must fetch a doctor. This man's dead."
"And a priest, too, I suppose," said Dalroy in an undecipherable manner. "All these Champions
are papists." The American knelt down by the body, felt the heart, propped up the head
and used some last efforts at restoration; but before the other journalist reappeared,
followed by a doctor and a priest, he was already prepared to assert they were too late.
"Were you too late also?" asked the doctor, a solid prosperous-looking man, with conventional
moustache and whiskers, but a lively eye, which darted over Kidd dubiously. "In one
sense," drawled the representative of the Sun.
"I was too late to save the man, but I guess I was in time to hear something of importance.
I heard the dead man denounce his assassin." "And who was the assassin?" asked the doctor,
drawing his eyebrows together. "Boulnois," said Calhoun Kidd, and whistled softly. The
doctor stared at him gloomily with a reddening brow--, but he did not contradict. Then the
priest, a shorter figure in the background, said mildly: "I understood that Mr Boulnois
was not coming to Pendragon Park this evening." "There again," said the Yankee grimly, "I
may be in a position to give the old country a fact or two. Yes, sir, John Boulnois was
going to stay in all this evening; he fixed up a real good appointment there with me.
But John Boulnois changed his mind; John Boulnois left his home abruptly and all alone, and
came over to this darned Park an hour or so ago. His butler told me so. I think we hold
what the all-wise police call a clue--have you sent for them?" "Yes," said the doctor,
"but we haven't alarmed anyone else yet." "Does Mrs Boulnois know?" asked James Dalroy,
and again Kidd was conscious of an irrational desire to hit him on his curling mouth. "I
have not told her," said the doctor gruffly--, "but here come the police." The little priest
had stepped out into the main avenue, and now returned with the fallen sword, which
looked ludicrously large and theatrical when attached to his dumpy figure, at once clerical
and commonplace. "Just before the police come," he said apologetically, "has anyone got a
light?" The Yankee journalist took an electric torch from his pocket,
and the priest held it close to the middle part of the blade, which he examined with
blinking care. Then, without glancing at the point or pommel, he handed the long weapon
to the doctor. "I fear I'm no use here," he said, with a brief sigh. "I'll say good night
to you, gentlemen." And he walked away up the dark avenue towards the house, his hands
clasped behind him and his big head bent in cogitation. The rest of the group made increased
haste towards the lodge-gates, where an inspector and two constables could already be seen in
consultation with the lodge-keeper. But the little priest only walked slower and
slower in the dim cloister of pine, and at last stopped dead, on the steps of the house.
It was his silent way of acknowledging an equally silent approach; for there came towards
him a presence that might have satisfied even Calhoun Kidd's demands for a lovely and aristocratic
ghost. It was a young woman in silvery satins of a Renascence design; she had golden hair
in two long shining ropes, and a face so star tingly pale between them that she might have
been chryselephantine- made, that is, like some old Greek statues,
out of ivory and gold. But her eyes were very bright, and her voice, though low, was confident.
"Father Brown?" she said. "Mrs Boulnois?" he replied gravely. Then he looked at her
and immediately said: "I see you know about Sir Claude." "How do you know I know?" she
asked steadily. He did not answer the question, but asked another: "Have you seen your husband?"
"My husband is at home," she said. "He has nothing to do with this." Again he did not
answer; and the woman drew nearer to him, with a curiously intense expression on her
face. "Shall I tell you something more?" she said,
with a rather fearful smile. "I don't think he did it, and you don't either." Father Brown
returned her gaze with a long, grave stare, and then nodded, yet more gravely. "Father
Brown," said the lady, "I am going to tell you all I know, but I want you to do me a
favour first. Will you tell me why you haven't jumped to the conclusion of poor John's guilt,
as all the rest have done? Don't mind what you say: I--I know about the gossip and the
appearances that are against me." Father Brown looked honestly embarrassed, and passed his
hand across his forehead. "Two very little things," he said. "At least,
one's very trivial and the other very vague. But such as they are, they don't fit in with
Mr Boulnois being the murderer." He turned his blank, round face up to the stars and
continued absentmindedly: "To take the vague idea first. I attach a good deal of importance
to vague ideas. All those things that 'aren't evidence' are what convince me. I think a
moral impossibility the biggest of all impossibilities. I know your husband only slightly, but I think
this crime of his, as generally conceived, something very like a moral impossibility.
Please do not think I mean that Boulnois could not be so wicked. Anybody can be wicked--as
wicked as he chooses. We can direct our moral wills; but we can't generally change our instinctive
tastes and ways of doing things. Boulnois might commit a ***, but not this ***.
He would not *** Romeo's sword from its romantic scabbard; or slay his foe on the
sundial as on a kind of altar; or leave his body among the roses, or fling the sword away
among the pines. If Boulnois killed anyone he'd do it quietly and heavily, as he'd do
any other doubtful thing--take a tenth glass of port, or read a loose Greek poet.
No, the romantic setting is not like Boulnois. It's more like Champion." "Ah!" she said,
and looked at him with eyes like diamonds. "And the trivial thing was this," said Brown.
"There were finger-prints on that sword; finger-prints can be detected quite a time after they are
made if they're on some polished surface like glass or steel. These were on a polished surface.
They were half-way down the blade of the sword. Whose prints they were I have no earthly clue;
but why should anybody hold a sword half-way down? It was a long sword, but length is an
advantage in lunging at an enemy. At least, at most enemies. At all enemies except one."
"Except one," she repeated. "There is only one enemy," said Father Brown, "whom it is
easier to kill with a dagger than a sword." "I know," said the woman. "Oneself." There
was a long silence, and then the priest said quietly but abruptly: "Am I right, then? Did
Sir Claude kill himself?" "Yes" she said, with a face like marble. "I saw him do it."
"He died," said Father Brown, "for love of you?" An extraordinary expression flashed
across her face, very different from pity, modesty, remorse, or anything her companion
had expected: Her voice became suddenly strong and full.
"I don't believe," she said, "he ever cared about me a rap. He hated my husband." "Why?"
asked the other, and turned his round face from the sky to the lady. "He hated my husband
because...it is so strange I hardly know how to say it...because..." "Yes?" said Brown
patiently. "Because my husband wouldn't hate him." Father Brown only nodded, and seemed
still to be listening; he differed from most detectives in fact and fiction in a small
point--he never pretended not to understand when he understood perfectly well.
Mrs Boulnois drew near once more with the same contained glow of certainty. "My husband,"
she said, "is a great man. Sir Claude Champion was not a great man: he was a celebrated and
successful man. My husband has never been celebrated or successful; and it is the solemn
truth that he has never dreamed of being so. He no more expects to be famous for thinking
than for smoking cigars. On all that side he has a sort of splendid stupidity. He has
never grown up. He still liked Champion exactly as he liked him at school; he admired him
as he would admire a conjuring trick done at the dinner-table.
But he couldn't be got to conceive the notion of envying Champion. And Champion wanted to
be envied. He went mad and killed himself for that." "Yes," said Father Brown; "I think
I begin to understand." "Oh, don't you see?" she cried; "the whole picture is made for
that—the place is planned for it. Champion put John in a little house at his very door,
like a dependent--to make him feel a failure. He never felt it. He thinks no more about
such things than--than an absent-minded lion. Champion would burst in on John's shabbiest
hours or homeliest meals with some dazzling present or announcement or expedition that
made it like the visit of Haroun Alraschid, and John would accept or refuse amiably with
one eye off, so to speak, like one lazy schoolboy agreeing or disagreeing with another. After
five years of it John had not turned a hair; and Sir Claude Champion was a monomaniac."
"And Haman began to tell them," said Father Brown, "of all the things wherein the king
had honoured him; and he said: 'All these things profit me nothing while I see Mordecai
the Jew sitting in the gate.'" "The crisis came," Mrs Boulnois continued, "when I persuaded
John to let me take down some of his speculations and send them to a magazine.
They began to attract attention, especially in America, and one paper wanted to interview
him. When Champion (who was interviewed nearly every day)heard of this late little crumb
of success falling to his unconscious rival, the last link snapped that held back his devilish
hatred. Then he began to lay that insane siege to my own love and honour which has been the
talk of the shire. You will ask me why I allowed such atrocious attentions. I answer that I
could not have declined them except by explaining to my husband, and there are some things the
soul cannot do, as the body cannot fly. Nobody could have explained to my husband.
Nobody could do it now. If you said to him in so many words, 'Champion is stealing your
wife,' he would think the joke a little vulgar: that it could be anything but a joke--that
notion could find no crack in his great skull to get in by. Well, John was to come and see
us act this evening, but just as we were starting he said he wouldn't; he had got an interesting
book and a cigar. I told this to Sir Claude, and it was his death-blow. The monomaniac
suddenly saw despair. He stabbed himself, crying out like a devil
that Boulnois was slaying him; he lies there in the garden dead of his own jealousy to
produce jealousy, and John is sitting in the dining-room reading a book." There was another
silence, and then the little priest said: "There is only one weak point, Mrs Boulnois,
in all your very vivid account. Your husband is not sitting in the dining-room reading
a book. That American reporter told me he had been to your house, and your butler told
him Mr Boulnois had gone to Pen dragon Park after all."
Her bright eyes widened to an almost electric glare; and yet it seemed rather bewilderment
than confusion or fear. "Why, what can you mean?" she cried. "All the servants were out
of the house, seeing the theatricals. And we don't keep a butler, thank goodness!" Father
Brown started and spun half round like an absurd teetotum. "What, what?" he cried seeming
galvanized into sudden life. "Look here—I say--can I make your husband hear if I go
to the house?" "Oh, the servants will be back by now," she said, wondering. "Right, right!"
rejoined the cleric energetically, and set off scuttling up the path towards the Park
gates. He turned once to say: "Better get hold of
that Yankee, or 'Crime of John Boulnois' will be all over the Republic in large letters."
"You don't understand," said Mrs Boulnois. "He wouldn't mind. I don't think he imagines
that America really is a place." When Father Brown reached the house with the beehive and
the drowsy dog, a small and neat maid-servant showed him into the dining-room, where Boulnois
sat reading by a shaded lamp, exactly as his wife described him. A decanter of port and
a wineglass were at his elbow; and the instant the priest entered he noted the long ash stand
out unbroken on his cigar. "He has been here for half an hour at least,"
thought Father Brown. In fact, he had the air of sitting where he had sat when his dinner
was cleared away. "Don't get up, Mr Boulnois," said the priest in his pleasant, prosaic way.
"I shan't interrupt you a moment. I fear I break in on some of your scientific studies."
"No," said Boulnois; "I was reading 'The Bloody Thumb.'" He said it with neither frown nor
smile, and his visitor was conscious of a certain deep and virile indifference in the
man which his wife had called greatness. He laid down a gory yellow "shocker" without
even feeling its incongruity enough to comment on it humorously.
John Boulnois was a big, slow-moving man with a massive head, partly grey and partly bald,
and blunt, burly features. He was in shabby and very old-fashioned evening-dress, with
a narrow triangular opening of shirt-front: he had assumed it that evening in his original
purpose of going to see his wife act Juliet. "I won't keep you long from 'The Bloody Thumb'
or any other catastrophic affairs," said Father Brown, smiling. "I only came to ask you about
the crime you committed this evening." Boulnois looked at him steadily, but a red bar began
to show across his broad brow; and he seemed like one discovering embarrassment for the
first time. "I know it was a strange crime," assented
Brown in a low voice. "Stranger than *** perhaps--to you. The little sins are sometimes
harder to confess than the big ones--but that's why it's so important to confess them. Your
crime is committed by every fashionable hostess six times a week: and yet you find it sticks
to your tongue like a nameless atrocity." "It makes one feel," said the philosopher
slowly, "such a damned fool." "I know," assented the other, "but one often has to choose between
feeling a damned fool and being one." "I can't analyse myself well," went on Boulnois;
"but sitting in that chair with that story I was as happy as a schoolboy on a half-holiday.
It was security, eternity--I can't convey it... the cigars were within reach...the matches
were within reach... the Thumb had four more appearances to...it was not only a peace,
but a plenitude. Then that bell rang, and I thought for one long, mortal minute that
I couldn't get out of that chair--literally, physically, muscularly couldn't. Then I did
it like a man lifting the world, because I knew all the servants were out.
I opened the front door, and there was a little man with his mouth open to speak and his notebook
open to write in. I remembered the Yankee interviewer I had forgotten. His hair was
parted in the middle, and I tell you that ***--" "I understand," said Father Brown.
"I've seen him." "I didn't commit ***," continued the Catastrophist mildly, "but only
perjury. I said I had gone across to Pendragon Park and shut the door in his face. That is
my crime, Father Brown, and I don't know what penance you would inflict for it."
"I shan't inflict any penance," said the clerical gentleman, collecting his heavy hat and umbrella
with an air of some amusement; "quite the contrary. I came here specially to let you
off the little penance which would otherwise have followed your little offence." "And what,"
asked Boulnois, smiling, "is the little penance I have so luckily been let off?" "Being hanged,"
said Father Brown. Chapter TWELVE
The Fairy Tale of Father Brown THE picturesque city and state of Heiligwaldenstein
was one of those toy kingdoms of which certain parts of the German Empire still consist.
and drinking its beer. There had been not a little of war and wild justice there within
living memory, as soon will be shown. But in merely looking at it one could not dismiss
that impression of childishness which is the most charming side of Germany-
those little pantomime, paternal monarchies in which a king seems as domestic as a cook.
The German soldiers by the innumerable sentry-boxes looked strangely like German toys, and the
clean-cut battlements of the castle, gilded by the sunshine, looked the more like the
gilt gingerbread. For it was brilliant weather. The sky was as Prussian a blue as Potsdam
itself could require, but it was yet more like that lavish and glowing use of the colour
which a child extracts from a shilling paint-box. Even the grey-ribbed trees looked young, for
the pointed buds on them were still pink, and in a pattern against the strong blue looked
like innumerable childish figures. Despite his prosaic appearance and generally
practical walk of life, Father Brown was not without a certain streak of romance in his
composition, though he generally kept his daydreams to himself, as many children do.
Amid the brisk, bright colours of such a day, and in the heraldic framework of such a town,
he did feel rather as if he had entered a fairy tale. He took a childish pleasure, as
a younger brother might, in the formidable sword-stick which
Flambeau always flung as he walked, and which now stood upright beside his tall mug of Munich.
Nay, in his sleepy irresponsibility, he even found himself eyeing the knobbed and clumsy
head of his own shabby umbrella, with some faint memories of the ogre's club in a coloured
toy-book. But he never composed anything in the form of fiction, unless it be the tale
that follows: "I wonder," he said, "whether one would have real adventures in a place
like this, if one put oneself in the way? It's a splendid back-scene for them, but I
always have a kind of feeling that they would fight you with pasteboard sabres more than
real, horrible swords." "You are mistaken," said his friend.
"In this place they not only fight with swords, but kill without swords. And there's worse
than that." "Why, what do you mean?" asked Father Brown. "Why," replied the other, "I
should say this was the only place in Europe where a man was ever shot without firearms."
"Do you mean a bow and arrow?" asked Brown in some wonder. "I mean a bullet in the brain,"
replied Flambeau. "Don't you know the story of the late Prince of this place? It
was one of the great police mysteries about twenty years ago. You remember, of course,
that this place was forcibly annexed at the time of Bismarck's very earliest schemes of
consolidation--forcibly, that is, but not at all easily.
The empire (or what wanted to be one) sent Prince Otto of Grossenmark to rule the place
in the Imperial interests. We saw his portrait in the gallery there--a handsome old gentleman
if he'd had any hair or eyebrows, and hadn't been wrinkled all over like a vulture; but
he had things to harass him, as I'll explain in a minute. He was a soldier of distinguished
skill and success, but he didn't have altogether an easy job with this little place. He was
defeated in several battles by the celebrated Arnhold brothers--the three guerrilla patriots
to whom Swinburne wrote a poem, you remember: Wolves with the hair of the ermine, Crows
that are crowned and kings--These things be many as vermin, Yet Three shall abide these
things. Or something of that kind. Indeed, it is by no means certain that the occupation
would ever have been successful had not one of the three brothers, Paul, despicably, but
very decisively declined to abide these things any longer, and, by surrendering all the secrets
of the insurrection, ensured its overthrow and his own ultimate promotion to the post
of chamberlain to Prince Otto. After this, Ludwig, the one genuine hero among
Mr Swinburne's heroes, was killed, sword in hand, in the capture of the city; and the
third, Heinrich, who, though not a traitor, had always been tame and even timid compared
with his active brothers, retired into something like a hermitage, became converted to a Christian
quietism which was almost Quakerish, and never mixed with men except to give nearly all he
had to the poor. They tell me that not long ago he could still be seen about the neighbourhood
occasionally, a man in a black cloak, nearly blind, with very wild, white hair, but a face
of astonishing softness." "I know," said Father Brown. "I saw him once."
His friend looked at him in some surprise. "I didn't know you'd been here before," he
said. "Perhaps you know as much about it as I do. Anyhow, that's the story of the Arnholds,
and he was the last survivor of them. Yes, and of all the men who played parts in that
drama." "You mean that the Prince, too, died long before?" "Died," repeated Flambeau, "and
that's about as much as we can say. You must understand that towards the end of his life
he began to have those tricks of the nerves not uncommon with tyrants.
He multiplied the ordinary daily and nightly guard round his castle till there seemed to
be more sentry-boxes than houses in the town, and doubtful characters were shot without
mercy. He lived almost entirely in a little room that
was in the very centre of the enormous labyrinth of all the other rooms, and even in this he
erected another sort of central cabin or cupboard, lined with steel, like a safe or a battleship.
Some say that under the floor of this again was a secret hole in the earth, no more than
large enough to hold him, so that, in his anxiety to avoid the grave,
he was willing to go into a place pretty much like it. But he went further yet. The populace
had been supposed to be disarmed ever since the suppression of the revolt, but Otto now
insisted, as governments very seldom insist, on an absolute and literal disarmament. It
was carried out, with extraordinary thoroughness and severity, by very well-organized officials
over a small and familiar area, and, so far as human strength and science can be absolutely
certain of anything, Prince Otto was absolutely certain that nobody could introduce so much
as a toy pistol into Heiligwaldenstein." "Human science can never be quite certain
of things like that," said Father Brown, still looking at the red budding of the branches
over his head, "if only because of the difficulty about definition and connotation. What is
a weapon? People have been murdered with the mildest domestic comforts; certainly with
tea-kettles, probably with tea-cosies. On the other hand, if you showed an Ancient Briton
a revolver, I doubt if he would know it was a weapon--until it was fired into him, of
course. Perhaps somebody introduced a firearm so new that it didn't even look like a fire
arm. Perhaps it looked like a thimble or something.
Was the bullet at all peculiar?" "Not that I ever heard of," answered Flambeau; "but
my information is fragmentary, and only comes from my old friend Grimm. He was a very able
detective in the German service, and he tried to arrest me; I arrested him instead, and
we had many interesting chats. He was in charge here of the inquiry about Prince Otto, but
I forgot to ask him anything about the bullet. According to Grimm, what happened was this."
He paused a moment to drain the greater part of his dark lager at a draught, and then resumed:
"On the evening in question, it seems, the Prince was expected to appear in one of the
outer rooms, because he had to receive certain visitors whom he really wished to meet. They
were geological experts sent to investigate the old question of the alleged supply of
gold from the rocks round here, upon which (as it was said) the small city-state
had so long maintained its credit and been able to negotiate with its neighbours even
under the ceaseless bombardment of bigger armies. Hitherto it had never been found by
the most exacting inquiry which could--" "Which could be quite certain of discovering a toy
pistol," said Father Brown with a smile. "But what about the brother who ratted? Hadn't
he anything to tell the Prince?" "He always asseverated that he did not know," replied
Flambeau; "that this was the one secret his brothers had not told him. It is only right
to say that it received some support from fragmentary words--spoken by the great Ludwig
in the hour of death, when he looked at Heinrich but pointed at Paul, and said, 'You have not
told him...' and was soon afterwards incapable of speech. Anyhow, the deputation of distinguished
geologists and mineralogists from Paris and Berlin were there in the most magnificent
and appropriate dress, for there are no men who like wearing their
decorations so much as the men of science--as anybody knows who has ever been to a soiree
of the Royal Society. It was a brilliant gathering, but very late, and gradually the Chamberlain—you
saw his portrait, too: a man with black eyebrows, serious eyes, and a meaningless sort of smile
underneath--the Chamberlain, I say, discovered there was everything there except the Prince
himself. He searched all the outer salons; then, remembering the man's mad fits of fear,
hurried to the inmost chamber. That also was empty, but the steel turret or cabin erected
in the middle of it took some time to open. When it did open it was empty, too. He went
and looked into the hole in the ground, which seemed deeper and somehow all the more like
a grave--that is his account, of course. And even as he did so he heard a burst of cries
and tumult in the long rooms and corridors without.
"First it was a distant din and thrill of something unthinkable on the horizon of the
crowd, even beyond the castle. Next it was a wordless clamour startlingly close, and
loud enough to be distinct if each word had not killed the other. Next came words of a
terrible clearness, coming nearer, and next one man, rushing into the room and telling
the news as briefly as such news is told. "Otto, Prince of Heiligwaldenstein and Grossenmark,
was lying in the dews of the darkening twilight in the woods beyond the castle, with his arms
flung out and his face flung up to the moon. The blood still pulsed from his shattered
temple and jaw, but it was the only part of him that moved like a living thing. He was
clad in his full white and yellow uniform, as to receive his guests within, except that
the sash or scarf had been unbound and lay rather crumpled by his side. Before he could
be lifted he was dead. But, dead or alive, he was a riddle--he who had always hidden
in the inmost chamber out there in the wet woods, unarmed and alone."
"Who found his body?" asked Father Brown. "Some girl attached to the Court named Hedwig
von something or other," replied his friend, "who had been out in the wood picking wild
flowers." "Had she picked any?" asked the priest, staring rather vacantly at the veil
of the branches above him. "Yes," replied Flambeau. "I particularly remember that the
Chamberlain, or old Grimm or somebody, said how horrible it was, when they came up at
her call, to see a girl holding spring flowers and bending over that--that bloody collapse.
However, the main point is that before help arrived he was dead, and the news, of course,
had to be carried back to the castle. The consternation it created was something beyond
even that natural in a Court at the fall of a potentate. The foreign visitors, especially
the mining experts, were in the wildest doubt and excitement, as well as many important
Prussian officials, and it soon began to be clear that the scheme for finding the treasure
bulked much bigger in the business than people had supposed. Experts and officials had been
promised great prizes or international advantages, and some even said that the Prince's secret
apartments and strong military protection were due less to fear of the populace than
to the pursuit of some private investigation of--" "Had the flowers got long stalks?" asked
Father Brown. Flambeau stared at him. "What an odd person you are!" he said. "That's exactly
what old Grimm said. He said the ugliest part of it, he thought--uglier than the blood and
bullet--was that the flowers were quite short, plucked close under the head." "Of course,"
said the priest, "when a grown up girl is really picking flowers, she picks them with
plenty of stalk. If she just pulled their heads off, as a child
does, it looks as if--" And he hesitated. "Well?" inquired the other. "Well, it looks
rather as if she had snatched them nervously, to make an excuse for being there after--well,
after she was there." "I know what you're driving at," said Flambeau rather gloomily.
"But that and every other suspicion breaks down on the one point--the want of a weapon.
He could have been killed, as you say, with lots of other things--even with his own military
sash; but we have to explain not how he was killed, but how he was shot. And the fact
is we can't. They had the girl most ruthlessly searched;
for, to tell the truth, she was a little suspect, though the niece and ward of the wicked old
Chamberlain, Paul Arnhold. But she was very romantic, and was suspected of sympathy with
the old revolutionary enthusiasm in her family. All the same, however romantic you are, you
can't imagine a big bullet into a man's jaw or brain without using a gun or pistol. And
there was no pistol, though there were two pistol shots. I leave it to you, my friend."
"How do you know there were two shots?" asked the little priest. "There was only one in
his head," said his companion, "but there was another bullet-hole in the sash."
Father Brown's smooth brow became suddenly constricted. "Was the other bullet found?"
he demanded. Flambeau started a little. "I don't think I remember," he said. "Hold on!
Hold on! Hold on!" cried Brown, frowning more and more, with a quite unusual concentration
of curiosity. "Don't think me rude. Let me think this out for a moment." "All right,"
said Flambeau, laughing, and finished his beer. A slight breeze stirred the budding
trees and blew up into the sky cloudlets of white and pink that seemed to make the sky
bluer and the whole coloured scene more quaint. They might have been cherubs flying home to
the casements of a sort of celestial nursery. The oldest tower of the castle, the Dragon
Tower, stood up as grotesque as the ale-mug, but as homely. Only beyond the tower glimmered
the wood in which the man had lain dead. "What became of this Hedwig eventually?" asked the
priest at last. "She is married to General Schwartz," said Flambeau. "No doubt you've
heard of his career, which was rather romantic. He had distinguished himself even, before
his exploits at Sadowa and Gravelotte; in fact, he rose from the ranks, which is very
unusual even in the smallest of the German..." Father Brown sat up suddenly. "Rose from the
ranks!" he cried, and made a mouth as if to whistle. "Well, well, what a *** story!
What a *** way of killing a man; but I suppose it was the only one possible. But to think
of hate so patient--" "What do you mean?" demanded the other. "In what way did they
kill the man?" "They killed him with the sash," said Brown carefully; and then, as Flambeau
protested: "Yes, yes, I know about the bullet. Perhaps I ought to say he died of having a
sash. I know it doesn't sound like having a disease."
"I suppose," said Flambeau, "that you've got some notion in your head, but it won't easily
get the bullet out of his. As I explained before, he might easily have been strangled.
But he was shot. By whom? By what?" "He was shot by his own orders," said the priest.
"You mean he committed suicide?" "I didn't say by his own wish," replied Father Brown.
"I said by his own orders." "Well, anyhow, what is your theory?" Father Brown laughed.
"I am only on my holiday," he said. "I haven't got any theories. Only this place reminds
me of fairy stories, and, if you like, I'll tell you a story."
The little pink clouds, that looked rather like sweet-stuff, had floated up to crown
the turrets of the gilt gingerbread castle, and the pink baby fingers of the budding trees
seemed spreading and stretching to reach them; the blue sky began to take a bright violet
of evening, when Father Brown suddenly spoke again: "It was on a dismal night, with rain
still dropping from the trees and dew already clustering, that Prince Otto of Grossenmark
stepped hurriedly out of a side door of the castle and walked swiftly into the wood. One
of the innumerable sentries saluted him, but he did not notice it.
He had no wish to be specially noticed himself. He was glad when the great trees, grey and
already greasy with rain, swallowed him up like a swamp. He had deliberately chosen the
least frequented side of his palace, but even that was more frequented than he liked. But
there was no particular chance of officious or diplomatic pursuit, for his exit had been
a sudden impulse. All the full-dressed diplomatists he left behind were unimportant. He had realized
suddenly that he could do without them. "His great passion was not the much nobler dread
of death, but the strange desire of gold. For this legend of the gold he had left Grossenmark
and invaded Heiligwaldenstein. For this and only this he had bought the traitor and butchered
the hero, for this he had long questioned and cross-questioned the false Chamberlain,
until he had come to the conclusion that, touching his ignorance, the renegade really
told the truth. For this he had, somewhat reluctantly, paid and promised money on the
chance of gaining the larger amount; and for this he had stolen out of his palace like
a thief in the rain, for he had thought of another way to get the desire of his eyes,
and to get it cheap. "Away at the upper end of a rambling mountain
path to which he was making his way, among the pillared rocks along the ridge that hangs
above the town, stood the hermitage, hardly more than a cavern fenced with thorn, in which
the third of the great brethren had long hidden himself from the world. He, thought Prince
Otto, could have no real reason for refusing to give up the gold. He had known its place
for years, and made no effort to find it, even before his new ascetic creed had cut
him off from property or pleasures. True, he had been an enemy, but he now professed
a duty of having no enemies. Some concession to his cause, some appeal
to his principles, would probably get the mere money secret out of him. Otto was no
coward, in spite of his network of military precautions, and, in any case, his avarice
was stronger than his fears. Nor was there much cause for fear. Since he was certain
there were no private arms in the whole principality, he was a hundred times more certain there
were none in the Quaker's little hermitage on the hill, where he lived on herbs, with
two old rustic servants, and with no other voice of man for year after year.
Prince Otto looked down with something of a grim smile at the bright, square labyrinths
of the lamp-lit city below him. For as far as the eye could see there ran the rifles
of his friends, and not one pinch of powder for his enemies. Rifles ranked so close even
to that mountain path that a cry from him would bring the soldiers rushing up the hill,
to say nothing of the fact that the wood and ridge were patrolled at regular intervals;
rifles so far away, in the dim woods, dwarfed by distance, beyond the river, that an enemy
could not slink into the town by any detour. And round the palace rifles at the west door
and the east door, at the north door and the south, and all along the four facades linking
them. He was safe. "It was all the more clear when he had crested the ridge and found how
naked was the nest of his old enemy. He found himself on a small platform of rock, broken
abruptly by the three corners of precipice. Behind was the black cave, masked with green
thorn, so low that it was hard to believe that a man could enter it. In front was the
fall of the cliffs and the vast but cloudy vision of the valley. On the small rock platform
stood an old bronze lectern or reading-stand, groaning under a great German Bible.
The bronze or copper of it had grown green with the eating airs of that exalted place,
and Otto had instantly the thought, 'Even if they had arms, they must be rusted by now.'
Moonrise had already made a deathly dawn behind the crests and crags, and the rain had ceased.
"Behind the lectern, and looking across the valley, stood a very old man in a black robe
that fell as straight as the cliffs around him, but whose white hair and weak voice seemed
alike to waver in the wind. He was evidently reading some daily lesson as part of his religious
exercises. 'They trust in their horses...' "'Sir,' said the Prince of Heiligwaldenstein,
with quite unusual courtesy, 'I should like only one word with you.' "'...and in their
chariots,' went on the old man weakly, 'but we will trust in the name of the Lord of Hosts....'
His last words were inaudible, but he closed the book reverently and, being nearly blind,
made a groping movement and gripped the reading-stand. Instantly his two servants slipped out of
the low-browed cavern and supported him. They wore dull-black gowns like his own, but they
had not the frosty silver on the hair, nor the frost-bitten refinement of the features.
They were peasants, Croat or Magyar, with broad, blunt visages and blinking eyes. For
the first time something troubled the Prince, but his courage and diplomatic sense stood
firm. "'I fear we have not met,' he said, 'since that awful cannonade in which your
poor brother died.' "'All my brothers died,' said the old man, still looking across the
valley. Then, for one instant turning on Otto his drooping, delicate features, and the wintry
hair that seemed to drip over his eyebrows like icicles, he added: 'You see, I am dead,
too.' "'I hope you'll understand,' said the Prince,
controlling himself almost to a point of conciliation, 'that I do not come here to haunt you, as
a mere ghost of those great quarrels. We will not talk about who was right or wrong in that,
but at least there was one point on which we were never wrong, because you were always
right. Whatever is to be said of the policy of your family, no one for one moment imagines
that you were moved by the mere gold; you have proved yourself above the suspicion that...'
"The old man in the black gown had hitherto continued to gaze at him with watery blue
eyes and a sort of weak wisdom in his face. But when the word 'gold' was said he held
out his hand as if in arrest of something, and turned away his face to the mountains.
"'He has spoken of gold,' he said. 'He has spoken of things not lawful. Let him cease
to speak.' "Otto had the vice of his Prussian type and tradition, which is to regard success
not as an incident but as a quality. He conceived himself and his like as perpetually conquering
peoples who were perpetually being conquered. Consequently, he was ill acquainted with the
emotion of surprise, and ill prepared for the next movement, which startled and stiffened
him. He had opened his mouth to answer the hermit,
when the mouth was stopped and the voice strangled
by a strong, soft gag suddenly twisted round his head like a tourniquet. It was fully forty
seconds before he even realized that the two Hungarian servants had done it, and that they
had done it with his own military scarf. "The old man went again weakly to his great brazen-supported
Bible, turned over the leaves, with a patience that had something horrible about it, till
he came to the Epistle of St James, and then began to read: 'The tongue is a little member,
but--' "Something in the very voice made the Prince
turn suddenly and plunge down the mountain-path he had climbed. He was half-way towards the
gardens of the palace before he even tried to tear the strangling scarf from his neck
and jaws. He tried again and again, and it was impossible; the men who had knotted that
gag knew the difference between what a man can do with his hands in front of him and
what he can do with his hands behind his head. His legs were free to leap like an antelope
on the mountains, his arms were free to use any gesture or wave any signal, but he could
not speak. A dumb devil was in him. "He had come close to the woods that walled
in the castle before he had quite realized what his wordless state meant and was meant
to mean. Once more he looked down grimly at the bright, square labyrinths of the lamp-lit
city below him, and he smiled no more. He felt himself repeating the phrases of his
former mood with a murderous irony. Far as the eye could see ran the rifles of his friends,
every one of whom would shoot him dead if he could not answer the challenge. Rifles
were so near that the wood and ridge could be patrolled at regular intervals; therefore
it was useless to hide in the wood till morning. Rifles were ranked so far away that an enemy
could not slink into the town by any detour; therefore it was vain to return to the city
by any remote course. A cry from him would bring his soldiers rushing up the hill. But
from him no cry would come. "The moon had risen in strengthening silver, and the sky
showed in stripes of bright, nocturnal blue between the black stripes of the pines about
the castle. Flowers of some wide and feathery sort--for he had
never noticed such things before--were at once luminous and discoloured by the moonshine,
and seemed indescribably fantastic as they clustered, as if crawling about the roots
of the trees. Perhaps his reason had been suddenly unseated
by the unnatural captivity he carried with him, but in that wood he felt something unfathomably
German--the fairy tale. He knew with half his mind that he was drawing near to the castle
of an ogre—he had forgotten that he was the ogre. He remembered asking his mother
if bears lived in the old park at home. He stooped to pick a flower, as if it were a
charm against enchantment. The stalk was stronger than he expected, and broke with a slight
snap. Carefully trying to place it in his scarf, he heard the halloo, 'Who goes there?'
Then he remembered the scarf was not in its usual place. "He tried to scream and was silent.
The second challenge came; and then a shot that shrieked as it came and then was stilled
suddenly by impact. Otto of Grossenmark lay very peacefully among the fairy trees, and
would do no more harm either with gold or steel; only the silver pencil of the moon
would pick out and trace here and there the intricate ornament of his uniform, or the
old wrinkles on his brow. May God have mercy on his soul. "The sentry who had fired, according
to the strict orders of the garrison, naturally ran forward to find some trace of his quarry.
He was a private named Schwartz, since not unknown in his profession, and what he found
was a bald man in uniform, but with his face so bandaged by a kind of mask made of his
own military scarf that nothing but open, dead
eyes could be seen, glittering stonily in the moonlight. The bullet had gone through
the gag into the jaw; that is why there was a shot-hole in the scarf, but only one shot.
Naturally, if not correctly, young Schwartz tore off the mysterious silken mask and cast
it on the grass; and then he saw whom he had slain. "We cannot be certain of the next phase.
But I incline to believe that there was a fairy tale, after all, in that little wood,
horrible as was its occasion. Whether the young lady named Hedwig had any previous knowledge
of the soldier she saved and eventually married, or whether she came accidentally upon the
accident and their intimacy began that night, we shall probably never know. But we can know,
I fancy, that this Hedwig was a heroine, and deserved to marry a man who became something
of a hero. She did the bold and the wise thing. She persuaded the sentry to go back to his
post, in which place there was nothing to connect
him with the disaster; he was but one of the most loyal and orderly of fifty such sentries
within call. She remained by the body and gave the alarm; and there was nothing to connect
her with the disaster either, since she had not got, and could not have, any firearms.
"Well," said Father Brown rising cheerfully "I hope they're happy." "Where are you going?"
asked his friend. " "I'm going to have another look at that portrait
of the Chamberlain, the Arnhold who betrayed his brethren," answered the priest. "I wonder
what part--I wonder if a man is less a traitor when he is twice a traitor? And he ruminated
long before the portrait of a white-haired man with black eyebrows and a pink, painted
sort of smile that seemed to contradict the black warning in his eyes.