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THE WISDOM OF FATHER BROWN By G. K. Chesterton
Chapter ONE the Absence of Mr. Glass THE consulting-rooms of Dr Orion Hood, the
eminent criminologist and specialist in certain moral disorders, lay along the sea-front at
Scarborough, in a series of very large and well-lighted French windows, which showed
the North Sea like one endless outer wall of blue-green marble. In such a place the
sea had something of the monotony of a blue-green dado: for the chambers themselves were ruled
throughout by a terrible tidiness not unlike the terrible tidiness of the sea. It must
not be supposed that Dr Hood's apartments excluded luxury, or even poetry.
These things were there, in their place; but one felt that they were never allowed out
of their place. Luxury was there: there stood upon a special table eight or ten boxes of
the best cigars; but they were built upon a plan so that the strongest were always nearest
the wall and the mildest nearest the window. A Tantalus containing three kinds of spirit,
all of a liqueur excellence, stood always on this table of luxury; but the fanciful
have asserted that the whisky, brandy, and rum seemed always to stand at the same level.
Poetry was there: the left-hand corner of the room was lined with as complete a set
of English classics as the right hand could show of English and foreign physiologists.
But if one took a volume of Chaucer or Shelley from that rank, its absence irritated the
mind like a gap in a man's front teeth. One could not say the books were never read; probably
they were, but there was a sense of their being chained to their places, like the Bibles
in the old churches. Dr Hood treated his private book-shelf as if it were a public library.
And if this strict scientific intangibility steeped even the shelves laden with lyrics
and ballads and the tables laden with drink and tobacco, it goes without saying that yet
more of such heathen holiness protected the other shelves that held the specialist's library,
and the other tables that sustained the frail and even fairylike instruments of chemistry
or mechanics. Dr Hood paced the length of his string of apartments, bounded--as the
boys' geographies say--on the east by the North Sea and on the west by the serried ranks
of his sociological and criminologist library. He was clad in an artist's velvet, but with
none of an artist's negligence; his hair was heavily shot with grey, but growing thick
and healthy; his face was lean, but sanguine and expectant. Everything about him and his
room indicated something at once rigid and restless, like that great northern sea by
which (on pure principles of hygiene) he had built his home. Fate, being in a funny mood,
pushed the door open and introduced into those long, strict, sea-flanked apartments one who
was perhaps the most startling opposite of them and their master.
In answer to a curt but civil summons, the door opened inwards and there shambled into
the room a shapeless little figure, which seemed to find its own hat and umbrellas unmanageable
as a mass of luggage. The umbrella was a black and prosaic bundle long past repair; the hat
was a broad-curved black hat, clerical but not common in England; the man was the very
embodiment of all that is homely and helpless. The doctor regarded the new-comer with a restrained
astonishment, not unlike that he would have shown if some huge but obviously harmless
sea-beast had crawled into his room. The new-comer regarded the doctor with that
beaming but breathless geniality which characterizes a corpulent charwoman who has just managed
to stuff herself into an omnibus. It is a rich confusion of social
self-congratulation and bodily disarray. His hat tumbled to the carpet, his heavy umbrella
slipped between his knees with a thud; he reached after the one and ducked after the
other, but with an unimpaired smile on his round face spoke simultaneously as follows:
"My name is Brown. Pray excuse me. I've come about that business of the MacNabs.
I have heard, you often help people out of such troubles. Pray excuse me if I am wrong."
By this time he had sprawlingly recovered the hat, and made an odd little bobbing bow
over it, as if setting everything quite right. "I hardly understand you," replied the scientist,
with a cold intensity of manner. "I fear you have mistaken the chambers. I am Dr Hood,
and my work is almost entirely literary and educational. It is true that I have sometimes
been consulted by the police in cases of peculiar difficulty
and importance, but--" "Oh, this is of the greatest importance,"
broke in the little man called Brown. "Why, her mother won't let them get engaged." And
he leaned back in his chair in radiant rationality. The brows of Dr Hood were drawn down darkly,
but the eyes under them were bright with something that might be anger or might be amusement.
"And still," he said, "I do not quite understand." "You see, they want to get married," said
the man with the clerical hat. "Maggie MacNab and young To hunter want to get married. Now,
what can be more important than that?" The great Orion Hood's scientific triumphs
had deprived him of many things--some said of his health, others of his God; but they
had not wholly despoiled him of his sense of the absurd. At the last plea of the ingenuous
priest a chuckle broke out of him from inside, and he threw himself into an arm-chair in
an ironical attitude of the consulting physician."Mr Brown," he said gravely, "it is quite fourteen
and a half years since I was personally asked to test a personal problem: then it was the
case of an attempt to poison the French President at a Lord Mayor's Banquet.
It is now, I understand, a question of whether some friend of yours called Maggie is a suitable
fiancee for some friend of hers called To hunter. Well, Mr Brown, I am a sportsman.
I will take it on. I will give the MacNab family my best advice, as good as I gave the
French Republic and the King of England--no, better: fourteen years better. I have nothing
else to do this afternoon. Tell me your story." The little clergyman called Brown thanked
him with unquestionable warmth, but still with a *** kind of simplicity. It was rather
as if he were thanking a stranger in a smoking-room for some trouble in passing the matches,
than as if he were (as he was) practically thanking the Curator of Kew Gardens for coming
with him into a field to find a four-leaved clover. With scarcely a semi-colon after his
hearty thanks, the little man began his recital: "I told you my name was Brown; well, that's
the fact, and I'm the priest of the little Catholic Church I dare say you've seen beyond
those straggly streets, where the town ends towards the north. In the last and straggliest
of those streets which runs along the sea like a sea-wall there is a very honest but
rather sharp-tempered member of my flock, a widow called MacNab.
She has one daughter, and she lets lodgings, and between her and the daughter, and between
her and the lodgers--well, I dare say there is a great deal to be said on both sides.
At present she has only one lodger, the young man called Todhunter; but he has given more
trouble than all the rest, for he wants to marry the young woman of the house." "And
the young woman of the house," asked Dr Hood, with huge and silent amusement, "what does
she want?" "Why, she wants to marry him," cried Father Brown, sitting up eagerly. "That
is just the awful complication." "It is indeed a hideous enigma," said Dr Hood.
"This young James Todhunter," continued the cleric, "is a very decent man so far as I
know; but then nobody knows very much. He is a bright, brownish little fellow, agile
like a monkey, clean-shaven like an actor, and obliging like a born courtier. He seems
to have quite a pocketful of money, but nobody knows what his trade is. Mrs MacNab, therefore
(being of a pessimistic turn), is quite sure it is something dreadful, and probably connected
with dynamite. The dynamite must be of a shy and noiseless sort, for the poor fellow only
shuts himself up for several hours of the day and studies something behind a locked
door. He declares his privacy is temporary and justified,
and promises to explain before the wedding. That is all that anyone knows for certain,
but Mrs MacNab will tell you a great deal more than even she is certain of. You know
how the tales grow like grass on such a patch of ignorance as that. There are tales of two
voices heard talking in the room; though, when the door is opened, Todhunter is always
found alone. There are tales of a mysterious tall man in a silk hat, who once came out
of the sea-mists and apparently out of the sea, stepping softly across the sandy fields
and through the small back garden at twilight, till he was heard talking to the lodger at
his open window. The colloquy seemed to end in a quarrel. Todhunter dashed down his window
with violence, and the man in the high hat melted into the sea-fog again. This story
is told by the family with the fiercest mystification; but I really think Mrs MacNab prefers her
own original tale: that the Other Man (or whatever it is) crawls out every night from
the big box in the corner, which is kept locked all day. You see, therefore, how this sealed
door of Todhunter's is treated as the gate of all the fancies and monstrosities of the
'Thousand and One Nights'. And yet there is the little fellow in his
respectable black jacket, as punctual and innocent as a parlour clock. He pays his rent
to the tick; he is practically a teetotaller; he is tirelessly kind with the younger children,
and can keep them amused for a day on end; and, last and most urgent of all, he has made
himself equally popular with the eldest daughter, who is ready to go to church with him tomorrow."
A man warmly concerned with any large theories has always a relish for applying them to any
triviality. The great specialist having condescended to the priest's simplicity, condescended expansively.
He settled himself with comfort in his arm-chair and began to talk in the tone of a somewhat
absent-minded lecturer: "Even in a minute instance, it is best to look first to the
main tendencies of Nature. A particular flower may not be dead in early winter, but the flowers
are dying; a particular pebble may never be wetted with the tide, but the tide is coming
in. To the scientific eye all human history is a series of collective movements, destructions
or migrations, like the massacre of flies in winter or the return of birds in spring.
Now the root fact in all history is Race. Race produces religion; Race produces legal
and ethical wars. There is no stronger case than that of the
wild, unworldly and perishing stock which we commonly call the Celts, of whom your friends
the MacNabs are specimens. Small, swarthy, and of this dreamy and drifting blood, they
accept easily the superstitious explanation of any
incidents, just as they still accept (you will excuse me for saying) that superstitious
explanation of all incidents which you and your Church represent. It is not remarkable
that such people, with the sea moaning behind them and the Church (excuse me again) droning
in front of them, should put fantastic features into what are probably plain events.
You, with your small parochial responsibilities, see only this particular Mrs MacNab, terrified
with this particular tale of two voices and a tall man out of the sea. But the man with
the scientific imagination sees, as it were, the whole clans of MacNab scattered over the
whole world, in its ultimate average as uniform as a tribe of birds. He sees thousands of
Mrs MacNabs, in thousands of houses, dropping their little drop of morbidity in the tea-cups
of their friends; he sees--" Before the scientist could conclude his sentence, another and more
impatient summons sounded from without; someone with swishing skirts was marshalled
hurriedly down the corridor, and the door opened on a young girl, decently dressed but
disordered and red-hot with haste. She had sea-blown blonde hair, and would have been
entirely beautiful if her cheek-bones had not been, in the Scotch manner, a little high
in relief as well as in colour. Her apology was almost as abrupt as a command. "I'm sorry
to interrupt you, sir," she said, "but I had to follow Father Brown at once; it's nothing
less than life or death." Father Brown began to get to his feet in some disorder. "Why,
what has happened, Maggie?" he said. "James has been murdered, for all I can make
out," answered the girl, still breathing hard from her rush. "That man Glass has been with
him again; I heard them talking through the door quite plain. Two separate voices: for
James speaks low, with a burr, and the other voice was high and quavery." "That man Glass?"
repeated the priest in some perplexity. "I know his name is Glass," answered the girl,
in great impatience. "I heard it through the door. They were quarrelling--about money,
I think--for I heard James say again and again, 'That's right, Mr Glass,' or 'No, Mr Glass,'
and then, 'Two or three, Mr Glass. But we're talking too much; you must come
at once, and there may be time yet." "But time for what?" asked Dr Hood, who had been
studying the young lady with marked interest. "What is there about Mr Glass and his money
troubles that should impel such urgency?" "I tried to break down the door and couldn't,"
answered the girl shortly, "Then I ran to the back-yard, and managed to climb on to
the window-sill that looks into the room. It was an dim, and seemed to be empty, but
I swear I saw James lying huddled up in a corner, as if he were drugged or strangled."
"This is very serious," said Father Brown, gathering his errant hat and umbrella and
standing up; "in point of fact I was just putting your case before this gentleman, and
his view--" "Has been largely altered," said the scientist gravely. "I do not think this
young lady is so Celtic as I had supposed. As I have nothing else to do, I will put on
my hat and stroll down town with you." In a few minutes all three were approaching the
dreary tail of the MacNabs' street: the girl with the stern and breathless stride of the
mountaineer, the criminologist with a lounging grace (which
was not without a certain leopard-like swiftness), and the priest at an energetic trot entirely
devoid of distinction. The aspect of this edge of the town was not entirely without
justification for the doctor's hints about desolate moods and environments. The scattered
houses stood farther and farther apart in a broken string along the seashore; the afternoon
was closing with a premature and partly lurid twilight; the sea was of an inky purple and
murmuring ominously. In the scrappy back garden of the MacNabs
which ran down towards the sand, two black, barren-looking trees stood up like demon hands
held up in astonishment, and as Mrs MacNab ran down the street to meet them with lean
hands similarly spread, and her fierce face in shadow, she was a little like a demon herself.
The doctor and the priest made scant reply to her shrill reiterations of her daughter's
story, with more disturbing details of her own, to the divided vows of vengeance against
Mr Glass for murdering, and against Mr Todhunter for being murdered,
or against the latter for having dared to want to marry her daughter, and for not having
lived to do it. They passed through the narrow passage in the front of the house until they
came to the lodger's door at the back, and there Dr Hood, with the trick of an old detective,
put his shoulder sharply to the panel and burst in the door. It opened on a scene of
silent catastrophe. No one seeing it, even for a flash, could doubt that the room had
been the theatre of some thrilling collision between two, or perhaps more, persons. Playing-cards
lay littered across the table or fluttered about the floor as if a game had been interrupted.
Two wine glasses stood ready for wine on a side-table, but a third lay smashed in a star
of crystal upon the carpet. A few feet from it lay what looked like a long knife or short
sword, straight, but with an ornamental and pictured handle, its dull blade just caught
a grey glint from the dreary window behind, which showed the black trees against the leaden
level of the sea. Towards the opposite corner of the room was rolled a gentleman's silk
top hat, as if it had just been knocked off his head; so much so, indeed, that one almost
looked to see it still rolling. And in the corner behind it, thrown like a
sack of potatoes, but corded like a railway trunk, lay Mr James Todhunter, with a scarf
across his mouth, and six or seven ropes knotted round his elbows and ankles. His brown eyes
were alive and shifted alertly. Dr Orion Hood paused for one instant on the doormat and
drank in the whole scene of voiceless violence. Then he stepped swiftly across the carpet,
picked up the tall silk hat, and gravely put it upon the head of the yet pinioned Todhunter.
It was so much too large for him that it almost slipped down on to his shoulders.
"Mr Glass's hat," said the doctor, returning with it and peering into the inside with a
pocket lens. "How to explain the absence of Mr Glass and the presence of Mr Glass's hat?
For Mr Glass is not a careless man with his clothes. That hat is of a stylish shape and
systematically brushed and burnished, though not very new. An old dandy, I should think."
"But, good heavens!" called out Miss MacNab, "aren't you going to untie the man first?"
"I say 'old' with intention, though not with certainty" continued the expositor; "my reason
for it might seem a little far-fetched. The hair of human beings falls out in very
varying degrees, but almost always falls out slightly, and with the lens I should see the
tiny hairs in a hat recently worn. It has none, which leads me to guess that Mr Glass
is bald. Now when this is taken with the high-pitched and querulous voice which Miss MacNab described
so vividly (patience, my dear lady, patience), when we take the hairless head together with
the tone common in senile anger, I should think we may deduce some advance in years.
Nevertheless, he was probably vigorous, and he was almost certainly tall.
I might rely in some degree on the story of his previous appearance at the window, as
a tall man in a silk hat, but I think I have more exact indication. This wineglass has
been smashed all over the place, but one of its splinters lies on the high bracket beside
the mantelpiece. No such fragment could have fallen there if the vessel had been smashed
in the hand of a comparatively short man like Mr Todhunter." "By the way," said Father Brown,
"might it not be as well to untie Mr Todhunter?" "Our lesson from the drinking-vessels does
not end here," proceeded the specialist. "I may say at once that it is possible that
the man Glass was bald or nervous through dissipation rather than age. Mr Todhunter,
as has been remarked, is a quiet thrifty gentleman, essentially an abstainer. These cards and
wine-cups are no part of his normal habit; they have been produced for a particular companion.
But, as it happens, we may go farther. Mr Todhunter may or may not possess this wine-service,
but there is no appearance of his possessing any wine. What, then, were these vessels to
contain? I would at once suggest some brandy or whisky, perhaps of a luxurious sort, from
a flask in the pocket of Mr Glass. We have thus something like a picture of the
man, or at least of the type: tall, elderly, fashionable, but somewhat frayed, certainly
fond of play and strong waters, perhaps rather too fond of them. Mr Glass is a gentleman
not unknown on the fringes of society." "Look here," cried the young woman, "if you don't
let me pass to untie him I'll run outside and scream for the police." "I should not
advise you, Miss MacNab," said Dr Hood gravely, "to be in any hurry to fetch the police. Father
Brown, I seriously ask you to compose your flock, for their sakes, not for mine.
Well, we have seen something of the figure and quality of Mr Glass; what are the chief
facts known of Mr Todhunter? They are substantially three: that he is economical, that he is more
or less wealthy, and that he has a secret. Now, surely it is obvious that there are the
three chief marks of the kind of man who is blackmailed. And surely it is equally obvious
that the faded finery, the profligate habits, and the shrill irritation of Mr Glass are
the unmistakable marks of the kind of man who blackmails him. We have the two typical
figures of a tragedy of hush money: on the one hand,
the respectable man with a mystery; on the other, the West-end vulture with a scent for
a mystery. These two men have met here today and have quarrelled, using blows and a bare
weapon." "Are you going to take those ropes off?" asked the girl stubbornly. Dr Hood replaced
the silk hat carefully on the side table, and went across to the captive. He studied
him intently, even moving him a little and half-turning him round by the shoulders, but
he only answered: "No; I think these ropes will do very well till your friends the police
bring the handcuffs." Father Brown, who had been looking dully at
the carpet, lifted his round face and said: "What do you mean?" The man of science had
picked up the peculiar dagger-sword from the carpet and was examining it intently as he
answered: "Because you find Mr Todhunter tied up," he said, "you all jump to the conclusion
that Mr Glass had tied him up; and then, I suppose, escaped. There are four objections
to this: First, why should a gentleman so dressy as our friend Glass leave his hat behind
him, if he left of his own free will? Second," he continued, moving
towards the window, "this is the only exit, and it is locked on the inside.
Third, this blade here has a tiny touch of blood at the point, but there is no wound
on Mr Todhunter. Mr Glass took that wound away with him, dead or alive. Add to all this
primary probability. It is much more likely that the blackmailed person would try to kill
his incubus, rather than that the blackmailer would try to kill the goose that lays his
golden egg. There, I think, we have a pretty complete story." "But the ropes?" inquired
the priest, whose eyes had remained open with a rather vacant admiration. "Ah, the ropes,"
said the expert with a singular intonation. "Miss MacNab very much wanted to know why
I did not set Mr Todhunter free from his ropes. Well, I will tell her. I did not do it because
Mr Todhunter can set himself free from them at any minute he chooses." "What?" cried the
audience on quite different notes of astonishment. "I have looked at all the knots on Mr Todhunter,"
reiterated Hood quietly. "I happen to know something about knots; they are quite a branch
of criminal science. Every one of those knots he has made himself and could loosen himself;
not one of them would have been made by an enemy really trying to pinion him.
The whole of this affair of the ropes is a clever fake, to make us think him the victim
of the struggle instead of the wretched Glass, whose corpse may be hidden in the garden or
stuffed up the chimney." There was a rather depressed silence; the room was darkening,
the sea-blighted boughs of the garden trees looked leaner and blacker than ever, yet they
seemed to have come nearer to the window. One could almost fancy they were sea-monsters
like krakens or cuttlefish, writhing polypi who had crawled up from the sea to see the
end of this tragedy, even as he, the villain and victim of it,
the terrible man in the tall hat, had once crawled up from the sea. For the whole air
was dense with the morbidity of blackmail, which is the most morbid of human things,
because it is a crime concealing a crime; a black plaster on a blacker wound. The face
of the little Catholic priest, which was commonly complacent and even comic, had suddenly become
knotted with a curious frown. It was not the blank curiosity of his first innocence. It
was rather that creative curiosity which comes when a man has the beginnings of an idea.
"Say it again, please," he said in a simple, bothered manner; "do you mean that Todhunter
can tie himself up all alone and untie himself all alone?" "That is what I mean," said the
doctor. "Jerusalem!" *** Brown suddenly, "I wonder if it could possibly be that!" He
scuttled across the room rather like a rabbit, and peered with quite a new impulsiveness
into the partially-covered face of the captive. Then he turned his own rather fatuous face
to the company. "Yes, that's it!" he cried in a certain excitement. "Can't you see it
in the man's face? Why, look at his eyes!" Both the Professor and the girl followed the
direction of his glance. And though the broad black scarf completely masked the lower half
of Todhunter's visage, they did grow conscious of something struggling and intense about
the upper part of it. "His eyes do look ***," cried the young woman, strongly moved. "You
brutes; I believe it's hurting him!" "Not that, I think," said Dr Hood; "the eyes have
certainly a singular expression. But I should interpret those transverse wrinkles as expressing
rather such slight psychological abnormality--" "Oh, bosh!" cried Father Brown: "can't you
see he's laughing?" "Laughing!" repeated the doctor, with a start;
"but what on earth can he be laughing at?" "Well," replied the Reverend Brown apologetically,
"not to put too fine a point on it, I think he is laughing at you. And indeed, I'm a little
inclined to laugh at myself, now I know about it." "Now you know about what?" asked Hood,
in some exasperation. "Now I know," replied the priest, "the profession of Mr Todhunter."
He shuffled about the room, looking at one object after another with what seemed to be
a vacant stare, and then invariably bursting into an equally vacant laugh, a highly irritating
process for those who had to watch it. He laughed very much over the hat, still more
uproariously over the broken glass, but the blood on the sword point sent him into mortal
convulsions of amusement. Then he turned to the fuming specialist. "Dr Hood," he cried
enthusiastically, "you are a great poet! You have called an uncreated being out of the
void. How much more godlike that is than if you had only ferreted out the mere facts!
Indeed, the mere facts are rather commonplace and comic by comparison." "I have no notion
what you are talking about," said Dr Hood rather haughtily; "my facts are all inevitable,
though necessarily incomplete. A place may be permitted to intuition, perhaps
(or poetry if you prefer the term), but only because the corresponding details cannot as
yet be ascertained. In the absence of Mr Glass--" "That's it, that's it," said the little priest,
nodding quite eagerly, "that's the first idea to get fixed; the absence of Mr Glass. He
is so extremely absent. I suppose," he added reflectively, "that there was never anybody
so absent as Mr Glass." "Do you mean he is absent from the town?" demanded the doctor.
"I mean he is absent from everywhere," answered Father Brown; "he is absent from the Nature
of Things, so to speak. "Do you seriously mean," said the specialist
with a smile, "that there is no such person?" The priest made a sign of assent. "It does
seem a pity," he said. Orion Hood broke into a contemptuous laugh. "Well," he said, "before
we go on to the hundred and one other evidences, let us take the first proof we found; the
first fact we fell over when we fell into this room. If there is no Mr Glass, whose
hat is this?" "It is Mr Todhunter's," replied Father Brown. "But it doesn't fit him," cried
Hood impatiently. "He couldn't possibly wear it!" Father Brown shook his head with ineffable
mildness. "I never said he could wear it," he answered.
"I said it was his hat. Or, if you insist on a shade of difference, a hat that is his."
"And what is the shade of difference?" asked the criminologist with a slight sneer. "My
good sir," cried the mild little man, with his first movement akin to impatience, "if
you will walk down the street to the nearest hatter's shop, you will see that there is,
in common speech, a difference between a man's hat and the hats that are his." "But a hatter,"
protested Hood, "can get money out of his stock of new hats. What could Todhunter get
out of this one old hat? "Rabbits," replied Father Brown promptly.
"What?" cried Dr Hood. "Rabbits, ribbons, sweetmeats, goldfish, rolls of coloured paper,"
said the reverend gentleman with rapidity. "Didn't you see it all when you found out
the faked ropes? It's just the same with the sword. Mr Todhunter hasn't got a scratch on
him, as you say; but he's got a scratch in him, if you follow me." "Do you mean inside
Mr Todhunter's clothes?" inquired Mrs MacNab sternly. "I do not mean inside Mr Todhunter's
clothes," said Father Brown. "I mean inside Mr Todhunter."
"Well, what in the name of Bedlam do you mean?" "Mr Todhunter," explained Father Brown placidly,
"is learning to be a professional conjurer, as well as juggler, ventriloquist, and expert
in the rope trick. The conjuring explains the hat. It is without traces of hair, not
because it is worn by the prematurely bald Mr Glass, but because it has never been worn
by anybody. The juggling explains the three glasses, which Todhunter was teaching himself
to throw up and catch in rotation. But, being only at the stage of practice, he smashed
one glass against the ceiling. And the juggling also explains the sword,
which it was Mr Todhunter's professional pride and duty to swallow. But, again, being at
the stage of practice, he very slightly grazed the inside of his throat with the weapon.
Hence he has a wound inside him, which I am sure (from the expression on his face) is
not a serious one. He was also practising the trick of a release from ropes, like the
Davenport Brothers, and he was just about to free himself when we all burst into the
room. The cards, of course, are for card tricks, and they are scattered on the floor because
he had just been practising one of those dodges of sending them flying through the air. He
merely kept his trade secret, because he had to keep his tricks secret, like any other
conjurer. But the mere fact of an idler in a top hat having once looked in at his back
window, and been driven away by him with great indignation, was enough to set us all on a
wrong track of romance, and make us imagine his whole life overshadowed by the silk-hatted
spectre of Mr Glass." "But What about the two voices?" asked Maggie,
staring. "Have you never heard a ventriloquist?" asked
Father Brown. "Don't you know they speak first in their natural voice, and then answer themselves
in just that shrill, squeaky, unnatural voice that you heard?" There was a long silence,
and Dr Hood regarded the little man who had spoken with a dark and attentive smile. "You
are certainly a very ingenious person," he said; "it could not have been done better
in a book. But there is just one part of Mr Glass you have not succeeded in explaining
away, and that is his name. Miss MacNab distinctly heard him so addressed by Mr Todhunter."
The Rev. Mr Brown broke into a rather childish giggle. "Well, that," he said, "that's the
silliest part of the whole silly story. When our juggling friend here threw up the three
glasses in turn, he counted them aloud as he caught them, and also commented aloud when
he failed to catch them. What he really said was: 'One, two and three--missed a glass one,
two--missed a glass.' And so on." There was a second of stillness in the room, and then
everyone with one accord burst out laughing. As they did so the figure in the corner complacently
uncoiled all the ropes and let them fall with a flourish.
Then, advancing into the middle of the room with a bow, he produced from his pocket a
big bill printed in blue and red, which announced that ZALADIN, the World's Greatest Conjurer,
Contortionist, Ventriloquist and Human Kangaroo would be ready with an entirely new series
of Tricks at the Empire Pavilion, Scarborough, on Monday next at eight o'clock precisely.
Chapter TWO The Paradise of Thieves
THE great Muscari, most original of the young Tuscan poets, walked swiftly into his favourite
restaurant, which overlooked the Mediterranean, was covered by an awning and fenced by little
lemon and orange trees. Waiters in white aprons were already laying out on white tables the
insignia of an early and elegant lunch; and this seemed to increase a satisfaction that
already touched the top of swagger. Muscari had an eagle nose like Dante; his hair and
neckerchief were dark and flowing; he carried a black cloak, and might almost have carried
a black mask, so much did he bear with him a sort of Venetian melodrama.
He acted as if a troubadour had still a definite social office, like a bishop. He went as near
as his century permitted to walking the world literally like Don Juan, with rapier and guitar.
For he never travelled without a case of swords, with which he had fought many brilliant duels,
or without a corresponding case for his mandolin, with which he had actually serenaded Miss
Ethel Harrogate, the highly conventional daughter of a Yorkshire banker on a holiday. Yet he
was neither a charlatan nor a child; but a hot, logical Latin who liked a certain thing
and was it. His poetry was as straightforward as anyone else's prose.
He desired fame or wine or the beauty of women with a torrid directness inconceivable among
the cloudy ideals or cloudy compromises of the north; to vaguer races his intensity smelt
of danger or even crime. Like fire or the sea, he was too simple to be trusted. The
banker and his beautiful English daughter were staying at the hotel attached to Muscari's
restaurant; that was why it was his favourite restaurant. A glance flashed around the room
told him at once, however, that the English party had not descended. The restaurant was
glittering, but still comparatively empty. Two priests were talking at a table in a corner,
but Muscari (an ardent Catholic) took no more notice of them than of a couple of crows.
But from a yet farther seat, partly concealed behind a dwarf tree golden with oranges, there
rose and advanced towards the poet a person whose costume was the most aggressively opposite
to his own. This figure was clad in tweeds of a piebald check, with a pink tie, a sharp
collar and protuberant yellow boots. He contrived, in the true tradition of 'Arry at Margate,
to look at once startling and commonplace. But as the Cockney apparition drew nearer,
Muscari was astounded to observe that the head was distinctly different from the body.
It was an Italian head: fuzzy, swarthy and very vivacious, that rose abruptly out of
the standing collar like cardboard and the comic pink tie. In fact it was a head he knew.
He recognized it, above all the dire *** of English holiday array, as the face of an
old but forgotten friend name Ezza. This youth had been a prodigy at college, and European
fame was promised him when he was barely fifteen; but when he appeared in the world he failed,
first publicly as a dramatist and a demagogue, and then privately for years on end as an
actor, a traveller, a commission agent or a journalist. Muscari had known him last behind
the footlights; he was but too well attuned to the excitements of that profession, and
it was believed that some moral calamity had swallowed him up. "Ezza!" cried the poet,
rising and shaking hands in a pleasant astonishment. "Well, I've seen you in many costumes in the
green room; but I never expected to see you dressed up as an Englishman." "This," answered
Ezza gravely, "is not the costume of an Englishman, but of the Italian of the future."
"In that case," remarked Muscari, "I confess I prefer the Italian of the past." "That is
your old mistake, Muscari," said the man in tweeds, shaking his head; "and the mistake
of Italy. In the sixteenth century we Tuscans made the morning: we had the newest steel,
the newest carving, the newest chemistry. Why should we not now have
the newest factories, the newest motors, the newest finance--the newest clothes?" "Because
they are not worth having," answered Muscari. "You cannot make Italians really progressive;
they are too intelligent. Men who see the short cut to good living will never go by
the new elaborate roads." "Well, to me Marconi, or D'Annunzio, is the
star of Italy" said the other. "That is why I have become a Futurist--and a courier."
"A courier!" cried Muscari, laughing. "Is that the last of your list of trades? And
whom are you conducting?" "Oh, a man of the name of Harrogate, and his family, I believe."
"Not the banker in this hotel?" inquired the poet, with some eagerness. "That's the man,"
answered the courier. "Does it pay well?" asked the troubadour innocently. "It will
pay me," said Ezza, with a very enigmatic smile. "But I am a rather curious sort of
courier." Then, as if changing the subject, he said abruptly: "He has a daughter--and
a son." "The daughter is divine," affirmed Muscari,
"the father and son are, I suppose, human. But granted his harmless qualities doesn't
that banker strike you as a splendid instance of my argument? Harrogate has millions in
his safes, and I have--the hole in my pocket. But you daren't say--you can't say--that he's
cleverer than I, or bolder than I, or even more energetic. He's not clever, he's got
eyes like blue buttons; he's not energetic, he moves from chair to chair like a paralytic.
He's a conscientious, kindly old blockhead; but he's got money simply because he collects
money, as a boy collects stamps. You're too strong-minded for business, Ezza.
You won't get on. To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough
to want it." "I'm stupid enough for that," said Ezza gloomily. "But I should suggest
a suspension of your critique of the banker, for here he comes." Mr Harrogate, the great
financier, did indeed enter the room, but nobody looked at him. He was a massive elderly
man with a boiled blue eye and faded grey-sandy moustaches; but for his heavy stoop he might
have been a colonel. He carried several unopened letters in his hand.
His son Frank was a really fine lad, curly-haired, sun-burnt and strenuous; but nobody looked
at him either. All eyes, as usual, were riveted, for the moment at least, upon Ethel Harrogate,
whose golden Greek head and colour of the dawn seemed set purposely above that sapphire
sea, like a goddess's. The poet Muscari drew a deep breath as if he were drinking something,
as indeed he was. He was drinking the Classic; which his fathers made. Ezza studied her with
a gaze equally intense and far more baffling. Miss Harrogate was specially radiant and ready
for conversation on this occasion; and her family had fallen into the easier
Continental habit, allowing the stranger Muscari and even the courier Ezza to share their table
and their talk. In Ethel Harrogate conventionality crowned itself with a perfection and splendour
of its own. Proud of her father's prosperity, fond of fashionable pleasures, a fond daughter
but an arrant flirt, she was all these things with a sort of golden good-nature that made
her very pride pleasing and her worldly respectability a fresh and hearty thing.
They were in an eddy of excitement about some alleged peril in the mountain path they were
to attempt that week. The danger was not from rock and avalanche, but from something yet
more romantic. Ethel had been earnestly assured that brigands, the true cut-throats of the
modern legend, still haunted that ridge and held that pass of the Apennines. "They say,"
she cried, with the awful relish of a schoolgirl, "that all that country isn't ruled by the
King of Italy, but by the King of Thieves. Who is the King of Thieves?" "A great man,"
replied Muscari, "worthy to rank with your own Robin Hood, signorina.
Montano, the King of Thieves, was first heard of in the mountains some ten years ago, when
people said brigands were extinct. But his wild authority spread with the swiftness of
a silent revolution. Men found his fierce proclamations nailed in every mountain village;
his sentinels, gun in hand, in every mountain ravine. Six times the Italian Government tried
to dislodge him, and was defeated in six pitched battles as if by Napoleon." "Now that sort
of thing," observed the banker weightily, "would never be allowed in England; perhaps,
after all, we had better choose another route. But the courier thought it perfectly safe."
"It is perfectly safe," said the courier contemptuously. "I have been over it twenty times. There may
have been some old jailbird called a King in the time of our grandmothers; but he belongs
to history if not to fable. Brigandage is utterly stamped out." "It can never be utterly
stamped out," Muscari answered; "because armed revolt is a recreation natural to southerners.
Our peasants are like their mountains, rich in grace and green gaiety, but with the fires
beneath. There is a point of human despair where the
northern poor take to drink--and our own poor take to daggers." "A poet is privileged,"
replied Ezza, with a sneer. "If Signor Muscari were English he would still be looking for
highwaymen in Wandsworth. Believe me, there is no more danger of being captured in Italy
than of being scalped in Boston." "Then you propose to attempt it?" asked Mr Harrogate,
frowning. "Oh, it sounds rather dreadful," cried the girl, turning her glorious eyes
on Muscari. "Do you really think the pass is dangerous?"
Muscari threw back his black mane. "I know it is dangerous:" he said. "I am crossing
it tomorrow." The young Harrogate was left behind for a moment emptying a glass of white
wine and lighting a cigarette, as the beauty retired with the banker, the courier and the
poet, distributing peals of silvery satire. At about the same instant the two priests
in the corner rose; the taller, a white-haired Italian, taking his leave. The shorter priest
turned and walked towards the banker's son, and the latter was astonished to realize that
though a Roman priest the man was an Englishman. He vaguely remembered meeting him at the social
crushes of some of his Catholic friends. But the man spoke before his memories could collect
themselves. "Mr Frank Harrogate, I think," he said. "I have had an introduction, but
I do not mean to presume on it. The odd thing I have to say will come far better from a
stranger. Mr Harrogate, I say one word and go: take care of your sister in her great
sorrow." Even for Frank's truly fraternal indifference the radiance and derision of
his sister still seemed to sparkle and ring; he could hear her laughter still from the
garden of the hotel, and he stared at his somber adviser in puzzle Dom.
"Do you mean the brigands?" he asked; and then, remembering a vague fear of his own,
"or can you be thinking of Muscari?" "One is never thinking of the real sorrow," said
the strange priest. "One can only be kind when it comes." And he passed promptly from
the room, leaving the other almost with his mouth open. A day or two afterwards a coach
containing the company was really crawling and staggering up the spurs of the menacing
mountain range. Between Ezza's cheery denial of the danger and Muscari's boisterous defiance
of it, the financial family were firm in their original
purpose; and Muscari made his mountain journey coincide with theirs. A
more surprising feature was the appearance at the coast-town station of the little priest
of the restaurant; he alleged merely that business led him also to cross the mountains
of the midland. But young Harrogate could not but connect his presence with the mystical
fears and warnings of yesterday. The coach was a kind of commodious wagonette, invented
by the modernist talent of the courier, who dominated the expedition with his scientific
activity and breezy wit. The theory of danger from thieves was banished
from thought and speech; though so far conceded in formal act that some slight protection
was employed. The courier and the young banker carried loaded revolvers, and Muscari (with
much boyish gratification) buckled on a kind of cutlass under his black cloak. He had planted
his person at a flying leap next to the lovely Englishwoman; on the other side of her sat
the priest, whose name was Brown and who was fortunately a silent individual; the courier
and the father and son were on the banc behind. Muscari was in towering spirits, seriously
believing in the peril, and his talk to Ethel might well have made her think him a maniac.
But there was something in the crazy and gorgeous ascent, amid crags like peaks loaded
with woods like orchards, that dragged her spirit up alone with his into purple preposterous
heavens with wheeling suns. The white road climbed like a white cat; it spanned sunless
chasms like a tight-rope; it was flung round far-off headlands like a lasso. And yet, however
high they went, the desert still blossomed like the rose.
The fields were burnished in sun and wind with the colour of kingfisher and parrot and
humming-bird, the hues of a hundred flowering flowers. There are no lovelier meadows and
woodlands than the English, no nobler crests or chasms than those of Snowdon and Glencoe.
But Ethel Harrogate had never before seen the
southern parks tilted on the splintered northern peaks; the gorge of Glencoe laden with the
fruits of Kent. There was nothing here of that chill and desolation that in Britain
one associates with high and wild scenery. It was rather like a mosaic palace, rent with
earthquakes; or like a Dutch tulip garden blown to the stars with dynamite. "It's like
Kew Gardens on Beachy Head," said Ethel. "It is our secret," answered he, "the secret of
the volcano; that is also the secret of the revolution--that a thing can be violent and
yet fruitful." "You are rather violent yourself," and she smiled at him. "And yet rather fruitless,"
he admitted; "if I die tonight I die unmarried and a fool." "It is not my fault if you have
come," she said after a difficult silence. "It is never your fault," answered Muscari;
"it was not your fault that Troy fell." As they spoke they came under overwhelming cliffs
that spread almost like wings above a corner of peculiar peril. Shocked by the big shadow
on the narrow ledge, the horses stirred doubtfully. The driver leapt to the earth to hold their
heads, and they became ungovernable. One horse reared up to his full height--the titanic
and terrifying height of a horse when he becomes a biped. It was just enough to alter the equilibrium;
the whole coach heeled over like a ship and crashed through the fringe of bushes over
the cliff. Muscari threw an arm round Ethel, who clung
to him, and shouted aloud. It was for such moments that he lived. At the moment when
the gorgeous mountain walls went round the poet's head like a purple windmill a thing
happened which was superficially even more startling. The elderly and lethargic banker
sprang erect in the coach and leapt over the precipice before the tilted vehicle could
take him thaere. In the first flash it looked as wild as suicide; but in the second it was
to him, and shouted aloud. It was for such moments that he lived. At the moment when
the gorgeous mountain walls went round the poet's head like a purple windmill a thing
happened which was superficially even more startling. The elderly and lethargic banker
sprang erect in the coach and leapt over the precipice before the tilted vehicle could
take him thaere. In the first flash it looked as wild as suicide; but in the second it was
as sensible as a safe investment. The Yorkshire man had evidently more promptitude,
as well as more sagacity, than Muscari had given him credit for; for he landed in a lap
of land which might have been specially padded with turf and clover to receive him. As it
happened, indeed, the whole company were equally lucky, if less dignified in their form of
ejection. Immediately under this abrupt turn of the road was a grassy and flowery hollow
like a sunken meadow; a sort of green velvet pocket in the long, green, trailing garments
of the hills. Into this they were all tipped or tumbled with little damage,
save that their smallest baggage and even the contents of their pockets were scattered
in the grass around them. The wrecked coach still hung above, entangled in the tough hedge,
and the horses plunged painfully down the slope. The first to sit up was the little
priest, who scratched his head with a face of foolish wonder. Frank Harrogate heard him
say to himself: "Now why on earth have we fallen just here?" He blinked at the litter
around him, and recovered his own very clumsy umbrella.
Beyond it lay the broad sombrero fallen from the head of
Muscari, and beside it a sealed business letter which, after a glance at the address, he returned
to the elder Harrogate. On the other side of him the grass partly hid Miss Ethel's sunshade,
and just beyond it lay a curious little glass bottle hardly two inches long. The priest
picked it up; in a quick, unobtrusive manner he uncorked and sniffed it, and his heavy
face turned the colour of clay. "Heaven deliver us!" he muttered; "it can't be hers! Has her
sorrow come on her already?" He slipped it into his own waistcoat pocket.
"I think I'm justified," he said, "till I know a little more." He gazed painfully at
the girl, at that moment being raised out of the flowers by Muscari, who was saying:
"We have fallen into heaven; it is a sign. Mortals climb up and they fall down; but it
is only gods and goddesses who can fall upwards." And indeed she rose out of the sea of colours
so beautiful and happy a vision that the priest felt his suspicion shaken and shifted. "After
all," he thought, "perhaps the poison isn't hers; perhaps it's one of Muscari's melodramatic
tricks." Muscari set the lady lightly on her feet,
made her an absurdly theatrical bow, and then, drawing his cutlass, hacked hard at the taut
reins of the horses, so that they scrambled to their feet and stood in the grass trembling.
When he had done so, a most remarkable thing occurred. A very quiet man, very poorly dressed
and extremely sunburnt, came out of the bushes and took hold of the horses' heads. He had
a ***-shaped knife, very broad and crooked, buckled on his belt; there was nothing else
remarkable about him, except his sudden and silent appearance.
The poet asked him who he was, and he did not answer. Looking around him at the confused
and startled group in the hollow, Muscari then perceived that another tanned and tattered
man, with a short gun under his arm, was looking at them from the ledge just below, leaning
his elbows on the edge of the turf. Then he looked up at the road from which they had
fallen and saw, looking down on them, the muzzles of four other carbines and four other
brown faces with bright but quite motionless eyes. "The brigands!" cried Muscari, with
a kind of monstrous gaiety. "This was a trap. Ezza, if you will oblige
me by shooting the coachman first, we can cut our way out yet. There are only six of
them." "The coachman," said Ezza, who was standing grimly with his hands in his pockets,
"happens to be a servant of Mr Harrogate's." "Then shoot him all the more," cried the poet
impatiently; "he was bribed to upset his master. Then put the lady in the middle, and we will
break the line up there--with a rush." And, wading in wild grass and flowers, he advanced
fearlessly on the four carbines; but finding that no one followed except young Harrogate,
he turned, brandishing his cutlass to wave the others on.
He beheld the courier still standing slightly astride in the centre of the grassy ring,
his hands in his pockets; and his lean, ironical Italian face seemed to grow longer and longer
in the evening light. "You thought, Muscari, I was the failure among our schoolfellows,"
he said, "and you thought you were the success. But I have succeeded more than you and fill
a bigger place in history. I have been acting epics while you have been writing them." "Come
on, I tell you!" thundered Muscari from above. "Will you stand there talking nonsense about
yourself with a woman to save and three strong men to help you? What do you call yourself?"
"I call myself Montano," cried the strange courier in a voice equally loud and full.
"I am the King of Thieves, and I welcome you all to my summer palace."And even as he spoke
five more silent men with weapons ready came out of the bushes, and looked towards him
for their orders. One of them held a large paper in his hand. "This pretty little nest
where we are all picnicking," went on the courier-brigand, with the same easy yet sinister
smile, "is, together with some caves underneath it, known by the name of the Paradise of Thieves.
It is my principal stronghold on these hills; for (as you have
doubtless noticed) the eyrie is invisible both from the road above and from the valley
below. It is something better than impregnable; it is unnoticeable. Here I mostly live, and
here I shall certainly die, if the gendarmes ever track me here. I am not the kind of criminal
that 'reserves his defence,' but the better kind that reserves his last bullet." All were
staring at him thunderstruck and still, except Father Brown, who heaved a huge sigh as of
relief and fingered the little phial in his pocket. "Thank God!" he muttered; "that's
much more probable. The poison belongs to this robber-chief, of
course. He carries it so that he may never be captured, like Cato." The King of Thieves
was, however, continuing his address with the same kind of dangerous politeness. "It
only remains for me," he said, "to explain to my guests the social conditions upon which
I have the pleasure of entertaining them. I need not expound the quaint old ritual of
ransom, which it is incumbent upon me to keep up; and even this only applies to a part of
the company. The Reverend Father Brown and the celebrated Signor Muscari I shall release
tomorrow at dawn and escort to my outposts. Poets and priests, if you will pardon my simplicity
of speech, never have any money. And so (since it is impossible to get anything out of them),
let us, seize the opportunity to show our admiration for classic literature and our
reverence for Holy Church." He paused with an unpleasing smile; and Father Brown blinked
repeatedly at him, and seemed suddenly to be listening with great attention. The brigand
captain took the large paper from the attendant brigand and, glancing over it, continued:
"My other intentions are clearly set forth in this public document, which I will hand
round in a moment; and which after that will be posted on a tree
by every village in the valley, and every cross-road in the hills. I will not weary
you with the verbalism, since you will be able to check it; the substance of my proclamation
is this: I announce first that I have captured the English millionaire, the colossus of finance,
Mr Samuel Harrogate. I next announce that I have found on his person notes and bonds
for two thousand pounds, which he has given up to me. Now since it would be really immoral
to announce such a thing to a credulous public if it had not occurred, I suggest it should
occur without further delay. I suggest that Mr Harrogate senior should
now give me the two thousand pounds in his pocket." The banker looked at him under lowering
brows, red-faced and sulky, but seemingly cowed. That leap from the failing carriage
seemed to have used up his last virility. He had held back in a hang-dog style when
his son and Muscari had made a bold movement to break out of the brigand trap. And now
his red and trembling hand went reluctantly to his breast-pocket, and passed a bundle
of papers and envelopes to the brigand. "Excellent!" cried that outlaw gaily; "so far we are all
cosy. I resume the points of my proclamation, so
soon to be published to all Italy. The third item is that of ransom. I am asking from the
friends of the Harrogate family a ransom of three thousand pounds, which I am sure is
almost insulting to that family in its moderate estimate of their importance. Who would not
pay triple this sum for another day's association with such a domestic circle? I will not conceal
from you that the document ends with certain legal phrases about the unpleasant things
that may happen if the money is not paid; but meanwhile, ladies and gentlemen, let me
assure you that I am comfortably off here for accommodation, wine and cigars, and bid
you for the present a sportsman-like welcome to the luxuries of the Paradise of Thieves."
All the time that he had been speaking, the dubious-looking men with carbines and dirty
slouch hats had been gathering silently in such preponderating numbers that even Muscari
was compelled to recognize his sally with the sword as hopeless. He glanced around him;
but the girl had already gone over to soothe and comfort her father,
for her natural affection for his person was as strong or stronger than her somewhat snobbish
pride in his success. Muscari, with the illogicality of a lover, admired this filial devotion,
and yet was irritated by it. He slapped his sword back in the scabbard and went and flung
himself somewhat sulkily on one of the green banks. The priest sat down within a yard or
two, and Muscari turned his aquiline nose on him in an instantaneous irritation. "Well,"
said the poet tartly, "do people still think me too romantic? Are there, I wonder, any
brigands left in the mountains?" "There may be," said Father Brown agnostically.
"What do you mean?" asked the other sharply. "I mean I am puzzled," replied the priest.
"I am puzzled about Ezza or Montano, or whatever his name is. He seems to me much more inexplicable
as a brigand even than he was as a courier." "But in what way?" persisted his companion.
"Santa Maria! I should have thought the brigand was plain enough." "I find three curious difficulties,"
said the priest in a quiet voice. "I should like to have your opinion on them. First of
all I must tell you I was lunching in that restaurant at the seaside.
As four of you left the room, you and Miss Harrogate went ahead, talking and laughing;
the banker and the courier came behind, speaking sparely and rather low. But I could not help
hearing Ezza say these words--'Well, let her have a little fun; you know the blow may smash
her any minute.' Mr Harrogate answered nothing; so the words must have had some meaning. On
the impulse of the moment I warned her brother that she might be in peril; I said nothing
of its nature, for I did not know. But if it meant this capture in the hills, the thing
is nonsense. Why should the brigand-courier warn his patron, even by a hint,
when it was his whole purpose to lure him into the mountain-mousetrap? It could not
have meant that. But if not, what is this disaster, known both to courier and banker,
which hangs over Miss Harrogate's head?" "Disaster to Miss Harrogate!" *** the poet, sitting
up with some ferocity. "Explain yourself; go on." "All my riddles, however, revolve
round our bandit chief," resumed the priest reflectively. "And here is the second of them.
Why did he putso prominently in his demand for ransom the fact that he had taken two
thousand pounds from his victim on the spot? It had no faintest tendency to evoke the ransom.
Quite the other way, in fact. Harrogate's friends would be far likelier to fear for
his fate if they thought the thieves were poor and desperate. Yet the spoliation on
the spot was emphasized and even put first in the demand. Why should Ezza Montano want
so specially to tell all Europe that he had picked the pocket before he levied the blackmail?"
"I cannot imagine," said Muscari, rubbing up his black hair for once with an unaffected
gesture. "You may think you enlighten me, but you are leading me deeper in the dark.
What may be the third objection to the King of the Thieves?" "The third objection," said
Father Brown, still in meditation, "is this bank we are sitting on. Why does our brigand-courier
call this his chief fortress and the Paradise of Thieves? It is certainly a soft spot to
fall on and a sweet spot to look at. It is also quite true, as he says, that it is invisible
from valley and peak, and is therefore a hiding-place. But it is not a fortress. It never could be
a fortress. I think it would be the worst fortress in the world. For it is actually
commanded from above by the common high-road across the mountains--the very place where
the police would most probably pass. Why, five shabby short guns held us helpless
here about half an hour ago. The quarter of a company
of any kind of soldiers could have blown us over the precipice. Whatever is the meaning
of this odd little nook of grass and flowers, it is not an entrenched position. It is something
else; it has some other strange sort of importance; some value that I do not understand. It is
more like an accidental theatre or a natural green-room; it is like the scene for some
romantic comedy; it is like...." As the little priest's words lengthened and
lost themselves in a dull and dreamy sincerity, Muscari, whose animal senses were alert and
impatient, heard a new noise in the mountains. Even for him the sound was as yet very small
and faint; but he could have sworn the evening breeze bore with it something like the pulsation
of horses' hoofs and a distant hallooing. At the same moment, and long before the vibration
had touched the less-experienced English ears, Montano the brigand ran up the bank above
them and stood in the broken hedge, steadying himself against a tree and peering down the
road. He was a strange figure as he stood there,
for he had assumed a flapped fantastic hat and swinging baldric and cutlass in his capacity
of bandit king, but the bright prosaic tweed of the courier showed through in patches all
over him. The next moment he turned his olive, sneering face and made a movement with his
hand. The brigands scattered at the signal, not in confusion, but in what was evidently
a kind of guerrilla discipline. Instead of occupying the road along the ridge, they sprinkled
themselves along the side of it behind the trees and the hedge, as if watching unseen
for an enemy. The noise beyond grew stronger, beginning
to shake the mountain road, and a voice could be clearly heard calling out orders. The brigands
swayed and huddled, cursing and whispering, and the evening air was full of little metallic
noises as they cocked their pistols, or loosened their knives, or trailed their scabbards over
the stones. Then the noises from both quarters seemed to meet on the road above; branches
broke, horses neighed, men cried out. "A rescue!" cried Muscari, springing to his feet and waving
his hat; "the gendarmes are on them! Now for freedom and a blow for it! Now to be rebels
against robbers! Come, don't let us leave everything to the
police; that is so dreadfully modern. Fall on the rear of these ruffians. The gendarmes
are rescuing us; come, friends, let us rescue the gendarmes!" And throwing his hat over
the trees, he drew his cutlass once more and began to escalade the slope up to the road.
Frank Harrogate jumped up and ran across to help him, revolver in hand, but was astounded
to hear himself imperatively recalled by the raucous voice of his father, who seemed to
be in great agitation. "I won't have it," said the banker in a choking voice; "I command
you not to interfere." "But, father," said Frank very warmly, "an
Italian gentleman has led the way. You wouldn't have it said that the English hung back."
"It is useless," said the older man, who was trembling violently, "it is useless. We must
submit to our lot." Father Brown looked at the banker; then he put his hand instinctively
as if on his heart, but really on the little bottle of poison; and a great light came into
his face like the light of the revelation of death. Muscari meanwhile, without waiting
for support, had crested the bank up to the road, and struck the brigand king heavily
on the shoulder, causing him to stagger and swing round.
Montano also had his cutlass unsheathed, and Muscari, without further speech, sent a slash
at his head which he was compelled to catch and parry. But even as the two short blades
crossed and clashed the King of Thieves deliberately dropped his point and laughed. "What's the
good, old man?" he said in spirited Italian slang; "this damned farce will soon be over."
"What do you mean, you shuffler?" panted the fire-eating poet. "Is your courage a sham
as well as your honesty?" "Everything about me is a sham," responded the ex-courier in
complete good humour. "I am an actor; and if I ever had a private
character, I have forgotten it. I am no more a genuine brigand than I am a genuine courier.
I am only a bundle of masks, and you can't fight a duel with that." And he laughed with
boyish pleasure and fell into his old straddling attitude, with his back to the skirmish up
the road. Darkness was deepening under the mountain walls, and it was not easy to discern
much of the progress of the struggle, save that tall men were pushing their horses' muzzles
through a clinging crowd of brigands, who seemed more inclined to harass and hustle
the invaders than to kill them. It was more like a town crowd preventing the
passage of the police than anything the poet had ever pictured as the last stand of doomed
and outlawed men of blood. Just as he was rolling his eyes in bewilderment he felt a
touch on his elbow, and found the odd little priest standing there like a small Noah with
a large hat, and requesting the favour of a word or two. "Signor Muscari," said the
cleric, "in this *** crisis personalities may be pardoned. I may tell you without offence
of a way in which you will do more good than by helping the gendarmes, who are bound to
break through in any case. You will permit me the impertinent intimacy,
but do you care about that girl? Care enough to marry her and make her a good husband,
I mean?" "Yes," said the poet quite simply. "Does she care about you?" "I think so," was
the equally grave reply. "Then go over there and offer yourself," said the priest: "offer
her everything you can; offer her heaven and earth if you've got them. The time is short."
"Why?" asked the astonished man of letters. "Because," said Father Brown, "her Doom is
coming up the road." "Nothing is coming up the road," argued Muscari, "except the rescue."
"Well, you go over there," said his adviser, "and be ready to rescue her from the rescue."
Almost as he spoke the hedges were broken all along the ridge by a rush of the escaping
brigands. They dived into bushes and thick grass like defeated men pursued; and the great
cocked hats of the mounted gendarmerie were seen passing along above the broken hedge.
Another order was given; there was a noise of dismounting, and a tall officer with cocked
hat, a grey imperial, and a paper in his hand appeared in the gap that was the gate of the
Paradise of Thieves. There was a momentary silence, broken in an
extraordinary way by the banker, who cried out in a hoarse and strangled voice: "Robbed!
I've been robbed!" "Why, that was hours ago," cried his son in astonishment: "when you were
robbed of two thousand pounds." "Not of two thousand pounds," said the financier, with
an abrupt and terrible composure, "only of a small bottle." The policeman with the grey
imperial was striding across the green hollow. Encountering the King of the Thieves in his
path, he clapped him on the shoulder with something between a caress and a buffet and
gave him a push that sent him staggering away. "You'll get into trouble, too," he said, "if
you play these tricks." Again to Muscari's artistic eye it seemed scarcely like the capture
of a great outlaw at bay. Passing on, the policeman halted before the Harrogate group
and said: "Samuel Harrogate, I arrest you in the name of the law for embezzlement of
the funds of the Hull and Huddersfield Bank." The great banker nodded with an odd air of
business assent, seemed to reflect a moment, and before they could interpose took a half
turn and a step that brought him to the edge of the outer mountain wall. Then, flinging
up his hands, he leapt exactly as he leapt out of the coach.
But this time he did not fall into a little meadow just beneath; he fell a thousand feet
below, to become a wreck of bones in the valley. The anger of the Italian policeman, which
he expressed volubly to Father Brown, was largely mixed with admiration. "It was like
him to escape us at last," he said. "He was a great brigand if you like. This last trick
of his I believe to be absolutely unprecedented. He fled with the company's money to Italy,
and actually got himself captured by sham brigands in his own pay, so as to explain
both the disappearance of the money and the disappearance of himself.
That demand for ransom was really taken seriously by most of the police. But for years he's
been doing things as good as that, quite as good as that. He will be a serious loss to
his family." Muscari was leading away the unhappy daughter, who held hard to him, as
she did for many a year after. But even in that tragic wreck he could not help having
a smile and a hand of half-mocking friendship for the indefensible Ezza Montano. "And where
are you going next?" he asked him over his shoulder.
"Birmingham," answered the actor, puffing a cigarette. "Didn't I tell you I was a Futurist?
I really do believe in those things if I believe in anything. Change, bustle and new things
every morning. I am going to Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Hull, Huddersfield, Glasgow, Chicago—in
short, to enlightened, energetic, civilized society!" "In short," said Muscari, "to the
real Paradise of Thieves." Chapter THREE
The Duel of Dr Hirsch M. MAURICE BRUN and M. Armand Armagnac were
crossing the sunlit Champs Elysee with a kind of vivacious respectability. They were both
short, brisk and bold. They both had black beards that did not seem to belong to their
faces, after the strange French fashion which makes real hair look like artificial. M. Brun
had a dark wedge of beard apparently affixed under his lower lip. M. Armagnac, by way of
a change, had two beards; one sticking out from each corner of his emphatic chin. They
were both young. They were both atheists, with a depressing fixity of outlook but great
mobility of exposition. They were both pupils of the great Dr Hirsch,
scientist, publicist and moralist. M. Brun had become prominent by his proposal that
the common expression "Adieu" should be obliterated from all the French classics, and a slight
fine imposed for its use in private life. "Then," he said, "the very name of your imagined
God will have echoed for the last time in the ear of man." M. Armagnac specialized rather
in a resistance to militarism, and wished the chorus of the Marseillaise altered from
"Aux armes, citoyens" to "Aux greves, citoyens". But his antimilitarism was of a peculiar and
Gallic sort. An eminent and very wealthy English Quaker, who had come to see him to arrange
for the disarmament of the whole planet, was rather distressed by Armagnac's proposal that
(by way of beginning) the soldiers should shoot their officers. And indeed it was in
this regard that the two men differed most from their leader and father in philosophy.
Dr Hirsch, though born in France and covered with the most triumphant favours of French
education, was temperamentally of another type--mild, dreamy, humane; and, despite his
sceptical system, not devoid of transcendentalism. He was, in short, more like a German than
a Frenchman; and much as they admired him, something in the sub consciousness of these
Gauls was irritated at his pleading for peace in so peaceful a manner. To their party throughout
Europe, however, Paul Hirsch was a saint of science. His large and daring cosmic theories
advertised his austere life and innocent, if somewhat frigid, morality; he held something
of the position of Darwin doubled with the position of Tolstoy. But he was neither an
anarchist nor an anti patriot; his views on disarmament were moderate and
evolutionary--the Republican Government put considerable confidence in him as to various
chemical improvements. He had lately even discovered a noiseless explosive, the secret
of which the Government was carefully guarding. His house stood in a handsome street near
the Elysee--a street which in that strong summer seemed almost as full of foliage as
the park itself; a row of chestnuts shattered the sunshine, interrupted only in one place
where a large cafe ran out into the street. Almost opposite to this were the white and
green blinds of the great scientist's house, an iron balcony, also painted green, running
along in front of the first-floor windows. Beneath this was the entrance into a kind
of court, gay with shrubs and tiles, into which the two Frenchmen passed in animated
talk. The door was opened to them by the doctor's old servant, Simon, who might very well have
passed for a doctor himself, having a strict suit of black, spectacles, grey hair, and
a confidential manner. In fact, he was a far more presentable man of science than his master,
Dr Hirsch, who was a forked radish of a fellow, with
just enough bulb of a head to make his body insignificant. With all the gravity of a great
physician handling a prescription, Simon handed a letter to M. Armagnac. That gentleman ripped
it up with a racial impatience, and rapidly read the following: I cannot come down to
speak to you. There is a man in this house whom I refuse to meet. He is a Chauvinist
officer, Dubosc. He is sitting on the stairs. He has been kicking the furniture about in
all the other rooms; I have locked myself in my study, opposite that cafe.
If you love me, go over to the cafe and wait at one of the tables outside. I will try to
send him over to you. I want you to answer him and deal with him. I cannot meet him myself.
I cannot: I will not. There is going to be another Dreyfus case.P. HIRSCH M. Armagnac
looked at M. Brun. M. Brun borrowed the letter, read it, and looked at M. Armagnac. Then both
betook themselves briskly to one of the little tables under the chestnuts opposite, where
they procured two tall glasses of horrible green absinthe, which they could drink apparently
in any weather and at any time. Otherwise the cafe seemed empty, except for
one soldier drinking coffee at one table, and at another a large man drinking a small
syrup and a priest drinking nothing. Maurice Brun cleared his throat and said: "Of course
we must help the master in every way, but--" There was an abrupt silence, and Armagnac
said: "He may have excellent reasons for not meeting the man himself, but--" Before either
could complete a sentence, it was evident that the invader had been expelled from the
house opposite. The shrubs under the archway swayed and burst apart, as that unwelcome
guest was shot out of them like a cannon-ball. He was a sturdy figure in a small and tilted
Tyrolean felt hat, a figure that had indeed something generally Tyrolean about it. The
man's shoulders were big and broad, but his legs were neat and active in knee-breeches
and knitted stockings. His face was brown like a nut; he had very bright and restless
brown eyes; his dark hair was brushed back stiffly in front and cropped close behind,
outlining a square and powerful skull; and he had a huge black moustache like the horns
of a bison. Such a substantial head is generally based on a bull neck;
But this was hidden by a big coloured scarf, swathed round up the man's ears and falling
in front inside his jacket like a sort of fancy waistcoat. It was a scarf of strong
dead colours, dark red and old gold and purple, probably of Oriental fabrication. Altogether
the man had something a shade barbaric about him; more like a Hungarian squire than an
ordinary French officer. His French, however, was obviously that of a native; and his French
patriotism was so impulsive as to be slightly absurd. His first act when he burst out of
the archway was to call in a clarion voice down the street:
"Are there any Frenchmen here?" as if he were calling for Christians in Mecca. Armagnac
and Brun instantly stood up; but they were too late. Men were already running from the
street corners; there was a small but ever-clustering crowd. With the prompt French instinct for
the politics of the street, the man with the black moustache had already run across to
a corner of the cafe, sprung on one of the tables, and seizing a branch of chestnut to
steady himself, shouted as Camille Desmoulins once shouted when he scattered the oak-leaves
among the populace. "Frenchmen!" he volleyed; "I cannot speak!
God help me, that is why I am speaking! The fellows in their filthy parliaments who learn
to speak also learn to be silent--silent as that spy cowering in the house opposite! Silent
as he is when I beat on his bedroom door! Silent as he is now, though he hears my voice
across this street and shakes where he sits! Oh, they can be silent eloquently--the politicians!
But the time has come when we that cannot speak must speak. You are betrayed to the
Prussians. Betrayed at this moment. Betrayed by that man.
I am Jules Dubosc, Colonel of Artillery, Belfort. We caught a German spy in the Vosges yesterday,
and a paper was found on him--a paper I hold in my hand. Oh, they tried to hush it up;
but I took it direct to the man who wrote it--the man in that house! It is in his hand.
It is signed with his initials. It is a direction for finding the secret of this new Noiseless
Powder. Hirsch invented it; Hirsch wrote this note about it. This note is in German, and
was found in a German's pocket. 'Tell the man the formula for powder is in grey envelope
in first drawer to the left of Secretary's desk, War Office, in red ink.
He must be careful. P.H.'" He rattled short sentences like a quick-firing gun, but he
was plainly the sort of man who is either mad or right. The mass of the crowd was Nationalist,
and already in threatening uproar; and a minority of equally angry Intellectuals, led by Armagnac
and Brun, only made the majority more militant. "If this is a military secret," shouted Brun,
"why do you yell about it in the street?" "I will tell you why I do!" roared Dubosc
above the roaring crowd. "I went to this man in straight and civil style. If he had any
explanation it could have been given in complete confidence.
He refuses to explain. He refers me to two strangers in a cafe as to two flunkeys. He
has thrown me out of the house, but I am going back into it, with the people of Paris behind
me!" A shout seemed to shake the very facade of mansions and two stones flew, one breaking
a window above the balcony. The indignant Colonel plunged once more under the archway
and was heard crying and thundering inside. Every instant the human sea grew wider and
wider; it surged up against the rails and steps of the traitor's house;
it was already certain that the place would be burst into like the Bastille, when the
broken French window opened and Dr Hirsch came out on the balcony. For an instant the
fury half turned to laughter; for he was an absurd figure in such a scene. His long bare
neck and sloping shoulders were the shape of a champagne bottle, but that was the only
festive thing about him. His coat hung on him as on a peg; he wore his carrot-coloured
hair long and weedy; his cheeks and chin were fully fringed with one of those irritating
beards that begin far from the mouth. He was very pale, and he wore blue spectacles.
livid as he was, he spoke with a sort of prim decision, so that the mob fell silent in the
middle of his third sentence. "...only two things to say to you now. The first is to
my foes, the second to my friends. To my foes I say: It is true I will not meet M. Dubosc,
though he is storming outside this very room. It is true I have asked two other men to confront
him for me. And I will tell you why! Because I will not and must not see him--because it
would be against all rules of dignity and honor to see him.
Before I am triumphantly cleared before a court, there is another arbitration this gentleman
owes me as a gentleman, and in referring him to my seconds I am strictly--" Armagnac and
Brun were waving their hats wildly, and even the Doctor's enemies roared applause at this
unexpected defiance. Once more a few sentences were inaudible, but they could hear him say:
"To my friends—I myself should always prefer weapons purely intellectual, and to these
an evolved humanity will certainly confine itself. But our own most precious truth is
the fundamental force of matter and heredity. I cannot speak like Clemenceau and Deroulede,
for their words are like echoes of their pistols. The French ask for a duellist as the English
ask for a sportsman. Well, I give my proofs: I will pay this barbaric bribe, and then go
back to reason for the rest of my life." Two men were instantly found in the crowd itself
to offer their services to Colonel Dubosc, who came out presently, satisfied. One was
the common soldier with the coffee, who said simply: "I will act for you, sir. I am the
Duc de Valognes." The other was the big man, whom his friend the priest sought at first
to dissuade; and then walked away alone. In the early evening a light dinner was spread
at the back of the Café Charlemagne. Though unroofed by any glass or gilt plaster, the
guests were nearly all under a delicate and irregular roof of leaves; for the ornamental
trees stood so thick around and among the tables as to give something of the dimness
and the dazzle of a small orchard. At one of the central tables a very stumpy little
priest sat in complete solitude, and applied himself to a pile of whitebait with the gravest
sort of enjoyment. His daily living being very plain, he had
a peculiar taste for sudden and isolated luxuries; he was an abstemious epicure. He did not lift
his eyes from his plate, round which red pepper, lemons, brown bread and butter, etc., were
rigidly ranked, until a tall shadow fell across the table, and his friend Flambeau sat down
opposite. Flambeau was gloomy. "I'm afraid I must chuck this business," said he heavily.
"I'm all on the side of the French soldiers like Dubosc, and I'm all against the French
atheists like Hirsch; but it seems to me in this case we've made a mistake.
The Duke and I thought it as well to investigate the charge, and I must say I'm glad we did."
"Is the paper a forgery, then?" asked the priest "That's just the odd thing," replied
Flambeau. "It's exactly like Hirsch's writing, and nobody can point out any mistake in it.
But it wasn't written by Hirsch. If he's a French patriot he didn't write it, because
it gives information to Germany. And if he's a German spy he didn't write it, well--because
it doesn't give information to Germany." "You mean the information is wrong?" asked Father
Brown. "Wrong," replied the other, "and wrong exactly
where Dr Hirsch would have been right--about the hiding-place of his own secret formula
in his own official department. By favour of Hirsch and the authorities, the Duke and
I have actually been allowed to inspect the secret drawer at the War Office where the
Hirsch formula is kept. We are the only people who have ever known it, except the inventor
himself and the Minister for War; but the Minister permitted it to save Hirsch from
fighting. After that we really can't support Dubosc if his revelation is a mare's nest."
"And it is?" asked Father Brown. "It is," said his friend gloomily. "It is a clumsy
forgery by somebody who knew nothing of the real hiding-place. It says the paper is in
the cupboard on the right of the Secretary's desk.
As a fact the cupboard with the secret drawer is some way to the left of the desk. It says
the grey envelope contains a long document written in red ink. It isn't written in red
ink, but in ordinary black ink. It's manifestly absurd to say that Hirsch can have made a
mistake about a paper that nobody knew of but himself;
or can have tried to help a foreign thief by telling him to fumble in the wrong drawer.
I think we must chuck it up and apologize to old Carrots." Father Brown seemed to cogitate;
he lifted a little whitebait on his fork. "You are sure the grey envelope was in the
left cupboard?" he asked. "Positive," replied Flambeau. "The grey envelope--it was a white
envelope really--was--" Father Brown put down the small silver fish and the fork and stared
across at his companion. "What?" he asked, in an altered voice. "Well, what?" repeated
Flambeau, eating heartily. "It was not grey," said the priest. "Flambeau,
you frighten me." "What the deuce are you frightened of?" "I'm frightened of a white
envelope," said the other seriously, "If it had only just been grey! Hang it all, it might
as well have been grey. But if it was white, the whole business is black. The Doctor has
been dabbling in some of the old brimstone after all." "But I tell you he couldn't have
written such a note!" cried Flambeau. "The note is utterly wrong about the facts. And
innocent or guilty, Dr Hirsch knew all about the facts."
"It was not grey," said the priest. "Flambeau, you frighten me." "What the deuce are you
frightened of?" "I'm frightened of a white envelope," said the other seriously, "If it
had only just been grey! Hang it all, it might as well have been grey. But if it was white,
the whole business is black. The Doctor has been dabbling in some of the old brimstone
after all." "But I tell you he couldn't have written such a note!" cried Flambeau. "The
note is utterly wrong about the facts. And innocent or guilty, Dr Hirsch knew all about
the facts." "The man who wrote that note knew all about
the facts," said his clerical companion soberly. "He could never have got 'em so wrong without
knowing about 'em. You have to know an awful lot to be wrong on every subject--like the
devil." "Do you mean--?" "I mean a man telling lies on chance would have told some of the
truth," said his friend firmly. "Suppose someone sent you to find a house with a green door
and a blue blind, with a front garden but no back garden, with a dog but no cat, and
where they drank coffee but not tea. You would say if you found no such house that
it was all made up. But I say no. I say if you found a house where the door was blue
and the blind green, where there was a back garden and no front garden, where cats were
common and dogs instantly shot, where tea was drunk in quarts and coffee forbidden--then
you would know you had found the house. The man must have known that particular house
to be so accurately inaccurate." "But what could it mean?" demanded the diner opposite.
"I can't conceive," said Brown; "I don't understand this Hirsch affair at all.
As long as it was only the left drawer instead of the right, and red ink instead of black,
I thought it must be the chance blunders of a forger, as you say. But three is a mystical
number; it finishes things. It finishes this. That the direction about the drawer, the colour
of ink, the colour of envelope, should none of them be right by accident, that can't be
a coincidence. It wasn't." "What was it, then? Treason?" asked Flambeau, resuming his dinner.
"I don't know that either," answered Brown, with a face of blank bewilderment. "The only
thing I can think of.... Well, I never understood that Dreyfus case.
I can always grasp moral evidence easier than the other sorts. I go by a man's eyes and
voice, don't you know, and whether his family seems happy, and by what subjects he chooses—and
avoids. Well, I was puzzled in the Dreyfus case. Not by the horrible things imputed both
ways; I know (though it's not modern to say so) that human nature in the highest places
is still capable of being Cenci or Borgia. No--, what puzzled me was the sincerity of
both parties. I don't mean the political parties; the rank and file are always roughly honest,
and often duped. I mean the persons of the play. I mean the
conspirators, if they were conspirators. I mean the traitor, if he was a traitor. I mean
the men who must have known the truth. Now Dreyfus went on like a man who knew he was
a wronged man. And yet the French statesmen and soldiers went on as if they knew he wasn't
a wronged man but simply a wrong 'un. I don't mean they behaved well; I mean they behaved
as if they were sure. I can't describe these things; I know what I mean." "I wish I did,"
said his friend. "And what has it to do with old Hirsch?"
"Suppose a person in a position of trust," went on the priest, "began to give the enemy
information because it was false information. Suppose he even thought he was saving his
country by misleading the foreigner. Suppose this brought him into spy circles, and little
loans were made to him, and little ties tied on to him. Suppose he kept up his contradictory
position in a confused way by never telling the foreign spies the truth, but letting it
more and more be guessed. The better part of him (what was left of it) would still say:
'I have not helped the enemy; I said it was the left drawer.
The meaner part of him would already be saying: 'But they may have the sense to see that means
the right.' I think it is psychologically possible--in an enlightened age, you know."
"It may be psychologically possible," answered Flambeau, "and it certainly would explain
Dreyfus being certain he was wronged and his judges being sure he was guilty. But it won't
wash historically, because Dreyfus's document (if it was his document) was literally correct."
"I wasn't thinking of Dreyfus," said Father Brown. Silence had sunk around them with the
emptying of the tables; it was already late, though the sunlight still
clung to everything, as if accidentally entangled in the trees. In the stillness Flambeau shifted
his seat sharply--making an isolated and echoing noise--and threw his elbow over the angle
of it. "Well," he said, rather harshly, "if Hirsch is not better than a timid treason-monger..."
"You mustn't be too *** them," said Father Brown gently. "It's not entirely their fault;
but they have no instincts. I mean those things that make a woman refuse to dance with a man
or a man to touch an investment. They've been taught that it's all a matter of degree."
"Anyhow," cried Flambeau impatiently, "he's not a patch on my principal; and I shall go
through with it. Old Dubosc may be a bit mad, but he's a sort of patriot after all." Father
Brown continued to consume whitebait. Something in the stolid way he did so caused Flambeau's
fierce black eyes to ramble over his companion afresh. "What's the matter with you?" Flambeau
demanded. "Dubosc's all right in that way. You don't doubt him?" "My friend," said the
small priest, laying down his knife and fork in a kind of cold despair,
"I doubt everything. Everything, I mean, that has happened today. I doubt the whole story,
though it has been acted before my face. I doubt every sight that my eyes have seen since
morning. There is something in this business quite different from the ordinary police mystery
where one man is more or less lying and the other man more or less telling the truth.
Here both men.... Well! I've told you the only theory I can think of that could satisfy
anybody. It doesn't satisfy me. "Nor me either," replied Flambeau frowning, while the other
went on eating fish with an air of entire resignation.
"If all you can suggest is that notion of a message conveyed by contraries, I call it
uncommonly clever, but...well, what would you call it?" "I should call it thin," said
the priest promptly. "I should call it uncommonly thin. But that's the *** thing about the
whole business. The lie is like a schoolboy's. There are only three versions, Dubosc's and
Hirsch's and that fancy of mine. Either that note was written by a French officer to ruin
a French official; or it was written by the French official to help German officers; or
it was written by the French official to mislead German officers. Very well.
You'd expect a secret paper passing between such people, officials or officers, to look
quite different from that. You'd expect, probably a cipher, certainly abbreviations; most certainly
scientific and strictly professional terms. But this thing's elaborately simple, like
a penny dreadful: 'In the purple grotto you will find the golden casket.' It looks as
if... As if it were meant to be seen through at once." Almost before they could take it
in a short figure in French uniform had walked up to their table like the wind, and sat down
with a sort of thump. "I have extraordinary news," said the Duc
de Valognes. "I have just come from this Colonel of ours. He is packing up to leave the country,
and he asks us to make his excuses sur le terrain." "What?" cried Flambeau, with an
incredulity quite frightful--"apologize?" "Yes," said the Duke gruffly; "then and there--before
everybody—when the swords are drawn. And you and I have to do it while he is leaving
the country." "But what can this mean?" cried Flambeau. "He can't be afraid of that little
Hirsch! Confound it!" he cried, in a kind of rational rage; "nobody could be afraid
of Hirsch!" "I believe it's some plot!" snapped Valognes--"some
plot of the Jews and Freemasons. It's meant to work up glory for Hirsch..." The face of
Father Brown was commonplace, but curiously contented; it could shine with ignorance as
well as with knowledge. But there was always one flash when the foolish mask fell, and
the wise mask fitted itself in its place; and Flambeau, who knew his friend, knew that
his friend had suddenly understood. Brown said nothing, but finished his plate of fish.
"Where did you last see our precious Colonel?" asked Flambeau, irritably.
"He's round at the Hotel Saint Louis by the Elysee, where we drove with him. He's packing
up, I tell you." "Will he be there still, do you think?" asked Flambeau, frowning at
the table. "I don't think he can get away yet," replied the Duke; "he's packing to go
a long journey..." "No," said Father Brown, quite simply, but suddenly standing up, "for
a very short journey. For one of the shortest, in fact. But we may still be in time to catch
him if we go there in a motor-cab." Nothing more could be got out of him until the cab
swept round the corner by the Hotel Saint Louis,
where they got out, and he led the party up a side lane already in deep shadow with the
growing dusk. Once, when the Duke impatiently asked whether Hirsch was guilty of treason
or not, he answered rather absently: "No; only of ambition--like Caesar." Then he somewhat
inconsequently added: "He lives a very lonely life; he has had to do everything for himself."
"Well, if he's ambitious, he ought to be satisfied now," said Flambeau rather bitterly. "All
Paris will cheer him now our cursed Colonel has turned tail." "Don't talk so loud," said
Father Brown, lowering his voice, "your cursed Colonel is just in front."
The other two started and shrank farther back into the shadow of them wall, for the sturdy
figure of their runaway principal could indeed be seen shuffling along in the twilight in
front, a bag in each hand. He looked much the same as when they first saw him, except
that he had changed his picturesque mountaineering knickers for a conventional pair of trousers.
It was clear he was already escaping from the hotel. The lane down which they followed
him was one of those that seem to be at the back of things, and look like the wrong side
of the stage scenery. A colourless, continuous wall ran down one
flank of it, interrupted at intervals by dull-hued and dirt-stained doors, all shut fast and
featureless save for the chalk scribbles of some passing gamin. The tops of trees, mostly
rather depressing evergreens, showed at intervals over the top of the wall, and beyond them
in the grey and purple gloaming could be seen the back of
some long terrace of tall Parisian houses, really comparatively close, but somehow looking
as inaccessible as a range of marble mountains. On the other side of the lane ran the high
gilt railings of a gloomy park. Flambeau was looking round him in rather a
weird way. "Do you know," he said, "there is something about this place that--" "Hullo!"
called out the Duke sharply; "that fellow's disappeared. Vanished, like a blasted fairy!"
"He has a key," explained their clerical friend. "He's only gone into one of these garden doors,"
and as he spoke they heard one of the dull wooden doors close again with a click in front
of them. Flambeau strode up to the door thus shut almost in his face, and stood in front
of it for a moment, biting his black moustache in a fury of curiosity.
Then he threw up his long arms and swung himself aloft like a monkey and stood on the top of
the wall, his enormous figure dark against the purple sky, like the dark tree-tops. The
Duke looked at the priest. "Dubosc's escape is more elaborate than we thought," he said;
"but I suppose he is escaping from France." "He is escaping from everywhere," answered
Father Brown. Valognes's eyes brightened, but his voice sank. "Do you mean suicide?"
he asked. "You will not find his body," replied the other. A kind of cry came from Flambeau
on the wall above. "My God," he exclaimed in French, "I know
what this place is now! Why, it's the back of the street where old Hirsch lives. I thought
I could recognize the back of a house as well as the back of a man." "And Dubosc's gone
in there!" cried the Duke, smiting his hip. "Why, they'll meet after all!" And with sudden
Gallic vivacity he hopped up on the wall beside Flambeau and sat there positively kicking
his legs with excitement. The priest alone remained below, leaning against the wall,
with his back to the whole theatre of events, and looking wistfully
across to the park palings and the twinkling, twilit trees.
The Duke, however stimulated, had the instincts of an aristocrat, and desired rather to stare
at the house than to spy on it; but Flambeau, who had the instincts of a burglar (and a
detective), had already swung himself from the wall into the fork of a straggling tree
from which he could crawl quite close to the only illuminated window in the back of the
high dark house. A red blind had been pulled down over the light, but pulled crookedly,
so that it gaped on one side, and by risking his neck along a branch that looked as treacherous
as a twig, Flambeau could just see Colonel Dubosc walking
about in a brilliantly-lighted and luxurious bedroom. But close as Flambeau was to the
house, he heard the words of his colleagues by the wall, and repeated them in a low voice.
"Yes, they will meet now after all!" "They will never meet," said Father Brown. "Hirsch
was right when he said that in such an affair the principals must not meet. Have you read
a *** psychological story by Henry James, of two persons who so perpetually missed meeting
each other by accident that they began to feel quite frightened of each other,
and to think it was fate? This is something of the kind, but more curious." "There are
people in Paris who will cure them of such morbid fancies," said Valognes vindictively.
"They will jolly well have to meet if we capture them and force them to fight." "They will
not meet on the Day of Judgement," said the priest. "If God Almighty held the truncheon
of the lists, if St Michael blew the trumpet for the swords to cross--even then, if one
of them stood ready, the other would not come." "Oh, what does all this mysticism mean? cried
the Duc de Valognes, impatiently; "why on earth shouldn't they meet like other
people?" "They are the opposite of each other," said Father Brown, with a *** kind of smile.
"They contradict each other. They cancel out, so to speak." He continued to gaze at the
darkening trees opposite, but Valognes turned his head sharply at a suppressed exclamation
from Flambeau. That investigator, peering into the lighted room, had just seen the Colonel,
after a pace or two, proceed to take his coat off. Flambeau's first thought was that this
really looked like a fight; but he soon dropped the thought for another.
The solidity and squareness of Dubosc's chest and shoulders was all a powerful piece of
padding and came off with his coat. In his shirt and trousers he was a comparatively
slim gentleman, who walked across the bedroom to the bathroom with no more pugnacious purpose
than that of washing himself. He bent over a basin, dried his dripping hands and face
on a towel, and turned again so that the strong light fell on his face. His brown complexion
had gone, his big black moustache had gone; he--was clean-shaven and very pate.
Nothing remained of the Colonel but his bright, hawk-like, brown eyes. Under the wall Father
Brown was going on in heavy meditation, as if to himself. "It is all just like what I
was saying to Flambeau. These opposites won't do. They don't work. They don't fight. If
it's white instead of black, and solid instead of liquid, and so on all along the line—then
there's something wrong, Monsieur, there's something wrong. One of these men is fair
and the other dark, one stout and the other slim, one strong and the other weak. One has
a moustache and no beard, so you can't see his mouth;
the other has a beard and no moustache, so you can't see his chin. One has hair cropped
to his skull, but a scarf to hide his neck; the other has low shirt-collars, but long
hair to bide his skull. It's all too neat and correct, Monsieur, and there's something
wrong. Things made so opposite are things that cannot quarrel. Wherever the one sticks
out the other sinks in. Like a face and a mask, like a lock and a key..." Flambeau was
peering into the house with a visage as white as a sheet. The occupant of the room was standing
with his back to him, but in front of a looking-glass, and had already fitted round his face a sort
of framework of rank red hair, hanging disordered from the head and clinging round the jaws
and chin while leaving the mocking mouth uncovered. Seen thus in the glass the white face looked
like the face of Judas laughing horribly and surrounded by capering flames of hell. For
a spasm Flambeau saw the fierce, red-brown eyes dancing, then they were covered with
a pair of blue spectacles. Slipping on a loose black coat, the figure vanished towards the
front of the house. A few moments later a roar of popular applause from the street beyond
announced that Dr Hirsch had once more appeared upon the balcony.
Chapter FOUR The Man in the Passage
TWO men appeared simultaneously at the two ends of a sort of passage running along the
side of the Apollo Theatre in the Adelphi. The evening daylight in the streets was large
and luminous, opalescent and empty. The passage was comparatively long and dark, so each man
could see the other as a mere black silhouette at the other end. Nevertheless, each man knew
the other, even in that inky outline; for they were both men of striking appearance
and they hated each other. The covered passage opened at one end on one of the steep streets
of the Adelphi, and at the other on a terrace overlooking the sunset-coloured river.
One side of the passage was a blank wall, for the building it
supported was an old unsuccessful theatre restaurant, now shut up. The other side of
the passage contained two doors, one at each end. Neither was what was commonly called
the stage door; they were a sort of special and private stage doors used by very special
performers, and in this case by the star actor and actress in the Shakespearean performance
of the day. Persons of that eminence often like to have such private exits and entrances,
for meeting friends or avoiding them. The two men in question were certainly two
such friends, men who evidently knew the doors and counted on their opening, for each approached
the door at the upper end with equal coolness and confidence. Not, however, with equal speed;
but the man who walked fast was the man from the other end of the tunnel, so they both
arrived before the secret stage door almost at the same instant. They saluted each other
with civility, and waited a moment before one of them, the sharper walker who seemed
to have the shorter patience, knocked at the door.
In this and everything else each man was opposite and neither could be called inferior. As private
persons both were handsome, capable and popular. As public persons, both were in the first
public rank. But everything about them, from their glory to their good looks, was of a
diverse and incomparable kind. Sir Wilson Seymour was the kind of man whose importance
is known to everybody who knows. The more you mixed with the innermost ring in every
polity or profession, the more often you met Sir Wilson Seymour.
He was the one intelligent man on twenty unintelligent committees--on every sort of subject, from
the reform of the Royal Academy to the project of bimetallism for Greater Britain. In the
Arts especially he was omnipotent. He was so unique that nobody could quite decide whether
he was a great aristocrat who had taken up Art, or a great artist whom the aristocrats
had taken up. But you could not meet him for five minutes without realizing that you had
really been ruled by him all your life. His appearance was "distinguished" in exactly
the same sense; it was at once conventional and unique.
Fashion could have found no fault with his high silk hat--, yet it was unlike anyone
else's hat--a little higher, perhaps, and adding something to his natural height. His
tall, slender figure had a slight stoop yet it looked the reverse of feeble. His hair
was silver-grey, but he did not look old; it was worn longer than the common yet he
did not look effeminate; it was curly but it did not look curled. His carefully pointed
beard made him look more manly and militant than otherwise, as it does in those old admirals
of Velazquez with whose dark portraits his house was hung.
His grey gloves were a shade bluer, his silver-knobbed cane a shade longer than scores of such gloves
and canes flapped and flourished about the theatres and the restaurants. The other man
was not so tall, yet would have struck nobody as short, but merely as strong and handsome.
His hair also was curly, but fair and cropped close to a strong, massive head--the sort
of head you break a door with, as Chaucer said of the Miller's. His military moustache
and the carriage of his shoulders showed him a soldier, but he had a pair of those peculiar
frank and piercing blue eyes which are more common in sailors.
His face was somewhat square, his jaw was square, his shoulders were square, even his
jacket was square. Indeed, in the wild school of caricature then current, Mr Max Beerbohm
had represented him as a proposition in the fourth book of Euclid. For he also was a public
man, though with quite another sort of success. You did not have to be in the best society
to have heard of Captain Cutler, of the siege of Hong-Kong, and the great march across China.
You could not get away from hearing of him wherever you were; his portrait was on every
other postcard; his maps and battles in every other illustrated
paper; songs in his honour in every other music-hall turn or on every other barrel-organ.
His fame, though probably more temporary, was ten times more wide, popular and spontaneous
than the other man's. In thousands of English homes he appeared enormous above England,
like Nelson. Yet he had infinitely less power in England than Sir Wilson Seymour. The door
was opened to them by an aged servant or "dresser", whose broken-down face and figure and black
shabby coat and trousers contrasted queerly with the glittering interior of the great
actress's dressing-room. It was fitted and filled with looking-glasses
at every angle of refraction, so that they looked like the hundred facets of one huge
diamond--if one could get inside a diamond. The other features of luxury, a few flowers,
a few coloured cushions, a few scraps of stage costume, were multiplied by all the mirrors
into the madness of the Arabian Nights, and danced and changed places perpetually as the
shuffling attendant shifted a mirror outwards or shot one back against the wall. They both
spoke to the dingy dresser by name, calling him Parkinson, and asking for the lady as
Miss Aurora Rome. Parkinson said she was in the other room,
but he would go and tell her. A shade crossed the brow of both visitors; for the other room
was the private room of the great actor with whom Miss Aurora was performing, and she was
of the kind that does not inflame admiration without inflaming jealousy. In about half
a minute, however, the inner door opened, and she entered as she always did, even in
private life, so that the very silence seemed to be a roar of applause, and one well-deserved.
She was clad in a somewhat strange garb of peacock green and peacock blue satins, that
gleamed like blue and green metals, such as delight children and aesthetes, and her heavy,
hot brown hair framed one of those magic faces which are dangerous to all men, but especially
to boys and to men growing grey. In company with her male colleague, the great American
actor, Isidore Bruno, she was producing a particularly poetical and fantastic interpretation
of Midsummer Night's Dream: in which the artistic prominence was given to Oberon and Titania,
or in other words to Bruno and herself. Set in dreamy and exquisite scenery, and moving
in mystical dances, The green costume, like burnished beetle-wings, expressed all the
elusive individuality of an elfin queen. But when personally confronted in what was still
broad daylight, a man looked only at the woman's face. She greeted both men with the beaming
and baffling smile which kept so many males at the same just dangerous distance from her.
She accepted some flowers from Cutler, which were as tropical and expensive as his victories;
and another sort of present from Sir Wilson Seymour, offered later on and more nonchalantly
by that gentleman. For it was against his breeding to show eagerness,
and against his conventional unconventionality to give anything so obvious as flowers. He
had picked up a trifle, he said, which was rather a curiosity, it was an ancient Greek
dagger of the Mycenaean Epoch, and might well have been worn in the time of Theseus and
Hippolyta. It was made of brass like all the Heroic weapons, but, oddly enough, sharp enough
to prick anyone still. He had really been attracted to it by the leaf-like shape; it
was as perfect as a Greek vase. If it was of any interest to Miss Rome or could come
in anywhere in the play, he hoped she would-- The inner door burst open and a big figure
appeared, who was more of a contrast to the explanatory Seymour than even Captain Cutler.
Nearly six-foot-six, and of more than theatrical thews and muscles, Isidore Bruno, in the gorgeous
leopard skin and golden-brown garments of Oberon, looked like a barbaric god. He leaned
on a sort of hunting-spear, which across a theatre looked a slight, silvery wand, but
which in the small and comparatively crowded room looked as plain as a pike-staff--and
as menacing. His vivid black eyes rolled volcanically, his bronzed face, handsome as it was,
showed at that moment a combination of high cheekbones with set white teeth, which recalled
certain American conjectures about his origin in the Southern plantations. "Aurora," he
began, in that deep voice like a drum of passion that had moved so many audiences, "will you--"
He stopped indecisively because a sixth figure had suddenly presented itself just inside
the doorway--a figure so incongruous in the scene as to be almost comic. It was a very
short man in the black uniform of the Roman secular clergy, and looking (especially in
such a presence as Bruno's and Aurora's) rather like the wooden Noah out of an ark.
He did not, however, seem conscious of any contrast, but said with dull civility: "I
believe Miss Rome sent for me." A shrewd observer might have remarked that the emotional temperature
rather rose at so unemotional an interruption. The detachment of a professional celibate
seemed to reveal to the others that they stood round the woman as a ring of amorous rivals;
just as a stranger coming in with frost on his coat will reveal that a room is like a
furnace. The presence of the one man who did not care
about her increased Miss Rome's sense that everybody else was in love with her, and each
in a somewhat dangerous way: the actor with all the appetite of a savage and a spoilt
child; the soldier with all the simple selfishness of a man of will rather than mind; Sir Wilson
with that daily hardening concentration with which old Hedonists take to a hobby; nay,
even the abject Parkinson, who had known her before her triumphs, and who followed her
about the room with eyes or feet, with the dumb fascination of a dog.
A shrewd person might also have noted a yet odder thing. The man like a black wooden Noah
(who was not wholly without shrewdness) noted it with a considerable but contained amusement.
It was evident that the great Aurora, though by no means indifferent to the admiration
of the other sex, wanted at this moment to get rid of all the men who admired her and
be left alone with the man who did not--did not admire her in that sense at least; for
the little priest did admire and even enjoy the firm feminine diplomacy with which she
set about her task. There was, perhaps, only one thing that Aurora
Rome was clever about, and that was one half of humanity--the other half. The little priest
watched, like a Napoleonic campaign, the swift precision of her policy for expelling all
while banishing none. Bruno, the big actor, was so babyish that it was easy to send him
off in brute sulks, banging the door. Cutler, the British officer, was pachydermatous to
ideas, but punctilious about behavior. He would ignore all hints, but he would die rather
than ignore a definite commission from a lady. As to old Seymour, he had to be treated differently;
he had to be left to the last. The only way to move him was to appeal to him in confidence
as an old friend, to let him into the secret of the clearance. The priest did really admire
Miss Rome as she achieved all these three objects in one selected action. She went across
to Captain Cutler and said in her sweetest manner: "I shall value all these flowers,
because they must be your favorite flowers. But they won't be complete, you know, without
my favorite flower. Do go over to that shop round the corner and get me some lilies-of-the-valley,
and then it will be quite lovely." The first object of her diplomacy, the exit
of the enraged Bruno, was at once achieved. He had already handed his spear in a lordly
style, like a sceptre, to the piteous Parkinson, and was about to assume one of the cushioned
seats like a throne. But at this open appeal to his rival there glowed in his opal eyeballs
all the sensitive insolence of the slave; he knotted his enormous brown fists for an
instant, and then, dashing open the door, disappeared into his own apartments beyond.
But meanwhile Miss Rome's experiment in mobilizing the British Army had not succeeded so simply
as seemed probable. Cutler had indeed risen stiffly and suddenly,
and walked towards the door, hatless, as if at a word of command. But perhaps there was
something ostentatiously elegant about the languid figure of Seymour leaning against
one of the looking-glasses that brought him up short at the entrance, turning his head
this way and that like a bewildered bulldog. "I must show this stupid man where to go,"
said Aurora in a whisper to Seymour, and ran out to the threshold to speed the parting
guest. Seymour seemed to be listening, elegant and unconscious as was his posture,
and he seemed relieved when he heard the lady call out some last instructions to the Captain,
and then turn sharply and run laughing down the passage towards the other end, the end
on the terrace above the Thames. Yet a second or two after Seymour's brow darkened again.
A man in his position has so many rivals, and he remembered that at the other end of
the passage was the corresponding entrance to Bruno's private room. He did not lose his
dignity; he said some civil words to Father Brown about the revival of Byzantine architecture
in the Westminster Cathedral, and then, quite naturally,
strolled out himself into the upper end of the passage. Father Brown and Parkinson were
left alone, and they were neither of them men with a taste for superfluous conversation.
The dresser went round the room, pulling out looking-glasses and pushing them in again,
his dingy dark coat and trousers looking all the more dismal since he was still holding
the festive fairy spear of King Oberon. Every time he pulled out the frame of a new glass,
a new black figure of Father Brown appeared; the absurd glass chamber was full of Father
Browns, upside down in the air like angels, turning
somersaults like acrobats, turning their backs to everybody like very rude persons. Father
Brown seemed quite unconscious of this cloud of witnesses, but followed Parkinson with
an idly attentive eye till he took himself and his absurd spear into the farther room
of Bruno. Then he abandoned himself to such abstract meditations as always amused him—calculating
the angles of the mirrors, the angles of each refraction, the angle at which each must fit
into the wall...when he heard a strong but strangled cry. He sprang to his feet and stood
rigidly listening. At the same instant Sir Wilson Seymour burst
back into the room, white as ivory. "Who's that man in the passage?" he cried. "Where's
that dagger of mine?" Before Father Brown could turn in his heavy boots Seymour was
plunging about the room looking for the weapon. And before he could possibly find that weapon
or any other, a brisk running of feet broke upon the pavement outside, and the square
face of Cutler was thrust into the same doorway. He was still grotesquely grasping a bunch
of lilies-of-the-valley. "What's this?" he cried. "What's that creature down the passage?
Is this some of your tricks?" "My tricks!" hissed his pale rival, and made
a stride towards him. In the instant of time in which all this happened Father Brown stepped
out into the top of the passage, looked down it, and at once walked briskly towards what
he saw. At this the other two men dropped their quarrel and darted after him, Cutler
calling out: "What are you doing? Who are you?" "My name is Brown," said the priest
sadly, as he bent over something and straightened himself again. "Miss Rome sent for me, and
I came as quickly as I could. I have come too late."
The three men looked down, and in one of them at least the life died in that late light
of afternoon. It ran along the passage like a path of gold, and in the midst of it Aurora
Rome lay lustrous in her robes of green and gold, with her dead face turned upwards. Her
dress was torn away as in a struggle, leaving the right shoulder bare, but the wound from
which the blood was welling was on the other side. The brass dagger lay flat and gleaming
a yard or so away. There was a blank stillness for a measurable time, so that they could
hear far off a flower-girl's laugh outside Charing Cross,
and someone whistling furiously for a taxicab in one of the streets off the Strand. Then
the Captain, with a movement so sudden that it might have been passion or play-acting,
took Sir Wilson Seymour by the throat. Seymour looked at him steadily without either fight
or fear. "You need not kill me," he said in a voice quite cold; "I shall do that on my
own account." The Captain's hand hesitated and dropped; and the other added with the
same icy candour: "If I find I haven't the nerve to do it with that dagger I can do it
in a month with drink." "Drink isn't good enough for me," replied
Cutler, "but I'll have blood for this before I die. Not yours--but I think I know whose."
And before the others could appreciate his intention he snatched up the dagger, sprang
at the other door at the lower end of the passage, burst it open, bolt and all, and
confronted Bruno in his dressing-room. As he did so, old Parkinson tottered in his wavering
way out of the door and caught sight of the corpse lying in the passage. He moved shakily
towards it; looked at it weakly with a working face,
then moved shakily back into the dressing-room again, and sat down suddenly on one of the
richly cushioned chairs. Father Brown instantly ran across to him, taking no notice of Cutler
and the colossal actor, though the room already rang with their blows and they began to struggle
for the dagger. Seymour, who retained some practical sense, was whistling for the police
at the end of the passage. When the police arrived it was to tear the two men from an
almost ape-like grapple; and, after a few formal inquiries, to arrest Isidore Bruno
upon a charge of ***, brought against him by his furious opponent.
The idea that the great national hero of the hour had arrested a wrongdoer with his own
hand doubtless had its weight with the police, who are not without elements of the journalist.
They treated Cutler with a certain solemn attention, and pointed out that he had got
a slight slash on the hand. Even as Cutler bore him back across tilted chair and table,
Bruno had twisted the dagger out of his grasp and disabled him just below the wrist. The
injury was really slight, but till he was removed from the room the half-savage prisoner
stared at the running blood with a steady smile.
"Looks a cannibal sort of chap, don't he?" said the constable confidentially to Cutler.
Cutler made no answer, but said sharply a moment after: "We must attend to the...the
death..." and his voice escaped from articulation. "The two deaths," came in the voice of the
priest from the farther side of the room. "This poor fellow was gone when I got across
to him." And he stood looking down at old Parkinson, who sat in a black huddle on the
gorgeous chair. He also had paid his tribute, not without eloquence, to the woman who had
died. The silence was first broken by Cutler, who
seemed not untouched by a rough tenderness. "I wish I was him," he said huskily. "I remember
he used to watch her wherever she walked more than--anybody. She was his air, and he's dried
up. He's just dead." "We are all dead," said Seymour in a strange voice, looking down the
road. They took leave of Father Brown at the corner of the road, with some random apologies
for any rudeness they might have shown. Both their faces were tragic, but also cryptic.
The mind of the little priest was always a rabbit-warren of wild
thoughts that jumped too quickly for him to catch them.
Like the white tail of a rabbit he had the vanishing thought that he was certain of their
grief, but not so certain of their innocence. "We had better all be going," said Seymour
heavily; "we have done all we can to help." "Will you understand my motives," asked Father
Brown quietly, "if I say you have done all you can to hurt?" They both started as if
guiltily, and Cutler said sharply: "To hurt whom?" "To hurt yourselves," answered the
priest. "I would not add to your troubles if it weren't common justice to warn you.
You've done nearly everything you could do to hang yourselves, if this actor should be
acquitted. They'll be sure to subpoena me; I shall be bound to say that after the cry
was heard each of you rushed into the room in a wild state and began quarrelling about
a dagger. As far as my words on oath can go, you might either of you have done it. You
hurt yourselves with that; and then Captain Cutler must have hurt himself with the dagger."
"Hurt myself!" exclaimed the Captain, with contempt. "A silly little scratch." "Which
drew blood," replied the priest, nodding. "We know there's blood on the brass now.
And so we shall never know whether there was blood on it before." There was a silence;
and then Seymour said, with an emphasis quite alien to his daily accent: "But I saw a man
in the passage." "I know you did," answered the cleric Brown with a face of wood, "so
did Captain Cutler. That's what seems so improbable." Before either could make sufficient sense
of it even to answer, Father Brown had politely excused himself and gone stumping up the road
with his stumpy old umbrella. As modern newspapers are conducted, the most honest and most important
news is the police news. If it be true that in the twentieth century
more space is given to *** than to politics, it is for the excellent reason that ***
is a more serious subject. But even this would hardly explain the enormous omnipresence and
widely distributed detail of "The Bruno Case," or "The Passage Mystery," in the Press of
London and the provinces. So vast was the excitement that for some weeks the Press really
told the truth; and the reports of examination and cross-examination, if interminable, even
if intolerable are at least reliable. The true reason, of course, was the coincidence
of persons. The victim was a popular actress; the accused
was a popular actor; and the accused had been caught red-handed, as it were, by the most
popular soldier of the patriotic season. In those extraordinary circumstances the Press
was paralysed into probity and accuracy; and the rest of this somewhat singular business
can practically be recorded from reports of Bruno's trial. The trial was presided over
by Mr Justice Monkhouse, one of those who are jeered at as humorous judges, but who
are generally much more serious than the serious judges, for their levity comes from a living
impatience of professional solemnity; while the serious judge is really filled with
frivolity, because he is filled with vanity. All the chief actors being of a worldly importance,
the barristers were well balanced; the prosecutor for the Crown was Sir Walter Cowdray, a heavy,
but weighty advocate of the sort that knows how to seem English and trustworthy, and how
to be rhetorical with reluctance. The prisoner was defended by Mr Patrick Butler, K.C., who
was mistaken for a mere flaneur by those who misunderstood the Irish character--and those
who had not been examined by him. The medical evidence involved no contradictions,
the doctor, whom Seymour had summoned on the spot, agreeing with the eminent surgeon who
had later examined the body. Aurora Rome had been stabbed with some sharp instrument such
as a knife or dagger; some instrument, at least, of which the blade was short. The wound
was just over the heart, and she had died instantly. When the doctor first saw her she
could hardly have been dead for twenty minutes. Therefore when Father Brown found her she
could hardly have been dead for three. Some official detective evidence followed,
chiefly concerned with the presence or absence of any proof of a struggle; the only suggestion
of this was the tearing of the dress at the shoulder, and this did not seem to fit in
particularly well with the direction and finality of the blow. When these details had been supplied,
though not explained, the first of the important witnesses was called. Sir Wilson Seymour gave
evidence as he did everything else that he did at all--not only well, but perfectly.
Though himself much more of a public man than the judge,
he conveyed exactly the fine shade of self-effacement before the King's justice; and though everyone
looked at him as they would at the Prime Minister or the Archbishop of Canterbury, they could
have said nothing of his part in it but that it was that of a private gentleman, with an
accent on the noun. He was also refreshingly lucid, as he was on the committees. He had
been calling on Miss Rome at the theatre; he had met Captain Cutler there; they had
been joined for a short time by the accused, who had then returned to his own dressing-room;
they had then been joined by a Roman Catholic priest, who asked for the deceased lady and
said his name was Brown. Miss Rome had then gone just outside the theatre
to the entrance of the passage, in order to point out to Captain Cutler a flower-shop
at which he was to buy her some more flowers; and the witness had remained in the room,
exchanging a few words with the priest. He had then distinctly heard the deceased, having
sent the Captain on his errand, turn round laughing and run down the passage towards
its other end, where was the prisoner's dressing-room. In idle curiosity as to the rapid movement
of his friends, he had strolled out to the head of the passage himself and looked down
it towards the prisoner's door. Did he see anything in the passage? Yes; he
saw something in the passage. Sir Walter Cowdray allowed an impressive interval, during which
the witness looked down, and for all his usual composure seemed to have more than his usual
pallor. Then the barrister said in a lower voice, which seemed at once sympathetic and
creepy: "Did you see it distinctly?" Sir Wilson Seymour, however moved, had his excellent
brains in full working-order. "Very distinctly as regards its outline, but quite indistinctly,
indeed not at all, as regards the details inside the outline.
The passage is of such length that anyone in the middle of it appears quite black against
the light at the other end." The witness lowered his steady eyes once more and added: "I had
noticed the fact before, when Captain Cutler first entered it." There was another silence,
and the judge leaned forward and made a note. "Well," said Sir Walter patiently, "what was
the outline like? Was it, for instance, like the figure of the murdered woman?" "Not in
the least," answered Seymour quietly. "What did it look like to you?" "It looked to me,"
replied the witness, "like a tall man." Everyone in court kept his eyes riveted on
his pen, or his umbrella-handle, or his book, or his boots or whatever he happened to be
looking at. They seemed to be holding their eyes away from the prisoner by main force;
but they felt his figure in the dock, and they felt it as gigantic. Tall as Bruno was
to the eye, he seemed to swell taller and taller when an eyes had been torn away from
him. Cowdray was resuming his seat with his solemn face, smoothing his black silk robes,
and white silk whiskers. Sir Wilson was leaving the witness-box, after a few final particulars
to which there were many other witnesses, when the counsel for the defence sprang up
and stopped him. "I shall only detain you a moment," said Mr
Butler, who was a rustic-looking person with red eyebrows and an expression of partial
slumber. "Will you tell his lordship how you knew it was a man?" A faint, refined smile
seemed to pass over Seymour's features. "I'm afraid it is the vulgar test of trousers,"
he said. "When I saw daylight between the long legs I was sure it was a man, after all."
Butler's sleepy eyes opened as suddenly as some silent explosion. "After all!" he repeated
slowly. "So you did think at first it was a woman?" Seymour looked troubled for the
first time. "It is hardly a point of fact," he said, "but
if his lordship would like me to answer for my impression, of course I shall do so. There
was something about the thing that was not exactly a woman and yet was not quite a man;
somehow the curves were different. And it had something that looked like long hair."
"Thank you," said Mr Butler, K.C., and sat down suddenly, as if he had got what he wanted.
Captain Cutler was a far less plausible and composed witness than Sir Wilson, but his
account of the opening incidents was solidly the same.
He described the return of Bruno to his dressing-room, the dispatching of himself to buy a bunch
of lilies-of-the-valley, his return to the upper end of the passage, the thing he saw
in the passage, his suspicion of Seymour, and his struggle with Bruno. But he could
give little artistic assistance about the black figure that he and Seymour had seen.
Asked about its outline, he said he was no art critic--with a somewhat too obvious sneer
at Seymour. Asked if it was a man or a woman, he said it looked more like a beast--with
a too obvious snarl at the prisoner. But the man was plainly shaken with sorrow
and sincere anger, and Cowdray quickly excused him from confirming facts that were already
fairly clear. The defending counsel also was again brief in his cross-examination; although
(as was his custom) even in being brief, he seemed to take a long time about it. "You
used a rather remarkable expression," he said, looking at Cutler sleepily. "What do you mean
by saying that it looked more like a beast than a man or a woman?" Cutler seemed seriously
agitated. "Perhaps I oughtn't to have said that," he
said; "but when the brute has huge *** shoulders like a chimpanzee, and bristles
sticking out of its head like a pig--" Mr Butler cut short his curious impatience in
the middle. "Never mind whether its hair was like a pig's," he said, "was it like a woman's?"
"A woman's!" cried the soldier. "Great Scott, no!" "The last witness said it was," commented
the counsel, with unscrupulous swiftness. "And did the figure have any of those serpentine
and semi-feminine curves to which eloquent allusion has been made? No? No feminine curves?
The figure, if I understand you, was rather heavy and square than otherwise?"
"He may have been bending forward," said Cutler, in a hoarse and rather faint voice. "Or again,
he may not," said Mr Butler, and sat down suddenly for the second time. The third, witness
called by Sir Walter Cowdray was the little Catholic clergyman, so little, compared with
the others, that his head seemed hardly to come above the box, so that it was like cross-examining
a child. But unfortunately Sir Walter had somehow got it into his head (mostly by some
ramifications of his family's religion) that Father Brown was on the side of the prisoner,
because the prisoner was wicked and foreign and even partly black.
Therefore he took Father Brown up sharply whenever that proud pontiff tried to explain
anything; and told him to answer yes or no, and tell the plain facts without any jesuitry.
When Father Brown began, in his simplicity, to say who he thought the man in the passage
was, the barrister told him that he did not want his theories. "A black shape was seen
in the passage. And you say you saw the black shape. Well, what shape was it?" Father Brown
blinked as under rebuke; but he had long known the literal nature of obedience.
"The shape," he said, "was short and thick, but had two sharp, black projections curved
upwards on each side of the head or top, rather like horns, and--" "Oh! the devil with horns,
no doubt," *** Cowdray, sitting down in triumphant jocularity. "It was the devil
come to eat Protestants." "No," said the priest dispassionately; "I know who it was." Those
in court had been wrought up to an irrational, but real sense of some monstrosity. They had
forgotten the figure in the dock and thought only of the figure in the passage.
And the figure in the passage, described by three capable and respectable men who had
all seen it, was a shifting nightmare: one called it a woman, and the other a beast,
and the other a devil.... The judge was looking at Father Brown with level and piercing eyes.
"You are a most extraordinary witness," he said; "but there is something about you that
makes me think you are trying to tell the truth. Well, who was the man you saw in the
passage?" "He was myself," said Father Brown. Butler, K.C., sprang to his feet in an extraordinary
stillness, and said quite calmly: "Your lordship will allow me to cross-examine?
And then, without stopping, he shot at Brown the apparently disconnected question: "You
have heard about this dagger; you know the experts say the crime was committed with a
short blade?" "A short blade," assented Brown, nodding solemnly like an owl, "but a very
long hilt." Before the audience could quite dismiss the idea that the priest had really
seen himself doing *** with a short dagger with a long hilt (which seemed somehow to
make it more horrible), he had himself hurried on to explain. "I mean daggers aren't the
only things with short blades. Spears have short blades.
And spears catch at the end of the steel just like daggers, if they're that sort of fancy
spear they had in theatres; like the spear poor old Parkinson killed his wife with, just
when she'd sent for me to settle their family troubles--and I came just too late, God forgive
me! But he died penitent--he just died of being penitent. He couldn't bear what he'd
done." The general impression in court was that the little priest, who was gobbling away,
had literally gone mad in the box. But the judge still looked at him with bright and
steady eyes of interest; and the counsel for the defence went on with his questions unperturbed.
"If Parkinson did it with that pantomime spear," said Butler, "he must have thrust from four
yards away. How do you account for signs of struggle, like the dress dragged off the shoulder?"
He had slipped into treating his mere witness as an expert; but no one noticed it now. "The
poor lady's dress was torn," said the witness, "because it was caught in a panel that slid
to just behind her. She struggled to free herself, and as she did so Parkinson came
out of the prisoner's room and lunged with the spear." "A panel?" repeated the barrister
in a curious voice. "It was a looking-glass on the other side," explained Father Brown.
"When I was in the dressing-room I noticed that some of them could probably be slid out
into the passage." There was another vast and unnatural silence, and this time it was
the judge who spoke. "So you really mean that when you looked down that passage, the man
you saw was yourself--in a mirror?" "Yes, my lord; that was what I was trying to say,"
said Brown, "but they asked me for the shape; and our hats have corners just like horns,
and so I--" The judge leaned forward, his old eyes yet more brilliant, and said in specially
distinct tones: "Do you really mean to say that when Sir Wilson
Seymour saw that wild what-you-call-him with curves and a woman's hair and a man's trousers,
what he saw was Sir Wilson Seymour?" "Yes, my lord," said Father Brown. "And you mean
to say that when Captain Cutler saw that chimpanzee with *** shoulders and hog's bristles,
he simply saw himself?" "Yes, my lord." The judge leaned back in his chair with a luxuriance
in which it was hard to separate the cynicism and the admiration.
"And can you tell us why," he asked, "you should know your own figure in a looking-glass,
when two such distinguished men don't?" Father Brown blinked even more painfully than before;
then he stammered: "Really, my lord, I don't know unless it's because I don't look at it
so often."