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The Innocence of Father Brown, by G. K. Chesterton

 

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THE INNOCENCE OF FATHER BROWN

 

    Contents

 

    The Blue Cross

    The Secret Garden

    The Queer Feet

    The Flying Stars

    The Invisible Man

    The Honour of Israel Gow

    The Wrong Shape

    The Sins of Prince Saradine

    The Hammer of God

    The Eye of Apollo

    The Sign of the Broken Sword

    The Three Tools of Death

 

    The Blue Cross

 

Between the silver ribbon of morning and the green glittering

ribbon of sea, the boat touched Harwich and let loose a swarm of

folk like flies, among whom the man we must follow was by no means

conspicuous--nor wished to be. There was nothing notable about

him, except a slight contrast between the holiday gaiety of his

clothes and the official gravity of his face. His clothes

included a slight, pale grey jacket, a white waistcoat, and a

silver straw hat with a grey-blue ribbon. His lean face was dark

by contrast, and ended in a curt black beard that looked Spanish

and suggested an Elizabethan ruff. He was smoking a cigarette

with the seriousness of an idler. There was nothing about him to

indicate the fact that the grey jacket covered a loaded revolver,

that the white waistcoat covered a police card, or that the straw

hat covered one of the most powerful intellects in Europe. For

this was Valentin himself, the head of the Paris police and the

most famous investigator of the world; and he was coming from

Brussels to London to make the greatest arrest of the century.

    Flambeau was in England. The police of three countries had

tracked the great criminal at last from Ghent to Brussels, from

Brussels to the Hook of Holland; and it was conjectured that he

would take some advantage of the unfamiliarity and confusion of

the Eucharistic Congress, then taking place in London. Probably

he would travel as some minor clerk or secretary connected with

it; but, of course, Valentin could not be certain; nobody could be

certain about Flambeau.

    It is many years now since this colossus of crime suddenly

ceased keeping the world in a turmoil; and when he ceased, as they

said after the death of Roland, there was a great quiet upon the

earth. But in his best days (I mean, of course, his worst)

Flambeau was a figure as statuesque and international as the

Kaiser. Almost every morning the daily paper announced that he

had escaped the consequences of one extraordinary crime by

committing another. He was a Gascon of gigantic stature and

bodily daring; and the wildest tales were told of his outbursts of

athletic humour; how he turned the juge d'instruction upside down

and stood him on his head, "to clear his mind"; how he ran down

the Rue de Rivoli with a policeman under each arm. It is due to

him to say that his fantastic physical strength was generally

employed in such bloodless though undignified scenes; his real

crimes were chiefly those of ingenious and wholesale robbery. But

each of his thefts was almost a new sin, and would make a story by

itself. It was he who ran the great Tyrolean Dairy Company in

London, with no dairies, no cows, no carts, no milk, but with some

thousand subscribers. These he served by the simple operation of

moving the little milk cans outside people's doors to the doors of

his own customers. It was he who had kept up an unaccountable and

close correspondence with a young lady whose whole letter-bag was

intercepted, by the extraordinary trick of photographing his

messages infinitesimally small upon the slides of a microscope. A

sweeping simplicity, however, marked many of his experiments. It

is said that he once repainted all the numbers in a street in the

dead of night merely to divert one traveller into a trap. It is

quite certain that he invented a portable pillar-box, which he put

up at corners in quiet suburbs on the chance of strangers dropping

postal orders into it. Lastly, he was known to be a startling

acrobat; despite his huge figure, he could leap like a grasshopper

and melt into the tree-tops like a monkey. Hence the great

Valentin, when he set out to find Flambeau, was perfectly aware

that his adventures would not end when he had found him.

    But how was he to find him? On this the great Valentin's

ideas were still in process of settlement.

    There was one thing which Flambeau, with all his dexterity of

disguise, could not cover, and that was his singular height. If

Valentin's quick eye had caught a tall apple-woman, a tall

grenadier, or even a tolerably tall duchess, he might have

arrested them on the spot. But all along his train there was

nobody that could be a disguised Flambeau, any more than a cat

could be a disguised giraffe. About the people on the boat he had

already satisfied himself; and the people picked up at Harwich or

on the journey limited themselves with certainty to six. There

was a short railway official travelling up to the terminus, three

fairly short market gardeners picked up two stations afterwards,

one very short widow lady going up from a small Essex town, and a

very short Roman Catholic priest going up from a small Essex

village. When it came to the last case, Valentin gave it up and

almost laughed. The little priest was so much the essence of

those Eastern flats; he had a face as round and dull as a Norfolk

dumpling; he had eyes as empty as the North Sea; he had several

brown paper parcels, which he was quite incapable of collecting.

The Eucharistic Congress had doubtless sucked out of their local

stagnation many such creatures, blind and helpless, like moles

disinterred. Valentin was a sceptic in the severe style of

France, and could have no love for priests. But he could have

pity for them, and this one might have provoked pity in anybody.

He had a large, shabby umbrella, which constantly fell on the

floor. He did not seem to know which was the right end of his

return ticket. He explained with a moon-calf simplicity to

everybody in the carriage that he had to be careful, because he

had something made of real silver "with blue stones" in one of his

brown-paper parcels. His quaint blending of Essex flatness with

saintly simplicity continuously amused the Frenchman till the

priest arrived (somehow) at Tottenham with all his parcels, and

came back for his umbrella. When he did the last, Valentin even

had the good nature to warn him not to take care of the silver by

telling everybody about it. But to whomever he talked, Valentin

kept his eye open for someone else; he looked out steadily for

anyone, rich or poor, male or female, who was well up to six feet;

for Flambeau was four inches above it.

    He alighted at Liverpool Street, however, quite conscientiously

secure that he had not missed the criminal so far. He then went

to Scotland Yard to regularise his position and arrange for help

in case of need; he then lit another cigarette and went for a long

stroll in the streets of London. As he was walking in the streets

and squares beyond Victoria, he paused suddenly and stood. It was

a quaint, quiet square, very typical of London, full of an

accidental stillness. The tall, flat houses round looked at once

prosperous and uninhabited; the square of shrubbery in the centre

looked as deserted as a green Pacific islet. One of the four

sides was much higher than the rest, like a dais; and the line of

this side was broken by one of London's admirable accidents--a

restaurant that looked as if it had strayed from Soho. It was an

unreasonably attractive object, with dwarf plants in pots and

long, striped blinds of lemon yellow and white. It stood specially

high above the street, and in the usual patchwork way of London, a

flight of steps from the street ran up to meet the front door

almost as a fire-escape might run up to a first-floor window.

Valentin stood and smoked in front of the yellow-white blinds and

considered them long.

    The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen.

A few clouds in heaven do come together into the staring shape of

one human eye. A tree does stand up in the landscape of a

doubtful journey in the exact and elaborate shape of a note of

interrogation. I have seen both these things myself within the

last few days. Nelson does die in the instant of victory; and a

man named Williams does quite accidentally murder a man named

Williamson; it sounds like a sort of infanticide. In short, there

is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people reckoning

on the prosaic may perpetually miss. As it has been well

expressed in the paradox of Poe, wisdom should reckon on the

unforeseen.

    Aristide Valentin was unfathomably French; and the French

intelligence is intelligence specially and solely. He was not "a

thinking machine"; for that is a brainless phrase of modern

fatalism and materialism. A machine only is a machine because it

cannot think. But he was a thinking man, and a plain man at the

same time. All his wonderful successes, that looked like

conjuring,

had been gained by plodding logic, by clear and commonplace French

thought. The French electrify the world not by starting any

paradox, they electrify it by carrying out a truism. They carry a

truism so far--as in the French Revolution. But exactly because

Valentin understood reason, he understood the limits of reason.

Only a man who knows nothing of motors talks of motoring without

petrol; only a man who knows nothing of reason talks of reasoning

without strong, undisputed first principles. Here he had no

strong first principles. Flambeau had been missed at Harwich; and

if he was in London at all, he might be anything from a tall tramp

on Wimbledon Common to a tall toast-master at the Hotel Metropole.

In such a naked state of nescience, Valentin had a view and a

method of his own.

    In such cases he reckoned on the unforeseen. In such cases,

when he could not follow the train of the reasonable, he coldly

and carefully followed the train of the unreasonable. Instead of

going to the right places--banks, police stations, rendezvous--

he systematically went to the wrong places; knocked at every empty

house, turned down every cul de sac, went up every lane blocked

with rubbish, went round every crescent that led him uselessly out

of the way. He defended this crazy course quite logically. He

said that if one had a clue this was the worst way; but if one had

no clue at all it was the best, because there was just the chance

that any oddity that caught the eye of the pursuer might be the

same that had caught the eye of the pursued. Somewhere a man must

begin, and it had better be just where another man might stop.

Something about that flight of steps up to the shop, something

about the quietude and quaintness of the restaurant, roused all

the detective's rare romantic fancy and made him resolve to strike

at random. He went up the steps, and sitting down at a table by

the window, asked for a cup of black coffee.

    It was half-way through the morning, and he had not

breakfasted; the slight litter of other breakfasts stood about on

the table to remind him of his hunger; and adding a poached egg to

his order, he proceeded musingly to shake some white sugar into

his coffee, thinking all the time about Flambeau. He remembered

how Flambeau had escaped, once by a pair of nail scissors, and

once by a house on fire; once by having to pay for an unstamped

letter, and once by getting people to look through a telescope at

a comet that might destroy the world. He thought his detective

brain as good as the criminal's, which was true. But he fully

realised the disadvantage. "The criminal is the creative artist;

the detective only the critic," he said with a sour smile, and

lifted his coffee cup to his lips slowly, and put it down very

quickly. He had put salt in it.

    He looked at the vessel from which the silvery powder had

come; it was certainly a sugar-basin; as unmistakably meant for

sugar as a champagne-bottle for champagne. He wondered why they

should keep salt in it. He looked to see if there were any more

orthodox vessels. Yes; there were two salt-cellars quite full.

Perhaps there was some speciality in the condiment in the

salt-cellars. He tasted it; it was sugar. Then he looked round

at the restaurant with a refreshed air of interest, to see if

there were any other traces of that singular artistic taste which

puts the sugar in the salt-cellars and the salt in the sugar-basin.

Except for an odd splash of some dark fluid on one of the

white-papered walls, the whole place appeared neat, cheerful and

ordinary. He rang the bell for the waiter.

    When that official hurried up, fuzzy-haired and somewhat

blear-eyed at that early hour, the detective (who was not without

an appreciation of the simpler forms of humour) asked him to taste

the sugar and see if it was up to the high reputation of the hotel.

The result was that the waiter yawned suddenly and woke up.

    "Do you play this delicate joke on your customers every

morning?" inquired Valentin. "Does changing the salt and sugar

never pall on you as a jest?"

    The waiter, when this irony grew clearer, stammeringly assured

him that the establishment had certainly no such intention; it

must be a most curious mistake. He picked up the sugar-basin and

looked at it; he picked up the salt-cellar and looked at that, his

face growing more and more bewildered. At last he abruptly

excused himself, and hurrying away, returned in a few seconds with

the proprietor. The proprietor also examined the sugar-basin and

then the salt-cellar; the proprietor also looked bewildered.

    Suddenly the waiter seemed to grow inarticulate with a rush of

words.

    "I zink," he stuttered eagerly, "I zink it is those two

clergy-men."

    "What two clergymen?"

    "The two clergymen," said the waiter, "that threw soup at the

wall."

    "Threw soup at the wall?" repeated Valentin, feeling sure this

must be some singular Italian metaphor.

    "Yes, yes," said the attendant excitedly, and pointed at the

dark splash on the white paper; "threw it over there on the wall."

    Valentin looked his query at the proprietor, who came to his

rescue with fuller reports.

    "Yes, sir," he said, "it's quite true, though I don't suppose

it has anything to do with the sugar and salt. Two clergymen came

in and drank soup here very early, as soon as the shutters were

taken down. They were both very quiet, respectable people; one of

them paid the bill and went out; the other, who seemed a slower

coach altogether, was some minutes longer getting his things

together. But he went at last. Only, the instant before he

stepped into the street he deliberately picked up his cup, which

he had only half emptied, and threw the soup slap on the wall. I

was in the back room myself, and so was the waiter; so I could

only rush out in time to find the wall splashed and the shop

empty. It don't do any particular damage, but it was confounded

cheek; and I tried to catch the men in the street. They were too

far off though; I only noticed they went round the next corner

into Carstairs Street."

    The detective was on his feet, hat settled and stick in hand.

He had already decided that in the universal darkness of his mind

he could only follow the first odd finger that pointed; and this

finger was odd enough. Paying his bill and clashing the glass

doors behind him, he was soon swinging round into the other

street.

    It was fortunate that even in such fevered moments his eye was

cool and quick. Something in a shop-front went by him like a mere

flash; yet he went back to look at it. The shop was a popular

greengrocer and fruiterer's, an array of goods set out in the open

air and plainly ticketed with their names and prices. In the two

most prominent compartments were two heaps, of oranges and of nuts

respectively. On the heap of nuts lay a scrap of cardboard, on

which was written in bold, blue chalk, "Best tangerine oranges,

two a penny." On the oranges was the equally clear and exact

description, "Finest Brazil nuts, 4d. a lb." M. Valentin looked

at these two placards and fancied he had met this highly subtle

form of humour before, and that somewhat recently. He drew the

attention of the red-faced fruiterer, who was looking rather

sullenly up and down the street, to this inaccuracy in his

advertisements. The fruiterer said nothing, but sharply put each

card into its proper place. The detective, leaning elegantly on

his walking-cane, continued to scrutinise the shop. At last he

said, "Pray excuse my apparent irrelevance, my good sir, but I

should like to ask you a question in experimental psychology and

the association of ideas."

    The red-faced shopman regarded him with an eye of menace; but

he continued gaily, swinging his cane, "Why," he pursued, "why are

two tickets wrongly placed in a greengrocer's shop like a shovel

hat that has come to London for a holiday? Or, in case I do not

make myself clear, what is the mystical association which connects

the idea of nuts marked as oranges with the idea of two clergymen,

one tall and the other short?"

    The eyes of the tradesman stood out of his head like a

snail's; he really seemed for an instant likely to fling himself

upon the stranger. At last he stammered angrily: "I don't know

what you 'ave to do with it, but if you're one of their friends,

you can tell 'em from me that I'll knock their silly 'eads off,

parsons or no parsons, if they upset my apples again."

    "Indeed?" asked the detective, with great sympathy. "Did they

upset your apples?"

    "One of 'em did," said the heated shopman; "rolled 'em all

over the street. I'd 'ave caught the fool but for havin' to pick

'em up."

    "Which way did these parsons go?" asked Valentin.

    "Up that second road on the left-hand side, and then across

the square," said the other promptly.

    "Thanks," replied Valentin, and vanished like a fairy. On the

other side of the second square he found a policeman, and said:

"This is urgent, constable; have you seen two clergymen in shovel

hats?"

    The policeman began to chuckle heavily. "I 'ave, sir; and if

you arst me, one of 'em was drunk. He stood in the middle of the

road that bewildered that--"

    "Which way did they go?" snapped Valentin.

    "They took one of them yellow buses over there," answered the

man; "them that go to Hampstead."

    Valentin produced his official card and said very rapidly:

"Call up two of your men to come with me in pursuit," and crossed

the road with such contagious energy that the ponderous policeman

was moved to almost agile obedience. In a minute and a half the

French detective was joined on the opposite pavement by an

inspector and a man in plain clothes.

    "Well, sir," began the former, with smiling importance, "and

what may--?"

    Valentin pointed suddenly with his cane. "I'll tell you on

the top of that omnibus," he said, and was darting and dodging

across the tangle of the traffic. When all three sank panting on

the top seats of the yellow vehicle, the inspector said: "We could

go four times as quick in a taxi."

    "Quite true," replied their leader placidly, "if we only had

an idea of where we were going."

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

    Valentin smoked frowningly for a few seconds; then, removing

his cigarette, he said: "If you know what a man's doing, get in

front of him; but if you want to guess what he's doing, keep

behind him. Stray when he strays; stop when he stops; travel as

slowly as he. Then you may see what he saw and may act as he

acted. All we can do is to keep our eyes skinned for a queer

thing."

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

    "Any sort of queer thing," answered Valentin, and relapsed

into obstinate silence.

    The yellow omnibus crawled up the northern roads for what

seemed like hours on end; the great detective would not explain

further, and perhaps his assistants felt a silent and growing doubt

of his errand. Perhaps, also, they felt a silent and growing

desire for lunch, for the hours crept long past the normal luncheon

hour, and the long roads of the North London suburbs seemed to

shoot out into length after length like an infernal telescope. It

was one of those journeys on which a man perpetually feels that

now at last he must have come to the end of the universe, and then

finds he has only come to the beginning of Tufnell Park. London

died away in draggled taverns and dreary scrubs, and then was

unaccountably born again in blazing high streets and blatant

hotels. It was like passing through thirteen separate vulgar

cities all just touching each other. But though the winter

twilight was already threatening the road ahead of them, the

Parisian detective still sat silent and watchful, eyeing the

frontage of the streets that slid by on either side. By the time

they had left Camden Town behind, the policemen were nearly

asleep; at least, they gave something like a jump as Valentin

leapt erect, struck a hand on each man's shoulder, and shouted to

the driver to stop.

    They tumbled down the steps into the road without realising

why they had been dislodged; when they looked round for

enlightenment they found Valentin triumphantly pointing his finger

towards a window on the left side of the road. It was a large

window, forming part of the long facade of a gilt and palatial

public-house; it was the part reserved for respectable dining, and

labelled "Restaurant." This window, like all the rest along the

frontage of the hotel, was of frosted and figured glass; but in

the middle of it was a big, black smash, like a star in the ice.

    "Our cue at last," cried Valentin, waving his stick; "the

place with the broken window."

    "What window? What cue?" asked his principal assistant.

"Why, what proof is there that this has anything to do with them?"

    Valentin almost broke his bamboo stick with rage.

    "Proof!" he cried. "Good God! the man is looking for proof!

Why, of course, the chances are twenty to one that it has nothing

to do with them. But what else can we do? Don't you see we must

either follow one wild possibility or else go home to bed?" He

banged his way into the restaurant, followed by his companions,

and they were soon seated at a late luncheon at a little table,

and looked at the star of smashed glass from the inside. Not that

it was very informative to them even then.

    "Got your window broken, I see," said Valentin to the waiter

as he paid the bill.

    "Yes, sir," answered the attendant, bending busily over the

change, to which Valentin silently added an enormous tip. The

waiter straightened himself with mild but unmistakable animation.

    "Ah, yes, sir," he said. "Very odd thing, that, sir."

    "Indeed?" Tell us about it," said the detective with careless

curiosity.

    "Well, two gents in black came in," said the waiter; "two of

those foreign parsons that are running about. They had a cheap

and quiet little lunch, and one of them paid for it and went out.

The other was just going out to join him when I looked at my

change again and found he'd paid me more than three times too

much. `Here,' I says to the chap who was nearly out of the door,

`you've paid too much.' `Oh,' he says, very cool, `have we?'

'Yes,' I says, and picks up the bill to show him. Well, that was

a knock-out."

    "What do you mean?" asked his interlocutor.

    "Well, I'd have sworn on seven Bibles that I'd put 4s. on that

bill. But now I saw I'd put 14s., as plain as paint."

    "Well?" cried Valentin, moving slowly, but with burning eyes,

"and then?"

    "The parson at the door he says all serene, `Sorry to confuse

your accounts, but it'll pay for the window.' `What window?' I

says. `The one I'm going to break,' he says, and smashed that

blessed pane with his umbrella."

    All three inquirers made an exclamation; and the inspector

said under his breath, "Are we after escaped lunatics?" The waiter

went on with some relish for the ridiculous story:

    "I was so knocked silly for a second, I couldn't do anything.

The man marched out of the place and joined his friend just round

the corner. Then they went so quick up Bullock Street that I

couldn't catch them, though I ran round the bars to do it."

    "Bullock Street," said the detective, and shot up that

thoroughfare as quickly as the strange couple he pursued.

    Their journey now took them through bare brick ways like

tunnels; streets with few lights and even with few windows;

streets that seemed built out of the blank backs of everything and

everywhere. Dusk was deepening, and it was not easy even for the

London policemen to guess in what exact direction they were

treading. The inspector, however, was pretty certain that they

would eventually strike some part of Hampstead Heath. Abruptly

one bulging gas-lit window broke the blue twilight like a

bull's-eye lantern; and Valentin stopped an instant before a little

garish sweetstuff shop. After an instant's hesitation he went in;

he stood amid the gaudy colours of the confectionery with entire

gravity and bought thirteen chocolate cigars with a certain care.

He was clearly preparing an opening; but he did not need one.

    An angular, elderly young woman in the shop had regarded his

elegant appearance with a merely automatic inquiry; but when she

saw the door behind him blocked with the blue uniform of the

inspector, her eyes seemed to wake up.

    "Oh," she said, "if you've come about that parcel, I've sent

it off already."

    "Parcel?" repeated Valentin; and it was his turn to look

inquiring.

    "I mean the parcel the gentleman left--the clergyman

gentleman."

    "For goodness' sake," said Valentin, leaning forward with his

first real confession of eagerness, "for Heaven's sake tell us

what happened exactly."

    "Well," said the woman a little doubtfully, "the clergymen

came in about half an hour ago and bought some peppermints and

talked a bit, and then went off towards the Heath. But a second

after, one of them runs back into the shop and says, `Have I left

a parcel!' Well, I looked everywhere and couldn't see one; so he

says, `Never mind; but if it should turn up, please post it to

this address,' and he left me the address and a shilling for my

trouble. And sure enough, though I thought I'd looked everywhere,

I found he'd left a brown paper parcel, so I posted it to the

place he said. I can't remember the address now; it was somewhere

in Westminster. But as the thing seemed so important, I thought

perhaps the police had come about it."

    "So they have," said Valentin shortly. "Is Hampstead Heath

near here?"

    "Straight on for fifteen minutes," said the woman, "and you'll

come right out on the open." Valentin sprang out of the shop and

began to run. The other detectives followed him at a reluctant

trot.

    The street they threaded was so narrow and shut in by shadows

that when they came out unexpectedly into the void common and vast

sky they were startled to find the evening still so light and

clear. A perfect dome of peacock-green sank into gold amid the

blackening trees and the dark violet distances. The glowing green

tint was just deep enough to pick out in points of crystal one or

two stars. All that was left of the daylight lay in a golden

glitter across the edge of Hampstead and that popular hollow which

is called the Vale of Health. The holiday makers who roam this

region had not wholly dispersed; a few couples sat shapelessly on

benches; and here and there a distant girl still shrieked in one

of the swings. The glory of heaven deepened and darkened around

the sublime vulgarity of man; and standing on the slope and looking

across the valley, Valentin beheld the thing which he sought.

    Among the black and breaking groups in that distance was one

especially black which did not break--a group of two figures

clerically clad. Though they seemed as small as insects, Valentin

could see that one of them was much smaller than the other.

Though the other had a student's stoop and an inconspicuous manner,

he could see that the man was well over six feet high. He shut

his teeth and went forward, whirling his stick impatiently. By

the time he had substantially diminished the distance and

magnified the two black figures as in a vast microscope, he had

perceived something else; something which startled him, and yet

which he had somehow expected. Whoever was the tall priest, there

could be no doubt about the identity of the short one. It was his

friend of the Harwich train, the stumpy little cure of Essex whom

he had warned about his brown paper parcels.

    Now, so far as this went, everything fitted in finally and

rationally enough. Valentin had learned by his inquiries that

morning that a Father Brown from Essex was bringing up a silver

cross with sapphires, a relic of considerable value, to show some

of the foreign priests at the congress. This undoubtedly was the

"silver with blue stones"; and Father Brown undoubtedly was the

little greenhorn in the train. Now there was nothing wonderful

about the fact that what Valentin had found out Flambeau had also

found out; Flambeau found out everything. Also there was nothing

wonderful in the fact that when Flambeau heard of a sapphire cross

he should try to steal it; that was the most natural thing in all

natural history. And most certainly there was nothing wonderful

about the fact that Flambeau should have it all his own way with

such a silly sheep as the man with the umbrella and the parcels.

He was the sort of man whom anybody could lead on a string to the

North Pole; it was not surprising that an actor like Flambeau,

dressed as another priest, could lead him to Hampstead Heath. So

far the crime seemed clear enough; and while the detective pitied

the priest for his helplessness, he almost despised Flambeau for

condescending to so gullible a victim. But when Valentin thought

of all that had happened in between, of all that had led him to

his triumph, he racked his brains for the smallest rhyme or reason

in it. What had the stealing of a blue-and-silver cross from a

priest from Essex to do with chucking soup at wall paper? What

had it to do with calling nuts oranges, or with paying for windows

first and breaking them afterwards? He had come to the end of his

chase; yet somehow he had missed the middle of it. When he failed

(which was seldom), he had usually grasped the clue, but

nevertheless missed the criminal. Here he had grasped the

criminal, but still he could not grasp the clue.

    The two figures that they followed were crawling like black

flies across the huge green contour of a hill. They were evidently

sunk in conversation, and perhaps did not notice where they were

going; but they were certainly going to the wilder and more silent

heights of the Heath. As their pursuers gained on them, the

latter had to use the undignified attitudes of the deer-stalker,

to crouch behind clumps of trees and even to crawl prostrate in

deep grass. By these ungainly ingenuities the hunters even came

close enough to the quarry to hear the murmur of the discussion,

but no word could be distinguished except the word "reason"

recurring frequently in a high and almost childish voice. Once

over an abrupt dip of land and a dense tangle of thickets, the

detectives actually lost the two figures they were following.

They did not find the trail again for an agonising ten minutes,

and then it led round the brow of a great dome of hill overlooking

an amphitheatre of rich and desolate sunset scenery. Under a tree

in this commanding yet neglected spot was an old ramshackle wooden

seat. On this seat sat the two priests still in serious speech

together. The gorgeous green and gold still clung to the darkening

horizon; but the dome above was turning slowly from peacock-green

to peacock-blue, and the stars detached themselves more and more

like solid jewels. Mutely motioning to his followers, Valentin

contrived to creep up behind the big branching tree, and, standing

there in deathly silence, heard the words of the strange priests

for the first time.

    After he had listened for a minute and a half, he was gripped

by a devilish doubt. Perhaps he had dragged the two English

policemen to the wastes of a nocturnal heath on an errand no saner

than seeking figs on its thistles. For the two priests were

talking exactly like priests, piously, with learning and leisure,

about the most aerial enigmas of theology. The little Essex

priest spoke the more simply, with his round face turned to the

strengthening stars; the other talked with his head bowed, as if

he were not even worthy to look at them. But no more innocently

clerical conversation could have been heard in any white Italian

cloister or black Spanish cathedral.

    The first he heard was the tail of one of Father Brown's

sentences, which ended: "... what they really meant in the Middle

Ages by the heavens being incorruptible."

    The taller priest nodded his bowed head and said:

    "Ah, yes, these modern infidels appeal to their reason; but

who can look at those millions of worlds and not feel that there

may well be wonderful universes above us where reason is utterly

unreasonable?"

    "No," said the other priest; "reason is always reasonable,

even in the last limbo, in the lost borderland of things. I know

that people charge the Church with lowering reason, but it is just

the other way. Alone on earth, the Church makes reason really

supreme. Alone on earth, the Church affirms that God himself is

bound by reason."

    The other priest raised his austere face to the spangled sky

and said:

    "Yet who knows if in that infinite universe--?"

    "Only infinite physically," said the little priest, turning

sharply in his seat, "not infinite in the sense of escaping from

the laws of truth."

    Valentin behind his tree was tearing his fingernails with

silent fury. He seemed almost to hear the sniggers of the English

detectives whom he had brought so far on a fantastic guess only to

listen to the metaphysical gossip of two mild old parsons. In his

impatience he lost the equally elaborate answer of the tall cleric,

and when he listened again it was again Father Brown who was

speaking:

    "Reason and justice grip the remotest and the loneliest star.

Look at those stars. Don't they look as if they were single

diamonds and sapphires? Well, you can imagine any mad botany or

geology you please. Think of forests of adamant with leaves of

brilliants. Think the moon is a blue moon, a single elephantine

sapphire. But don't fancy that all that frantic astronomy would

make the smallest difference to the reason and justice of conduct.

On plains of opal, under cliffs cut out of pearl, you would still

find a notice-board, `Thou shalt not steal.'"

    Valentin was just in the act of rising from his rigid and

crouching attitude and creeping away as softly as might be, felled

by the one great folly of his life. But something in the very

silence of the tall priest made him stop until the latter spoke.

When at last he did speak, he said simply, his head bowed and his

hands on his knees:

    "Well, I think that other worlds may perhaps rise higher than

our reason. The mystery of heaven is unfathomable, and I for one

can only bow my head."

    Then, with brow yet bent and without changing by the faintest

shade his attitude or voice, he added:

    "Just hand over that sapphire cross of yours, will you? We're

all alone here, and I could pull you to pieces like a straw doll."

    The utterly unaltered voice and attitude added a strange

violence to that shocking change of speech. But the guarder of

the relic only seemed to turn his head by the smallest section of

the compass. He seemed still to have a somewhat foolish face

turned to the stars. Perhaps he had not understood. Or, perhaps,

he had understood and sat rigid with terror.

    "Yes," said the tall priest, in the same low voice and in the

same still posture, "yes, I am Flambeau."

    Then, after a pause, he said:

    "Come, will you give me that cross?"

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

    Flambeau suddenly flung off all his pontifical pretensions.

The great robber leaned back in his seat and laughed low but long.

    "No," he cried, "you won't give it me, you proud prelate. You

won't give it me, you little celibate simpleton. Shall I tell you

why you won't give it me? Because I've got it already in my own

breast-pocket."

    The small man from Essex turned what seemed to be a dazed face

in the dusk, and said, with the timid eagerness of "The Private

Secretary":

    "Are--are you sure?"

    Flambeau yelled with delight.

    "Really, you're as good as a three-act farce," he cried.

"Yes, you turnip, I am quite sure. I had the sense to make a

duplicate of the right parcel, and now, my friend, you've got the

duplicate and I've got the jewels. An old dodge, Father Brown--

a very old dodge."

    "Yes," said Father Brown, and passed his hand through his hair

with the same strange vagueness of manner. "Yes, I've heard of it

before."

    The colossus of crime leaned over to the little rustic priest

with a sort of sudden interest.

    "You have heard of it?" he asked. "Where have you heard of

it?"

    "Well, I mustn't tell you his name, of course," said the

little man simply. "He was a penitent, you know. He had lived

prosperously for about twenty years entirely on duplicate brown

paper parcels. And so, you see, when I began to suspect you, I

thought of this poor chap's way of doing it at once."

    "Began to suspect me?" repeated the outlaw with increased

intensity. "Did you really have the gumption to suspect me just

because I brought you up to this bare part of the heath?"

    "No, no," said Brown with an air of apology. "You see, I

suspected you when we first met. It's that little bulge up the

sleeve where you people have the spiked bracelet."

    "How in Tartarus," cried Flambeau, "did you ever hear of the

spiked bracelet?"

    "Oh, one's little flock, you know!" said Father Brown, arching

his eyebrows rather blankly. "When I was a curate in Hartlepool,

there were three of them with spiked bracelets. So, as I

suspected you from the first, don't you see, I made sure that the

cross should go safe, anyhow. I'm afraid I watched you, you know.

So at last I saw you change the parcels. Then, don't you see, I

changed them back again. And then I left the right one behind."

    "Left it behind?" repeated Flambeau, and for the first time

there was another note in his voice beside his triumph.

    "Well, it was like this," said the little priest, speaking in

the same unaffected way. "I went back to that sweet-shop and

asked if I'd left a parcel, and gave them a particular address if

it turned up. Well, I knew I hadn't; but when I went away again I

did. So, instead of running after me with that valuable parcel,

they have sent it flying to a friend of mine in Westminster."

Then he added rather sadly: "I learnt that, too, from a poor

fellow in Hartlepool. He used to do it with handbags he stole at

railway stations, but he's in a monastery now. Oh, one gets to

know, you know," he added, rubbing his head again with the same

sort of desperate apology. "We can't help being priests. People

come and tell us these things."

    Flambeau tore a brown-paper parcel out of his inner pocket and

rent it in pieces. There was nothing but paper and sticks of lead

inside it. He sprang to his feet with a gigantic gesture, and

cried:

    "I don't believe you. I don't believe a bumpkin like you

could manage all that. I believe you've still got the stuff on

you, and if you don't give it up--why, we're all alone, and I'll

take it by force!"

    "No," said Father Brown simply, and stood up also, "you won't

take it by force. First, because I really haven't still got it.

And, second, because we are not alone."

    Flambeau stopped in his stride forward.

    "Behind that tree," said Father Brown, pointing, "are two

strong policemen and the greatest detective alive. How did they

come here, do you ask? Why, I brought them, of course! How did I

do it? Why, I'll tell you if you like! Lord bless you, we have

to know twenty such things when we work among the criminal classes!

Well, I wasn't sure you were a thief, and it would never do to

make a scandal against one of our own clergy. So I just tested

you to see if anything would make you show yourself. A man

generally makes a small scene if he finds salt in his coffee; if

he doesn't, he has some reason for keeping quiet. I changed the

salt and sugar, and you kept quiet. A man generally objects if

his bill is three times too big. If he pays it, he has some motive

for passing unnoticed. I altered your bill, and you paid it."

    The world seemed waiting for Flambeau to leap like a tiger.

But he was held back as by a spell; he was stunned with the utmost

curiosity.

    "Well," went on Father Brown, with lumbering lucidity, "as you

wouldn't leave any tracks for the police, of course somebody had

to. At every place we went to, I took care to do something that

would get us talked about for the rest of the day. I didn't do

much harm--a splashed wall, spilt apples, a broken window; but I

saved the cross, as the cross will always be saved. It is at

Westminster by now. I rather wonder you didn't stop it with the

Donkey's Whistle."

    "With the what?" asked Flambeau.

    "I'm glad you've never heard of it," said the priest, making a

face. "It's a foul thing. I'm sure you're too good a man for a

Whistler. I couldn't have countered it even with the Spots myself;

I'm not strong enough in the legs."

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

    "Well, I did think you'd know the Spots," said Father Brown,

agreeably surprised. "Oh, you can't have gone so very wrong yet!"

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

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

clerical opponent.

    "Oh, by being a celibate simpleton, I suppose," he said. "Has

it never struck you that a man who does next to nothing but hear

men's real sins is not likely to be wholly unaware of human evil?

But, as a matter of fact, another part of my trade, too, made me

sure you weren't a priest."

    "What?" asked the thief, almost gaping.

    "You attacked reason," said Father Brown. "It's bad theology."

    And even as he turned away to collect his property, the three

policemen came out from under the twilight trees. Flambeau was an

artist and a sportsman. He stepped back and swept Valentin a great

bow.

    "Do not bow to me, mon ami," said Valentin with silver

clearness. "Let us both bow to our master."

    And they both stood an instant uncovered while the little Essex

priest blinked about for his umbrella.

 

    The Secret Garden

 

Aristide Valentin, Chief of the Paris Police, was late for his

dinner, and some of his guests began to arrive before him. These

were, however, reassured by his confidential servant, Ivan, the

old man with a scar, and a face almost as grey as his moustaches,

who always sat at a table in the entrance hall--a hall hung with

weapons. Valentin's house was perhaps as peculiar and celebrated

as its master. It was an old house, with high walls and tall

poplars almost overhanging the Seine; but the oddity--and

perhaps the police value--of its architecture was this: that

there was no ultimate exit at all except through this front door,

which was guarded by Ivan and the armoury. The garden was large

and elaborate, and there were many exits from the house into the

garden. But there was no exit from the garden into the world

outside; all round it ran a tall, smooth, unscalable wall with

special spikes at the top; no bad garden, perhaps, for a man to

reflect in whom some hundred criminals had sworn to kill.

    As Ivan explained to the guests, their host had telephoned

that he was detained for ten minutes. He was, in truth, making

some last arrangements about executions and such ugly things; and

though these duties were rootedly repulsive to him, he always

performed them with precision. Ruthless in the pursuit of

criminals, he was very mild about their punishment. Since he had

been supreme over French--and largely over European--policial

methods, his great influence had been honourably used for the

mitigation of sentences and the purification of prisons. He was

one of the great humanitarian French freethinkers; and the only

thing wrong with them is that they make mercy even colder than

justice.

    When Valentin arrived he was already dressed in black clothes

and the red rosette--an elegant figure, his dark beard already

streaked with grey. He went straight through his house to his

study, which opened on the grounds behind. The garden door of it

was open, and after he had carefully locked his box in its official

place, he stood for a few seconds at the open door looking out upon

the garden. A sharp moon was fighting with the flying rags and

tatters of a storm, and Valentin regarded it with a wistfulness

unusual in such scientific natures as his. Perhaps such scientific

natures have some psychic prevision of the most tremendous problem

of their lives. From any such occult mood, at least, he quickly

recovered, for he knew he was late, and that his guests had

already begun to arrive. A glance at his drawing-room when he

entered it was enough to make certain that his principal guest was

not there, at any rate. He saw all the other pillars of the

little party; he saw Lord Galloway, the English Ambassador--a

choleric old man with a russet face like an apple, wearing the

blue ribbon of the Garter. He saw Lady Galloway, slim and

threadlike, with silver hair and a face sensitive and superior.

He saw her daughter, Lady Margaret Graham, a pale and pretty girl

with an elfish face and copper-coloured hair. He saw the Duchess

of Mont St. Michel, black-eyed and opulent, and with her her two

daughters, black-eyed and opulent also. He saw Dr. Simon, a

typical French scientist, with glasses, a pointed brown beard, and

a forehead barred with those parallel wrinkles which are the

penalty of superciliousness, since they come through constantly

elevating the eyebrows. He saw Father Brown, of Cobhole, in Essex,

whom he had recently met in England. He saw--perhaps with more

interest than any of these--a tall man in uniform, who had bowed

to the Galloways without receiving any very hearty acknowledgment,

and who now advanced alone to pay his respects to his host. This

was Commandant O'Brien, of the French Foreign Legion. He was a

slim yet somewhat swaggering figure, clean-shaven, dark-haired,

and blue-eyed, and, as seemed natural in an officer of that famous

regiment of victorious failures and successful suicides, he had an

air at once dashing and melancholy. He was by birth an Irish

gentleman, and in boyhood had known the Galloways--especially

Margaret Graham. He had left his country after some crash of

debts, and now expressed his complete freedom from British

etiquette by swinging about in uniform, sabre and spurs. When he

bowed to the Ambassador's family, Lord and Lady Galloway bent

stiffly, and Lady Margaret looked away.

    But for whatever old causes such people might be interested in

each other, their distinguished host was not specially interested

in them. No one of them at least was in his eyes the guest of the

evening. Valentin was expecting, for special reasons, a man of

world-wide fame, whose friendship he had secured during some of

his great detective tours and triumphs in the United States. He

was expecting Julius K. Brayne, that multi-millionaire whose

colossal and even crushing endowments of small religions have

occasioned so much easy sport and easier solemnity for the

American and English papers. Nobody could quite make out whether

Mr. Brayne was an atheist or a Mormon or a Christian Scientist;

but he was ready to pour money into any intellectual vessel, so

long as it was an untried vessel. One of his hobbies was to wait

for the American Shakespeare--a hobby more patient than angling.

He admired Walt Whitman, but thought that Luke P. Tanner, of

Paris, Pa., was more "progressive" than Whitman any day. He liked

anything that he thought "progressive." He thought Valentin

"progressive," thereby doing him a grave injustice.

    The solid appearance of Julius K. Brayne in the room was as

decisive as a dinner bell. He had this great quality, which very

few of us can claim, that his presence was as big as his absence.

He was a huge fellow, as fat as he was tall, clad in complete

evening black, without so much relief as a watch-chain or a ring.

His hair was white and well brushed back like a German's; his face

was red, fierce and cherubic, with one dark tuft under the lower

lip that threw up that otherwise infantile visage with an effect

theatrical and even Mephistophelean. Not long, however, did that

salon merely stare at the celebrated American; his lateness had

already become a domestic problem, and he was sent with all speed

into the dining-room with Lady Galloway on his arm.

    Except on one point the Galloways were genial and casual

enough. So long as Lady Margaret did not take the arm of that

adventurer O'Brien, her father was quite satisfied; and she had

not done so, she had decorously gone in with Dr. Simon.

Nevertheless, old Lord Galloway was restless and almost rude. He

was diplomatic enough during dinner, but when, over the cigars,

three of the younger men--Simon the doctor, Brown the priest,

and the detrimental O'Brien, the exile in a foreign uniform--all

melted away to mix with the ladies or smoke in the conservatory,

then the English diplomatist grew very undiplomatic indeed. He

was stung every sixty seconds with the thought that the scamp

O'Brien might be signalling to Margaret somehow; he did not

attempt to imagine how. He was left over the coffee with Brayne,

the hoary Yankee who believed in all religions, and Valentin, the

grizzled Frenchman who believed in none. They could argue with

each other, but neither could appeal to him. After a time this

"progressive" logomachy had reached a crisis of tedium; Lord

Galloway got up also and sought the drawing-room. He lost his way

in long passages for some six or eight minutes: till he heard the

high-pitched, didactic voice of the doctor, and then the dull

voice of the priest, followed by general laughter. They also, he

thought with a curse, were probably arguing about "science and

religion." But the instant he opened the salon door he saw only

one thing--he saw what was not there. He saw that Commandant

O'Brien was absent, and that Lady Margaret was absent too.

    Rising impatiently from the drawing-room, as he had from the

dining-room, he stamped along the passage once more. His notion

of protecting his daughter from the Irish-Algerian n'er-do-weel

had become something central and even mad in his mind. As he went

towards the back of the house, where was Valentin's study, he was

surprised to meet his daughter, who swept past with a white,

scornful face, which was a second enigma. If she had been with

O'Brien, where was O'Brien! If she had not been with O'Brien,

where had she been? With a sort of senile and passionate

suspicion he groped his way to the dark back parts of the mansion,

and eventually found a servants' entrance that opened on to the

garden. The moon with her scimitar had now ripped up and rolled

away all the storm-wrack. The argent light lit up all four corners

of the garden. A tall figure in blue was striding across the lawn

towards the study door; a glint of moonlit silver on his facings

picked him out as Commandant O'Brien.

    He vanished through the French windows into the house, leaving

Lord Galloway in an indescribable temper, at once virulent and

vague. The blue-and-silver garden, like a scene in a theatre,

seemed to taunt him with all that tyrannic tenderness against

which his worldly authority was at war. The length and grace of

the Irishman's stride enraged him as if he were a rival instead of

a father; the moonlight maddened him. He was trapped as if by

magic into a garden of troubadours, a Watteau fairyland; and,

willing to shake off such amorous imbecilities by speech, he

stepped briskly after his enemy. As he did so he tripped over

some tree or stone in the grass; looked down at it first with

irritation and then a second time with curiosity. The next

instant the moon and the tall poplars looked at an unusual sight

--an elderly English diplomatist running hard and crying or

bellowing as he ran.

    His hoarse shouts brought a pale face to the study door, the

beaming glasses and worried brow of Dr. Simon, who heard the

nobleman's first clear words. Lord Galloway was crying: "A corpse

in the grass--a blood-stained corpse." O'Brien at last had gone

utterly out of his mind.

    "We must tell Valentin at once," said the doctor, when the

other had brokenly described all that he had dared to examine.

"It is fortunate that he is here"; and even as he spoke the great

detective entered the study, attracted by the cry. It was almost

amusing to note his typical transformation; he had come with the

common concern of a host and a gentleman, fearing that some guest

or servant was ill. When he was told the gory fact, he turned

with all his gravity instantly bright and businesslike; for this,

however abrupt and awful, was his business.

    "Strange, gentlemen," he said as they hurried out into the

garden, "that I should have hunted mysteries all over the earth,

and now one comes and settles in my own back-yard. But where is

the place?" They crossed the lawn less easily, as a slight mist

had begun to rise from the river; but under the guidance of the

shaken Galloway they found the body sunken in deep grass--the

body of a very tall and broad-shouldered man. He lay face

downwards, so they could only see that his big shoulders were clad

in black cloth, and that his big head was bald, except for a wisp

or two of brown hair that clung to his skull like wet seaweed. A

scarlet serpent of blood crawled from under his fallen face.

    "At least," said Simon, with a deep and singular intonation,

"he is none of our party."

    "Examine him, doctor," cried Valentin rather sharply. "He may

not be dead."

    The doctor bent down. "He is not quite cold, but I am afraid

he is dead enough," he answered. "Just help me to lift him up."

    They lifted him carefully an inch from the ground, and all

doubts as to his being really dead were settled at once and

frightfully. The head fell away. It had been entirely sundered

from the body; whoever had cut his throat had managed to sever the

neck as well. Even Valentin was slightly shocked. "He must have

been as strong as a gorilla," he muttered.

    Not without a shiver, though he was used to anatomical

abortions, Dr. Simon lifted the head. It was slightly slashed

about the neck and jaw, but the face was substantially unhurt. It

was a ponderous, yellow face, at once sunken and swollen, with a

hawk-like nose and heavy lids--a face of a wicked Roman emperor,

with, perhaps, a distant touch of a Chinese emperor. All present

seemed to look at it with the coldest eye of ignorance. Nothing

else could be noted about the man except that, as they had lifted

his body, they had seen underneath it the white gleam of a

shirt-front defaced with a red gleam of blood. As Dr. Simon said,

the man had never been of their party. But he might very well

have been trying to join it, for he had come dressed for such an

occasion.

    Valentin went down on his hands and knees and examined with

his closest professional attention the grass and ground for some

twenty yards round the body, in which he was assisted less

skillfully by the doctor, and quite vaguely by the English lord.

Nothing rewarded their grovellings except a few twigs, snapped or

chopped into very small lengths, which Valentin lifted for an

instant's examination and then tossed away.

    "Twigs," he said gravely; "twigs, and a total stranger with

his head cut off; that is all there is on this lawn."

    There was an almost creepy stillness, and then the unnerved

Galloway called out sharply:

    "Who's that! Who's that over there by the garden wall!"

    A small figure with a foolishly large head drew waveringly

near them in the moonlit haze; looked for an instant like a

goblin, but turned out to be the harmless little priest whom they

had left in the drawing-room.

    "I say," he said meekly, "there are no gates to this garden,

do you know."

    Valentin's black brows had come together somewhat crossly, as

they did on principle at the sight of the cassock. But he was far

too just a man to deny the relevance of the remark. "You are

right," he said. "Before we find out how he came to be killed, we

may have to find out how he came to be here. Now listen to me,

gentlemen. If it can be done without prejudice to my position and

duty, we shall all agree that certain distinguished names might

well be kept out of this. There are ladies, gentlemen, and there

is a foreign ambassador. If we must mark it down as a crime, then

it must be followed up as a crime. But till then I can use my own

discretion. I am the head of the police; I am so public that I

can afford to be private. Please Heaven, I will clear everyone of

my own guests before I call in my men to look for anybody else.

Gentlemen, upon your honour, you will none of you leave the house

till tomorrow at noon; there are bedrooms for all. Simon, I think

you know where to find my man, Ivan, in the front hall; he is a

confidential man. Tell him to leave another servant on guard and

come to me at once. Lord Galloway, you are certainly the best

person to tell the ladies what has happened, and prevent a panic.

They also must stay. Father Brown and I will remain with the

body."

    When this spirit of the captain spoke in Valentin he was obeyed

like a bugle. Dr. Simon went through to the armoury and routed

out Ivan, the public detective's private detective. Galloway went

to the drawing-room and told the terrible news tactfully enough,

so that by the time the company assembled there the ladies were

already startled and already soothed. Meanwhile the good priest

and the good atheist stood at the head and foot of the dead man

motionless in the moonlight, like symbolic statues of their two

philosophies of death.

    Ivan, the confidential man with the scar and the moustaches,

came out of the house like a cannon ball, and came racing across

the lawn to Valentin like a dog to his master. His livid face was

quite lively with the glow of this domestic detective story, and

it was with almost unpleasant eagerness that he asked his master's

permission to examine the remains.

    "Yes; look, if you like, Ivan," said Valentin, "but don't be

long. We must go in and thrash this out in the house."

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

    "Why," he gasped, "it's--no, it isn't; it can't be. Do you

know this man, sir?"

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

    Between them they carried the corpse to a sofa in the study,

and then all made their way to the drawing-room.

    The detective sat down at a desk quietly, and even without

hesitation; but his eye was the iron eye of a judge at assize. He

made a few rapid notes upon paper in front of him, and then said

shortly: "Is everybody here?"

    "Not Mr. Brayne," said the Duchess of Mont St. Michel, looking

round.

    "No," said Lord Galloway in a hoarse, harsh voice. "And not

Mr. Neil O'Brien, I fancy. I saw that gentleman walking in the

garden when the corpse was still warm."

    "Ivan," said the detective, "go and fetch Commandant O'Brien

and Mr. Brayne. Mr. Brayne, I know, is finishing a cigar in the

dining-room; Commandant O'Brien, I think, is walking up and down

the conservatory. I am not sure."

    The faithful attendant flashed from the room, and before

anyone could stir or speak Valentin went on with the same

soldierly swiftness of exposition.

    "Everyone here knows that a dead man has been found in the

garden, his head cut clean from his body. Dr. Simon, you have

examined it. Do you think that to cut a man's throat like that

would need great force? Or, perhaps, only a very sharp knife?"

    "I should say that it could not be done with a knife at all,"

said the pale doctor.

    "Have you any thought," resumed Valentin, "of a tool with

which it could be done?"

    "Speaking within modern probabilities, I really haven't," said

the doctor, arching his painful brows. "It's not easy to hack a

neck through even clumsily, and this was a very clean cut. It

could be done with a battle-axe or an old headsman's axe, or an

old two-handed sword."

    "But, good heavens!" cried the Duchess, almost in hysterics,

"there aren't any two-handed swords and battle-axes round here."

    Valentin was still busy with the paper in front of him. "Tell

me," he said, still writing rapidly, "could it have been done with

a long French cavalry sabre?"

    A low knocking came at the door, which, for some unreasonable

reason, curdled everyone's blood like the knocking in Macbeth.

Amid that frozen silence Dr. Simon managed to say: "A sabre--

yes, I suppose it could."

    "Thank you," said Valentin. "Come in, Ivan."

    The confidential Ivan opened the door and ushered in Commandant

Neil O'Brien, whom he had found at last pacing the garden again.

    The Irish officer stood up disordered and defiant on the

threshold. "What do you want with me?" he cried.

    "Please sit down," said Valentin in pleasant, level tones.

"Why, you aren't wearing your sword. Where is it?"

    "I left it on the library table," said O'Brien, his brogue

deepening in his disturbed mood. "It was a nuisance, it was

getting--"

    "Ivan," said Valentin, "please go and get the Commandant's

sword from the library." Then, as the servant vanished, "Lord

Galloway says he saw you leaving the garden just before he found

the corpse. What were you doing in the garden?"

    The Commandant flung himself recklessly into a chair. "Oh,"

he cried in pure Irish, "admirin' the moon. Communing with

Nature, me bhoy."

    A heavy silence sank and endured, and at the end of it came

again that trivial and terrible knocking. Ivan reappeared,

carrying an empty steel scabbard. "This is all I can find," he

said.

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

    There was an inhuman silence in the room, like that sea of

inhuman silence round the dock of the condemned murderer. The

Duchess's weak exclamations had long ago died away. Lord

Galloway's swollen hatred was satisfied and even sobered. The

voice that came was quite unexpected.

    "I think I can tell you," cried Lady Margaret, in that clear,

quivering voice with which a courageous woman speaks publicly. "I

can tell you what Mr. O'Brien was doing in the garden, since he is

bound to silence. He was asking me to marry him. I refused; I

said in my family circumstances I could give him nothing but my

respect. He was a little angry at that; he did not seem to think

much of my respect. I wonder," she added, with rather a wan

smile, "if he will care at all for it now. For I offer it him

now. I will swear anywhere that he never did a thing like this."

    Lord Galloway had edged up to his daughter, and was

intimidating her in what he imagined to be an undertone. "Hold

your tongue, Maggie," he said in a thunderous whisper. "Why

should you shield the fellow? Where's his sword? Where's his

confounded cavalry--"

    He stopped because of the singular stare with which his

daughter was regarding him, a look that was indeed a lurid magnet

for the whole group.

    "You old fool!" she said in a low voice without pretence of

piety, "what do you suppose you are trying to prove? I tell you

this man was innocent while with me. But if he wasn't innocent,

he was still with me. If he murdered a man in the garden, who was

it who must have seen--who must at least have known? Do you

hate Neil so much as to put your own daughter--"

    Lady Galloway screamed. Everyone else sat tingling at the

touch of those satanic tragedies that have been between lovers

before now. They saw the proud, white face of the Scotch

aristocrat and her lover, the Irish adventurer, like old portraits

in a dark house. The long silence was full of formless historical

memories of murdered husbands and poisonous paramours.

    In the centre of this morbid silence an innocent voice said:

"Was it a very long cigar?"

    The change of thought was so sharp that they had to look round

to see who had spoken.

    "I mean," said little Father Brown, from the corner of the

room, "I mean that cigar Mr. Brayne is finishing. It seems nearly

as long as a walking-stick."

    Despite the irrelevance there was assent as well as irritation

in Valentin's face as he lifted his head.

    "Quite right," he remarked sharply. "Ivan, go and see about

Mr. Brayne again, and bring him here at once."

    The instant the factotum had closed the door, Valentin

addressed the girl with an entirely new earnestness.

    "Lady Margaret," he said, "we all feel, I am sure, both

gratitude and admiration for your act in rising above your lower

dignity and explaining the Commandant's conduct. But there is a

hiatus still. Lord Galloway, I understand, met you passing from

the study to the drawing-room, and it was only some minutes

afterwards that he found the garden and the Commandant still

walking there."

    "You have to remember," replied Margaret, with a faint irony

in her voice, "that I had just refused him, so we should scarcely

have come back arm in arm. He is a gentleman, anyhow; and he

loitered behind--and so got charged with murder."

    "In those few moments," said Valentin gravely, "he might

really--"

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

    "Beg pardon, sir," he said, "but Mr. Brayne has left the

house."

    "Left!" cried Valentin, and rose for the first time to his

feet.

    "Gone. Scooted. Evaporated," replied Ivan in humorous

French. "His hat and coat are gone, too, and I'll tell you

something to cap it all. I ran outside the house to find any

traces of him, and I found one, and a big trace, too."

    "What do you mean?" asked Valentin.

    "I'll show you," said his servant, and reappeared with a

flashing naked cavalry sabre, streaked with blood about the point

and edge. Everyone in the room eyed it as if it were a

thunderbolt; but the experienced Ivan went on quite quietly:

    "I found this," he said, "flung among the bushes fifty yards

up the road to Paris. In other words, I found it just where your

respectable Mr. Brayne threw it when he ran away."

    There was again a silence, but of a new sort. Valentin took

the sabre, examined it, reflected with unaffected concentration of

thought, and then turned a respectful face to O'Brien.

"Commandant," he said, "we trust you will always produce this

weapon if it is wanted for police examination. Meanwhile," he

added, slapping the steel back in the ringing scabbard, "let me

return you your sword."

    At the military symbolism of the action the audience could

hardly refrain from applause.

    For Neil O'Brien, indeed, that gesture was the turning-point

of existence. By the time he was wandering in the mysterious

garden again in the colours of the morning the tragic futility of

his ordinary mien had fallen from him; he was a man with many

reasons for happiness. Lord Galloway was a gentleman, and had

offered him an apology. Lady Margaret was something better than a

lady, a woman at least, and had perhaps given him something better

than an apology, as they drifted among the old flowerbeds before

breakfast. The whole company was more lighthearted and humane,

for though the riddle of the death remained, the load of suspicion

was lifted off them all, and sent flying off to Paris with the

strange millionaire--a man they hardly knew. The devil was cast

out of the house--he had cast himself out.

    Still, the riddle remained; and when O'Brien threw himself on

a garden seat beside Dr. Simon, that keenly scientific person at

once resumed it. He did not get much talk out of O'Brien, whose

thoughts were on pleasanter things.

    "I can't say it interests me much," said the Irishman frankly,

"especially as it seems pretty plain now. Apparently Brayne hated

this stranger for some reason; lured him into the garden, and

killed him with my sword. Then he fled to the city, tossing the

sword away as he went. By the way, Ivan tells me the dead man had

a Yankee dollar in his pocket. So he was a countryman of Brayne's,

and that seems to clinch it. I don't see any difficulties about

the business."

    "There are five colossal difficulties," said the doctor

quietly; "like high walls within walls. Don't mistake me. I

don't doubt that Brayne did it; his flight, I fancy, proves that.

But as to how he did it. First difficulty: Why should a man kill

another man with a great hulking sabre, when he can almost kill

him with a pocket knife and put it back in his pocket? Second

difficulty: Why was there no noise or outcry? Does a man commonly

see another come up waving a scimitar and offer no remarks? Third

difficulty: A servant watched the front door all the evening; and

a rat cannot get into Valentin's garden anywhere. How did the

dead man get into the garden? Fourth difficulty: Given the same

conditions, how did Brayne get out of the garden?"

    "And the fifth," said Neil, with eyes fixed on the English

priest who was coming slowly up the path.

    "Is a trifle, I suppose," said the doctor, "but I think an odd

one. When I first saw how the head had been slashed, I supposed

the assassin had struck more than once. But on examination I

found many cuts across the truncated section; in other words, they

were struck after the head was off. Did Brayne hate his foe so

fiendishly that he stood sabring his body in the moonlight?"

    "Horrible!" said O'Brien, and shuddered.

    The little priest, Brown, had arrived while they were talking,

and had waited, with characteristic shyness, till they had

finished. Then he said awkwardly:

    "I say, I'm sorry to interrupt. But I was sent to tell you

the news!"

    "News?" repeated Simon, and stared at him rather painfully

through his glasses.

    "Yes, I'm sorry," said Father Brown mildly. "There's been

another murder, you know."

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

    "And, what's stranger still," continued the priest, with his

dull eye on the rhododendrons, "it's the same disgusting sort;

it's another beheading. They found the second head actually

bleeding into the river, a few yards along Brayne's road to Paris;

so they suppose that he--"

    "Great Heaven!" cried O'Brien. "Is Brayne a monomaniac?"

    "There are American vendettas," said the priest impassively.

Then he added: "They want you to come to the library and see it."

    Commandant O'Brien followed the others towards the inquest,

feeling decidedly sick. As a soldier, he loathed all this

secretive carnage; where were these extravagant amputations going

to stop? First one head was hacked off, and then another; in this

case (he told himself bitterly) it was not true that two heads

were better than one. As he crossed the study he almost staggered

at a shocking coincidence. Upon Valentin's table lay the coloured

picture of yet a third bleeding head; and it was the head of

Valentin himself. A second glance showed him it was only a

Nationalist paper, called The Guillotine, which every week showed

one of its political opponents with rolling eyes and writhing

features just after execution; for Valentin was an anti-clerical

of some note. But O'Brien was an Irishman, with a kind of

chastity even in his sins; and his gorge rose against that great

brutality of the intellect which belongs only to France. He felt

Paris as a whole, from the grotesques on the Gothic churches to

the gross caricatures in the newspapers. He remembered the

gigantic jests of the Revolution. He saw the whole city as one

ugly energy, from the sanguinary sketch lying on Valentin's table

up to where, above a mountain and forest of gargoyles, the great

devil grins on Notre Dame.

    The library was long, low, and dark; what light entered it shot

from under low blinds and had still some of the ruddy tinge of

morning. Valentin and his servant Ivan were waiting for them at

the upper end of a long, slightly-sloping desk, on which lay the

mortal remains, looking enormous in the twilight. The big black

figure and yellow face of the man found in the garden confronted

them essentially unchanged. The second head, which had been

fished from among the river reeds that morning, lay streaming and

dripping beside it; Valentin's men were still seeking to recover

the rest of this second corpse, which was supposed to be afloat.

Father Brown, who did not seem to share O'Brien's sensibilities in

the least, went up to the second head and examined it with his

blinking care. It was little more than a mop of wet white hair,

fringed with silver fire in the red and level morning light; the

face, which seemed of an ugly, empurpled and perhaps criminal

type, had been much battered against trees or stones as it tossed

in the water.

    "Good morning, Commandant O'Brien," said Valentin, with quiet

cordiality. "You have heard of Brayne's last experiment in

butchery, I suppose?"

    Father Brown was still bending over the head with white hair,

and he said, without looking up:

    "I suppose it is quite certain that Brayne cut off this head,

too."

    "Well, it seems common sense," said Valentin, with his hands

in his pockets. "Killed in the same way as the other. Found

within a few yards of the other. And sliced by the same weapon

which we know he carried away."

    "Yes, yes; I know," replied Father Brown submissively. "Yet,

you know, I doubt whether Brayne could have cut off this head."

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

    "Well, doctor," said the priest, looking up blinking, "can a

man cut off his own head? I don't know."

    O'Brien felt an insane universe crashing about his ears; but

the doctor sprang forward with impetuous practicality and pushed

back the wet white hair.

    "Oh, there's no doubt it's Brayne," said the priest quietly.

"He had exactly that chip in the left ear."

    The detective, who had been regarding the priest with steady

and glittering eyes, opened his clenched mouth and said sharply:

"You seem to know a lot about him, Father Brown."

    "I do," said the little man simply. "I've been about with him

for some weeks. He was thinking of joining our church."

    The star of the fanatic sprang into Valentin's eyes; he strode

towards the priest with clenched hands. "And, perhaps," he cried,

with a blasting sneer, "perhaps he was also thinking of leaving

all his money to your church."

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

    "In that case," cried Valentin, with a dreadful smile, "you

may indeed know a great deal about him. About his life and about

his--"

    Commandant O'Brien laid a hand on Valentin's arm. "Drop that

slanderous rubbish, Valentin," he said, "or there may be more

swords yet."

    But Valentin (under the steady, humble gaze of the priest) had

already recovered himself. "Well," he said shortly, "people's

private opinions can wait. You gentlemen are still bound by your

promise to stay; you must enforce it on yourselves--and on each

other. Ivan here will tell you anything more you want to know;

I must get to business and write to the authorities. We can't

keep this quiet any longer. I shall be writing in my study if

there is any more news."

    "Is there any more news, Ivan?" asked Dr. Simon, as the chief

of police strode out of the room.

    "Only one more thing, I think, sir," said Ivan, wrinkling up

his grey old face, "but that's important, too, in its way.

There's that old buffer you found on the lawn," and he pointed

without pretence of reverence at the big black body with the

yellow head. "We've found out who he is, anyhow."

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

    "His name was Arnold Becker," said the under-detective,

"though he went by many aliases. He was a wandering sort of scamp,

and is known to have been in America; so that was where Brayne got

his knife into him. We didn't have much to do with him ourselves,

for he worked mostly in Germany. We've communicated, of course,

with the German police. But, oddly enough, there was a twin

brother of his, named Louis Becker, whom we had a great deal to do

with. In fact, we found it necessary to guillotine him only

yesterday. Well, it's a rum thing, gentlemen, but when I saw that

fellow flat on the lawn I had the greatest jump of my life. If I

hadn't seen Louis Becker guillotined with my own eyes, I'd have

sworn it was Louis Becker lying there in the grass. Then, of

course, I remembered his twin brother in Germany, and following up

the clue--"

    The explanatory Ivan stopped, for the excellent reason that

nobody was listening to him. The Commandant and the doctor were

both staring at Father Brown, who had sprung stiffly to his feet,

and was holding his temples tight like a man in sudden and violent

pain.

    "Stop, stop, stop!" he cried; "stop talking a minute, for I

see half. Will God give me strength? Will my brain make the one

jump and see all? Heaven help me! I used to be fairly good at

thinking. I could paraphrase any page in Aquinas once. Will my

head split--or will it see? I see half--I only see half."

    He buried his head in his hands, and stood in a sort of rigid

torture of thought or prayer, while the other three could only go

on staring at this last prodigy of their wild twelve hours.

    When Father Brown's hands fell they showed a face quite fresh

and serious, like a child's. He heaved a huge sigh, and said:

"Let us get this said and done with as quickly as possible. Look

here, this will be the quickest way to convince you all of the

truth." He turned to the doctor. "Dr. Simon," he said, "you have

a strong head-piece, and I heard you this morning asking the five

hardest questions about this business. Well, if you will ask them

again, I will answer them."

    Simon's pince-nez dropped from his nose in his doubt and

wonder, but he answered at once. "Well, the first question, you

know, is why a man should kill another with a clumsy sabre at all

when a man can kill with a bodkin?"

    "A man cannot behead with a bodkin," said Brown calmly, "and

for this murder beheading was absolutely necessary."

    "Why?" asked O'Brien, with interest.

    "And the next question?" asked Father Brown.

    "Well, why didn't the man cry out or anything?" asked the

doctor; "sabres in gardens are certainly unusual."

    "Twigs," said the priest gloomily, and turned to the window

which looked on the scene of death. "No one saw the point of the

twigs. Why should they lie on that lawn (look at it) so far from

any tree? They were not snapped off; they were chopped off. The

murderer occupied his enemy with some tricks with the sabre,

showing how he could cut a branch in mid-air, or what-not. Then,

while his enemy bent down to see the result, a silent slash, and

the head fell."

    "Well," said the doctor slowly, "that seems plausible enough.

But my next two questions will stump anyone."

    The priest still stood looking critically out of the window

and waited.

    "You know how all the garden was sealed up like an air-tight

chamber," went on the doctor. "Well, how did the strange man get

into the garden?"

    Without turning round, the little priest answered: "There

never was any strange man in the garden."

    There was a silence, and then a sudden cackle of almost

childish laughter relieved the strain. The absurdity of Brown's

remark moved Ivan to open taunts.

    "Oh!" he cried; "then we didn't lug a great fat corpse on to a

sofa last night? He hadn't got into the garden, I suppose?"

    "Got into the garden?" repeated Brown reflectively. "No, not

entirely."

    "Hang it all," cried Simon, "a man gets into a garden, or he

doesn't."

    "Not necessarily," said the priest, with a faint smile. "What

is the nest question, doctor?"

    "I fancy you're ill," exclaimed Dr. Simon sharply; "but I'll

ask the next question if you like. How did Brayne get out of the

garden?"

    "He didn't get out of the garden," said the priest, still

looking out of the window.

    "Didn't get out of the garden?" exploded Simon.

    "Not completely," said Father Brown.

    Simon shook his fists in a frenzy of French logic. "A man

gets out of a garden, or he doesn't," he cried.

    "Not always," said Father Brown.

    Dr. Simon sprang to his feet impatiently. "I have no time to

spare on such senseless talk," he cried angrily. "If you can't

understand a man being on one side of a wall or the other, I won't

trouble you further."

    "Doctor," said the cleric very gently, "we have always got on

very pleasantly together. If only for the sake of old friendship,

stop and tell me your fifth question."

    The impatient Simon sank into a chair by the door and said

briefly: "The head and shoulders were cut about in a queer way.

It seemed to be done after death."

    "Yes," said the motionless priest, "it was done so as to make

you assume exactly the one simple falsehood that you did assume.

It was done to make you take for granted that the head belonged to

the body."

    The borderland of the brain, where all the monsters are made,

moved horribly in the Gaelic O'Brien. He felt the chaotic

presence of all the horse-men and fish-women that man's unnatural

fancy has begotten. A voice older than his first fathers seemed

saying in his ear: "Keep out of the monstrous garden where grows

the tree with double fruit. Avoid the evil garden where died the

man with two heads." Yet, while these shameful symbolic shapes

passed across the ancient mirror of his Irish soul, his

Frenchified intellect was quite alert, and was watching the odd

priest as closely and incredulously as all the rest.

    Father Brown had turned round at last, and stood against the

window, with his face in dense shadow; but even in that shadow

they could see it was pale as ashes. Nevertheless, he spoke quite

sensibly, as if there were no Gaelic souls on earth.

    "Gentlemen," he said, "you did not find the strange body of

Becker in the garden. You did not find any strange body in the

garden. In face of Dr. Simon's rationalism, I still affirm that

Becker was only partly present. Look here!" (pointing to the

black bulk of the mysterious corpse) "you never saw that man in

your lives. Did you ever see this man?"

    He rapidly rolled away the bald, yellow head of the unknown,

and put in its place the white-maned head beside it. And there,

complete, unified, unmistakable, lay Julius K. Brayne.

    "The murderer," went on Brown quietly, "hacked off his enemy's

head and flung the sword far over the wall. But he was too clever

to fling the sword only. He flung the head over the wall also.

Then he had only to clap on another head to the corpse, and (as he

insisted on a private inquest) you all imagined a totally new

man."

    "Clap on another head!" said O'Brien staring. "What other

head? Heads don't grow on garden bushes, do they?"

    "No," said Father Brown huskily, and looking at his boots;

"there is only one place where they grow. They grow in the basket

of the guillotine, beside which the chief of police, Aristide

Valentin, was standing not an hour before the murder. Oh, my

friends, hear me a minute more before you tear me in pieces.

Valentin is an honest man, if being mad for an arguable cause is

honesty. But did you never see in that cold, grey eye of his that

he is mad! He would do anything, anything, to break what he calls

the superstition of the Cross. He has fought for it and starved

for it, and now he has murdered for it. Brayne's crazy millions

had hitherto been scattered among so many sects that they did

little to alter the balance of things. But Valentin heard a

whisper that Brayne, like so many scatter-brained sceptics, was

drifting to us; and that was quite a different thing. Brayne

would pour supplies into the impoverished and pugnacious Church of

France; he would support six Nationalist newspapers like The

Guillotine. The battle was already balanced on a point, and the

fanatic took flame at the risk. He resolved to destroy the

millionaire, and he did it as one would expect the greatest of

detectives to commit his only crime. He abstracted the severed

head of Becker on some criminological excuse, and took it home in

his official box. He had that last argument with Brayne, that

Lord Galloway did not hear the end of; that failing, he led him

out into the sealed garden, talked about swordsmanship, used twigs

and a sabre for illustration, and--"

    Ivan of the Scar sprang up. "You lunatic," he yelled; "you'll

go to my master now, if I take you by--"

    "Why, I was going there," said Brown heavily; "I must ask him

to confess, and all that."

    Driving the unhappy Brown before them like a hostage or

sacrifice, they rushed together into the sudden stillness of

Valentin's study.

    The great detective sat at his desk apparently too occupied to

hear their turbulent entrance. They paused a moment, and then

something in the look of that upright and elegant back made the

doctor run forward suddenly. A touch and a glance showed him that

there was a small box of pills at Valentin's elbow, and that

Valentin was dead in his chair; and on the blind face of the

suicide was more than the pride of Cato.

 

    The Queer Feet

 

If you meet a member of that select club, "The Twelve True

Fishermen," entering the Vernon Hotel for the annual club dinner,

you will observe, as he takes off his overcoat, that his evening

coat is green and not black. If (supposing that you have the

star-defying audacity to address such a being) you ask him why, he

will probably answer that he does it to avoid being mistaken for a

waiter. You will then retire crushed. But you will leave behind

you a mystery as yet unsolved and a tale worth telling.

    If (to pursue the same vein of improbable conjecture) you were

to meet a mild, hard-working little priest, named Father Brown,

and were to ask him what he thought was the most singular luck of

his life, he would probably reply that upon the whole his best

stroke was at the Vernon Hotel, where he had averted a crime and,

perhaps, saved a soul, merely by listening to a few footsteps in a

passage. He is perhaps a little proud of this wild and wonderful

guess of his, and it is possible that he might refer to it. But

since it is immeasurably unlikely that you will ever rise high

enough in the social world to find "The Twelve True Fishermen," or

that you will ever sink low enough among slums and criminals to

find Father Brown, I fear you will never hear the story at all

unless you hear it from me.

    The Vernon Hotel at which The Twelve True Fishermen held their

annual dinners was an institution such as can only exist in an

oligarchical society which has almost gone mad on good manners.

It was that topsy-turvy product--an "exclusive" commercial

enterprise. That is, it was a thing which paid not by attracting

people, but actually by turning people away. In the heart of a

plutocracy tradesmen become cunning enough to be more fastidious

than their customers. They positively create difficulties so that

their wealthy and weary clients may spend money and diplomacy in

overcoming them. If there were a fashionable hotel in London

which no man could enter who was under six foot, society would

meekly make up parties of six-foot men to dine in it. If there

were an expensive restaurant which by a mere caprice of its

proprietor was only open on Thursday afternoon, it would be

crowded on Thursday afternoon. The Vernon Hotel stood, as if by

accident, in the corner of a square in Belgravia. It was a small

hotel; and a very inconvenient one. But its very inconveniences

were considered as walls protecting a particular class. One

inconvenience, in particular, was held to be of vital importance:

the fact that practically only twenty-four people could dine in

the place at once. The only big dinner table was the celebrated

terrace table, which stood open to the air on a sort of veranda

overlooking one of the most exquisite old gardens in London. Thus

it happened that even the twenty-four seats at this table could

only be enjoyed in warm weather; and this making the enjoyment yet

more difficult made it yet more desired. The existing owner of

the hotel was a Jew named Lever; and he made nearly a million out

of it, by making it difficult to get into. Of course he combined

with this limitation in the scope of his enterprise the most

careful polish in its performance. The wines and cooking were

really as good as any in Europe, and the demeanour of the

attendants exactly mirrored the fixed mood of the English upper

class. The proprietor knew all his waiters like the fingers on

his hand; there were only fifteen of them all told. It was much

easier to become a Member of Parliament than to become a waiter in

that hotel. Each waiter was trained in terrible silence and

smoothness, as if he were a gentleman's servant. And, indeed,

there was generally at least one waiter to every gentleman who

dined.

    The club of The Twelve True Fishermen would not have consented

to dine anywhere but in such a place, for it insisted on a

luxurious privacy; and would have been quite upset by the mere

thought that any other club was even dining in the same building.

On the occasion of their annual dinner the Fishermen were in the

habit of exposing all their treasures, as if they were in a

private house, especially the celebrated set of fish knives and

forks which were, as it were, the insignia of the society, each

being exquisitely wrought in silver in the form of a fish, and

each loaded at the hilt with one large pearl. These were always

laid out for the fish course, and the fish course was always the

most magnificent in that magnificent repast. The society had a

vast number of ceremonies and observances, but it had no history

and no object; that was where it was so very aristocratic. You

did not have to be anything in order to be one of the Twelve

Fishers; unless you were already a certain sort of person, you

never even heard of them. It had been in existence twelve years.

Its president was Mr. Audley. Its vice-president was the Duke of

Chester.

    If I have in any degree conveyed the atmosphere of this

appalling hotel, the reader may feel a natural wonder as to how I

came to know anything about it, and may even speculate as to how

so ordinary a person as my friend Father Brown came to find himself

in that golden galley. As far as that is concerned, my story is

simple, or even vulgar. There is in the world a very aged rioter

and demagogue who breaks into the most refined retreats with the

dreadful information that all men are brothers, and wherever this

leveller went on his pale horse it was Father Brown's trade to

follow. One of the waiters, an Italian, had been struck down with

a paralytic stroke that afternoon; and his Jewish employer,

marvelling mildly at such superstitions, had consented to send for

the nearest Popish priest. With what the waiter confessed to

Father Brown we are not concerned, for the excellent reason that

that cleric kept it to himself; but apparently it involved him in

writing out a note or statement for the conveying of some message

or the righting of some wrong. Father Brown, therefore, with a

meek impudence which he would have shown equally in Buckingham

Palace, asked to be provided with a room and writing materials.

Mr. Lever was torn in two. He was a kind man, and had also that

bad imitation of kindness, the dislike of any difficulty or scene.

At the same time the presence of one unusual stranger in his hotel

that evening was like a speck of dirt on something just cleaned.

There was never any borderland or anteroom in the Vernon Hotel, no

people waiting in the hall, no customers coming in on chance.

There were fifteen waiters. There were twelve guests. It would

be as startling to find a new guest in the hotel that night as to

find a new brother taking breakfast or tea in one's own family.

Moreover, the priest's appearance was second-rate and his clothes

muddy; a mere glimpse of him afar off might precipitate a crisis

in the club. Mr. Lever at last hit on a plan to cover, since he

might not obliterate, the disgrace. When you enter (as you never

will) the Vernon Hotel, you pass down a short passage decorated

with a few dingy but important pictures, and come to the main

vestibule and lounge which opens on your right into passages

leading to the public rooms, and on your left to a similar passage

pointing to the kitchens and offices of the hotel. Immediately on

your left hand is the corner of a glass office, which abuts upon

the lounge--a house within a house, so to speak, like the old

hotel bar which probably once occupied its place.

    In this office sat the representative of the proprietor

(nobody in this place ever appeared in person if he could help

it), and just beyond the office, on the way to the servants'

quarters, was the gentlemen's cloak room, the last boundary of the

gentlemen's domain. But between the office and the cloak room was

a small private room without other outlet, sometimes used by the

proprietor for delicate and important matters, such as lending a

duke a thousand pounds or declining to lend him sixpence. It is a

mark of the magnificent tolerance of Mr. Lever that he permitted

this holy place to be for about half an hour profaned by a mere

priest, scribbling away on a piece of paper. The story which

Father Brown was writing down was very likely a much better story

than this one, only it will never be known. I can merely state

that it was very nearly as long, and that the last two or three

paragraphs of it were the least exciting and absorbing.

    For it was by the time that he had reached these that the

priest began a little to allow his thoughts to wander and his

animal senses, which were commonly keen, to awaken. The time of

darkness and dinner was drawing on; his own forgotten little room

was without a light, and perhaps the gathering gloom, as

occasionally happens, sharpened the sense of sound. As Father

Brown wrote the last and least essential part of his document, he

caught himself writing to the rhythm of a recurrent noise outside,

just as one sometimes thinks to the tune of a railway train. When

he became conscious of the thing he found what it was: only the

ordinary patter of feet passing the door, which in an hotel was no

very unlikely matter. Nevertheless, he stared at the darkened

ceiling, and listened to the sound. After he had listened for a

few seconds dreamily, he got to his feet and listened intently,

with his head a little on one side. Then he sat down again and

buried his brow in his hands, now not merely listening, but

listening and thinking also.

    The footsteps outside at any given moment were such as one

might hear in any hotel; and yet, taken as a whole, there was

something very strange about them. There were no other footsteps.

It was always a very silent house, for the few familiar guests

went at once to their own apartments, and the well-trained waiters

were told to be almost invisible until they were wanted. One

could not conceive any place where there was less reason to

apprehend anything irregular. But these footsteps were so odd

that one could not decide to call them regular or irregular.

Father Brown followed them with his finger on the edge of the

table, like a man trying to learn a tune on the piano.

    First, there came a long rush of rapid little steps, such as a

light man might make in winning a walking race. At a certain

point they stopped and changed to a sort of slow, swinging stamp,

numbering not a quarter of the steps, but occupying about the same

time. The moment the last echoing stamp had died away would come

again the run or ripple of light, hurrying feet, and then again

the thud of the heavier walking. It was certainly the same pair

of boots, partly because (as has been said) there were no other

boots about, and partly because they had a small but unmistakable

creak in them. Father Brown had the kind of head that cannot help

asking questions; and on this apparently trivial question his head

almost split. He had seen men run in order to jump. He had seen

men run in order to slide. But why on earth should a man run in

order to walk? Or, again, why should he walk in order to run?

Yet no other description would cover the antics of this invisible

pair of legs. The man was either walking very fast down one-half

of the corridor in order to walk very slow down the other half; or

he was walking very slow at one end to have the rapture of walking

fast at the other. Neither suggestion seemed to make much sense.

His brain was growing darker and darker, like his room.

    Yet, as he began to think steadily, the very blackness of his

cell seemed to make his thoughts more vivid; he began to see as in

a kind of vision the fantastic feet capering along the corridor in

unnatural or symbolic attitudes. Was it a heathen religious dance?

Or some entirely new kind of scientific exercise? Father Brown

began to ask himself with more exactness what the steps suggested.

Taking the slow step first: it certainly was not the step of the

proprietor. Men of his type walk with a rapid waddle, or they sit

still. It could not be any servant or messenger waiting for

directions. It did not sound like it. The poorer orders (in an

oligarchy) sometimes lurch about when they are slightly drunk, but

generally, and especially in such gorgeous scenes, they stand or

sit in constrained attitudes. No; that heavy yet springy step,

with a kind of careless emphasis, not specially noisy, yet not

caring what noise it made, belonged to only one of the animals of

this earth. It was a gentleman of western Europe, and probably

one who had never worked for his living.

    Just as he came to this solid certainty, the step changed to

the quicker one, and ran past the door as feverishly as a rat.

The listener remarked that though this step was much swifter it

was also much more noiseless, almost as if the man were walking on

tiptoe. Yet it was not associated in his mind with secrecy, but

with something else--something that he could not remember. He

was maddened by one of those half-memories that make a man feel

half-witted. Surely he had heard that strange, swift walking

somewhere. Suddenly he sprang to his feet with a new idea in his

head, and walked to the door. His room had no direct outlet on

the passage, but let on one side into the glass office, and on the

other into the cloak room beyond. He tried the door into the

office, and found it locked. Then he looked at the window, now a

square pane full of purple cloud cleft by livid sunset, and for an

instant he smelt evil as a dog smells rats.

    The rational part of him (whether the wiser or not) regained

its supremacy. He remembered that the proprietor had told him

that he should lock the door, and would come later to release him.

He told himself that twenty things he had not thought of might

explain the eccentric sounds outside; he reminded himself that

there was just enough light left to finish his own proper work.

Bringing his paper to the window so as to catch the last stormy

evening light, he resolutely plunged once more into the almost

completed record. He had written for about twenty minutes, bending

closer and closer to his paper in the lessening light; then

suddenly he sat upright. He had heard the strange feet once more.

    This time they had a third oddity. Previously the unknown man

had walked, with levity indeed and lightning quickness, but he had

walked. This time he ran. One could hear the swift, soft,

bounding steps coming along the corridor, like the pads of a

fleeing and leaping panther. Whoever was coming was a very strong,

active man, in still yet tearing excitement. Yet, when the sound

had swept up to the office like a sort of whispering whirlwind, it

suddenly changed again to the old slow, swaggering stamp.

    Father Brown flung down his paper, and, knowing the office door

to be locked, went at once into the cloak room on the other side.

The attendant of this place was temporarily absent, probably

because the only guests were at dinner and his office was a

sinecure. After groping through a grey forest of overcoats, he

found that the dim cloak room opened on the lighted corridor in

the form of a sort of counter or half-door, like most of the

counters across which we have all handed umbrellas and received

tickets. There was a light immediately above the semicircular arch

of this opening. It threw little illumination on Father Brown

himself, who seemed a mere dark outline against the dim sunset

window behind him. But it threw an almost theatrical light on the

man who stood outside the cloak room in the corridor.

    He was an elegant man in very plain evening dress; tall, but

with an air of not taking up much room; one felt that he could

have slid along like a shadow where many smaller men would have

been obvious and obstructive. His face, now flung back in the

lamplight, was swarthy and vivacious, the face of a foreigner.

His figure was good, his manners good humoured and confident; a

critic could only say that his black coat was a shade below his

figure and manners, and even bulged and bagged in an odd way. The

moment he caught sight of Brown's black silhouette against the

sunset, he tossed down a scrap of paper with a number and called

out with amiable authority: "I want my hat and coat, please; I

find I have to go away at once."

    Father Brown took the paper without a word, and obediently

went to look for the coat; it was not the first menial work he had

done in his life. He brought it and laid it on the counter;

meanwhile, the strange gentleman who had been feeling in his

waistcoat pocket, said laughing: "I haven't got any silver; you