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Title: The wisdom of Father Brown

Author: G. K. Chesterton

Release date: February 1, 1995 [eBook #223]
Most recently updated: January 28, 2021

Language: English

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

Credits: Produced by Martin Ward, and David Widger

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

THE WISDOM OF FATHER
BROWN

By G. K. Chesterton

To
LUCIAN OLDERSHAW

Contents

ONE — The Absence of Mr Glass
TWO — The Paradise of Thieves
THREE — The Duel of Dr Hirsch
FOUR — The Man in the Passage
FIVE — The Mistake of the Machine
SIX — The Head of Caesar
SEVEN — The Purple Wig
EIGHT — The Perishing of the Pendragons
NINE — The God of the Gongs
TEN — The Salad of Colonel Cray
ELEVEN — The Strange Crime of John
Boulnois
TWELVE — The Fairy Tale of Father
Brown

ONE — The Absence of Mr Glass
THE consulting-rooms of Dr Orion Hood, the eminent criminologist and
specialist in certain moral disorders, lay along the sea-front at Scarborough,
in a series of very large and well-lighted french windows, which showed the
North Sea like one endless outer wall of blue-green marble. In such a place
the sea had something of the monotony of a blue-green dado: for the
chambers themselves were ruled throughout by a terrible tidiness not unlike
the terrible tidiness of the sea. It must not be supposed that Dr Hood’s
apartments excluded luxury, or even poetry. These things were there, in
their place; but one felt that they were never allowed out of their place.
Luxury was there: there stood upon a special table eight or ten boxes of the
best cigars; but they were built upon a plan so that the strongest were
always nearest the wall and the mildest nearest the window. A tantalus
containing three kinds of spirit, all of a liqueur excellence, stood always on
this table of luxury; but the fanciful have asserted that the whisky, brandy,
and rum seemed always to stand at the same level. Poetry was there: the
left-hand corner of the room was lined with as complete a set of English
classics as the right hand could show of English and foreign physiologists.
But if one took a volume of Chaucer or Shelley from that rank, its absence
irritated the mind like a gap in a man’s front teeth. One could not say the
books were never read; probably they were, but there was a sense of their
being chained to their places, like the Bibles in the old churches. Dr Hood
treated his private book-shelf as if it were a public library. And if this strict
scientific intangibility steeped even the shelves laden with lyrics and
ballads and the tables laden with drink and tobacco, it goes without saying
that yet more of such heathen holiness protected the other shelves that held
the specialist’s library, and the other tables that sustained the frail and even
fairylike instruments of chemistry or mechanics.
Dr Hood paced the length of his string of apartments, bounded—as the
boys’ geographies say—on the east by the North Sea and on the west by the
serried ranks of his sociological and criminologist library. He was clad in an
artist’s velvet, but with none of an artist’s negligence; his hair was heavily
shot with grey, but growing thick and healthy; his face was lean, but

sanguine and expectant. Everything about him and his room indicated
something at once rigid and restless, like that great northern sea by which
(on pure principles of hygiene) he had built his home.
Fate, being in a funny mood, pushed the door open and introduced into
those long, strict, sea-flanked apartments one who was perhaps the most
startling opposite of them and their master. In answer to a curt but civil
summons, the door opened inwards and there shambled into the room a
shapeless little figure, which seemed to find its own hat and umbrella as
unmanageable as a mass of luggage. The umbrella was a black and prosaic
bundle long past repair; the hat was a broad-curved black hat, clerical but
not common in England; the man was the very embodiment of all that is
homely and helpless.
The doctor regarded the new-comer with a restrained astonishment, not
unlike that he would have shown if some huge but obviously harmless sea-
beast had crawled into his room. The new-comer regarded the doctor with
that beaming but breathless geniality which characterizes a corpulent
charwoman who has just managed to stuff herself into an omnibus. It is a
rich confusion of social self-congratulation and bodily disarray. His hat
tumbled to the carpet, his heavy umbrella slipped between his knees with a
thud; he reached after the one and ducked after the other, but with an
unimpaired smile on his round face spoke simultaneously as follows:
“My name is Brown. Pray excuse me. I’ve come about that business of
the MacNabs. I have heard, you often help people out of such troubles. Pray
excuse me if I am wrong.”
By this time he had sprawlingly recovered the hat, and made an odd little
bobbing bow over it, as if setting everything quite right.
“I hardly understand you,” replied the scientist, with a cold intensity of
manner. “I fear you have mistaken the chambers. I am Dr Hood, and my
work is almost entirely literary and educational. It is true that I have
sometimes been consulted by the police in cases of peculiar difficulty and
importance, but—”
“Oh, this is of the greatest importance,” broke in the little man called
Brown. “Why, her mother won’t let them get engaged.” And he leaned back
in his chair in radiant rationality.
The brows of Dr Hood were drawn down darkly, but the eyes under them
were bright with something that might be anger or might be amusement.

“And still,” he said, “I do not quite understand.”
“You see, they want to get married,” said the man with the clerical hat.
“Maggie MacNab and young Todhunter want to get married. Now, what can
be more important than that?”
The great Orion Hood’s scientific triumphs had deprived him of many
things—some said of his health, others of his God; but they had not wholly
despoiled him of his sense of the absurd. At the last plea of the ingenuous
priest a chuckle broke out of him from inside, and he threw himself into an
arm-chair in an ironical attitude of the consulting physician.
“Mr Brown,” he said gravely, “it is quite fourteen and a half years since I
was personally asked to test a personal problem: then it was the case of an
attempt to poison the French President at a Lord Mayor’s Banquet. It is
now, I understand, a question of whether some friend of yours called
Maggie is a suitable fiancee for some friend of hers called Todhunter. Well,
Mr Brown, I am a sportsman. I will take it on. I will give the MacNab
family my best advice, as good as I gave the French Republic and the King
of England—no, better: fourteen years better. I have nothing else to do this
afternoon. Tell me your story.”
The little clergyman called Brown thanked him with unquestionable
warmth, but still with a queer kind of simplicity. It was rather as if he were
thanking a stranger in a smoking-room for some trouble in passing the
matches, than as if he were (as he was) practically thanking the Curator of
Kew Gardens for coming with him into a field to find a four-leaved clover.
With scarcely a semi-colon after his hearty thanks, the little man began his
recital:
“I told you my name was Brown; well, that’s the fact, and I’m the priest
of the little Catholic Church I dare say you’ve seen beyond those straggly
streets, where the town ends towards the north. In the last and straggliest of
those streets which runs along the sea like a sea-wall there is a very honest
but rather sharp-tempered member of my flock, a widow called MacNab.
She has one daughter, and she lets lodgings, and between her and the
daughter, and between her and the lodgers—well, I dare say there is a great
deal to be said on both sides. At present she has only one lodger, the young
man called Todhunter; but he has given more trouble than all the rest, for he
wants to marry the young woman of the house.”

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

A man warmly concerned with any large theories has always a relish for
applying them to any triviality. The great specialist having condescended to
the priest’s simplicity, condescended expansively. He settled himself with
comfort in his arm-chair and began to talk in the tone of a somewhat
absent-minded lecturer:
“Even in a minute instance, it is best to look first to the main tendencies
of Nature. A particular flower may not be dead in early winter, but the
flowers are dying; a particular pebble may never be wetted with the tide,
but the tide is coming in. To the scientific eye all human history is a series
of collective movements, destructions or migrations, like the massacre of
flies in winter or the return of birds in spring. Now the root fact in all
history is Race. Race produces religion; Race produces legal and ethical
wars. There is no stronger case than that of the wild, unworldly and
perishing stock which we commonly call the Celts, of whom your friends
the MacNabs are specimens. Small, swarthy, and of this dreamy and
drifting blood, they accept easily the superstitious explanation of any
incidents, just as they still accept (you will excuse me for saying) that
superstitious explanation of all incidents which you and your Church
represent. It is not remarkable that such people, with the sea moaning
behind them and the Church (excuse me again) droning in front of them,
should put fantastic features into what are probably plain events. You, with
your small parochial responsibilities, see only this particular Mrs MacNab,
terrified with this particular tale of two voices and a tall man out of the sea.
But the man with the scientific imagination sees, as it were, the whole clans
of MacNab scattered over the whole world, in its ultimate average as
uniform as a tribe of birds. He sees thousands of Mrs MacNabs, in
thousands of houses, dropping their little drop of morbidity in the tea-cups
of their friends; he sees—”
Before the scientist could conclude his sentence, another and more
impatient summons sounded from without; someone with swishing skirts
was marshalled hurriedly down the corridor, and the door opened on a
young girl, decently dressed but disordered and red-hot with haste. She had
sea-blown blonde hair, and would have been entirely beautiful if her cheek-
bones had not been, in the Scotch manner, a little high in relief as well as in
colour. Her apology was almost as abrupt as a command.

“I’m sorry to interrupt you, sir,” she said, “but I had to follow Father
Brown at once; it’s nothing less than life or death.”
Father Brown began to get to his feet in some disorder. “Why, what has
happened, Maggie?” he said.
“James has been murdered, for all I can make out,” answered the girl,
still breathing hard from her rush. “That man Glass has been with him
again; I heard them talking through the door quite plain. Two separate
voices: for James speaks low, with a burr, and the other voice was high and
quavery.”
“That man Glass?” repeated the priest in some perplexity.
“I know his name is Glass,” answered the girl, in great impatience. “I
heard it through the door. They were quarrelling—about money, I think—
for I heard James say again and again, ‘That’s right, Mr Glass,’ or ‘No, Mr
Glass,’ and then, ‘Two or three, Mr Glass.’ But we’re talking too much; you
must come at once, and there may be time yet.”
“But time for what?” asked Dr Hood, who had been studying the young
lady with marked interest. “What is there about Mr Glass and his money
troubles that should impel such urgency?”
“I tried to break down the door and couldn’t,” answered the girl shortly,
“Then I ran to the back-yard, and managed to climb on to the window-sill
that looks into the room. It was all dim, and seemed to be empty, but I
swear I saw James lying huddled up in a corner, as if he were drugged or
strangled.”
“This is very serious,” said Father Brown, gathering his errant hat and
umbrella and standing up; “in point of fact I was just putting your case
before this gentleman, and his view—”
“Has been largely altered,” said the scientist gravely. “I do not think this
young lady is so Celtic as I had supposed. As I have nothing else to do, I
will put on my hat and stroll down town with you.”
In a few minutes all three were approaching the dreary tail of the
MacNabs’ street: the girl with the stern and breathless stride of the
mountaineer, the criminologist with a lounging grace (which was not
without a certain leopard-like swiftness), and the priest at an energetic trot
entirely devoid of distinction. The aspect of this edge of the town was not
entirely without justification for the doctor’s hints about desolate moods

and environments. The scattered houses stood farther and farther apart in a
broken string along the seashore; the afternoon was closing with a
premature and partly lurid twilight; the sea was of an inky purple and
murmuring ominously. In the scrappy back garden of the MacNabs which
ran down towards the sand, two black, barren-looking trees stood up like
demon hands held up in astonishment, and as Mrs MacNab ran down the
street to meet them with lean hands similarly spread, and her fierce face in
shadow, she was a little like a demon herself. The doctor and the priest
made scant reply to her shrill reiterations of her daughter’s story, with more
disturbing details of her own, to the divided vows of vengeance against Mr
Glass for murdering, and against Mr Todhunter for being murdered, or
against the latter for having dared to want to marry her daughter, and for not
having lived to do it. They passed through the narrow passage in the front
of the house until they came to the lodger’s door at the back, and there Dr
Hood, with the trick of an old detective, put his shoulder sharply to the
panel and burst in the door.
It opened on a scene of silent catastrophe. No one seeing it, even for a
flash, could doubt that the room had been the theatre of some thrilling
collision between two, or perhaps more, persons. Playing-cards lay littered
across the table or fluttered about the floor as if a game had been
interrupted. Two wine glasses stood ready for wine on a side-table, but a
third lay smashed in a star of crystal upon the carpet. A few feet from it lay
what looked like a long knife or short sword, straight, but with an
ornamental and pictured handle, its dull blade just caught a grey glint from
the dreary window behind, which showed the black trees against the leaden
level of the sea. Towards the opposite corner of the room was rolled a
gentleman’s silk top hat, as if it had just been knocked off his head; so much
so, indeed, that one almost looked to see it still rolling. And in the corner
behind it, thrown like a sack of potatoes, but corded like a railway trunk, lay
Mr James Todhunter, with a scarf across his mouth, and six or seven ropes
knotted round his elbows and ankles. His brown eyes were alive and shifted
alertly.
Dr Orion Hood paused for one instant on the doormat and drank in the
whole scene of voiceless violence. Then he stepped swiftly across the
carpet, picked up the tall silk hat, and gravely put it upon the head of the yet
pinioned Todhunter. It was so much too large for him that it almost slipped
down on to his shoulders.

“Mr Glass’s hat,” said the doctor, returning with it and peering into the
inside with a pocket lens. “How to explain the absence of Mr Glass and the
presence of Mr Glass’s hat? For Mr Glass is not a careless man with his
clothes. That hat is of a stylish shape and systematically brushed and
burnished, though not very new. An old dandy, I should think.”
“But, good heavens!” called out Miss MacNab, “aren’t you going to untie
the man first?”
“I say ‘old’ with intention, though not with certainty” continued the
expositor; “my reason for it might seem a little far-fetched. The hair of
human beings falls out in very varying degrees, but almost always falls out
slightly, and with the lens I should see the tiny hairs in a hat recently worn.
It has none, which leads me to guess that Mr Glass is bald. Now when this
is taken with the high-pitched and querulous voice which Miss MacNab
described so vividly (patience, my dear lady, patience), when we take the
hairless head together with the tone common in senile anger, I should think
we may deduce some advance in years. Nevertheless, he was probably
vigorous, and he was almost certainly tall. I might rely in some degree on
the story of his previous appearance at the window, as a tall man in a silk
hat, but I think I have more exact indication. This wineglass has been
smashed all over the place, but one of its splinters lies on the high bracket
beside the mantelpiece. No such fragment could have fallen there if the
vessel had been smashed in the hand of a comparatively short man like Mr
Todhunter.”
“By the way,” said Father Brown, “might it not be as well to untie Mr
Todhunter?”
“Our lesson from the drinking-vessels does not end here,” proceeded the
specialist. “I may say at once that it is possible that the man Glass was bald
or nervous through dissipation rather than age. Mr Todhunter, as has been
remarked, is a quiet thrifty gentleman, essentially an abstainer. These cards
and wine-cups are no part of his normal habit; they have been produced for
a particular companion. But, as it happens, we may go farther. Mr
Todhunter may or may not possess this wine-service, but there is no
appearance of his possessing any wine. What, then, were these vessels to
contain? I would at once suggest some brandy or whisky, perhaps of a
luxurious sort, from a flask in the pocket of Mr Glass. We have thus
something like a picture of the man, or at least of the type: tall, elderly,

fashionable, but somewhat frayed, certainly fond of play and strong waters,
perhaps rather too fond of them. Mr Glass is a gentleman not unknown on
the fringes of society.”
“Look here,” cried the young woman, “if you don’t let me pass to untie
him I’ll run outside and scream for the police.”
“I should not advise you, Miss MacNab,” said Dr Hood gravely, “to be in
any hurry to fetch the police. Father Brown, I seriously ask you to compose
your flock, for their sakes, not for mine. Well, we have seen something of
the figure and quality of Mr Glass; what are the chief facts known of Mr
Todhunter? They are substantially three: that he is economical, that he is
more or less wealthy, and that he has a secret. Now, surely it is obvious that
there are the three chief marks of the kind of man who is blackmailed. And
surely it is equally obvious that the faded finery, the profligate habits, and
the shrill irritation of Mr Glass are the unmistakable marks of the kind of
man who blackmails him. We have the two typical figures of a tragedy of
hush money: on the one hand, the respectable man with a mystery; on the
other, the West-end vulture with a scent for a mystery. These two men have
met here today and have quarrelled, using blows and a bare weapon.”
“Are you going to take those ropes off?” asked the girl stubbornly.
Dr Hood replaced the silk hat carefully on the side table, and went across
to the captive. He studied him intently, even moving him a little and half-
turning him round by the shoulders, but he only answered:
“No; I think these ropes will do very well till your friends the police
bring the handcuffs.”
Father Brown, who had been looking dully at the carpet, lifted his round
face and said: “What do you mean?”
The man of science had picked up the peculiar dagger-sword from the
carpet and was examining it intently as he answered:
“Because you find Mr Todhunter tied up,” he said, “you all jump to the
conclusion that Mr Glass had tied him up; and then, I suppose, escaped.
There are four objections to this: First, why should a gentleman so dressy as
our friend Glass leave his hat behind him, if he left of his own free will?
Second,” he continued, moving towards the window, “this is the only exit,
and it is locked on the inside. Third, this blade here has a tiny touch of
blood at the point, but there is no wound on Mr Todhunter. Mr Glass took

that wound away with him, dead or alive. Add to all this primary
probability. It is much more likely that the blackmailed person would try to
kill his incubus, rather than that the blackmailer would try to kill the goose
that lays his golden egg. There, I think, we have a pretty complete story.”
“But the ropes?” inquired the priest, whose eyes had remained open with
a rather vacant admiration.
“Ah, the ropes,” said the expert with a singular intonation. “Miss
MacNab very much wanted to know why I did not set Mr Todhunter free
from his ropes. Well, I will tell her. I did not do it because Mr Todhunter
can set himself free from them at any minute he chooses.”
“What?” cried the audience on quite different notes of astonishment.
“I have looked at all the knots on Mr Todhunter,” reiterated Hood quietly.
“I happen to know something about knots; they are quite a branch of
criminal science. Every one of those knots he has made himself and could
loosen himself; not one of them would have been made by an enemy really
trying to pinion him. The whole of this affair of the ropes is a clever fake, to
make us think him the victim of the struggle instead of the wretched Glass,
whose corpse may be hidden in the garden or stuffed up the chimney.”
There was a rather depressed silence; the room was darkening, the sea-
blighted boughs of the garden trees looked leaner and blacker than ever, yet
they seemed to have come nearer to the window. One could almost fancy
they were sea-monsters like krakens or cuttlefish, writhing polypi who had
crawled up from the sea to see the end of this tragedy, even as he, the villain
and victim of it, the terrible man in the tall hat, had once crawled up from
the sea. For the whole air was dense with the morbidity of blackmail, which
is the most morbid of human things, because it is a crime concealing a
crime; a black plaster on a blacker wound.
The face of the little Catholic priest, which was commonly complacent
and even comic, had suddenly become knotted with a curious frown. It was
not the blank curiosity of his first innocence. It was rather that creative
curiosity which comes when a man has the beginnings of an idea. “Say it
again, please,” he said in a simple, bothered manner; “do you mean that
Todhunter can tie himself up all alone and untie himself all alone?”
“That is what I mean,” said the doctor.

“Jerusalem!” ejaculated Brown suddenly, “I wonder if it could possibly
be that!”
He scuttled across the room rather like a rabbit, and peered with quite a
new impulsiveness into the partially-covered face of the captive. Then he
turned his own rather fatuous face to the company. “Yes, that’s it!” he cried
in a certain excitement. “Can’t you see it in the man’s face? Why, look at
his eyes!”
Both the Professor and the girl followed the direction of his glance. And
though the broad black scarf completely masked the lower half of
Todhunter’s visage, they did grow conscious of something struggling and
intense about the upper part of it.
“His eyes do look queer,” cried the young woman, strongly moved. “You
brutes; I believe it’s hurting him!”
“Not that, I think,” said Dr Hood; “the eyes have certainly a singular
expression. But I should interpret those transverse wrinkles as expressing
rather such slight psychological abnormality—”
“Oh, bosh!” cried Father Brown: “can’t you see he’s laughing?”
“Laughing!” repeated the doctor, with a start; “but what on earth can he
be laughing at?”
“Well,” replied the Reverend Brown apologetically, “not to put too fine a
point on it, I think he is laughing at you. And indeed, I’m a little inclined to
laugh at myself, now I know about it.”
“Now you know about what?” asked Hood, in some exasperation.
“Now I know,” replied the priest, “the profession of Mr Todhunter.”
He shuffled about the room, looking at one object after another with what
seemed to be a vacant stare, and then invariably bursting into an equally
vacant laugh, a highly irritating process for those who had to watch it. He
laughed very much over the hat, still more uproariously over the broken
glass, but the blood on the sword point sent him into mortal convulsions of
amusement. Then he turned to the fuming specialist.
“Dr Hood,” he cried enthusiastically, “you are a great poet! You have
called an uncreated being out of the void. How much more godlike that is
than if you had only ferreted out the mere facts! Indeed, the mere facts are
rather commonplace and comic by comparison.”

“I have no notion what you are talking about,” said Dr Hood rather
haughtily; “my facts are all inevitable, though necessarily incomplete. A
place may be permitted to intuition, perhaps (or poetry if you prefer the
term), but only because the corresponding details cannot as yet be
ascertained. In the absence of Mr Glass—”
“That’s it, that’s it,” said the little priest, nodding quite eagerly, “that’s
the first idea to get fixed; the absence of Mr Glass. He is so extremely
absent. I suppose,” he added reflectively, “that there was never anybody so
absent as Mr Glass.”
“Do you mean he is absent from the town?” demanded the doctor.
“I mean he is absent from everywhere,” answered Father Brown; “he is
absent from the Nature of Things, so to speak.”
“Do you seriously mean,” said the specialist with a smile, “that there is
no such person?”
The priest made a sign of assent. “It does seem a pity,” he said.
Orion Hood broke into a contemptuous laugh. “Well,” he said, “before
we go on to the hundred and one other evidences, let us take the first proof
we found; the first fact we fell over when we fell into this room. If there is
no Mr Glass, whose hat is this?”
“It is Mr Todhunter’s,” replied Father Brown.
“But it doesn’t fit him,” cried Hood impatiently. “He couldn’t possibly
wear it!”
Father Brown shook his head with ineffable mildness. “I never said he
could wear it,” he answered. “I said it was his hat. Or, if you insist on a
shade of difference, a hat that is his.”
“And what is the shade of difference?” asked the criminologist with a
slight sneer.
“My good sir,” cried the mild little man, with his first movement akin to
impatience, “if you will walk down the street to the nearest hatter’s shop,
you will see that there is, in common speech, a difference between a man’s
hat and the hats that are his.”
“But a hatter,” protested Hood, “can get money out of his stock of new
hats. What could Todhunter get out of this one old hat?”
“Rabbits,” replied Father Brown promptly.

“What?” cried Dr Hood.
“Rabbits, ribbons, sweetmeats, goldfish, rolls of coloured paper,” said the
reverend gentleman with rapidity. “Didn’t you see it all when you found out
the faked ropes? It’s just the same with the sword. Mr Todhunter hasn’t got
a scratch on him, as you say; but he’s got a scratch in him, if you follow
me.”
“Do you mean inside Mr Todhunter’s clothes?” inquired Mrs MacNab
sternly.
“I do not mean inside Mr Todhunter’s clothes,” said Father Brown. “I
mean inside Mr Todhunter.”
“Well, what in the name of Bedlam do you mean?”
“Mr Todhunter,” explained Father Brown placidly, “is learning to be a
professional conjurer, as well as juggler, ventriloquist, and expert in the
rope trick. The conjuring explains the hat. It is without traces of hair, not
because it is worn by the prematurely bald Mr Glass, but because it has
never been worn by anybody. The juggling explains the three glasses, which
Todhunter was teaching himself to throw up and catch in rotation. But,
being only at the stage of practice, he smashed one glass against the ceiling.
And the juggling also explains the sword, which it was Mr Todhunter’s
professional pride and duty to swallow. But, again, being at the stage of
practice, he very slightly grazed the inside of his throat with the weapon.
Hence he has a wound inside him, which I am sure (from the expression on
his face) is not a serious one. He was also practising the trick of a release
from ropes, like the Davenport Brothers, and he was just about to free
himself when we all burst into the room. The cards, of course, are for card
tricks, and they are scattered on the floor because he had just been
practising one of those dodges of sending them flying through the air. He
merely kept his trade secret, because he had to keep his tricks secret, like
any other conjurer. But the mere fact of an idler in a top hat having once
looked in at his back window, and been driven away by him with great
indignation, was enough to set us all on a wrong track of romance, and
make us imagine his whole life overshadowed by the silk-hatted spectre of
Mr Glass.”
“But what about the two voices?” asked Maggie, staring.
“Have you never heard a ventriloquist?” asked Father Brown. “Don’t you
know they speak first in their natural voice, and then answer themselves in

just that shrill, squeaky, unnatural voice that you heard?”
There was a long silence, and Dr Hood regarded the little man who had
spoken with a dark and attentive smile. “You are certainly a very ingenious
person,” he said; “it could not have been done better in a book. But there is
just one part of Mr Glass you have not succeeded in explaining away, and
that is his name. Miss MacNab distinctly heard him so addressed by Mr
Todhunter.”
The Rev. Mr Brown broke into a rather childish giggle. “Well, that,” he
said, “that’s the silliest part of the whole silly story. When our juggling
friend here threw up the three glasses in turn, he counted them aloud as he
caught them, and also commented aloud when he failed to catch them. What
he really said was: ‘One, two and three—missed a glass one, two—missed a
glass.’ And so on.”
There was a second of stillness in the room, and then everyone with one
accord burst out laughing. As they did so the figure in the corner
complacently uncoiled all the ropes and let them fall with a flourish. Then,
advancing into the middle of the room with a bow, he produced from his
pocket a big bill printed in blue and red, which announced that ZALADIN,
the World’s Greatest Conjurer, Contortionist, Ventriloquist and Human
Kangaroo would be ready with an entirely new series of Tricks at the
Empire Pavilion, Scarborough, on Monday next at eight o’clock precisely.

TWO. — The Paradise of Thieves
THE great Muscari, most original of the young Tuscan poets, walked
swiftly into his favourite restaurant, which overlooked the Mediterranean,
was covered by an awning and fenced by little lemon and orange trees.
Waiters in white aprons were already laying out on white tables the insignia
of an early and elegant lunch; and this seemed to increase a satisfaction that
already touched the top of swagger. Muscari had an eagle nose like Dante;
his hair and neckerchief were dark and flowing; he carried a black cloak,
and might almost have carried a black mask, so much did he bear with him
a sort of Venetian melodrama. He acted as if a troubadour had still a definite
social office, like a bishop. He went as near as his century permitted to
walking the world literally like Don Juan, with rapier and guitar.
For he never travelled without a case of swords, with which he had
fought many brilliant duels, or without a corresponding case for his
mandolin, with which he had actually serenaded Miss Ethel Harrogate, the
highly conventional daughter of a Yorkshire banker on a holiday. Yet he was
neither a charlatan nor a child; but a hot, logical Latin who liked a certain
thing and was it. His poetry was as straightforward as anyone else’s prose.
He desired fame or wine or the beauty of women with a torrid directness
inconceivable among the cloudy ideals or cloudy compromises of the north;
to vaguer races his intensity smelt of danger or even crime. Like fire or the
sea, he was too simple to be trusted.
The banker and his beautiful English daughter were staying at the hotel
attached to Muscari’s restaurant; that was why it was his favourite
restaurant. A glance flashed around the room told him at once, however, that
the English party had not descended. The restaurant was glittering, but still
comparatively empty. Two priests were talking at a table in a corner, but
Muscari (an ardent Catholic) took no more notice of them than of a couple
of crows. But from a yet farther seat, partly concealed behind a dwarf tree
golden with oranges, there rose and advanced towards the poet a person
whose costume was the most aggressively opposite to his own.
This figure was clad in tweeds of a piebald check, with a pink tie, a sharp
collar and protuberant yellow boots. He contrived, in the true tradition of

‘Arry at Margate, to look at once startling and commonplace. But as the
Cockney apparition drew nearer, Muscari was astounded to observe that the
head was distinctly different from the body. It was an Italian head: fuzzy,
swarthy and very vivacious, that rose abruptly out of the standing collar like
cardboard and the comic pink tie. In fact it was a head he knew. He
recognized it, above all the dire erection of English holiday array, as the
face of an old but forgotten friend name Ezza. This youth had been a
prodigy at college, and European fame was promised him when he was
barely fifteen; but when he appeared in the world he failed, first publicly as
a dramatist and a demagogue, and then privately for years on end as an
actor, a traveller, a commission agent or a journalist. Muscari had known
him last behind the footlights; he was but too well attuned to the
excitements of that profession, and it was believed that some moral
calamity had swallowed him up.
“Ezza!” cried the poet, rising and shaking hands in a pleasant
astonishment. “Well, I’ve seen you in many costumes in the green room;
but I never expected to see you dressed up as an Englishman.”
“This,” answered Ezza gravely, “is not the costume of an Englishman,
but of the Italian of the future.”
“In that case,” remarked Muscari, “I confess I prefer the Italian of the
past.”
“That is your old mistake, Muscari,” said the man in tweeds, shaking his
head; “and the mistake of Italy. In the sixteenth century we Tuscans made
the morning: we had the newest steel, the newest carving, the newest
chemistry. Why should we not now have the newest factories, the newest
motors, the newest finance—the newest clothes?”
“Because they are not worth having,” answered Muscari. “You cannot
make Italians really progressive; they are too intelligent. Men who see the
short cut to good living will never go by the new elaborate roads.”
“Well, to me Marconi, or D’Annunzio, is the star of Italy” said the other.
“That is why I have become a Futurist—and a courier.”
“A courier!” cried Muscari, laughing. “Is that the last of your list of
trades? And whom are you conducting?”
“Oh, a man of the name of Harrogate, and his family, I believe.”
“Not the banker in this hotel?” inquired the poet, with some eagerness.

“That’s the man,” answered the courier.
“Does it pay well?” asked the troubadour innocently.
“It will pay me,” said Ezza, with a very enigmatic smile. “But I am a
rather curious sort of courier.” Then, as if changing the subject, he said
abruptly: “He has a daughter—and a son.”
“The daughter is divine,” affirmed Muscari, “the father and son are, I
suppose, human. But granted his harmless qualities doesn’t that banker
strike you as a splendid instance of my argument? Harrogate has millions in
his safes, and I have—the hole in my pocket. But you daren’t say—you
can’t say—that he’s cleverer than I, or bolder than I, or even more
energetic. He’s not clever, he’s got eyes like blue buttons; he’s not
energetic, he moves from chair to chair like a paralytic. He’s a
conscientious, kindly old blockhead; but he’s got money simply because he
collects money, as a boy collects stamps. You’re too strong-minded for
business, Ezza. You won’t get on. To be clever enough to get all that money,
one must be stupid enough to want it.”
“I’m stupid enough for that,” said Ezza gloomily. “But I should suggest a
suspension of your critique of the banker, for here he comes.”
Mr Harrogate, the great financier, did indeed enter the room, but nobody
looked at him. He was a massive elderly man with a boiled blue eye and
faded grey-sandy moustaches; but for his heavy stoop he might have been a
colonel. He carried several unopened letters in his hand. His son Frank was
a really fine lad, curly-haired, sun-burnt and strenuous; but nobody looked
at him either. All eyes, as usual, were riveted, for the moment at least, upon
Ethel Harrogate, whose golden Greek head and colour of the dawn seemed
set purposely above that sapphire sea, like a goddess’s. The poet Muscari
drew a deep breath as if he were drinking something, as indeed he was. He
was drinking the Classic; which his fathers made. Ezza studied her with a
gaze equally intense and far more baffling.
Miss Harrogate was specially radiant and ready for conversation on this
occasion; and her family had fallen into the easier Continental habit,
allowing the stranger Muscari and even the courier Ezza to share their table
and their talk. In Ethel Harrogate conventionality crowned itself with a
perfection and splendour of its own. Proud of her father’s prosperity, fond
of fashionable pleasures, a fond daughter but an arrant flirt, she was all

these things with a sort of golden good-nature that made her very pride
pleasing and her worldly respectability a fresh and hearty thing.
They were in an eddy of excitement about some alleged peril in the
mountain path they were to attempt that week. The danger was not from
rock and avalanche, but from something yet more romantic. Ethel had been
earnestly assured that brigands, the true cut-throats of the modern legend,
still haunted that ridge and held that pass of the Apennines.
“They say,” she cried, with the awful relish of a schoolgirl, “that all that
country isn’t ruled by the King of Italy, but by the King of Thieves. Who is
the King of Thieves?”
“A great man,” replied Muscari, “worthy to rank with your own Robin
Hood, signorina. Montano, the King of Thieves, was first heard of in the
mountains some ten years ago, when people said brigands were extinct. But
his wild authority spread with the swiftness of a silent revolution. Men
found his fierce proclamations nailed in every mountain village; his
sentinels, gun in hand, in every mountain ravine. Six times the Italian
Government tried to dislodge him, and was defeated in six pitched battles as
if by Napoleon.”
“Now that sort of thing,” observed the banker weightily, “would never be
allowed in England; perhaps, after all, we had better choose another route.
But the courier thought it perfectly safe.”
“It is perfectly safe,” said the courier contemptuously. “I have been over
it twenty times. There may have been some old jailbird called a King in the
time of our grandmothers; but he belongs to history if not to fable.
Brigandage is utterly stamped out.”
“It can never be utterly stamped out,” Muscari answered; “because armed
revolt is a recreation natural to southerners. Our peasants are like their
mountains, rich in grace and green gaiety, but with the fires beneath. There
is a point of human despair where the northern poor take to drink—and our
own poor take to daggers.”
“A poet is privileged,” replied Ezza, with a sneer. “If Signor Muscari
were English he would still be looking for highwaymen in Wandsworth.
Believe me, there is no more danger of being captured in Italy than of being
scalped in Boston.”
“Then you propose to attempt it?” asked Mr Harrogate, frowning.

“Oh, it sounds rather dreadful,” cried the girl, turning her glorious eyes
on Muscari. “Do you really think the pass is dangerous?”
Muscari threw back his black mane. “I know it is dangerous:” he said. “I
am crossing it tomorrow.”
The young Harrogate was left behind for a moment emptying a glass of
white wine and lighting a cigarette, as the beauty retired with the banker,
the courier and the poet, distributing peals of silvery satire. At about the
same instant the two priests in the corner rose; the taller, a white-haired
Italian, taking his leave. The shorter priest turned and walked towards the
banker’s son, and the latter was astonished to realize that though a Roman
priest the man was an Englishman. He vaguely remembered meeting him at
the social crushes of some of his Catholic friends. But the man spoke before
his memories could collect themselves.
“Mr Frank Harrogate, I think,” he said. “I have had an introduction, but I
do not mean to presume on it. The odd thing I have to say will come far
better from a stranger. Mr Harrogate, I say one word and go: take care of
your sister in her great sorrow.”
Even for Frank’s truly fraternal indifference the radiance and derision of
his sister still seemed to sparkle and ring; he could hear her laughter still
from the garden of the hotel, and he stared at his sombre adviser in
puzzledom.
“Do you mean the brigands?” he asked; and then, remembering a vague
fear of his own, “or can you be thinking of Muscari?”
“One is never thinking of the real sorrow,” said the strange priest. “One
can only be kind when it comes.”
And he passed promptly from the room, leaving the other almost with his
mouth open.
A day or two afterwards a coach containing the company was really
crawling and staggering up the spurs of the menacing mountain range.
Between Ezza’s cheery denial of the danger and Muscari’s boisterous
defiance of it, the financial family were firm in their original purpose; and
Muscari made his mountain journey coincide with theirs. A more surprising
feature was the appearance at the coast-town station of the little priest of the
restaurant; he alleged merely that business led him also to cross the

mountains of the midland. But young Harrogate could not but connect his
presence with the mystical fears and warnings of yesterday.
The coach was a kind of commodious wagonette, invented by the
modernist talent of the courier, who dominated the expedition with his
scientific activity and breezy wit. The theory of danger from thieves was
banished from thought and speech; though so far conceded in formal act
that some slight protection was employed. The courier and the young
banker carried loaded revolvers, and Muscari (with much boyish
gratification) buckled on a kind of cutlass under his black cloak.
He had planted his person at a flying leap next to the lovely
Englishwoman; on the other side of her sat the priest, whose name was
Brown and who was fortunately a silent individual; the courier and the
father and son were on the banc behind. Muscari was in towering spirits,
seriously believing in the peril, and his talk to Ethel might well have made
her think him a maniac. But there was something in the crazy and gorgeous
ascent, amid crags like peaks loaded with woods like orchards, that dragged
her spirit up alone with his into purple preposterous heavens with wheeling
suns. The white road climbed like a white cat; it spanned sunless chasms
like a tight-rope; it was flung round far-off headlands like a lasso.
And yet, however high they went, the desert still blossomed like the rose.
The fields were burnished in sun and wind with the colour of kingfisher and
parrot and humming-bird, the hues of a hundred flowering flowers. There
are no lovelier meadows and woodlands than the English, no nobler crests
or chasms than those of Snowdon and Glencoe. But Ethel Harrogate had
never before seen the southern parks tilted on the splintered northern peaks;
the gorge of Glencoe laden with the fruits of Kent. There was nothing here
of that chill and desolation that in Britain one associates with high and wild
scenery. It was rather like a mosaic palace, rent with earthquakes; or like a
Dutch tulip garden blown to the stars with dynamite.
“It’s like Kew Gardens on Beachy Head,” said Ethel.
“It is our secret,” answered he, “the secret of the volcano; that is also the
secret of the revolution—that a thing can be violent and yet fruitful.”
“You are rather violent yourself,” and she smiled at him.
“And yet rather fruitless,” he admitted; “if I die tonight I die unmarried
and a fool.”

“It is not my fault if you have come,” she said after a difficult silence.
“It is never your fault,” answered Muscari; “it was not your fault that
Troy fell.”
As they spoke they came under overwhelming cliffs that spread almost
like wings above a corner of peculiar peril. Shocked by the big shadow on
the narrow ledge, the horses stirred doubtfully. The driver leapt to the earth
to hold their heads, and they became ungovernable. One horse reared up to
his full height—the titanic and terrifying height of a horse when he
becomes a biped. It was just enough to alter the equilibrium; the whole
coach heeled over like a ship and crashed through the fringe of bushes over
the cliff. Muscari threw an arm round Ethel, who clung to him, and shouted
aloud. It was for such moments that he lived.
At the moment when the gorgeous mountain walls went round the poet’s
head like a purple windmill a thing happened which was superficially even
more startling. The elderly and lethargic banker sprang erect in the coach
and leapt over the precipice before the tilted vehicle could take him there.
In the first flash it looked as wild as suicide; but in the second it was as
sensible as a safe investment. The Yorkshireman had evidently more
promptitude, as well as more sagacity, than Muscari had given him credit
for; for he landed in a lap of land which might have been specially padded
with turf and clover to receive him. As it happened, indeed, the whole
company were equally lucky, if less dignified in their form of ejection.
Immediately under this abrupt turn of the road was a grassy and flowery
hollow like a sunken meadow; a sort of green velvet pocket in the long,
green, trailing garments of the hills. Into this they were all tipped or
tumbled with little damage, save that their smallest baggage and even the
contents of their pockets were scattered in the grass around them. The
wrecked coach still hung above, entangled in the tough hedge, and the
horses plunged painfully down the slope. The first to sit up was the little
priest, who scratched his head with a face of foolish wonder. Frank
Harrogate heard him say to himself: “Now why on earth have we fallen just
here?”
He blinked at the litter around him, and recovered his own very clumsy
umbrella. Beyond it lay the broad sombrero fallen from the head of
Muscari, and beside it a sealed business letter which, after a glance at the
address, he returned to the elder Harrogate. On the other side of him the

grass partly hid Miss Ethel’s sunshade, and just beyond it lay a curious little
glass bottle hardly two inches long. The priest picked it up; in a quick,
unobtrusive manner he uncorked and sniffed it, and his heavy face turned
the colour of clay.
“Heaven deliver us!” he muttered; “it can’t be hers! Has her sorrow come
on her already?” He slipped it into his own waistcoat pocket. “I think I’m
justified,” he said, “till I know a little more.”
He gazed painfully at the girl, at that moment being raised out of the
flowers by Muscari, who was saying: “We have fallen into heaven; it is a
sign. Mortals climb up and they fall down; but it is only gods and goddesses
who can fall upwards.”
And indeed she rose out of the sea of colours so beautiful and happy a
vision that the priest felt his suspicion shaken and shifted. “After all,” he
thought, “perhaps the poison isn’t hers; perhaps it’s one of Muscari’s
melodramatic tricks.”
Muscari set the lady lightly on her feet, made her an absurdly theatrical
bow, and then, drawing his cutlass, hacked hard at the taut reins of the
horses, so that they scrambled to their feet and stood in the grass trembling.
When he had done so, a most remarkable thing occurred. A very quiet man,
very poorly dressed and extremely sunburnt, came out of the bushes and
took hold of the horses’ heads. He had a queer-shaped knife, very broad and
crooked, buckled on his belt; there was nothing else remarkable about him,
except his sudden and silent appearance. The poet asked him who he was,
and he did not answer.
Looking around him at the confused and startled group in the hollow,
Muscari then perceived that another tanned and tattered man, with a short
gun under his arm, was looking at them from the ledge just below, leaning
his elbows on the edge of the turf. Then he looked up at the road from
which they had fallen and saw, looking down on them, the muzzles of four
other carbines and four other brown faces with bright but quite motionless
eyes.
“The brigands!” cried Muscari, with a kind of monstrous gaiety. “This
was a trap. Ezza, if you will oblige me by shooting the coachman first, we
can cut our way out yet. There are only six of them.”
“The coachman,” said Ezza, who was standing grimly with his hands in
his pockets, “happens to be a servant of Mr Harrogate’s.”

“Then shoot him all the more,” cried the poet impatiently; “he was bribed
to upset his master. Then put the lady in the middle, and we will break the
line up there—with a rush.”
And, wading in wild grass and flowers, he advanced fearlessly on the
four carbines; but finding that no one followed except young Harrogate, he
turned, brandishing his cutlass to wave the others on. He beheld the courier
still standing slightly astride in the centre of the grassy ring, his hands in his
pockets; and his lean, ironical Italian face seemed to grow longer and longer
in the evening light.
“You thought, Muscari, I was the failure among our schoolfellows,” he
said, “and you thought you were the success. But I have succeeded more
than you and fill a bigger place in history. I have been acting epics while
you have been writing them.”
“Come on, I tell you!” thundered Muscari from above. “Will you stand
there talking nonsense about yourself with a woman to save and three
strong men to help you? What do you call yourself?”
“I call myself Montano,” cried the strange courier in a voice equally loud
and full. “I am the King of Thieves, and I welcome you all to my summer
palace.”
And even as he spoke five more silent men with weapons ready came out
of the bushes, and looked towards him for their orders. One of them held a
large paper in his hand.
“This pretty little nest where we are all picnicking,” went on the courier-
brigand, with the same easy yet sinister smile, “is, together with some caves
underneath it, known by the name of the Paradise of Thieves. It is my
principal stronghold on these hills; for (as you have doubtless noticed) the
eyrie is invisible both from the road above and from the valley below. It is
something better than impregnable; it is unnoticeable. Here I mostly live,
and here I shall certainly die, if the gendarmes ever track me here. I am not
the kind of criminal that ‘reserves his defence,’ but the better kind that
reserves his last bullet.”
All were staring at him thunderstruck and still, except Father Brown, who
heaved a huge sigh as of relief and fingered the little phial in his pocket.
“Thank God!” he muttered; “that’s much more probable. The poison
belongs to this robber-chief, of course. He carries it so that he may never be
captured, like Cato.”

The King of Thieves was, however, continuing his address with the same
kind of dangerous politeness. “It only remains for me,” he said, “to explain
to my guests the social conditions upon which I have the pleasure of
entertaining them. I need not expound the quaint old ritual of ransom,
which it is incumbent upon me to keep up; and even this only applies to a
part of the company. The Reverend Father Brown and the celebrated Signor
Muscari I shall release tomorrow at dawn and escort to my outposts. Poets
and priests, if you will pardon my simplicity of speech, never have any
money. And so (since it is impossible to get anything out of them), let us,
seize the opportunity to show our admiration for classic literature and our
reverence for Holy Church.”
He paused with an unpleasing smile; and Father Brown blinked
repeatedly at him, and seemed suddenly to be listening with great attention.
The brigand captain took the large paper from the attendant brigand and,
glancing over it, continued: “My other intentions are clearly set forth in this
public document, which I will hand round in a moment; and which after
that will be posted on a tree by every village in the valley, and every cross-
road in the hills. I will not weary you with the verbalism, since you will be
able to check it; the substance of my proclamation is this: I announce first
that I have captured the English millionaire, the colossus of finance, Mr
Samuel Harrogate. I next announce that I have found on his person notes
and bonds for two thousand pounds, which he has given up to me. Now
since it would be really immoral to announce such a thing to a credulous
public if it had not occurred, I suggest it should occur without further delay.
I suggest that Mr Harrogate senior should now give me the two thousand
pounds in his pocket.”
The banker looked at him under lowering brows, red-faced and sulky, but
seemingly cowed. That leap from the failing carriage seemed to have used
up his last virility. He had held back in a hang-dog style when his son and
Muscari had made a bold movement to break out of the brigand trap. And
now his red and trembling hand went reluctantly to his breast-pocket, and
passed a bundle of papers and envelopes to the brigand.
“Excellent!” cried that outlaw gaily; “so far we are all cosy. I resume the
points of my proclamation, so soon to be published to all Italy. The third
item is that of ransom. I am asking from the friends of the Harrogate family
a ransom of three thousand pounds, which I am sure is almost insulting to

that family in its moderate estimate of their importance. Who would not pay
triple this sum for another day’s association with such a domestic circle? I
will not conceal from you that the document ends with certain legal phrases
about the unpleasant things that may happen if the money is not paid; but
meanwhile, ladies and gentlemen, let me assure you that I am comfortably
off here for accommodation, wine and cigars, and bid you for the present a
sportsman-like welcome to the luxuries of the Paradise of Thieves.”
All the time that he had been speaking, the dubious-looking men with
carbines and dirty slouch hats had been gathering silently in such
preponderating numbers that even Muscari was compelled to recognize his
sally with the sword as hopeless. He glanced around him; but the girl had
already gone over to soothe and comfort her father, for her natural affection
for his person was as strong or stronger than her somewhat snobbish pride
in his success. Muscari, with the illogicality of a lover, admired this filial
devotion, and yet was irritated by it. He slapped his sword back in the
scabbard and went and flung himself somewhat sulkily on one of the green
banks. The priest sat down within a yard or two, and Muscari turned his
aquiline nose on him in an instantaneous irritation.
“Well,” said the poet tartly, “do people still think me too romantic? Are
there, I wonder, any brigands left in the mountains?”
“There may be,” said Father Brown agnostically.
“What do you mean?” asked the other sharply.
“I mean I am puzzled,” replied the priest. “I am puzzled about Ezza or
Montano, or whatever his name is. He seems to me much more inexplicable
as a brigand even than he was as a courier.”
“But in what way?” persisted his companion. “Santa Maria! I should
have thought the brigand was plain enough.”
“I find three curious difficulties,” said the priest in a quiet voice. “I
should like to have your opinion on them. First of all I must tell you I was
lunching in that restaurant at the seaside. As four of you left the room, you
and Miss Harrogate went ahead, talking and laughing; the banker and the
courier came behind, speaking sparely and rather low. But I could not help
hearing Ezza say these words—‘Well, let her have a little fun; you know the
blow may smash her any minute.’ Mr Harrogate answered nothing; so the
words must have had some meaning. On the impulse of the moment I
warned her brother that she might be in peril; I said nothing of its nature,

for I did not know. But if it meant this capture in the hills, the thing is
nonsense. Why should the brigand-courier warn his patron, even by a hint,
when it was his whole purpose to lure him into the mountain-mousetrap? It
could not have meant that. But if not, what is this disaster, known both to
courier and banker, which hangs over Miss Harrogate’s head?”
“Disaster to Miss Harrogate!” ejaculated the poet, sitting up with some
ferocity. “Explain yourself; go on.”
“All my riddles, however, revolve round our bandit chief,” resumed the
priest reflectively. “And here is the second of them. Why did he put so
prominently in his demand for ransom the fact that he had taken two
thousand pounds from his victim on the spot? It had no faintest tendency to
evoke the ransom. Quite the other way, in fact. Harrogate’s friends would
be far likelier to fear for his fate if they thought the thieves were poor and
desperate. Yet the spoliation on the spot was emphasized and even put first
in the demand. Why should Ezza Montano want so specially to tell all
Europe that he had picked the pocket before he levied the blackmail?”
“I cannot imagine,” said Muscari, rubbing up his black hair for once with
an unaffected gesture. “You may think you enlighten me, but you are
leading me deeper in the dark. What may be the third objection to the King
of the Thieves?” “The third objection,” said Father Brown, still in
meditation, “is this bank we are sitting on. Why does our brigand-courier
call this his chief fortress and the Paradise of Thieves? It is certainly a soft
spot to fall on and a sweet spot to look at. It is also quite true, as he says,
that it is invisible from valley and peak, and is therefore a hiding-place. But
it is not a fortress. It never could be a fortress. I think it would be the worst
fortress in the world. For it is actually commanded from above by the
common high-road across the mountains—the very place where the police
would most probably pass. Why, five shabby short guns held us helpless
here about half an hour ago. The quarter of a company of any kind of
soldiers could have blown us over the precipice. Whatever is the meaning
of this odd little nook of grass and flowers, it is not an entrenched position.
It is something else; it has some other strange sort of importance; some
value that I do not understand. It is more like an accidental theatre or a
natural green-room; it is like the scene for some romantic comedy; it is
like....”

As the little priest’s words lengthened and lost themselves in a dull and
dreamy sincerity, Muscari, whose animal senses were alert and impatient,
heard a new noise in the mountains. Even for him the sound was as yet very
small and faint; but he could have sworn the evening breeze bore with it
something like the pulsation of horses’ hoofs and a distant hallooing.
At the same moment, and long before the vibration had touched the less-
experienced English ears, Montano the brigand ran up the bank above them
and stood in the broken hedge, steadying himself against a tree and peering
down the road. He was a strange figure as he stood there, for he had
assumed a flapped fantastic hat and swinging baldric and cutlass in his
capacity of bandit king, but the bright prosaic tweed of the courier showed
through in patches all over him.
The next moment he turned his olive, sneering face and made a
movement with his hand. The brigands scattered at the signal, not in
confusion, but in what was evidently a kind of guerrilla discipline. Instead
of occupying the road along the ridge, they sprinkled themselves along the
side of it behind the trees and the hedge, as if watching unseen for an
enemy. The noise beyond grew stronger, beginning to shake the mountain
road, and a voice could be clearly heard calling out orders. The brigands
swayed and huddled, cursing and whispering, and the evening air was full
of little metallic noises as they cocked their pistols, or loosened their
knives, or trailed their scabbards over the stones. Then the noises from both
quarters seemed to meet on the road above; branches broke, horses neighed,
men cried out.
“A rescue!” cried Muscari, springing to his feet and waving his hat; “the
gendarmes are on them! Now for freedom and a blow for it! Now to be
rebels against robbers! Come, don’t let us leave everything to the police;
that is so dreadfully modern. Fall on the rear of these ruffians. The
gendarmes are rescuing us; come, friends, let us rescue the gendarmes!”
And throwing his hat over the trees, he drew his cutlass once more and
began to escalade the slope up to the road. Frank Harrogate jumped up and
ran across to help him, revolver in hand, but was astounded to hear himself
imperatively recalled by the raucous voice of his father, who seemed to be
in great agitation.
“I won’t have it,” said the banker in a choking voice; “I command you
not to interfere.”

“But, father,” said Frank very warmly, “an Italian gentleman has led the
way. You wouldn’t have it said that the English hung back.”
“It is useless,” said the older man, who was trembling violently, “it is
useless. We must submit to our lot.”
Father Brown looked at the banker; then he put his hand instinctively as
if on his heart, but really on the little bottle of poison; and a great light came
into his face like the light of the revelation of death.
Muscari meanwhile, without waiting for support, had crested the bank up
to the road, and struck the brigand king heavily on the shoulder, causing
him to stagger and swing round. Montano also had his cutlass unsheathed,
and Muscari, without further speech, sent a slash at his head which he was
compelled to catch and parry. But even as the two short blades crossed and
clashed the King of Thieves deliberately dropped his point and laughed.
“What’s the good, old man?” he said in spirited Italian slang; “this
damned farce will soon be over.”
“What do you mean, you shuffler?” panted the fire-eating poet. “Is your
courage a sham as well as your honesty?”
“Everything about me is a sham,” responded the ex-courier in complete
good humour. “I am an actor; and if I ever had a private character, I have
forgotten it. I am no more a genuine brigand than I am a genuine courier. I
am only a bundle of masks, and you can’t fight a duel with that.” And he
laughed with boyish pleasure and fell into his old straddling attitude, with
his back to the skirmish up the road.
Darkness was deepening under the mountain walls, and it was not easy to
discern much of the progress of the struggle, save that tall men were
pushing their horses’ muzzles through a clinging crowd of brigands, who
seemed more inclined to harass and hustle the invaders than to kill them. It
was more like a town crowd preventing the passage of the police than
anything the poet had ever pictured as the last stand of doomed and
outlawed men of blood. Just as he was rolling his eyes in bewilderment he
felt a touch on his elbow, and found the odd little priest standing there like a
small Noah with a large hat, and requesting the favour of a word or two.
“Signor Muscari,” said the cleric, “in this queer crisis personalities may
be pardoned. I may tell you without offence of a way in which you will do
more good than by helping the gendarmes, who are bound to break through

in any case. You will permit me the impertinent intimacy, but do you care
about that girl? Care enough to marry her and make her a good husband, I
mean?”
“Yes,” said the poet quite simply.
“Does she care about you?”
“I think so,” was the equally grave reply.
“Then go over there and offer yourself,” said the priest: “offer her
everything you can; offer her heaven and earth if you’ve got them. The time
is short.”
“Why?” asked the astonished man of letters.
“Because,” said Father Brown, “her Doom is coming up the road.”
“Nothing is coming up the road,” argued Muscari, “except the rescue.”
“Well, you go over there,” said his adviser, “and be ready to rescue her
from the rescue.”
Almost as he spoke the hedges were broken all along the ridge by a rush
of the escaping brigands. They dived into bushes and thick grass like
defeated men pursued; and the great cocked hats of the mounted
gendarmerie were seen passing along above the broken hedge. Another
order was given; there was a noise of dismounting, and a tall officer with
cocked hat, a grey imperial, and a paper in his hand appeared in the gap that
was the gate of the Paradise of Thieves. There was a momentary silence,
broken in an extraordinary way by the banker, who cried out in a hoarse and
strangled voice: “Robbed! I’ve been robbed!”
“Why, that was hours ago,” cried his son in astonishment: “when you
were robbed of two thousand pounds.”
“Not of two thousand pounds,” said the financier, with an abrupt and
terrible composure, “only of a small bottle.”
The policeman with the grey imperial was striding across the green
hollow. Encountering the King of the Thieves in his path, he clapped him
on the shoulder with something between a caress and a buffet and gave him
a push that sent him staggering away. “You’ll get into trouble, too,” he said,
“if you play these tricks.”
Again to Muscari’s artistic eye it seemed scarcely like the capture of a
great outlaw at bay. Passing on, the policeman halted before the Harrogate

group and said: “Samuel Harrogate, I arrest you in the name of the law for
embezzlement of the funds of the Hull and Huddersfield Bank.”
The great banker nodded with an odd air of business assent, seemed to
reflect a moment, and before they could interpose took a half turn and a step
that brought him to the edge of the outer mountain wall. Then, flinging up
his hands, he leapt exactly as he leapt out of the coach. But this time he did
not fall into a little meadow just beneath; he fell a thousand feet below, to
become a wreck of bones in the valley.
The anger of the Italian policeman, which he expressed volubly to Father
Brown, was largely mixed with admiration. “It was like him to escape us at
last,” he said. “He was a great brigand if you like. This last trick of his I
believe to be absolutely unprecedented. He fled with the company’s money
to Italy, and actually got himself captured by sham brigands in his own pay,
so as to explain both the disappearance of the money and the disappearance
of himself. That demand for ransom was really taken seriously by most of
the police. But for years he’s been doing things as good as that, quite as
good as that. He will be a serious loss to his family.”
Muscari was leading away the unhappy daughter, who held hard to him,
as she did for many a year after. But even in that tragic wreck he could not
help having a smile and a hand of half-mocking friendship for the
indefensible Ezza Montano. “And where are you going next?” he asked him
over his shoulder.
“Birmingham,” answered the actor, puffing a cigarette. “Didn’t I tell you
I was a Futurist? I really do believe in those things if I believe in anything.
Change, bustle and new things every morning. I am going to Manchester,
Liverpool, Leeds, Hull, Huddersfield, Glasgow, Chicago—in short, to
enlightened, energetic, civilized society!”
“In short,” said Muscari, “to the real Paradise of Thieves.”

THREE — The Duel of Dr Hirsch
M. MAURICE BRUN and M. Armand Armagnac were crossing the
sunlit Champs Elysee with a kind of vivacious respectability. They were
both short, brisk and bold. They both had black beards that did not seem to
belong to their faces, after the strange French fashion which makes real hair
look like artificial. M. Brun had a dark wedge of beard apparently affixed
under his lower lip. M. Armagnac, by way of a change, had two beards; one
sticking out from each corner of his emphatic chin. They were both young.
They were both atheists, with a depressing fixity of outlook but great
mobility of exposition. They were both pupils of the great Dr Hirsch,
scientist, publicist and moralist.
M. Brun had become prominent by his proposal that the common
expression “Adieu” should be obliterated from all the French classics, and a
slight fine imposed for its use in private life. “Then,” he said, “the very
name of your imagined God will have echoed for the last time in the ear of
man.” M. Armagnac specialized rather in a resistance to militarism, and
wished the chorus of the Marseillaise altered from “Aux armes, citoyens” to
“Aux greves, citoyens”. But his antimilitarism was of a peculiar and Gallic
sort. An eminent and very wealthy English Quaker, who had come to see
him to arrange for the disarmament of the whole planet, was rather
distressed by Armagnac’s proposal that (by way of beginning) the soldiers
should shoot their officers.
And indeed it was in this regard that the two men differed most from
their leader and father in philosophy. Dr Hirsch, though born in France and
covered with the most triumphant favours of French education, was
temperamentally of another type—mild, dreamy, humane; and, despite his
sceptical system, not devoid of transcendentalism. He was, in short, more
like a German than a Frenchman; and much as they admired him,
something in the subconsciousness of these Gauls was irritated at his
pleading for peace in so peaceful a manner. To their party throughout
Europe, however, Paul Hirsch was a saint of science. His large and daring
cosmic theories advertised his austere life and innocent, if somewhat frigid,
morality; he held something of the position of Darwin doubled with the

position of Tolstoy. But he was neither an anarchist nor an antipatriot; his
views on disarmament were moderate and evolutionary—the Republican
Government put considerable confidence in him as to various chemical
improvements. He had lately even discovered a noiseless explosive, the
secret of which the Government was carefully guarding.
His house stood in a handsome street near the Elysee—a street which in
that strong summer seemed almost as full of foliage as the park itself; a row
of chestnuts shattered the sunshine, interrupted only in one place where a
large cafe ran out into the street. Almost opposite to this were the white and
green blinds of the great scientist’s house, an iron balcony, also painted
green, running along in front of the first-floor windows. Beneath this was
the entrance into a kind of court, gay with shrubs and tiles, into which the
two Frenchmen passed in animated talk.
The door was opened to them by the doctor’s old servant, Simon, who
might very well have passed for a doctor himself, having a strict suit of
black, spectacles, grey hair, and a confidential manner. In fact, he was a far
more presentable man of science than his master, Dr Hirsch, who was a
forked radish of a fellow, with just enough bulb of a head to make his body
insignificant. With all the gravity of a great physician handling a
prescription, Simon handed a letter to M. Armagnac. That gentleman ripped
it up with a racial impatience, and rapidly read the following:
I cannot come down to speak to you. There is a man in this house whom I
refuse to meet. He is a Chauvinist officer, Dubosc. He is sitting on the
stairs. He has been kicking the furniture about in all the other rooms; I have
locked myself in my study, opposite that cafe. If you love me, go over to the
cafe and wait at one of the tables outside. I will try to send him over to you.
I want you to answer him and deal with him. I cannot meet him myself. I
cannot: I will not.
There is going to be another Dreyfus case.
P. HIRSCH
M. Armagnac looked at M. Brun. M. Brun borrowed the letter, read it,
and looked at M. Armagnac. Then both betook themselves briskly to one of
the little tables under the chestnuts opposite, where they procured two tall
glasses of horrible green absinthe, which they could drink apparently in any
weather and at any time. Otherwise the cafe seemed empty, except for one

soldier drinking coffee at one table, and at another a large man drinking a
small syrup and a priest drinking nothing.
Maurice Brun cleared his throat and said: “Of course we must help the
master in every way, but—”
There was an abrupt silence, and Armagnac said: “He may have excellent
reasons for not meeting the man himself, but—”
Before either could complete a sentence, it was evident that the invader
had been expelled from the house opposite. The shrubs under the archway
swayed and burst apart, as that unwelcome guest was shot out of them like a
cannon-ball.
He was a sturdy figure in a small and tilted Tyrolean felt hat, a figure that
had indeed something generally Tyrolean about it. The man’s shoulders
were big and broad, but his legs were neat and active in knee-breeches and
knitted stockings. His face was brown like a nut; he had very bright and
restless brown eyes; his dark hair was brushed back stiffly in front and
cropped close behind, outlining a square and powerful skull; and he had a
huge black moustache like the horns of a bison. Such a substantial head is
generally based on a bull neck; but this was hidden by a big coloured scarf,
swathed round up the man’s ears and falling in front inside his jacket like a
sort of fancy waistcoat. It was a scarf of strong dead colours, dark red and
old gold and purple, probably of Oriental fabrication. Altogether the man
had something a shade barbaric about him; more like a Hungarian squire
than an ordinary French officer. His French, however, was obviously that of
a native; and his French patriotism was so impulsive as to be slightly
absurd. His first act when he burst out of the archway was to call in a
clarion voice down the street: “Are there any Frenchmen here?” as if he
were calling for Christians in Mecca.
Armagnac and Brun instantly stood up; but they were too late. Men were
already running from the street corners; there was a small but ever-
clustering crowd. With the prompt French instinct for the politics of the
street, the man with the black moustache had already run across to a corner
of the cafe, sprung on one of the tables, and seizing a branch of chestnut to
steady himself, shouted as Camille Desmoulins once shouted when he
scattered the oak-leaves among the populace.
“Frenchmen!” he volleyed; “I cannot speak! God help me, that is why I
am speaking! The fellows in their filthy parliaments who learn to speak also

learn to be silent—silent as that spy cowering in the house opposite! Silent
as he is when I beat on his bedroom door! Silent as he is now, though he
hears my voice across this street and shakes where he sits! Oh, they can be
silent eloquently—the politicians! But the time has come when we that
cannot speak must speak. You are betrayed to the Prussians. Betrayed at this
moment. Betrayed by that man. I am Jules Dubosc, Colonel of Artillery,
Belfort. We caught a German spy in the Vosges yesterday, and a paper was
found on him—a paper I hold in my hand. Oh, they tried to hush it up; but I
took it direct to the man who wrote it—the man in that house! It is in his
hand. It is signed with his initials. It is a direction for finding the secret of
this new Noiseless Powder. Hirsch invented it; Hirsch wrote this note about
it. This note is in German, and was found in a German’s pocket. ‘Tell the
man the formula for powder is in grey envelope in first drawer to the left of
Secretary’s desk, War Office, in red ink. He must be careful. P.H.’”
He rattled short sentences like a quick-firing gun, but he was plainly the
sort of man who is either mad or right. The mass of the crowd was
Nationalist, and already in threatening uproar; and a minority of equally
angry Intellectuals, led by Armagnac and Brun, only made the majority
more militant.
“If this is a military secret,” shouted Brun, “why do you yell about it in
the street?”
“I will tell you why I do!” roared Dubosc above the roaring crowd. “I
went to this man in straight and civil style. If he had any explanation it
could have been given in complete confidence. He refuses to explain. He
refers me to two strangers in a cafe as to two flunkeys. He has thrown me
out of the house, but I am going back into it, with the people of Paris behind
me!”
A shout seemed to shake the very facade of mansions and two stones
flew, one breaking a window above the balcony. The indignant Colonel
plunged once more under the archway and was heard crying and thundering
inside. Every instant the human sea grew wider and wider; it surged up
against the rails and steps of the traitor’s house; it was already certain that
the place would be burst into like the Bastille, when the broken french
window opened and Dr Hirsch came out on the balcony. For an instant the
fury half turned to laughter; for he was an absurd figure in such a scene. His
long bare neck and sloping shoulders were the shape of a champagne bottle,

but that was the only festive thing about him. His coat hung on him as on a
peg; he wore his carrot-coloured hair long and weedy; his cheeks and chin
were fully fringed with one of those irritating beards that begin far from the
mouth. He was very pale, and he wore blue spectacles.
Livid as he was, he spoke with a sort of prim decision, so that the mob
fell silent in the middle of his third sentence.
“...only two things to say to you now. The first is to my foes, the second
to my friends. To my foes I say: It is true I will not meet M. Dubosc, though
he is storming outside this very room. It is true I have asked two other men
to confront him for me. And I will tell you why! Because I will not and
must not see him—because it would be against all rules of dignity and
honour to see him. Before I am triumphantly cleared before a court, there is
another arbitration this gentleman owes me as a gentleman, and in referring
him to my seconds I am strictly—”
Armagnac and Brun were waving their hats wildly, and even the Doctor’s
enemies roared applause at this unexpected defiance. Once more a few
sentences were inaudible, but they could hear him say: “To my friends—I
myself should always prefer weapons purely intellectual, and to these an
evolved humanity will certainly confine itself. But our own most precious
truth is the fundamental force of matter and heredity. My books are
successful; my theories are unrefuted; but I suffer in politics from a
prejudice almost physical in the French. I cannot speak like Clemenceau
and Deroulede, for their words are like echoes of their pistols. The French
ask for a duellist as the English ask for a sportsman. Well, I give my proofs:
I will pay this barbaric bribe, and then go back to reason for the rest of my
life.”
Two men were instantly found in the crowd itself to offer their services to
Colonel Dubosc, who came out presently, satisfied. One was the common
soldier with the coffee, who said simply: “I will act for you, sir. I am the
Duc de Valognes.” The other was the big man, whom his friend the priest
sought at first to dissuade; and then walked away alone.
In the early evening a light dinner was spread at the back of the Cafe
Charlemagne. Though unroofed by any glass or gilt plaster, the guests were
nearly all under a delicate and irregular roof of leaves; for the ornamental
trees stood so thick around and among the tables as to give something of the
dimness and the dazzle of a small orchard. At one of the central tables a

very stumpy little priest sat in complete solitude, and applied himself to a
pile of whitebait with the gravest sort of enjoyment. His daily living being
very plain, he had a peculiar taste for sudden and isolated luxuries; he was
an abstemious epicure. He did not lift his eyes from his plate, round which
red pepper, lemons, brown bread and butter, etc., were rigidly ranked, until
a tall shadow fell across the table, and his friend Flambeau sat down
opposite. Flambeau was gloomy.
“I’m afraid I must chuck this business,” said he heavily. “I’m all on the
side of the French soldiers like Dubosc, and I’m all against the French
atheists like Hirsch; but it seems to me in this case we’ve made a mistake.
The Duke and I thought it as well to investigate the charge, and I must say
I’m glad we did.”
“Is the paper a forgery, then?” asked the priest
“That’s just the odd thing,” replied Flambeau. “It’s exactly like Hirsch’s
writing, and nobody can point out any mistake in it. But it wasn’t written by
Hirsch. If he’s a French patriot he didn’t write it, because it gives
information to Germany. And if he’s a German spy he didn’t write it, well—
because it doesn’t give information to Germany.”
“You mean the information is wrong?” asked Father Brown.
“Wrong,” replied the other, “and wrong exactly where Dr Hirsch would
have been right—about the hiding-place of his own secret formula in his
own official department. By favour of Hirsch and the authorities, the Duke
and I have actually been allowed to inspect the secret drawer at the War
Office where the Hirsch formula is kept. We are the only people who have
ever known it, except the inventor himself and the Minister for War; but the
Minister permitted it to save Hirsch from fighting. After that we really can’t
support Dubosc if his revelation is a mare’s nest.”
“And it is?” asked Father Brown.
“It is,” said his friend gloomily. “It is a clumsy forgery by somebody who
knew nothing of the real hiding-place. It says the paper is in the cupboard
on the right of the Secretary’s desk. As a fact the cupboard with the secret
drawer is some way to the left of the desk. It says the grey envelope
contains a long document written in red ink. It isn’t written in red ink, but in
ordinary black ink. It’s manifestly absurd to say that Hirsch can have made
a mistake about a paper that nobody knew of but himself; or can have tried

to help a foreign thief by telling him to fumble in the wrong drawer. I think
we must chuck it up and apologize to old Carrots.”
Father Brown seemed to cogitate; he lifted a little whitebait on his fork.
“You are sure the grey envelope was in the left cupboard?” he asked.
“Positive,” replied Flambeau. “The grey envelope—it was a white
envelope really—was—”
Father Brown put down the small silver fish and the fork and stared
across at his companion. “What?” he asked, in an altered voice.
“Well, what?” repeated Flambeau, eating heartily.
“It was not grey,” said the priest. “Flambeau, you frighten me.”
“What the deuce are you frightened of?”
“I’m frightened of a white envelope,” said the other seriously, “If it had
only just been grey! Hang it all, it might as well have been grey. But if it
was white, the whole business is black. The Doctor has been dabbling in
some of the old brimstone after all.”
“But I tell you he couldn’t have written such a note!” cried Flambeau.
“The note is utterly wrong about the facts. And innocent or guilty, Dr
Hirsch knew all about the facts.”
“The man who wrote that note knew all about the facts,” said his clerical
companion soberly. “He could never have got ‘em so wrong without
knowing about ‘em. You have to know an awful lot to be wrong on every
subject—like the devil.”
“Do you mean—?”
“I mean a man telling lies on chance would have told some of the truth,”
said his friend firmly. “Suppose someone sent you to find a house with a
green door and a blue blind, with a front garden but no back garden, with a
dog but no cat, and where they drank coffee but not tea. You would say if
you found no such house that it was all made up. But I say no. I say if you
found a house where the door was blue and the blind green, where there
was a back garden and no front garden, where cats were common and dogs
instantly shot, where tea was drunk in quarts and coffee forbidden—then
you would know you had found the house. The man must have known that
particular house to be so accurately inaccurate.”
“But what could it mean?” demanded the diner opposite.

“I can’t conceive,” said Brown; “I don’t understand this Hirsch affair at
all. As long as it was only the left drawer instead of the right, and red ink
instead of black, I thought it must be the chance blunders of a forger, as you
say. But three is a mystical number; it finishes things. It finishes this. That
the direction about the drawer, the colour of ink, the colour of envelope,
should none of them be right by accident, that can’t be a coincidence. It
wasn’t.”
“What was it, then? Treason?” asked Flambeau, resuming his dinner.
“I don’t know that either,” answered Brown, with a face of blank
bewilderment. “The only thing I can think of.... Well, I never understood
that Dreyfus case. I can always grasp moral evidence easier than the other
sorts. I go by a man’s eyes and voice, don’t you know, and whether his
family seems happy, and by what subjects he chooses—and avoids. Well, I
was puzzled in the Dreyfus case. Not by the horrible things imputed both
ways; I know (though it’s not modern to say so) that human nature in the
highest places is still capable of being Cenci or Borgia. No—, what puzzled
me was the sincerity of both parties. I don’t mean the political parties; the
rank and file are always roughly honest, and often duped. I mean the
persons of the play. I mean the conspirators, if they were conspirators. I
mean the traitor, if he was a traitor. I mean the men who must have known
the truth. Now Dreyfus went on like a man who knew he was a wronged
man. And yet the French statesmen and soldiers went on as if they knew he
wasn’t a wronged man but simply a wrong ‘un. I don’t mean they behaved
well; I mean they behaved as if they were sure. I can’t describe these things;
I know what I mean.”
“I wish I did,” said his friend. “And what has it to do with old Hirsch?”
“Suppose a person in a position of trust,” went on the priest, “began to
give the enemy information because it was false information. Suppose he
even thought he was saving his country by misleading the foreigner.
Suppose this brought him into spy circles, and little loans were made to
him, and little ties tied on to him. Suppose he kept up his contradictory
position in a confused way by never telling the foreign spies the truth, but
letting it more and more be guessed. The better part of him (what was left of
it) would still say: ‘I have not helped the enemy; I said it was the left
drawer.’ The meaner part of him would already be saying: ‘But they may

have the sense to see that means the right.’ I think it is psychologically
possible—in an enlightened age, you know.”
“It may be psychologically possible,” answered Flambeau, “and it
certainly would explain Dreyfus being certain he was wronged and his
judges being sure he was guilty. But it won’t wash historically, because
Dreyfus’s document (if it was his document) was literally correct.”
“I wasn’t thinking of Dreyfus,” said Father Brown.
Silence had sunk around them with the emptying of the tables; it was
already late, though the sunlight still clung to everything, as if accidentally
entangled in the trees. In the stillness Flambeau shifted his seat sharply—
making an isolated and echoing noise—and threw his elbow over the angle
of it. “Well,” he said, rather harshly, “if Hirsch is not better than a timid
treason-monger...”
“You mustn’t be too hard on them,” said Father Brown gently. “It’s not
entirely their fault; but they have no instincts. I mean those things that make
a woman refuse to dance with a man or a man to touch an investment.
They’ve been taught that it’s all a matter of degree.”
“Anyhow,” cried Flambeau impatiently, “he’s not a patch on my
principal; and I shall go through with it. Old Dubosc may be a bit mad, but
he’s a sort of patriot after all.”
Father Brown continued to consume whitebait.
Something in the stolid way he did so caused Flambeau’s fierce black
eyes to ramble over his companion afresh. “What’s the matter with you?”
Flambeau demanded. “Dubosc’s all right in that way. You don’t doubt
him?”
“My friend,” said the small priest, laying down his knife and fork in a
kind of cold despair, “I doubt everything. Everything, I mean, that has
happened today. I doubt the whole story, though it has been acted before my
face. I doubt every sight that my eyes have seen since morning. There is
something in this business quite different from the ordinary police mystery
where one man is more or less lying and the other man more or less telling
the truth. Here both men.... Well! I’ve told you the only theory I can think
of that could satisfy anybody. It doesn’t satisfy me.”
“Nor me either,” replied Flambeau frowning, while the other went on
eating fish with an air of entire resignation. “If all you can suggest is that

notion of a message conveyed by contraries, I call it uncommonly clever,
but...well, what would you call it?”
“I should call it thin,” said the priest promptly. “I should call it
uncommonly thin. But that’s the queer thing about the whole business. The
lie is like a schoolboy’s. There are only three versions, Dubosc’s and
Hirsch’s and that fancy of mine. Either that note was written by a French
officer to ruin a French official; or it was written by the French official to
help German officers; or it was written by the French official to mislead
German officers. Very well. You’d expect a secret paper passing between
such people, officials or officers, to look quite different from that. You’d
expect, probably a cipher, certainly abbreviations; most certainly scientific
and strictly professional terms. But this thing’s elaborately simple, like a
penny dreadful: ‘In the purple grotto you will find the golden casket.’ It
looks as if... as if it were meant to be seen through at once.”
Almost before they could take it in a short figure in French uniform had
walked up to their table like the wind, and sat down with a sort of thump.
“I have extraordinary news,” said the Duc de Valognes. “I have just come
from this Colonel of ours. He is packing up to leave the country, and he
asks us to make his excuses sur le terrain.”
“What?” cried Flambeau, with an incredulity quite frightful
—“apologize?”
“Yes,” said the Duke gruffly; “then and there—before everybody—when
the swords are drawn. And you and I have to do it while he is leaving the
country.”
“But what can this mean?” cried Flambeau. “He can’t be afraid of that
little Hirsch! Confound it!” he cried, in a kind of rational rage; “nobody
could be afraid of Hirsch!”
“I believe it’s some plot!” snapped Valognes—“some plot of the Jews
and Freemasons. It’s meant to work up glory for Hirsch...”
The face of Father Brown was commonplace, but curiously contented; it
could shine with ignorance as well as with knowledge. But there was
always one flash when the foolish mask fell, and the wise mask fitted itself
in its place; and Flambeau, who knew his friend, knew that his friend had
suddenly understood. Brown said nothing, but finished his plate of fish.

“Where did you last see our precious Colonel?” asked Flambeau,
irritably.
“He’s round at the Hotel Saint Louis by the Elysee, where we drove with
him. He’s packing up, I tell you.”
“Will he be there still, do you think?” asked Flambeau, frowning at the
table.
“I don’t think he can get away yet,” replied the Duke; “he’s packing to go
a long journey...”
“No,” said Father Brown, quite simply, but suddenly standing up, “for a
very short journey. For one of the shortest, in fact. But we may still be in
time to catch him if we go there in a motor-cab.”
Nothing more could be got out of him until the cab swept round the
corner by the Hotel Saint Louis, where they got out, and he led the party up
a side lane already in deep shadow with the growing dusk. Once, when the
Duke impatiently asked whether Hirsch was guilty of treason or not, he
answered rather absently: “No; only of ambition—like Caesar.” Then he
somewhat inconsequently added: “He lives a very lonely life; he has had to
do everything for himself.”
“Well, if he’s ambitious, he ought to be satisfied now,” said Flambeau
rather bitterly. “All Paris will cheer him now our cursed Colonel has turned
tail.”
“Don’t talk so loud,” said Father Brown, lowering his voice, “your cursed
Colonel is just in front.”
The other two started and shrank farther back into the shadow of the
wall, for the sturdy figure of their runaway principal could indeed be seen
shuffling along in the twilight in front, a bag in each hand. He looked much
the same as when they first saw him, except that he had changed his
picturesque mountaineering knickers for a conventional pair of trousers. It
was clear he was already escaping from the hotel.
The lane down which they followed him was one of those that seem to be
at the back of things, and look like the wrong side of the stage scenery. A
colourless, continuous wall ran down one flank of it, interrupted at intervals
by dull-hued and dirt-stained doors, all shut fast and featureless save for the
chalk scribbles of some passing gamin. The tops of trees, mostly rather
depressing evergreens, showed at intervals over the top of the wall, and

beyond them in the grey and purple gloaming could be seen the back of
some long terrace of tall Parisian houses, really comparatively close, but
somehow looking as inaccessible as a range of marble mountains. On the
other side of the lane ran the high gilt railings of a gloomy park.
Flambeau was looking round him in rather a weird way. “Do you know,”
he said, “there is something about this place that—”
“Hullo!” called out the Duke sharply; “that fellow’s disappeared.
Vanished, like a blasted fairy!”
“He has a key,” explained their clerical friend. “He’s only gone into one
of these garden doors,” and as he spoke they heard one of the dull wooden
doors close again with a click in front of them.
Flambeau strode up to the door thus shut almost in his face, and stood in
front of it for a moment, biting his black moustache in a fury of curiosity.
Then he threw up his long arms and swung himself aloft like a monkey and
stood on the top of the wall, his enormous figure dark against the purple
sky, like the dark tree-tops.
The Duke looked at the priest. “Dubosc’s escape is more elaborate than
we thought,” he said; “but I suppose he is escaping from France.”
“He is escaping from everywhere,” answered Father Brown.
Valognes’s eyes brightened, but his voice sank. “Do you mean suicide?”
he asked.
“You will not find his body,” replied the other.
A kind of cry came from Flambeau on the wall above. “My God,” he
exclaimed in French, “I know what this place is now! Why, it’s the back of
the street where old Hirsch lives. I thought I could recognize the back of a
house as well as the back of a man.”
“And Dubosc’s gone in there!” cried the Duke, smiting his hip. “Why,
they’ll meet after all!” And with sudden Gallic vivacity he hopped up on the
wall beside Flambeau and sat there positively kicking his legs with
excitement. The priest alone remained below, leaning against the wall, with
his back to the whole theatre of events, and looking wistfully across to the
park palings and the twinkling, twilit trees.
The Duke, however stimulated, had the instincts of an aristocrat, and
desired rather to stare at the house than to spy on it; but Flambeau, who had
the instincts of a burglar (and a detective), had already swung himself from

the wall into the fork of a straggling tree from which he could crawl quite
close to the only illuminated window in the back of the high dark house. A
red blind had been pulled down over the light, but pulled crookedly, so that
it gaped on one side, and by risking his neck along a branch that looked as
treacherous as a twig, Flambeau could just see Colonel Dubosc walking
about in a brilliantly-lighted and luxurious bedroom. But close as Flambeau
was to the house, he heard the words of his colleagues by the wall, and
repeated them in a low voice.
“Yes, they will meet now after all!”
“They will never meet,” said Father Brown. “Hirsch was right when he
said that in such an affair the principals must not meet. Have you read a
queer psychological story by Henry James, of two persons who so
perpetually missed meeting each other by accident that they began to feel
quite frightened of each other, and to think it was fate? This is something of
the kind, but more curious.”
“There are people in Paris who will cure them of such morbid fancies,”
said Valognes vindictively. “They will jolly well have to meet if we capture
them and force them to fight.”
“They will not meet on the Day of Judgement,” said the priest. “If God
Almighty held the truncheon of the lists, if St Michael blew the trumpet for
the swords to cross—even then, if one of them stood ready, the other would
not come.”
“Oh, what does all this mysticism mean?” cried the Duc de Valognes,
impatiently; “why on earth shouldn’t they meet like other people?”
“They are the opposite of each other,” said Father Brown, with a queer
kind of smile. “They contradict each other. They cancel out, so to speak.”
He continued to gaze at the darkening trees opposite, but Valognes turned
his head sharply at a suppressed exclamation from Flambeau. That
investigator, peering into the lighted room, had just seen the Colonel, after a
pace or two, proceed to take his coat off. Flambeau’s first thought was that
this really looked like a fight; but he soon dropped the thought for another.
The solidity and squareness of Dubosc’s chest and shoulders was all a
powerful piece of padding and came off with his coat. In his shirt and
trousers he was a comparatively slim gentleman, who walked across the
bedroom to the bathroom with no more pugnacious purpose than that of
washing himself. He bent over a basin, dried his dripping hands and face on

a towel, and turned again so that the strong light fell on his face. His brown
complexion had gone, his big black moustache had gone; he—was clean-
shaven and very pate. Nothing remained of the Colonel but his bright,
hawk-like, brown eyes. Under the wall Father Brown was going on in
heavy meditation, as if to himself.
“It is all just like what I was saying to Flambeau. These opposites won’t
do. They don’t work. They don’t fight. If it’s white instead of black, and
solid instead of liquid, and so on all along the line—then there’s something
wrong, Monsieur, there’s something wrong. One of these men is fair and the
other dark, one stout and the other slim, one strong and the other weak. One
has a moustache and no beard, so you can’t see his mouth; the other has a
beard and no moustache, so you can’t see his chin. One has hair cropped to
his skull, but a scarf to hide his neck; the other has low shirt-collars, but
long hair to bide his skull. It’s all too neat and correct, Monsieur, and
there’s something wrong. Things made so opposite are things that cannot
quarrel. Wherever the one sticks out the other sinks in. Like a face and a
mask, like a lock and a key...”
Flambeau was peering into the house with a visage as white as a sheet.
The occupant of the room was standing with his back to him, but in front of
a looking-glass, and had already fitted round his face a sort of framework of
rank red hair, hanging disordered from the head and clinging round the jaws
and chin while leaving the mocking mouth uncovered. Seen thus in the
glass the white face looked like the face of Judas laughing horribly and
surrounded by capering flames of hell. For a spasm Flambeau saw the
fierce, red-brown eyes dancing, then they were covered with a pair of blue
spectacles. Slipping on a loose black coat, the figure vanished towards the
front of the house. A few moments later a roar of popular applause from the
street beyond announced that Dr Hirsch had once more appeared upon the
balcony.

FOUR — The Man in the Passage
TWO men appeared simultaneously at the two ends of a sort of passage
running along the side of the Apollo Theatre in the Adelphi. The evening
daylight in the streets was large and luminous, opalescent and empty. The
passage was comparatively long and dark, so each man could see the other
as a mere black silhouette at the other end. Nevertheless, each man knew
the other, even in that inky outline; for they were both men of striking
appearance and they hated each other.
The covered passage opened at one end on one of the steep streets of the
Adelphi, and at the other on a terrace overlooking the sunset-coloured river.
One side of the passage was a blank wall, for the building it supported was
an old unsuccessful theatre restaurant, now shut up. The other side of the
passage contained two doors, one at each end. Neither was what was
commonly called the stage door; they were a sort of special and private
stage doors used by very special performers, and in this case by the star
actor and actress in the Shakespearean performance of the day. Persons of
that eminence often like to have such private exits and entrances, for
meeting friends or avoiding them.
The two men in question were certainly two such friends, men who
evidently knew the doors and counted on their opening, for each
approached the door at the upper end with equal coolness and confidence.
Not, however, with equal speed; but the man who walked fast was the man
from the other end of the tunnel, so they both arrived before the secret stage
door almost at the same instant. They saluted each other with civility, and
waited a moment before one of them, the sharper walker who seemed to
have the shorter patience, knocked at the door.
In this and everything else each man was opposite and neither could be
called inferior. As private persons both were handsome, capable and
popular. As public persons, both were in the first public rank. But
everything about them, from their glory to their good looks, was of a
diverse and incomparable kind. Sir Wilson Seymour was the kind of man
whose importance is known to everybody who knows. The more you mixed
with the innermost ring in every polity or profession, the more often you

met Sir Wilson Seymour. He was the one intelligent man on twenty
unintelligent committees—on every sort of subject, from the reform of the
Royal Academy to the project of bimetallism for Greater Britain. In the Arts
especially he was omnipotent. He was so unique that nobody could quite
decide whether he was a great aristocrat who had taken up Art, or a great
artist whom the aristocrats had taken up. But you could not meet him for
five minutes without realizing that you had really been ruled by him all
your life.
His appearance was “distinguished” in exactly the same sense; it was at
once conventional and unique. Fashion could have found no fault with his
high silk hat—, yet it was unlike anyone else’s hat—a little higher, perhaps,
and adding something to his natural height. His tall, slender figure had a
slight stoop yet it looked the reverse of feeble. His hair was silver-grey, but
he did not look old; it was worn longer than the common yet he did not look
effeminate; it was curly but it did not look curled. His carefully pointed
beard made him look more manly and militant than otherwise, as it does in
those old admirals of Velazquez with whose dark portraits his house was
hung. His grey gloves were a shade bluer, his silver-knobbed cane a shade
longer than scores of such gloves and canes flapped and flourished about
the theatres and the restaurants.
The other man was not so tall, yet would have struck nobody as short, but
merely as strong and handsome. His hair also was curly, but fair and
cropped close to a strong, massive head—the sort of head you break a door
with, as Chaucer said of the Miller’s. His military moustache and the
carriage of his shoulders showed him a soldier, but he had a pair of those
peculiar frank and piercing blue eyes which are more common in sailors.
His face was somewhat square, his jaw was square, his shoulders were
square, even his jacket was square. Indeed, in the wild school of caricature
then current, Mr Max Beerbohm had represented him as a proposition in the
fourth book of Euclid.
For he also was a public man, though with quite another sort of success.
You did not have to be in the best society to have heard of Captain Cutler,
of the siege of Hong-Kong, and the great march across China. You could
not get away from hearing of him wherever you were; his portrait was on
every other postcard; his maps and battles in every other illustrated paper;
songs in his honour in every other music-hall turn or on every other barrel-

organ. His fame, though probably more temporary, was ten times more
wide, popular and spontaneous than the other man’s. In thousands of
English homes he appeared enormous above England, like Nelson. Yet he
had infinitely less power in England than Sir Wilson Seymour.
The door was opened to them by an aged servant or “dresser”, whose
broken-down face and figure and black shabby coat and trousers contrasted
queerly with the glittering interior of the great actress’s dressing-room. It
was fitted and filled with looking-glasses at every angle of refraction, so
that they looked like the hundred facets of one huge diamond—if one could
get inside a diamond. The other features of luxury, a few flowers, a few
coloured cushions, a few scraps of stage costume, were multiplied by all the
mirrors into the madness of the Arabian Nights, and danced and changed
places perpetually as the shuffling attendant shifted a mirror outwards or
shot one back against the wall.
They both spoke to the dingy dresser by name, calling him Parkinson,
and asking for the lady as Miss Aurora Rome. Parkinson said she was in the
other room, but he would go and tell her. A shade crossed the brow of both
visitors; for the other room was the private room of the great actor with
whom Miss Aurora was performing, and she was of the kind that does not
inflame admiration without inflaming jealousy. In about half a minute,
however, the inner door opened, and she entered as she always did, even in
private life, so that the very silence seemed to be a roar of applause, and one
well-deserved. She was clad in a somewhat strange garb of peacock green
and peacock blue satins, that gleamed like blue and green metals, such as
delight children and aesthetes, and her heavy, hot brown hair framed one of
those magic faces which are dangerous to all men, but especially to boys
and to men growing grey. In company with her male colleague, the great
American actor, Isidore Bruno, she was producing a particularly poetical
and fantastic interpretation of Midsummer Night’s Dream: in which the
artistic prominence was given to Oberon and Titania, or in other words to
Bruno and herself. Set in dreamy and exquisite scenery, and moving in
mystical dances, the green costume, like burnished beetle-wings, expressed
all the elusive individuality of an elfin queen. But when personally
confronted in what was still broad daylight, a man looked only at the
woman’s face.

She greeted both men with the beaming and baffling smile which kept so
many males at the same just dangerous distance from her. She accepted
some flowers from Cutler, which were as tropical and expensive as his
victories; and another sort of present from Sir Wilson Seymour, offered
later on and more nonchalantly by that gentleman. For it was against his
breeding to show eagerness, and against his conventional unconventionality
to give anything so obvious as flowers. He had picked up a trifle, he said,
which was rather a curiosity, it was an ancient Greek dagger of the
Mycenaean Epoch, and might well have been worn in the time of Theseus
and Hippolyta. It was made of brass like all the Heroic weapons, but, oddly
enough, sharp enough to prick anyone still. He had really been attracted to
it by the leaf-like shape; it was as perfect as a Greek vase. If it was of any
interest to Miss Rome or could come in anywhere in the play, he hoped she
would—
The inner door burst open and a big figure appeared, who was more of a
contrast to the explanatory Seymour than even Captain Cutler. Nearly six-
foot-six, and of more than theatrical thews and muscles, Isidore Bruno, in
the gorgeous leopard skin and golden-brown garments of Oberon, looked
like a barbaric god. He leaned on a sort of hunting-spear, which across a
theatre looked a slight, silvery wand, but which in the small and
comparatively crowded room looked as plain as a pike-staff—and as
menacing. His vivid black eyes rolled volcanically, his bronzed face,
handsome as it was, showed at that moment a combination of high
cheekbones with set white teeth, which recalled certain American
conjectures about his origin in the Southern plantations.
“Aurora,” he began, in that deep voice like a drum of passion that had
moved so many audiences, “will you—”
He stopped indecisively because a sixth figure had suddenly presented
itself just inside the doorway—a figure so incongruous in the scene as to be
almost comic. It was a very short man in the black uniform of the Roman
secular clergy, and looking (especially in such a presence as Bruno’s and
Aurora’s) rather like the wooden Noah out of an ark. He did not, however,
seem conscious of any contrast, but said with dull civility: “I believe Miss
Rome sent for me.”
A shrewd observer might have remarked that the emotional temperature
rather rose at so unemotional an interruption. The detachment of a

professional celibate seemed to reveal to the others that they stood round
the woman as a ring of amorous rivals; just as a stranger coming in with
frost on his coat will reveal that a room is like a furnace. The presence of
the one man who did not care about her increased Miss Rome’s sense that
everybody else was in love with her, and each in a somewhat dangerous
way: the actor with all the appetite of a savage and a spoilt child; the soldier
with all the simple selfishness of a man of will rather than mind; Sir Wilson
with that daily hardening concentration with which old Hedonists take to a
hobby; nay, even the abject Parkinson, who had known her before her
triumphs, and who followed her about the room with eyes or feet, with the
dumb fascination of a dog.
A shrewd person might also have noted a yet odder thing. The man like a
black wooden Noah (who was not wholly without shrewdness) noted it with
a considerable but contained amusement. It was evident that the great
Aurora, though by no means indifferent to the admiration of the other sex,
wanted at this moment to get rid of all the men who admired her and be left
alone with the man who did not—did not admire her in that sense at least;
for the little priest did admire and even enjoy the firm feminine diplomacy
with which she set about her task. There was, perhaps, only one thing that
Aurora Rome was clever about, and that was one half of humanity—the
other half. The little priest watched, like a Napoleonic campaign, the swift
precision of her policy for expelling all while banishing none. Bruno, the
big actor, was so babyish that it was easy to send him off in brute sulks,
banging the door. Cutler, the British officer, was pachydermatous to ideas,
but punctilious about behaviour. He would ignore all hints, but he would die
rather than ignore a definite commission from a lady. As to old Seymour, he
had to be treated differently; he had to be left to the last. The only way to
move him was to appeal to him in confidence as an old friend, to let him
into the secret of the clearance. The priest did really admire Miss Rome as
she achieved all these three objects in one selected action.
She went across to Captain Cutler and said in her sweetest manner: “I
shall value all these flowers, because they must be your favourite flowers.
But they won’t be complete, you know, without my favourite flower. Do go
over to that shop round the corner and get me some lilies-of-the-valley, and
then it will be quite lovely.”

The first object of her diplomacy, the exit of the enraged Bruno, was at
once achieved. He had already handed his spear in a lordly style, like a
sceptre, to the piteous Parkinson, and was about to assume one of the
cushioned seats like a throne. But at this open appeal to his rival there
glowed in his opal eyeballs all the sensitive insolence of the slave; he
knotted his enormous brown fists for an instant, and then, dashing open the
door, disappeared into his own apartments beyond. But meanwhile Miss
Rome’s experiment in mobilizing the British Army had not succeeded so
simply as seemed probable. Cutler had indeed risen stiffly and suddenly,
and walked towards the door, hatless, as if at a word of command. But
perhaps there was something ostentatiously elegant about the languid figure
of Seymour leaning against one of the looking-glasses that brought him up
short at the entrance, turning his head this way and that like a bewildered
bulldog.
“I must show this stupid man where to go,” said Aurora in a whisper to
Seymour, and ran out to the threshold to speed the parting guest.
Seymour seemed to be listening, elegant and unconscious as was his
posture, and he seemed relieved when he heard the lady call out some last
instructions to the Captain, and then turn sharply and run laughing down the
passage towards the other end, the end on the terrace above the Thames. Yet
a second or two after Seymour’s brow darkened again. A man in his
position has so many rivals, and he remembered that at the other end of the
passage was the corresponding entrance to Bruno’s private room. He did
not lose his dignity; he said some civil words to Father Brown about the
revival of Byzantine architecture in the Westminster Cathedral, and then,
quite naturally, strolled out himself into the upper end of the passage. Father
Brown and Parkinson were left alone, and they were neither of them men
with a taste for superfluous conversation. The dresser went round the room,
pulling out looking-glasses and pushing them in again, his dingy dark coat
and trousers looking all the more dismal since he was still holding the
festive fairy spear of King Oberon. Every time he pulled out the frame of a
new glass, a new black figure of Father Brown appeared; the absurd glass
chamber was full of Father Browns, upside down in the air like angels,
turning somersaults like acrobats, turning their backs to everybody like very
rude persons.

Father Brown seemed quite unconscious of this cloud of witnesses, but
followed Parkinson with an idly attentive eye till he took himself and his
absurd spear into the farther room of Bruno. Then he abandoned himself to
such abstract meditations as always amused him—calculating the angles of
the mirrors, the angles of each refraction, the angle at which each must fit
into the wall...when he heard a strong but strangled cry.
He sprang to his feet and stood rigidly listening. At the same instant Sir
Wilson Seymour burst back into the room, white as ivory. “Who’s that man
in the passage?” he cried. “Where’s that dagger of mine?”
Before Father Brown could turn in his heavy boots Seymour was
plunging about the room looking for the weapon. And before he could
possibly find that weapon or any other, a brisk running of feet broke upon
the pavement outside, and the square face of Cutler was thrust into the same
doorway. He was still grotesquely grasping a bunch of lilies-of-the-valley.
“What’s this?” he cried. “What’s that creature down the passage? Is this
some of your tricks?”
“My tricks!” hissed his pale rival, and made a stride towards him.
In the instant of time in which all this happened Father Brown stepped
out into the top of the passage, looked down it, and at once walked briskly
towards what he saw.
At this the other two men dropped their quarrel and darted after him,
Cutler calling out: “What are you doing? Who are you?”
“My name is Brown,” said the priest sadly, as he bent over something
and straightened himself again. “Miss Rome sent for me, and I came as
quickly as I could. I have come too late.”
The three men looked down, and in one of them at least the life died in
that late light of afternoon. It ran along the passage like a path of gold, and
in the midst of it Aurora Rome lay lustrous in her robes of green and gold,
with her dead face turned upwards. Her dress was torn away as in a
struggle, leaving the right shoulder bare, but the wound from which the
blood was welling was on the other side. The brass dagger lay flat and
gleaming a yard or so away.
There was a blank stillness for a measurable time, so that they could hear
far off a flower-girl’s laugh outside Charing Cross, and someone whistling
furiously for a taxicab in one of the streets off the Strand. Then the Captain,

with a movement so sudden that it might have been passion or play-acting,
took Sir Wilson Seymour by the throat.
Seymour looked at him steadily without either fight or fear. “You need
not kill me,” he said in a voice quite cold; “I shall do that on my own
account.”
The Captain’s hand hesitated and dropped; and the other added with the
same icy candour: “If I find I haven’t the nerve to do it with that dagger I
can do it in a month with drink.”
“Drink isn’t good enough for me,” replied Cutler, “but I’ll have blood for
this before I die. Not yours—but I think I know whose.”
And before the others could appreciate his intention he snatched up the
dagger, sprang at the other door at the lower end of the passage, burst it
open, bolt and all, and confronted Bruno in his dressing-room. As he did so,
old Parkinson tottered in his wavering way out of the door and caught sight
of the corpse lying in the passage. He moved shakily towards it; looked at it
weakly with a working face; then moved shakily back into the dressing-
room again, and sat down suddenly on one of the richly cushioned chairs.
Father Brown instantly ran across to him, taking no notice of Cutler and the
colossal actor, though the room already rang with their blows and they
began to struggle for the dagger. Seymour, who retained some practical
sense, was whistling for the police at the end of the passage.
When the police arrived it was to tear the two men from an almost ape-
like grapple; and, after a few formal inquiries, to arrest Isidore Bruno upon
a charge of murder, brought against him by his furious opponent. The idea
that the great national hero of the hour had arrested a wrongdoer with his
own hand doubtless had its weight with the police, who are not without
elements of the journalist. They treated Cutler with a certain solemn
attention, and pointed out that he had got a slight slash on the hand. Even as
Cutler bore him back across tilted chair and table, Bruno had twisted the
dagger out of his grasp and disabled him just below the wrist. The injury
was really slight, but till he was removed from the room the half-savage
prisoner stared at the running blood with a steady smile.
“Looks a cannibal sort of chap, don’t he?” said the constable
confidentially to Cutler.
Cutler made no answer, but said sharply a moment after: “We must attend
to the...the death...” and his voice escaped from articulation.

“The two deaths,” came in the voice of the priest from the farther side of
the room. “This poor fellow was gone when I got across to him.” And he
stood looking down at old Parkinson, who sat in a black huddle on the
gorgeous chair. He also had paid his tribute, not without eloquence, to the
woman who had died.
The silence was first broken by Cutler, who seemed not untouched by a
rough tenderness. “I wish I was him,” he said huskily. “I remember he used
to watch her wherever she walked more than—anybody. She was his air,
and he’s dried up. He’s just dead.”
“We are all dead,” said Seymour in a strange voice, looking down the
road.
They took leave of Father Brown at the corner of the road, with some
random apologies for any rudeness they might have shown. Both their faces
were tragic, but also cryptic.
The mind of the little priest was always a rabbit-warren of wild thoughts
that jumped too quickly for him to catch them. Like the white tail of a
rabbit he had the vanishing thought that he was certain of their grief, but not
so certain of their innocence.
“We had better all be going,” said Seymour heavily; “we have done all
we can to help.”
“Will you understand my motives,” asked Father Brown quietly, “if I say
you have done all you can to hurt?”
They both started as if guiltily, and Cutler said sharply: “To hurt whom?”
“To hurt yourselves,” answered the priest. “I would not add to your
troubles if it weren’t common justice to warn you. You’ve done nearly
everything you could do to hang yourselves, if this actor should be
acquitted. They’ll be sure to subpoena me; I shall be bound to say that after
the cry was heard each of you rushed into the room in a wild state and
began quarrelling about a dagger. As far as my words on oath can go, you
might either of you have done it. You hurt yourselves with that; and then
Captain Cutler must have hurt himself with the dagger.”
“Hurt myself!” exclaimed the Captain, with contempt. “A silly little
scratch.”
“Which drew blood,” replied the priest, nodding. “We know there’s blood
on the brass now. And so we shall never know whether there was blood on

it before.”
There was a silence; and then Seymour said, with an emphasis quite alien
to his daily accent: “But I saw a man in the passage.”
“I know you did,” answered the cleric Brown with a face of wood, “so
did Captain Cutler. That’s what seems so improbable.”
Before either could make sufficient sense of it even to answer, Father
Brown had politely excused himself and gone stumping up the road with his
stumpy old umbrella.
As modern newspapers are conducted, the most honest and most
important news is the police news. If it be true that in the twentieth century
more space is given to murder than to politics, it is for the excellent reason
that murder is a more serious subject. But even this would hardly explain
the enormous omnipresence and widely distributed detail of “The Bruno
Case,” or “The Passage Mystery,” in the Press of London and the provinces.
So vast was the excitement that for some weeks the Press really told the
truth; and the reports of examination and cross-examination, if
interminable, even if intolerable are at least reliable. The true reason, of
course, was the coincidence of persons. The victim was a popular actress;
the accused was a popular actor; and the accused had been caught red-
handed, as it were, by the most popular soldier of the patriotic season. In
those extraordinary circumstances the Press was paralysed into probity and
accuracy; and the rest of this somewhat singular business can practically be
recorded from reports of Bruno’s trial.
The trial was presided over by Mr Justice Monkhouse, one of those who
are jeered at as humorous judges, but who are generally much more serious
than the serious judges, for their levity comes from a living impatience of
professional solemnity; while the serious judge is really filled with frivolity,
because he is filled with vanity. All the chief actors being of a worldly
importance, the barristers were well balanced; the prosecutor for the Crown
was Sir Walter Cowdray, a heavy, but weighty advocate of the sort that
knows how to seem English and trustworthy, and how to be rhetorical with
reluctance. The prisoner was defended by Mr Patrick Butler, K.C., who was
mistaken for a mere flaneur by those who misunderstood the Irish character
—and those who had not been examined by him. The medical evidence
involved no contradictions, the doctor, whom Seymour had summoned on
the spot, agreeing with the eminent surgeon who had later examined the

body. Aurora Rome had been stabbed with some sharp instrument such as a
knife or dagger; some instrument, at least, of which the blade was short.
The wound was just over the heart, and she had died instantly. When the
doctor first saw her she could hardly have been dead for twenty minutes.
Therefore when Father Brown found her she could hardly have been dead
for three.
Some official detective evidence followed, chiefly concerned with the
presence or absence of any proof of a struggle; the only suggestion of this
was the tearing of the dress at the shoulder, and this did not seem to fit in
particularly well with the direction and finality of the blow. When these
details had been supplied, though not explained, the first of the important
witnesses was called.
Sir Wilson Seymour gave evidence as he did everything else that he did
at all—not only well, but perfectly. Though himself much more of a public
man than the judge, he conveyed exactly the fine shade of self-effacement
before the King’s justice; and though everyone looked at him as they would
at the Prime Minister or the Archbishop of Canterbury, they could have said
nothing of his part in it but that it was that of a private gentleman, with an
accent on the noun. He was also refreshingly lucid, as he was on the
committees. He had been calling on Miss Rome at the theatre; he had met
Captain Cutler there; they had been joined for a short time by the accused,
who had then returned to his own dressing-room; they had then been joined
by a Roman Catholic priest, who asked for the deceased lady and said his
name was Brown. Miss Rome had then gone just outside the theatre to the
entrance of the passage, in order to point out to Captain Cutler a flower-
shop at which he was to buy her some more flowers; and the witness had
remained in the room, exchanging a few words with the priest. He had then
distinctly heard the deceased, having sent the Captain on his errand, turn
round laughing and run down the passage towards its other end, where was
the prisoner’s dressing-room. In idle curiosity as to the rapid movement of
his friends, he had strolled out to the head of the passage himself and
looked down it towards the prisoner’s door. Did he see anything in the
passage? Yes; he saw something in the passage.
Sir Walter Cowdray allowed an impressive interval, during which the
witness looked down, and for all his usual composure seemed to have more

than his usual pallor. Then the barrister said in a lower voice, which seemed
at once sympathetic and creepy: “Did you see it distinctly?”
Sir Wilson Seymour, however moved, had his excellent brains in full
working-order. “Very distinctly as regards its outline, but quite indistinctly,
indeed not at all, as regards the details inside the outline. The passage is of
such length that anyone in the middle of it appears quite black against the
light at the other end.” The witness lowered his steady eyes once more and
added: “I had noticed the fact before, when Captain Cutler first entered it.”
There was another silence, and the judge leaned forward and made a note.
“Well,” said Sir Walter patiently, “what was the outline like? Was it, for
instance, like the figure of the murdered woman?”
“Not in the least,” answered Seymour quietly.
“What did it look like to you?”
“It looked to me,” replied the witness, “like a tall man.”
Everyone in court kept his eyes riveted on his pen, or his umbrella-
handle, or his book, or his boots or whatever he happened to be looking at.
They seemed to be holding their eyes away from the prisoner by main
force; but they felt his figure in the dock, and they felt it as gigantic. Tall as
Bruno was to the eye, he seemed to swell taller and taller when an eyes had
been torn away from him.
Cowdray was resuming his seat with his solemn face, smoothing his
black silk robes, and white silk whiskers. Sir Wilson was leaving the
witness-box, after a few final particulars to which there were many other
witnesses, when the counsel for the defence sprang up and stopped him.
“I shall only detain you a moment,” said Mr Butler, who was a rustic-
looking person with red eyebrows and an expression of partial slumber.
“Will you tell his lordship how you knew it was a man?”
A faint, refined smile seemed to pass over Seymour’s features. “I’m
afraid it is the vulgar test of trousers,” he said. “When I saw daylight
between the long legs I was sure it was a man, after all.”
Butler’s sleepy eyes opened as suddenly as some silent explosion. “After
all!” he repeated slowly. “So you did think at first it was a woman?”
Seymour looked troubled for the first time. “It is hardly a point of fact,”
he said, “but if his lordship would like me to answer for my impression, of
course I shall do so. There was something about the thing that was not

exactly a woman and yet was not quite a man; somehow the curves were
different. And it had something that looked like long hair.”
“Thank you,” said Mr Butler, K.C., and sat down suddenly, as if he had
got what he wanted.
Captain Cutler was a far less plausible and composed witness than Sir
Wilson, but his account of the opening incidents was solidly the same. He
described the return of Bruno to his dressing-room, the dispatching of
himself to buy a bunch of lilies-of-the-valley, his return to the upper end of
the passage, the thing he saw in the passage, his suspicion of Seymour, and
his struggle with Bruno. But he could give little artistic assistance about the
black figure that he and Seymour had seen. Asked about its outline, he said
he was no art critic—with a somewhat too obvious sneer at Seymour. Asked
if it was a man or a woman, he said it looked more like a beast—with a too
obvious snarl at the prisoner. But the man was plainly shaken with sorrow
and sincere anger, and Cowdray quickly excused him from confirming facts
that were already fairly clear.
The defending counsel also was again brief in his cross-examination;
although (as was his custom) even in being brief, he seemed to take a long
time about it. “You used a rather remarkable expression,” he said, looking at
Cutler sleepily. “What do you mean by saying that it looked more like a
beast than a man or a woman?”
Cutler seemed seriously agitated. “Perhaps I oughtn’t to have said that,”
he said; “but when the brute has huge humped shoulders like a chimpanzee,
and bristles sticking out of its head like a pig—”
Mr Butler cut short his curious impatience in the middle. “Never mind
whether its hair was like a pig’s,” he said, “was it like a woman’s?”
“A woman’s!” cried the soldier. “Great Scott, no!”
“The last witness said it was,” commented the counsel, with
unscrupulous swiftness. “And did the figure have any of those serpentine
and semi-feminine curves to which eloquent allusion has been made? No?
No feminine curves? The figure, if I understand you, was rather heavy and
square than otherwise?”
“He may have been bending forward,” said Cutler, in a hoarse and rather
faint voice.

“Or again, he may not,” said Mr Butler, and sat down suddenly for the
second time.
The third, witness called by Sir Walter Cowdray was the little Catholic
clergyman, so little, compared with the others, that his head seemed hardly
to come above the box, so that it was like cross-examining a child. But
unfortunately Sir Walter had somehow got it into his head (mostly by some
ramifications of his family’s religion) that Father Brown was on the side of
the prisoner, because the prisoner was wicked and foreign and even partly
black. Therefore he took Father Brown up sharply whenever that proud
pontiff tried to explain anything; and told him to answer yes or no, and tell
the plain facts without any jesuitry. When Father Brown began, in his
simplicity, to say who he thought the man in the passage was, the barrister
told him that he did not want his theories.
“A black shape was seen in the passage. And you say you saw the black
shape. Well, what shape was it?”
Father Brown blinked as under rebuke; but he had long known the literal
nature of obedience. “The shape,” he said, “was short and thick, but had
two sharp, black projections curved upwards on each side of the head or
top, rather like horns, and—”
“Oh! the devil with horns, no doubt,” ejaculated Cowdray, sitting down
in triumphant jocularity. “It was the devil come to eat Protestants.”
“No,” said the priest dispassionately; “I know who it was.”
Those in court had been wrought up to an irrational, but real sense of
some monstrosity. They had forgotten the figure in the dock and thought
only of the figure in the passage. And the figure in the passage, described
by three capable and respectable men who had all seen it, was a shifting
nightmare: one called it a woman, and the other a beast, and the other a
devil....
The judge was looking at Father Brown with level and piercing eyes.
“You are a most extraordinary witness,” he said; “but there is something
about you that makes me think you are trying to tell the truth. Well, who
was the man you saw in the passage?”
“He was myself,” said Father Brown.
Butler, K.C., sprang to his feet in an extraordinary stillness, and said
quite calmly: “Your lordship will allow me to cross-examine?” And then,

without stopping, he shot at Brown the apparently disconnected question:
“You have heard about this dagger; you know the experts say the crime was
committed with a short blade?”
“A short blade,” assented Brown, nodding solemnly like an owl, “but a
very long hilt.”
Before the audience could quite dismiss the idea that the priest had really
seen himself doing murder with a short dagger with a long hilt (which
seemed somehow to make it more horrible), he had himself hurried on to
explain.
“I mean daggers aren’t the only things with short blades. Spears have
short blades. And spears catch at the end of the steel just like daggers, if
they’re that sort of fancy spear they had in theatres; like the spear poor old
Parkinson killed his wife with, just when she’d sent for me to settle their
family troubles—and I came just too late, God forgive me! But he died
penitent—he just died of being penitent. He couldn’t bear what he’d done.”
The general impression in court was that the little priest, who was
gobbling away, had literally gone mad in the box. But the judge still looked
at him with bright and steady eyes of interest; and the counsel for the
defence went on with his questions unperturbed.
“If Parkinson did it with that pantomime spear,” said Butler, “he must
have thrust from four yards away. How do you account for signs of
struggle, like the dress dragged off the shoulder?” He had slipped into
treating his mere witness as an expert; but no one noticed it now.
“The poor lady’s dress was torn,” said the witness, “because it was
caught in a panel that slid to just behind her. She struggled to free herself,
and as she did so Parkinson came out of the prisoner’s room and lunged
with the spear.”
“A panel?” repeated the barrister in a curious voice.
“It was a looking-glass on the other side,” explained Father Brown.
“When I was in the dressing-room I noticed that some of them could
probably be slid out into the passage.”
There was another vast and unnatural silence, and this time it was the
judge who spoke. “So you really mean that when you looked down that
passage, the man you saw was yourself—in a mirror?”

“Yes, my lord; that was what I was trying to say,” said Brown, “but they
asked me for the shape; and our hats have corners just like horns, and so I
—”
The judge leaned forward, his old eyes yet more brilliant, and said in
specially distinct tones: “Do you really mean to say that when Sir Wilson
Seymour saw that wild what-you-call-him with curves and a woman’s hair
and a man’s trousers, what he saw was Sir Wilson Seymour?”
“Yes, my lord,” said Father Brown.
“And you mean to say that when Captain Cutler saw that chimpanzee
with humped shoulders and hog’s bristles, he simply saw himself?”
“Yes, my lord.”
The judge leaned back in his chair with a luxuriance in which it was hard
to separate the cynicism and the admiration. “And can you tell us why,” he
asked, “you should know your own figure in a looking-glass, when two
such distinguished men don’t?”
Father Brown blinked even more painfully than before; then he
stammered: “Really, my lord, I don’t know unless it’s because I don’t look
at it so often.”

FIVE — The Mistake of the Machine
FLAMBEAU and his friend the priest were sitting in the Temple Gardens
about sunset; and their neighbourhood or some such accidental influence
had turned their talk to matters of legal process. From the problem of the
licence in cross-examination, their talk strayed to Roman and mediaeval
torture, to the examining magistrate in France and the Third Degree in
America.
“I’ve been reading,” said Flambeau, “of this new psychometric method
they talk about so much, especially in America. You know what I mean;
they put a pulsometer on a man’s wrist and judge by how his heart goes at
the pronunciation of certain words. What do you think of it?”
“I think it very interesting,” replied Father Brown; “it reminds me of that
interesting idea in the Dark Ages that blood would flow from a corpse if the
murderer touched it.”
“Do you really mean,” demanded his friend, “that you think the two
methods equally valuable?”
“I think them equally valueless,” replied Brown. “Blood flows, fast or
slow, in dead folk or living, for so many more million reasons than we can
ever know. Blood will have to flow very funnily; blood will have to flow up
the Matterhorn, before I will take it as a sign that I am to shed it.”
“The method,” remarked the other, “has been guaranteed by some of the
greatest American men of science.”
“What sentimentalists men of science are!” exclaimed Father Brown,
“and how much more sentimental must American men of science be! Who
but a Yankee would think of proving anything from heart-throbs? Why, they
must be as sentimental as a man who thinks a woman is in love with him if
she blushes. That’s a test from the circulation of the blood, discovered by
the immortal Harvey; and a jolly rotten test, too.”
“But surely,” insisted Flambeau, “it might point pretty straight at
something or other.”
“There’s a disadvantage in a stick pointing straight,” answered the other.
“What is it? Why, the other end of the stick always points the opposite way.

It depends whether you get hold of the stick by the right end. I saw the thing
done once and I’ve never believed in it since.” And he proceeded to tell the
story of his disillusionment.
It happened nearly twenty years before, when he was chaplain to his co-
religionists in a prison in Chicago—where the Irish population displayed a
capacity both for crime and penitence which kept him tolerably busy. The
official second-in-command under the Governor was an ex-detective named
Greywood Usher, a cadaverous, careful-spoken Yankee philosopher,
occasionally varying a very rigid visage with an odd apologetic grimace. He
liked Father Brown in a slightly patronizing way; and Father Brown liked
him, though he heartily disliked his theories. His theories were extremely
complicated and were held with extreme simplicity.
One evening he had sent for the priest, who, according to his custom,
took a seat in silence at a table piled and littered with papers, and waited.
The official selected from the papers a scrap of newspaper cutting, which he
handed across to the cleric, who read it gravely. It appeared to be an extract
from one of the pinkest of American Society papers, and ran as follows:
“Society’s brightest widower is once more on the Freak Dinner stunt. All
our exclusive citizens will recall the Perambulator Parade Dinner, in which
Last-Trick Todd, at his palatial home at Pilgrim’s Pond, caused so many of
our prominent debutantes to look even younger than their years. Equally
elegant and more miscellaneous and large-hearted in social outlook was
Last-Trick’s show the year previous, the popular Cannibal Crush Lunch, at
which the confections handed round were sarcastically moulded in the
forms of human arms and legs, and during which more than one of our
gayest mental gymnasts was heard offering to eat his partner. The witticism
which will inspire this evening is as yet in Mr Todd’s pretty reticent
intellect, or locked in the jewelled bosoms of our city’s gayest leaders; but
there is talk of a pretty parody of the simple manners and customs at the
other end of Society’s scale. This would be all the more telling, as
hospitable Todd is entertaining in Lord Falconroy, the famous traveller, a
true-blooded aristocrat fresh from England’s oak-groves. Lord Falconroy’s
travels began before his ancient feudal title was resurrected, he was in the
Republic in his youth, and fashion murmurs a sly reason for his return. Miss
Etta Todd is one of our deep-souled New Yorkers, and comes into an
income of nearly twelve hundred million dollars.”

“Well,” asked Usher, “does that interest you?”
“Why, words rather fail me,” answered Father Brown. “I cannot think at
this moment of anything in this world that would interest me less. And,
unless the just anger of the Republic is at last going to electrocute
journalists for writing like that, I don’t quite see why it should interest you
either.”
“Ah!” said Mr Usher dryly, and handing across another scrap of
newspaper. “Well, does that interest you?”
The paragraph was headed “Savage Murder of a Warder. Convict
Escapes,” and ran: “Just before dawn this morning a shout for help was
heard in the Convict Settlement at Sequah in this State. The authorities,
hurrying in the direction of the cry, found the corpse of the warder who
patrols the top of the north wall of the prison, the steepest and most difficult
exit, for which one man has always been found sufficient. The unfortunate
officer had, however, been hurled from the high wall, his brains beaten out
as with a club, and his gun was missing. Further inquiries showed that one
of the cells was empty; it had been occupied by a rather sullen ruffian
giving his name as Oscar Rian. He was only temporarily detained for some
comparatively trivial assault; but he gave everyone the impression of a man
with a black past and a dangerous future. Finally, when daylight had fully
revealed the scene of murder, it was found that he had written on the wall
above the body a fragmentary sentence, apparently with a finger dipped in
blood: ‘This was self-defence and he had the gun. I meant no harm to him
or any man but one. I am keeping the bullet for Pilgrim’s Pond—O.R.’ A
man must have used most fiendish treachery or most savage and amazing
bodily daring to have stormed such a wall in spite of an armed man.”
“Well, the literary style is somewhat improved,” admitted the priest
cheerfully, “but still I don’t see what I can do for you. I should cut a poor
figure, with my short legs, running about this State after an athletic assassin
of that sort. I doubt whether anybody could find him. The convict
settlement at Sequah is thirty miles from here; the country between is wild
and tangled enough, and the country beyond, where he will surely have the
sense to go, is a perfect no-man’s land tumbling away to the prairies. He
may be in any hole or up any tree.”
“He isn’t in any hole,” said the governor; “he isn’t up any tree.”
“Why, how do you know?” asked Father Brown, blinking.

“Would you like to speak to him?” inquired Usher.
Father Brown opened his innocent eyes wide. “He is here?” he
exclaimed. “Why, how did your men get hold of him?”
“I got hold of him myself,” drawled the American, rising and lazily
stretching his lanky legs before the fire. “I got hold of him with the crooked
end of a walking-stick. Don’t look so surprised. I really did. You know I
sometimes take a turn in the country lanes outside this dismal place; well, I
was walking early this evening up a steep lane with dark hedges and grey-
looking ploughed fields on both sides; and a young moon was up and
silvering the road. By the light of it I saw a man running across the field
towards the road; running with his body bent and at a good mile-race trot.
He appeared to be much exhausted; but when he came to the thick black
hedge he went through it as if it were made of spiders’ webs;—or rather (for
I heard the strong branches breaking and snapping like bayonets) as if he
himself were made of stone. In the instant in which he appeared up against
the moon, crossing the road, I slung my hooked cane at his legs, tripping
him and bringing him down. Then I blew my whistle long and loud, and our
fellows came running up to secure him.”
“It would have been rather awkward,” remarked Brown, “if you had
found he was a popular athlete practising a mile race.”
“He was not,” said Usher grimly. “We soon found out who he was; but I
had guessed it with the first glint of the moon on him.”
“You thought it was the runaway convict,” observed the priest simply,
“because you had read in the newspaper cutting that morning that a convict
had run away.”
“I had somewhat better grounds,” replied the governor coolly. “I pass
over the first as too simple to be emphasized—I mean that fashionable
athletes do not run across ploughed fields or scratch their eyes out in
bramble hedges. Nor do they run all doubled up like a crouching dog. There
were more decisive details to a fairly well-trained eye. The man was clad in
coarse and ragged clothes, but they were something more than merely
coarse and ragged. They were so ill-fitting as to be quite grotesque; even as
he appeared in black outline against the moonrise, the coat-collar in which
his head was buried made him look like a hunchback, and the long loose
sleeves looked as if he had no hands. It at once occurred to me that he had
somehow managed to change his convict clothes for some confederate’s

clothes which did not fit him. Second, there was a pretty stiff wind against
which he was running; so that I must have seen the streaky look of blowing
hair, if the hair had not been very short. Then I remembered that beyond
these ploughed fields he was crossing lay Pilgrim’s Pond, for which (you
will remember) the convict was keeping his bullet; and I sent my walking-
stick flying.”
“A brilliant piece of rapid deduction,” said Father Brown; “but had he got
a gun?”
As Usher stopped abruptly in his walk the priest added apologetically:
“I’ve been told a bullet is not half so useful without it.”
“He had no gun,” said the other gravely; “but that was doubtless due to
some very natural mischance or change of plans. Probably the same policy
that made him change the clothes made him drop the gun; he began to
repent the coat he had left behind him in the blood of his victim.”
“Well, that is possible enough,” answered the priest.
“And it’s hardly worth speculating on,” said Usher, turning to some other
papers, “for we know it’s the man by this time.”
His clerical friend asked faintly: “But how?” And Greywood Usher threw
down the newspapers and took up the two press-cuttings again.
“Well, since you are so obstinate,” he said, “let’s begin at the beginning.
You will notice that these two cuttings have only one thing in common,
which is the mention of Pilgrim’s Pond, the estate, as you know, of the
millionaire Ireton Todd. You also know that he is a remarkable character;
one of those that rose on stepping-stones—”
“Of our dead selves to higher things,” assented his companion. “Yes; I
know that. Petroleum, I think.”
“Anyhow,” said Usher, “Last-Trick Todd counts for a great deal in this
rum affair.”
He stretched himself once more before the fire and continued talking in
his expansive, radiantly explanatory style.
“To begin with, on the face of it, there is no mystery here at all. It is not
mysterious, it is not even odd, that a jailbird should take his gun to
Pilgrim’s Pond. Our people aren’t like the English, who will forgive a man
for being rich if he throws away money on hospitals or horses. Last-Trick
Todd has made himself big by his own considerable abilities; and there’s no

doubt that many of those on whom he has shown his abilities would like to
show theirs on him with a shot-gun. Todd might easily get dropped by some
man he’d never even heard of; some labourer he’d locked out, or some
clerk in a business he’d busted. Last-Trick is a man of mental endowments
and a high public character; but in this country the relations of employers
and employed are considerably strained.
“That’s how the whole thing looks supposing this Rian made for
Pilgrim’s Pond to kill Todd. So it looked to me, till another little discovery
woke up what I have of the detective in me. When I had my prisoner safe, I
picked up my cane again and strolled down the two or three turns of
country road that brought me to one of the side entrances of Todd’s
grounds, the one nearest to the pool or lake after which the place is named.
It was some two hours ago, about seven by this time; the moonlight was
more luminous, and I could see the long white streaks of it lying on the
mysterious mere with its grey, greasy, half-liquid shores in which they say
our fathers used to make witches walk until they sank. I’d forgotten the
exact tale; but you know the place I mean; it lies north of Todd’s house
towards the wilderness, and has two queer wrinkled trees, so dismal that
they look more like huge fungoids than decent foliage. As I stood peering at
this misty pool, I fancied I saw the faint figure of a man moving from the
house towards it, but it was all too dim and distant for one to be certain of
the fact, and still less of the details. Besides, my attention was very sharply
arrested by something much closer. I crouched behind the fence which ran
not more than two hundred yards from one wing of the great mansion, and
which was fortunately split in places, as if specially for the application of a
cautious eye. A door had opened in the dark bulk of the left wing, and a
figure appeared black against the illuminated interior—a muffled figure
bending forward, evidently peering out into the night. It closed the door
behind it, and I saw it was carrying a lantern, which threw a patch of
imperfect light on the dress and figure of the wearer. It seemed to be the
figure of a woman, wrapped up in a ragged cloak and evidently disguised to
avoid notice; there was something very strange both about the rags and the
furtiveness in a person coming out of those rooms lined with gold. She took
cautiously the curved garden path which brought her within half a hundred
yards of me—, then she stood up for an instant on the terrace of turf that
looks towards the slimy lake, and holding her flaming lantern above her
head she deliberately swung it three times to and fro as for a signal. As she

swung it the second time a flicker of its light fell for a moment on her own
face, a face that I knew. She was unnaturally pale, and her head was
bundled in her borrowed plebeian shawl; but I am certain it was Etta Todd,
the millionaire’s daughter.
“She retraced her steps in equal secrecy and the door closed behind her
again. I was about to climb the fence and follow, when I realized that the
detective fever that had lured me into the adventure was rather undignified;
and that in a more authoritative capacity I already held all the cards in my
hand. I was just turning away when a new noise broke on the night. A
window was thrown up in one of the upper floors, but just round the corner
of the house so that I could not see it; and a voice of terrible distinctness
was heard shouting across the dark garden to know where Lord Falconroy
was, for he was missing from every room in the house. There was no
mistaking that voice. I have heard it on many a political platform or
meeting of directors; it was Ireton Todd himself. Some of the others seemed
to have gone to the lower windows or on to the steps, and were calling up to
him that Falconroy had gone for a stroll down to the Pilgrim’s Pond an hour
before, and could not be traced since. Then Todd cried ‘Mighty Murder!’
and shut down the window violently; and I could hear him plunging down
the stairs inside. Repossessing myself of my former and wiser purpose, I
whipped out of the way of the general search that must follow; and returned
here not later than eight o’clock.
“I now ask you to recall that little Society paragraph which seemed to
you so painfully lacking in interest. If the convict was not keeping the shot
for Todd, as he evidently wasn’t, it is most likely that he was keeping it for
Lord Falconroy; and it looks as if he had delivered the goods. No more
handy place to shoot a man than in the curious geological surroundings of
that pool, where a body thrown down would sink through thick slime to a
depth practically unknown. Let us suppose, then, that our friend with the
cropped hair came to kill Falconroy and not Todd. But, as I have pointed
out, there are many reasons why people in America might want to kill Todd.
There is no reason why anybody in America should want to kill an English
lord newly landed, except for the one reason mentioned in the pink paper—
that the lord is paying his attentions to the millionaire’s daughter. Our crop-
haired friend, despite his ill-fitting clothes, must be an aspiring lover.

“I know the notion will seem to you jarring and even comic; but that’s
because you are English. It sounds to you like saying the Archbishop of
Canterbury’s daughter will be married in St George’s, Hanover Square, to a
crossing-sweeper on ticket-of-leave. You don’t do justice to the climbing
and aspiring power of our more remarkable citizens. You see a good-
looking grey-haired man in evening-dress with a sort of authority about
him, you know he is a pillar of the State, and you fancy he had a father. You
are in error. You do not realize that a comparatively few years ago he may
have been in a tenement or (quite likely) in a jail. You don’t allow for our
national buoyancy and uplift. Many of our most influential citizens have not
only risen recently, but risen comparatively late in life. Todd’s daughter was
fully eighteen when her father first made his pile; so there isn’t really
anything impossible in her having a hanger-on in low life; or even in her
hanging on to him, as I think she must be doing, to judge by the lantern
business. If so, the hand that held the lantern may not be unconnected with
the hand that held the gun. This case, sir, will make a noise.”
“Well,” said the priest patiently, “and what did you do next?”
“I reckon you’ll be shocked,” replied Greywood Usher, “as I know you
don’t cotton to the march of science in these matters. I am given a good deal
of discretion here, and perhaps take a little more than I’m given; and I
thought it was an excellent opportunity to test that Psychometric Machine I
told you about. Now, in my opinion, that machine can’t lie.”
“No machine can lie,” said Father Brown; “nor can it tell the truth.”
“It did in this case, as I’ll show you,” went on Usher positively. “I sat the
man in the ill-fitting clothes in a comfortable chair, and simply wrote words
on a blackboard; and the machine simply recorded the variations of his
pulse; and I simply observed his manner. The trick is to introduce some
word connected with the supposed crime in a list of words connected with
something quite different, yet a list in which it occurs quite naturally. Thus I
wrote ‘heron’ and ‘eagle’ and ‘owl’, and when I wrote ‘falcon’ he was
tremendously agitated; and when I began to make an ‘r’ at the end of the
word, that machine just bounded. Who else in this republic has any reason
to jump at the name of a newly-arrived Englishman like Falconroy except
the man who’s shot him? Isn’t that better evidence than a lot of gabble from
witnesses—if the evidence of a reliable machine?”

“You always forget,” observed his companion, “that the reliable machine
always has to be worked by an unreliable machine.”
“Why, what do you mean?” asked the detective.
“I mean Man,” said Father Brown, “the most unreliable machine I know
of. I don’t want to be rude; and I don’t think you will consider Man to be an
offensive or inaccurate description of yourself. You say you observed his
manner; but how do you know you observed it right? You say the words
have to come in a natural way; but how do you know that you did it
naturally? How do you know, if you come to that, that he did not observe
your manner? Who is to prove that you were not tremendously agitated?
There was no machine tied on to your pulse.”
“I tell you,” cried the American in the utmost excitement, “I was as cool
as a cucumber.”
“Criminals also can be as cool as cucumbers,” said Brown with a smile.
“And almost as cool as you.”
“Well, this one wasn’t,” said Usher, throwing the papers about. “Oh, you
make me tired!”
“I’m sorry,” said the other. “I only point out what seems a reasonable
possibility. If you could tell by his manner when the word that might hang
him had come, why shouldn’t he tell from your manner that the word that
might hang him was coming? I should ask for more than words myself
before I hanged anybody.”
Usher smote the table and rose in a sort of angry triumph.
“And that,” he cried, “is just what I’m going to give you. I tried the
machine first just in order to test the thing in other ways afterwards and the
machine, sir, is right.”
He paused a moment and resumed with less excitement. “I rather want to
insist, if it comes to that, that so far I had very little to go on except the
scientific experiment. There was really nothing against the man at all. His
clothes were ill-fitting, as I’ve said, but they were rather better, if anything,
than those of the submerged class to which he evidently belonged.
Moreover, under all the stains of his plunging through ploughed fields or
bursting through dusty hedges, the man was comparatively clean. This
might mean, of course, that he had only just broken prison; but it reminded
me more of the desperate decency of the comparatively respectable poor.

His demeanour was, I am bound to confess, quite in accordance with theirs.
He was silent and dignified as they are; he seemed to have a big, but buried,
grievance, as they do. He professed total ignorance of the crime and the
whole question; and showed nothing but a sullen impatience for something
sensible that might come to take him out of his meaningless scrape. He
asked me more than once if he could telephone for a lawyer who had helped
him a long time ago in a trade dispute, and in every sense acted as you
would expect an innocent man to act. There was nothing against him in the
world except that little finger on the dial that pointed to the change of his
pulse.
“Then, sir, the machine was on its trial; and the machine was right. By
the time I came with him out of the private room into the vestibule where
all sorts of other people were awaiting examination, I think he had already
more or less made up his mind to clear things up by something like a
confession. He turned to me and began to say in a low voice: ‘Oh, I can’t
stick this any more. If you must know all about me—’
“At the same instant one of the poor women sitting on the long bench
stood up, screaming aloud and pointing at him with her finger. I have never
in my life heard anything more demoniacally distinct. Her lean finger
seemed to pick him out as if it were a pea-shooter. Though the word was a
mere howl, every syllable was as clear as a separate stroke on the clock.
“‘Drugger Davis!’ she shouted. ‘They’ve got Drugger Davis!’
“Among the wretched women, mostly thieves and streetwalkers, twenty
faces were turned, gaping with glee and hate. If I had never heard the
words, I should have known by the very shock upon his features that the so-
called Oscar Rian had heard his real name. But I’m not quite so ignorant,
you may be surprised to hear. Drugger Davis was one of the most terrible
and depraved criminals that ever baffled our police. It is certain he had done
murder more than once long before his last exploit with the warder. But he
was never entirely fixed for it, curiously enough because he did it in the
same manner as those milder—or meaner—crimes for which he was fixed
pretty often. He was a handsome, well-bred-looking brute, as he still is, to
some extent; and he used mostly to go about with barmaids or shop-girls
and do them out of their money. Very often, though, he went a good deal
farther; and they were found drugged with cigarettes or chocolates and their
whole property missing. Then came one case where the girl was found

dead; but deliberation could not quite be proved, and, what was more
practical still, the criminal could not be found. I heard a rumour of his
having reappeared somewhere in the opposite character this time, lending
money instead of borrowing it; but still to such poor widows as he might
personally fascinate, but still with the same bad result for them. Well, there
is your innocent man, and there is his innocent record. Even, since then,
four criminals and three warders have identified him and confirmed the
story. Now what have you got to say to my poor little machine after that?
Hasn’t the machine done for him? Or do you prefer to say that the woman
and I have done for him?”
“As to what you’ve done for him,” replied Father Brown, rising and
shaking himself in a floppy way, “you’ve saved him from the electrical
chair. I don’t think they can kill Drugger Davis on that old vague story of
the poison; and as for the convict who killed the warder, I suppose it’s
obvious that you haven’t got him. Mr Davis is innocent of that crime, at any
rate.”
“What do you mean?” demanded the other. “Why should he be innocent
of that crime?”
“Why, bless us all!” cried the small man in one of his rare moments of
animation, “why, because he’s guilty of the other crimes! I don’t know what
you people are made of. You seem to think that all sins are kept together in
a bag. You talk as if a miser on Monday were always a spendthrift on
Tuesday. You tell me this man you have here spent weeks and months
wheedling needy women out of small sums of money; that he used a drug at
the best, and a poison at the worst; that he turned up afterwards as the
lowest kind of moneylender, and cheated most poor people in the same
patient and pacific style. Let it be granted—let us admit, for the sake of
argument, that he did all this. If that is so, I will tell you what he didn’t do.
He didn’t storm a spiked wall against a man with a loaded gun. He didn’t
write on the wall with his own hand, to say he had done it. He didn’t stop to
state that his justification was self-defence. He didn’t explain that he had no
quarrel with the poor warder. He didn’t name the house of the rich man to
which he was going with the gun. He didn’t write his own, initials in a
man’s blood. Saints alive! Can’t you see the whole character is different, in
good and evil? Why, you don’t seem to be like I am a bit. One would think
you’d never had any vices of your own.”

The amazed American had already parted his lips in protest when the
door of his private and official room was hammered and rattled in an
unceremonious way to which he was totally unaccustomed.
The door flew open. The moment before Greywood Usher had been
coming to the conclusion that Father Brown might possibly be mad. The
moment after he began to think he was mad himself. There burst and fell
into his private room a man in the filthiest rags, with a greasy squash hat
still askew on his head, and a shabby green shade shoved up from one of his
eyes, both of which were glaring like a tiger’s. The rest of his face was
almost undiscoverable, being masked with a matted beard and whiskers
through which the nose could barely thrust itself, and further buried in a
squalid red scarf or handkerchief. Mr Usher prided himself on having seen
most of the roughest specimens in the State, but he thought he had never
seen such a baboon dressed as a scarecrow as this. But, above all, he had
never in all his placid scientific existence heard a man like that speak to him
first.
“See here, old man Usher,” shouted the being in the red handkerchief,
“I’m getting tired. Don’t you try any of your hide-and-seek on me; I don’t
get fooled any. Leave go of my guests, and I’ll let up on the fancy
clockwork. Keep him here for a split instant and you’ll feel pretty mean. I
reckon I’m not a man with no pull.”
The eminent Usher was regarding the bellowing monster with an
amazement which had dried up all other sentiments. The mere shock to his
eyes had rendered his ears, almost useless. At last he rang a bell with a hand
of violence. While the bell was still strong and pealing, the voice of Father
Brown fell soft but distinct.
“I have a suggestion to make,” he said, “but it seems a little confusing. I
don’t know this gentleman—but—but I think I know him. Now, you know
him—you know him quite well—but you don’t know him—naturally.
Sounds paradoxical, I know.”
“I reckon the Cosmos is cracked,” said Usher, and fell asprawl in his
round office chair.
“Now, see here,” vociferated the stranger, striking the table, but speaking
in a voice that was all the more mysterious because it was comparatively
mild and rational though still resounding. “I won’t let you in. I want—”
“Who in hell are you?” yelled Usher, suddenly sitting up straight.

“I think the gentleman’s name is Todd,” said the priest.
Then he picked up the pink slip of newspaper.
“I fear you don’t read the Society papers properly,” he said, and began to
read out in a monotonous voice, “‘Or locked in the jewelled bosoms of our
city’s gayest leaders; but there is talk of a pretty parody of the manners and
customs of the other end of Society’s scale.’ There’s been a big Slum
Dinner up at Pilgrim’s Pond tonight; and a man, one of the guests,
disappeared. Mr Ireton Todd is a good host, and has tracked him here,
without even waiting to take off his fancy-dress.”
“What man do you mean?”
“I mean the man with comically ill-fitting clothes you saw running across
the ploughed field. Hadn’t you better go and investigate him? He will be
rather impatient to get back to his champagne, from which he ran away in
such a hurry, when the convict with the gun hove in sight.”
“Do you seriously mean—” began the official.
“Why, look here, Mr Usher,” said Father Brown quietly, “you said the
machine couldn’t make a mistake; and in one sense it didn’t. But the other
machine did; the machine that worked it. You assumed that the man in rags
jumped at the name of Lord Falconroy, because he was Lord Falconroy’s
murderer. He jumped at the name of Lord Falconroy because he is Lord
Falconroy.”
“Then why the blazes didn’t he say so?” demanded the staring Usher.
“He felt his plight and recent panic were hardly patrician,” replied the
priest, “so he tried to keep the name back at first. But he was just going to
tell it you, when”—and Father Brown looked down at his boots—“when a
woman found another name for him.”
“But you can’t be so mad as to say,” said Greywood Usher, very white,
“that Lord Falconroy was Drugger Davis.”
The priest looked at him very earnestly, but with a baffling and
undecipherable face.
“I am not saying anything about it,” he said. “I leave all the rest to you.
Your pink paper says that the title was recently revived for him; but those
papers are very unreliable. It says he was in the States in youth; but the
whole story seems very strange. Davis and Falconroy are both pretty
considerable cowards, but so are lots of other men. I would not hang a dog

on my own opinion about this. But I think,” he went on softly and
reflectively, “I think you Americans are too modest. I think you idealize the
English aristocracy—even in assuming it to be so aristocratic. You see a
good-looking Englishman in evening-dress; you know he’s in the House of
Lords; and you fancy he has a father. You don’t allow for our national
buoyancy and uplift. Many of our most influential noblemen have not only
risen recently, but—”
“Oh, stop it!” cried Greywood Usher, wringing one lean hand in
impatience against a shade of irony in the other’s face.
“Don’t stay talking to this lunatic!” cried Todd brutally. “Take me to my
friend.”
Next morning Father Brown appeared with the same demure expression,
carrying yet another piece of pink newspaper.
“I’m afraid you neglect the fashionable press rather,” he said, “but this
cutting may interest you.”
Usher read the headlines, “Last-Trick’s Strayed Revellers: Mirthful
Incident near Pilgrim’s Pond.” The paragraph went on: “A laughable
occurrence took place outside Wilkinson’s Motor Garage last night. A
policeman on duty had his attention drawn by larrikins to a man in prison
dress who was stepping with considerable coolness into the steering-seat of
a pretty high-toned Panhard; he was accompanied by a girl wrapped in a
ragged shawl. On the police interfering, the young woman threw back the
shawl, and all recognized Millionaire Todd’s daughter, who had just come
from the Slum Freak Dinner at the Pond, where all the choicest guests were
in a similar deshabille. She and the gentleman who had donned prison
uniform were going for the customary joy-ride.”
Under the pink slip Mr Usher found a strip of a later paper, headed,
“Astounding Escape of Millionaire’s Daughter with Convict. She had
Arranged Freak Dinner. Now Safe in—”
Mr Greenwood Usher lifted his eyes, but Father Brown was gone.

SIX — The Head of Caesar
THERE is somewhere in Brompton or Kensington an interminable
avenue of tall houses, rich but largely empty, that looks like a terrace of
tombs. The very steps up to the dark front doors seem as steep as the side of
pyramids; one would hesitate to knock at the door, lest it should be opened
by a mummy. But a yet more depressing feature in the grey facade is its
telescopic length and changeless continuity. The pilgrim walking down it
begins to think he will never come to a break or a corner; but there is one
exception—a very small one, but hailed by the pilgrim almost with a shout.
There is a sort of mews between two of the tall mansions, a mere slit like
the crack of a door by comparison with the street, but just large enough to
permit a pigmy ale-house or eating-house, still allowed by the rich to their
stable-servants, to stand in the angle. There is something cheery in its very
dinginess, and something free and elfin in its very insignificance. At the feet
of those grey stone giants it looks like a lighted house of dwarfs.
Anyone passing the place during a certain autumn evening, itself almost
fairylike, might have seen a hand pull aside the red half-blind which (along
with some large white lettering) half hid the interior from the street, and a
face peer out not unlike a rather innocent goblin’s. It was, in fact, the face
of one with the harmless human name of Brown, formerly priest of Cobhole
in Essex, and now working in London. His friend, Flambeau, a semi-official
investigator, was sitting opposite him, making his last notes of a case he had
cleared up in the neighbourhood. They were sitting at a small table, close up
to the window, when the priest pulled the curtain back and looked out. He
waited till a stranger in the street had passed the window, to let the curtain
fall into its place again. Then his round eyes rolled to the large white
lettering on the window above his head, and then strayed to the next table,
at which sat only a navvy with beer and cheese, and a young girl with red
hair and a glass of milk. Then (seeing his friend put away the pocket-book),
he said softly:
“If you’ve got ten minutes, I wish you’d follow that man with the false
nose.”

Flambeau looked up in surprise; but the girl with the red hair also looked
up, and with something that was stronger than astonishment. She was
simply and even loosely dressed in light brown sacking stuff; but she was a
lady, and even, on a second glance, a rather needlessly haughty one. “The
man with the false nose!” repeated Flambeau. “Who’s he?”
“I haven’t a notion,” answered Father Brown. “I want you to find out; I
ask it as a favour. He went down there”—and he jerked his thumb over his
shoulder in one of his undistinguished gestures—“and can’t have passed
three lamp-posts yet. I only want to know the direction.”
Flambeau gazed at his friend for some time, with an expression between
perplexity and amusement; and then, rising from the table; squeezed his
huge form out of the little door of the dwarf tavern, and melted into the
twilight.
Father Brown took a small book out of his pocket and began to read
steadily; he betrayed no consciousness of the fact that the red-haired lady
had left her own table and sat down opposite him. At last she leaned over
and said in a low, strong voice: “Why do you say that? How do you know
it’s false?”
He lifted his rather heavy eyelids, which fluttered in considerable
embarrassment. Then his dubious eye roamed again to the white lettering on
the glass front of the public-house. The young woman’s eyes followed his,
and rested there also, but in pure puzzledom.
“No,” said Father Brown, answering her thoughts. “It doesn’t say ‘Sela’,
like the thing in the Psalms; I read it like that myself when I was wool-
gathering just now; it says ‘Ales.’”
“Well?” inquired the staring young lady. “What does it matter what it
says?”
His ruminating eye roved to the girl’s light canvas sleeve, round the wrist
of which ran a very slight thread of artistic pattern, just enough to
distinguish it from a working-dress of a common woman and make it more
like the working-dress of a lady art-student. He seemed to find much food
for thought in this; but his reply was very slow and hesitant. “You see,
madam,” he said, “from outside the place looks—well, it is a perfectly
decent place—but ladies like you don’t—don’t generally think so. They
never go into such places from choice, except—”

“Well?” she repeated.
“Except an unfortunate few who don’t go in to drink milk.”
“You are a most singular person,” said the young lady. “What is your
object in all this?”
“Not to trouble you about it,” he replied, very gently. “Only to arm
myself with knowledge enough to help you, if ever you freely ask my help.”
“But why should I need help?”
He continued his dreamy monologue. “You couldn’t have come in to see
protegees, humble friends, that sort of thing, or you’d have gone through
into the parlour... and you couldn’t have come in because you were ill, or
you’d have spoken to the woman of the place, who’s obviously
respectable... besides, you don’t look ill in that way, but only unhappy....
This street is the only original long lane that has no turning; and the houses
on both sides are shut up.... I could only suppose that you’d seen somebody
coming whom you didn’t want to meet; and found the public-house was the
only shelter in this wilderness of stone.... I don’t think I went beyond the
licence of a stranger in glancing at the only man who passed immediately
after.... And as I thought he looked like the wrong sort... and you looked like
the right sort.... I held myself ready to help if he annoyed you; that is all. As
for my friend, he’ll be back soon; and he certainly can’t find out anything
by stumping down a road like this.... I didn’t think he could.”
“Then why did you send him out?” she cried, leaning forward with yet
warmer curiosity. She had the proud, impetuous face that goes with reddish
colouring, and a Roman nose, as it did in Marie Antoinette.
He looked at her steadily for the first time, and said: “Because I hoped
you would speak to me.”
She looked back at him for some time with a heated face, in which there
hung a red shadow of anger; then, despite her anxieties, humour broke out
of her eyes and the corners of her mouth, and she answered almost grimly:
“Well, if you’re so keen on my conversation, perhaps you’ll answer my
question.” After a pause she added: “I had the honour to ask you why you
thought the man’s nose was false.”
“The wax always spots like that just a little in this weather,” answered
Father Brown with entire simplicity.
“But it’s such a crooked nose,” remonstrated the red-haired girl.

The priest smiled in his turn. “I don’t say it’s the sort of nose one would
wear out of mere foppery,” he admitted. “This man, I think, wears it
because his real nose is so much nicer.”
“But why?” she insisted.
“What is the nursery-rhyme?” observed Brown absent-mindedly. “There
was a crooked man and he went a crooked mile.... That man, I fancy, has
gone a very crooked road—by following his nose.”
“Why, what’s he done?” she demanded, rather shakily.
“I don’t want to force your confidence by a hair,” said Father Brown,
very quietly. “But I think you could tell me more about that than I can tell
you.”
The girl sprang to her feet and stood quite quietly, but with clenched
hands, like one about to stride away; then her hands loosened slowly, and
she sat down again. “You are more of a mystery than all the others,” she
said desperately, “but I feel there might be a heart in your mystery.”
“What we all dread most,” said the priest in a low voice, “is a maze with
no centre. That is why atheism is only a nightmare.” “I will tell you
everything,” said the red-haired girl doggedly, “except why I am telling
you; and that I don’t know.”
She picked at the darned table-cloth and went on: “You look as if you
knew what isn’t snobbery as well as what is; and when I say that ours is a
good old family, you’ll understand it is a necessary part of the story; indeed,
my chief danger is in my brother’s high-and-dry notions, noblesse oblige
and all that. Well, my name is Christabel Carstairs; and my father was that
Colonel Carstairs you’ve probably heard of, who made the famous Carstairs
Collection of Roman coins. I could never describe my father to you; the
nearest I can say is that he was very like a Roman coin himself. He was as
handsome and as genuine and as valuable and as metallic and as out-of-
date. He was prouder of his Collection than of his coat-of-arms—nobody
could say more than that. His extraordinary character came out most in his
will. He had two sons and one daughter. He quarrelled with one son, my
brother Giles, and sent him to Australia on a small allowance. He then made
a will leaving the Carstairs Collection, actually with a yet smaller
allowance, to my brother Arthur. He meant it as a reward, as the highest
honour he could offer, in acknowledgement of Arthur’s loyalty and
rectitude and the distinctions he had already gained in mathematics and

economics at Cambridge. He left me practically all his pretty large fortune;
and I am sure he meant it in contempt.
“Arthur, you may say, might well complain of this; but Arthur is my
father over again. Though he had some differences with my father in early
youth, no sooner had he taken over the Collection than he became like a
pagan priest dedicated to a temple. He mixed up these Roman halfpence
with the honour of the Carstairs family in the same stiff, idolatrous way as
his father before him. He acted as if Roman money must be guarded by all
the Roman virtues. He took no pleasures; he spent nothing on himself; he
lived for the Collection. Often he would not trouble to dress for his simple
meals; but pattered about among the corded brown-paper parcels (which no
one else was allowed to touch) in an old brown dressing-gown. With its
rope and tassel and his pale, thin, refined face, it made him look like an old
ascetic monk. Every now and then, though, he would appear dressed like a
decidedly fashionable gentleman; but that was only when he went up to the
London sales or shops to make an addition to the Carstairs Collection.
“Now, if you’ve known any young people, you won’t be shocked if I say
that I got into rather a low frame of mind with all this; the frame of mind in
which one begins to say that the Ancient Romans were all very well in their
way. I’m not like my brother Arthur; I can’t help enjoying enjoyment. I got
a lot of romance and rubbish where I got my red hair, from the other side of
the family. Poor Giles was the same; and I think the atmosphere of coins
might count in excuse for him; though he really did wrong and nearly went
to prison. But he didn’t behave any worse than I did; as you shall hear.
“I come now to the silly part of the story. I think a man as clever as you
can guess the sort of thing that would begin to relieve the monotony for an
unruly girl of seventeen placed in such a position. But I am so rattled with
more dreadful things that I can hardly read my own feeling; and don’t know
whether I despise it now as a flirtation or bear it as a broken heart. We lived
then at a little seaside watering-place in South Wales, and a retired sea-
captain living a few doors off had a son about five years older than myself,
who had been a friend of Giles before he went to the Colonies. His name
does not affect my tale; but I tell you it was Philip Hawker, because I am
telling you everything. We used to go shrimping together, and said and
thought we were in love with each other; at least he certainly said he was,
and I certainly thought I was. If I tell you he had bronzed curly hair and a

falconish sort of face, bronzed by the sea also, it’s not for his sake, I assure
you, but for the story; for it was the cause of a very curious coincidence.
“One summer afternoon, when I had promised to go shrimping along the
sands with Philip, I was waiting rather impatiently in the front drawing-
room, watching Arthur handle some packets of coins he had just purchased
and slowly shunt them, one or two at a time, into his own dark study and
museum which was at the back of the house. As soon as I heard the heavy
door close on him finally, I made a bolt for my shrimping-net and tam-o’-
shanter and was just going to slip out, when I saw that my brother had left
behind him one coin that lay gleaming on the long bench by the window. It
was a bronze coin, and the colour, combined with the exact curve of the
Roman nose and something in the very lift of the long, wiry neck, made the
head of Caesar on it the almost precise portrait of Philip Hawker. Then I
suddenly remembered Giles telling Philip of a coin that was like him, and
Philip wishing he had it. Perhaps you can fancy the wild, foolish thoughts
with which my head went round; I felt as if I had had a gift from the fairies.
It seemed to me that if I could only run away with this, and give it to Philip
like a wild sort of wedding-ring, it would be a bond between us for ever; I
felt a thousand such things at once. Then there yawned under me, like the
pit, the enormous, awful notion of what I was doing; above all, the
unbearable thought, which was like touching hot iron, of what Arthur would
think of it. A Carstairs a thief; and a thief of the Carstairs treasure! I believe
my brother could see me burned like a witch for such a thing, But then, the
very thought of such fanatical cruelty heightened my old hatred of his dingy
old antiquarian fussiness and my longing for the youth and liberty that
called to me from the sea. Outside was strong sunlight with a wind; and a
yellow head of some broom or gorse in the garden rapped against the glass
of the window. I thought of that living and growing gold calling to me from
all the heaths of the world—and then of that dead, dull gold and bronze and
brass of my brother’s growing dustier and dustier as life went by. Nature
and the Carstairs Collection had come to grips at last.
“Nature is older than the Carstairs Collection. As I ran down the streets to
the sea, the coin clenched tight in my fist, I felt all the Roman Empire on
my back as well as the Carstairs pedigree. It was not only the old lion argent
that was roaring in my ear, but all the eagles of the Caesars seemed flapping
and screaming in pursuit of me. And yet my heart rose higher and higher
like a child’s kite, until I came over the loose, dry sand-hills and to the flat,

wet sands, where Philip stood already up to his ankles in the shallow
shining water, some hundred yards out to sea. There was a great red sunset;
and the long stretch of low water, hardly rising over the ankle for half a
mile, was like a lake of ruby flame. It was not till I had torn off my shoes
and stockings and waded to where he stood, which was well away from the
dry land, that I turned and looked round. We were quite alone in a circle of
sea-water and wet sand, and I gave him the head of Caesar.
“At the very instant I had a shock of fancy: that a man far away on the
sand-hills was looking at me intently. I must have felt immediately after that
it was a mere leap of unreasonable nerves; for the man was only a dark dot
in the distance, and I could only just see that he was standing quite still and
gazing, with his head a little on one side. There was no earthly logical
evidence that he was looking at me; he might have been looking at a ship,
or the sunset, or the sea-gulls, or at any of the people who still strayed here
and there on the shore between us. Nevertheless, whatever my start sprang
from was prophetic; for, as I gazed, he started walking briskly in a bee-line
towards us across the wide wet sands. As he drew nearer and nearer I saw
that he was dark and bearded, and that his eyes were marked with dark
spectacles. He was dressed poorly but respectably in black, from the old
black top hat on his head to the solid black boots on his feet. In spite of
these he walked straight into the sea without a flash of hesitation, and came
on at me with the steadiness of a travelling bullet.
“I can’t tell you the sense of monstrosity and miracle I had when he thus
silently burst the barrier between land and water. It was as if he had walked
straight off a cliff and still marched steadily in mid-air. It was as if a house
had flown up into the sky or a man’s head had fallen off. He was only
wetting his boots; but he seemed to be a demon disregarding a law of
Nature. If he had hesitated an instant at the water’s edge it would have been
nothing. As it was, he seemed to look so much at me alone as not to notice
the ocean. Philip was some yards away with his back to me, bending over
his net. The stranger came on till he stood within two yards of me, the water
washing half-way up to his knees. Then he said, with a clearly modulated
and rather mincing articulation: ‘Would it discommode you to contribute
elsewhere a coin with a somewhat different superscription?’
“With one exception there was nothing definably abnormal about him.
His tinted glasses were not really opaque, but of a blue kind common

enough, nor were the eyes behind them shifty, but regarded me steadily. His
dark beard was not really long or wild—, but he looked rather hairy,
because the beard began very high up in his face, just under the cheek-
bones. His complexion was neither sallow nor livid, but on the contrary
rather clear and youthful; yet this gave a pink-and-white wax look which
somehow (I don’t know why) rather increased the horror. The only oddity
one could fix was that his nose, which was otherwise of a good shape, was
just slightly turned sideways at the tip; as if, when it was soft, it had been
tapped on one side with a toy hammer. The thing was hardly a deformity;
yet I cannot tell you what a living nightmare it was to me. As he stood there
in the sunset-stained water he affected me as some hellish sea-monster just
risen roaring out of a sea like blood. I don’t know why a touch on the nose
should affect my imagination so much. I think it seemed as if he could
move his nose like a finger. And as if he had just that moment moved it.
“‘Any little assistance,’ he continued with the same queer, priggish
accent, ‘that may obviate the necessity of my communicating with the
family.’
“Then it rushed over me that I was being blackmailed for the theft of the
bronze piece; and all my merely superstitious fears and doubts were
swallowed up in one overpowering, practical question. How could he have
found out? I had stolen the thing suddenly and on impulse; I was certainly
alone; for I always made sure of being unobserved when I slipped out to see
Philip in this way. I had not, to all appearance, been followed in the street;
and if I had, they could not ‘X-ray’ the coin in my closed hand. The man
standing on the sand-hills could no more have seen what I gave Philip than
shoot a fly in one eye, like the man in the fairy-tale.
“‘Philip,’ I cried helplessly, ‘ask this man what he wants.’
“When Philip lifted his head at last from mending his net he looked
rather red, as if sulky or ashamed; but it may have been only the exertion of
stooping and the red evening light; I may have only had another of the
morbid fancies that seemed to be dancing about me. He merely said gruffly
to the man: ‘You clear out of this.’ And, motioning me to follow, set off
wading shoreward without paying further attention to him. He stepped on to
a stone breakwater that ran out from among the roots of the sand-hills, and
so struck homeward, perhaps thinking our incubus would find it less easy to
walk on such rough stones, green and slippery with seaweed, than we, who

were young and used to it. But my persecutor walked as daintily as he
talked; and he still followed me, picking his way and picking his phrases. I
heard his delicate, detestable voice appealing to me over my shoulder, until
at last, when we had crested the sand-hills, Philip’s patience (which was by
no means so conspicuous on most occasions) seemed to snap. He turned
suddenly, saying, ‘Go back. I can’t talk to you now.’ And as the man
hovered and opened his mouth, Philip struck him a buffet on it that sent him
flying from the top of the tallest sand-hill to the bottom. I saw him crawling
out below, covered with sand.
“This stroke comforted me somehow, though it might well increase my
peril; but Philip showed none of his usual elation at his own prowess.
Though as affectionate as ever, he still seemed cast down; and before I
could ask him anything fully, he parted with me at his own gate, with two
remarks that struck me as strange. He said that, all things considered, I
ought to put the coin back in the Collection; but that he himself would keep
it ‘for the present’. And then he added quite suddenly and irrelevantly: ‘You
know Giles is back from Australia?’”
The door of the tavern opened and the gigantic shadow of the
investigator Flambeau fell across the table. Father Brown presented him to
the lady in his own slight, persuasive style of speech, mentioning his
knowledge and sympathy in such cases; and almost without knowing, the
girl was soon reiterating her story to two listeners. But Flambeau, as he
bowed and sat down, handed the priest a small slip of paper. Brown
accepted it with some surprise and read on it: “Cab to Wagga Wagga, 379,
Mafeking Avenue, Putney.” The girl was going on with her story.
“I went up the steep street to my own house with my head in a whirl; it
had not begun to clear when I came to the doorstep, on which I found a
milk-can—and the man with the twisted nose. The milk-can told me the
servants were all out; for, of course, Arthur, browsing about in his brown
dressing-gown in a brown study, would not hear or answer a bell. Thus
there was no one to help me in the house, except my brother, whose help
must be my ruin. In desperation I thrust two shillings into the horrid thing’s
hand, and told him to call again in a few days, when I had thought it out. He
went off sulking, but more sheepishly than I had expected—perhaps he had
been shaken by his fall—and I watched the star of sand splashed on his

back receding down the road with a horrid vindictive pleasure. He turned a
corner some six houses down.
“Then I let myself in, made myself some tea, and tried to think it out. I
sat at the drawing-room window looking on to the garden, which still
glowed with the last full evening light. But I was too distracted and dreamy
to look at the lawns and flower-pots and flower-beds with any
concentration. So I took the shock the more sharply because I’d seen it so
slowly.
“The man or monster I’d sent away was standing quite still in the middle
of the garden. Oh, we’ve all read a lot about pale-faced phantoms in the
dark; but this was more dreadful than anything of that kind could ever be.
Because, though he cast a long evening shadow, he still stood in warm
sunlight. And because his face was not pale, but had that waxen bloom still
upon it that belongs to a barber’s dummy. He stood quite still, with his face
towards me; and I can’t tell you how horrid he looked among the tulips and
all those tall, gaudy, almost hothouse-looking flowers. It looked as if we’d
stuck up a waxwork instead of a statue in the centre of our garden.
“Yet almost the instant he saw me move in the window he turned and ran
out of the garden by the back gate, which stood open and by which he had
undoubtedly entered. This renewed timidity on his part was so different
from the impudence with which he had walked into the sea, that I felt
vaguely comforted. I fancied, perhaps, that he feared confronting Arthur
more than I knew. Anyhow, I settled down at last, and had a quiet dinner
alone (for it was against the rules to disturb Arthur when he was rearranging
the museum), and, my thoughts, a little released, fled to Philip and lost
themselves, I suppose. Anyhow, I was looking blankly, but rather pleasantly
than otherwise, at another window, uncurtained, but by this time black as a
slate with the final night-fall. It seemed to me that something like a snail
was on the outside of the window-pane. But when I stared harder, it was
more like a man’s thumb pressed on the pane; it had that curled look that a
thumb has. With my fear and courage re-awakened together, I rushed at the
window and then recoiled with a strangled scream that any man but Arthur
must have heard.
“For it was not a thumb, any more than it was a snail. It was the tip of a
crooked nose, crushed against the glass; it looked white with the pressure;
and the staring face and eyes behind it were at first invisible and afterwards

grey like a ghost. I slammed the shutters together somehow, rushed up to
my room and locked myself in. But, even as I passed, I could swear I saw a
second black window with something on it that was like a snail.
“It might be best to go to Arthur after all. If the thing was crawling close
all around the house like a cat, it might have purposes worse even than
blackmail. My brother might cast me out and curse me for ever, but he was
a gentleman, and would defend me on the spot. After ten minutes’ curious
thinking, I went down, knocked on the door and then went in: to see the last
and worst sight.
“My brother’s chair was empty, and he was obviously out. But the man
with the crooked nose was sitting waiting for his return, with his hat still
insolently on his head, and actually reading one of my brother’s books
under my brother’s lamp. His face was composed and occupied, but his
nose-tip still had the air of being the most mobile part of his face, as if it
had just turned from left to right like an elephant’s proboscis. I had thought
him poisonous enough while he was pursuing and watching me; but I think
his unconsciousness of my presence was more frightful still.
“I think I screamed loud and long; but that doesn’t matter. What I did
next does matter: I gave him all the money I had, including a good deal in
paper which, though it was mine, I dare say I had no right to touch. He went
off at last, with hateful, tactful regrets all in long words; and I sat down,
feeling ruined in every sense. And yet I was saved that very night by a pure
accident. Arthur had gone off suddenly to London, as he so often did, for
bargains; and returned, late but radiant, having nearly secured a treasure
that was an added splendour even to the family Collection. He was so
resplendent that I was almost emboldened to confess the abstraction of the
lesser gem—, but he bore down all other topics with his over-powering
projects. Because the bargain might still misfire any moment, he insisted on
my packing at once and going up with him to lodgings he had already taken
in Fulham, to be near the curio-shop in question. Thus in spite of myself, I
fled from my foe almost in the dead of night—but from Philip also.... My
brother was often at the South Kensington Museum, and, in order to make
some sort of secondary life for myself, I paid for a few lessons at the Art
Schools. I was coming back from them this evening, when I saw the
abomination of desolation walking alive down the long straight street and
the rest is as this gentleman has said.

“I’ve got only one thing to say. I don’t deserve to be helped; and I don’t
question or complain of my punishment; it is just, it ought to have
happened. But I still question, with bursting brains, how it can have
happened. Am I punished by miracle? or how can anyone but Philip and
myself know I gave him a tiny coin in the middle of the sea?”
“It is an extraordinary problem,” admitted Flambeau.
“Not so extraordinary as the answer,” remarked Father Brown rather
gloomily. “Miss Carstairs, will you be at home if we call at your Fulham
place in an hour and a half hence?”
The girl looked at him, and then rose and put her gloves on. “Yes,” she
said, “I’ll be there”; and almost instantly left the place.
That night the detective and the priest were still talking of the matter as
they drew near the Fulham house, a tenement strangely mean even for a
temporary residence of the Carstairs family.
“Of course the superficial, on reflection,” said Flambeau, “would think
first of this Australian brother who’s been in trouble before, who’s come
back so suddenly and who’s just the man to have shabby confederates. But I
can’t see how he can come into the thing by any process of thought,
unless...”
“Well?” asked his companion patiently.
Flambeau lowered his voice. “Unless the girl’s lover comes in, too, and
he would be the blacker villain. The Australian chap did know that Hawker
wanted the coin. But I can’t see how on earth he could know that Hawker
had got it, unless Hawker signalled to him or his representative across the
shore.”
“That is true,” assented the priest, with respect.
“Have you noted another thing?” went on Flambeau eagerly, “this
Hawker hears his love insulted, but doesn’t strike till he’s got to the soft
sand-hills, where he can be victor in a mere sham-fight. If he’d struck amid
rocks and sea, he might have hurt his ally.”
“That is true again,” said Father Brown, nodding.
“And now, take it from the start. It lies between few people, but at least
three. You want one person for suicide; two people for murder; but at least
three people for blackmail”

“Why?” asked the priest softly.
“Well, obviously,” cried his friend, “there must be one to be exposed; one
to threaten exposure; and one at least whom exposure would horrify.”
After a long ruminant pause, the priest said: “You miss a logical step.
Three persons are needed as ideas. Only two are needed as agents.”
“What can you mean?” asked the other.
“Why shouldn’t a blackmailer,” asked Brown, in a low voice, “threaten
his victim with himself? Suppose a wife became a rigid teetotaller in order
to frighten her husband into concealing his pub-frequenting, and then wrote
him blackmailing letters in another hand, threatening to tell his wife! Why
shouldn’t it work? Suppose a father forbade a son to gamble and then,
following him in a good disguise, threatened the boy with his own sham
paternal strictness! Suppose—but, here we are, my friend.”
“My God!” cried Flambeau; “you don’t mean—”
An active figure ran down the steps of the house and showed under the
golden lamplight the unmistakable head that resembled the Roman coin.
“Miss Carstairs,” said Hawker without ceremony, “wouldn’t go in till you
came.”
“Well,” observed Brown confidently, “don’t you think it’s the best thing
she can do to stop outside—with you to look after her? You see, I rather
guess you have guessed it all yourself.”
“Yes,” said the young man, in an undertone, “I guessed on the sands and
now I know; that was why I let him fall soft.”
Taking a latchkey from the girl and the coin from Hawker, Flambeau let
himself and his friend into the empty house and passed into the outer
parlour. It was empty of all occupants but one. The man whom Father
Brown had seen pass the tavern was standing against the wall as if at bay;
unchanged, save that he had taken off his black coat and was wearing a
brown dressing-gown.
“We have come,” said Father Brown politely, “to give back this coin to
its owner.” And he handed it to the man with the nose.
Flambeau’s eyes rolled. “Is this man a coin-collector?” he asked.
“This man is Mr Arthur Carstairs,” said the priest positively, “and he is a
coin-collector of a somewhat singular kind.”

The man changed colour so horribly that the crooked nose stood out on
his face like a separate and comic thing. He spoke, nevertheless, with a sort
of despairing dignity. “You shall see, then,” he said, “that I have not lost all
the family qualities.” And he turned suddenly and strode into an inner room,
slamming the door.
“Stop him!” shouted Father Brown, bounding and half falling over a
chair; and, after a wrench or two, Flambeau had the door open. But it was
too late. In dead silence Flambeau strode across and telephoned for doctor
and police.
An empty medicine bottle lay on the floor. Across the table the body of
the man in the brown dressing-gown lay amid his burst and gaping brown-
paper parcels; out of which poured and rolled, not Roman, but very modern
English coins.
The priest held up the bronze head of Caesar. “This,” he said, “was all
that was left of the Carstairs Collection.”
After a silence he went on, with more than common gentleness: “It was a
cruel will his wicked father made, and you see he did resent it a little. He
hated the Roman money he had, and grew fonder of the real money denied
him. He not only sold the Collection bit by bit, but sank bit by bit to the
basest ways of making money—even to blackmailing his own family in a
disguise. He blackmailed his brother from Australia for his little forgotten
crime (that is why he took the cab to Wagga Wagga in Putney), he
blackmailed his sister for the theft he alone could have noticed. And that, by
the way, is why she had that supernatural guess when he was away on the
sand-dunes. Mere figure and gait, however distant, are more likely to
remind us of somebody than a well-made-up face quite close.”
There was another silence. “Well,” growled the detective, “and so this
great numismatist and coin-collector was nothing but a vulgar miser.”
“Is there so great a difference?” asked Father Brown, in the same strange,
indulgent tone. “What is there wrong about a miser that is not often as
wrong about a collector? What is wrong, except... thou shalt not make to
thyself any graven image; thou shalt not bow down to them nor serve them,
for I...but we must go and see how the poor young people are getting on.”
“I think,” said Flambeau, “that in spite of everything, they are probably
getting on very well.”

SEVEN — The Purple Wig
MR EDWARD NUTT, the industrious editor of the Daily Reformer, sat
at his desk, opening letters and marking proofs to the merry tune of a
typewriter, worked by a vigorous young lady.
He was a stoutish, fair man, in his shirt-sleeves; his movements were
resolute, his mouth firm and his tones final; but his round, rather babyish
blue eyes had a bewildered and even wistful look that rather contradicted all
this. Nor indeed was the expression altogether misleading. It might truly be
said of him, as for many journalists in authority, that his most familiar
emotion was one of continuous fear; fear of libel actions, fear of lost
advertisements, fear of misprints, fear of the sack.
His life was a series of distracted compromises between the proprietor of
the paper (and of him), who was a senile soap-boiler with three ineradicable
mistakes in his mind, and the very able staff he had collected to run the
paper; some of whom were brilliant and experienced men and (what was
even worse) sincere enthusiasts for the political policy of the paper.
A letter from one of these lay immediately before him, and rapid and
resolute as he was, he seemed almost to hesitate before opening it. He took
up a strip of proof instead, ran down it with a blue eye, and a blue pencil,
altered the word “adultery” to the word “impropriety,” and the word “Jew”
to the word “Alien,” rang a bell and sent it flying upstairs.
Then, with a more thoughtful eye, he ripped open the letter from his more
distinguished contributor, which bore a postmark of Devonshire, and read
as follows:
DEAR NUTT,—As I see you’re working Spooks and Dooks at the same
time, what about an article on that rum business of the Eyres of Exmoor; or
as the old women call it down here, the Devil’s Ear of Eyre? The head of
the family, you know, is the Duke of Exmoor; he is one of the few really
stiff old Tory aristocrats left, a sound old crusted tyrant it is quite in our line
to make trouble about. And I think I’m on the track of a story that will make
trouble.

Of course I don’t believe in the old legend about James I; and as for you,
you don’t believe in anything, not even in journalism. The legend, you’ll
probably remember, was about the blackest business in English history—
the poisoning of Overbury by that witch’s cat Frances Howard, and the
quite mysterious terror which forced the King to pardon the murderers.
There was a lot of alleged witchcraft mixed up with it; and the story goes
that a man-servant listening at the keyhole heard the truth in a talk between
the King and Carr; and the bodily ear with which he heard grew large and
monstrous as by magic, so awful was the secret. And though he had to be
loaded with lands and gold and made an ancestor of dukes, the elf-shaped
ear is still recurrent in the family. Well, you don’t believe in black magic;
and if you did, you couldn’t use it for copy. If a miracle happened in your
office, you’d have to hush it up, now so many bishops are agnostics. But
that is not the point. The point is that there really is something queer about
Exmoor and his family; something quite natural, I dare say, but quite
abnormal. And the Ear is in it somehow, I fancy; either a symbol or a
delusion or disease or something. Another tradition says that Cavaliers just
after James I began to wear their hair long only to cover the ear of the first
Lord Exmoor. This also is no doubt fanciful.
The reason I point it out to you is this: It seems to me that we make a
mistake in attacking aristocracy entirely for its champagne and diamonds.
Most men rather admire the nobs for having a good time, but I think we
surrender too much when we admit that aristocracy has made even the
aristocrats happy. I suggest a series of articles pointing out how dreary, how
inhuman, how downright diabolist, is the very smell and atmosphere of
some of these great houses. There are plenty of instances; but you couldn’t
begin with a better one than the Ear of the Eyres. By the end of the week I
think I can get you the truth about it.—Yours ever, FRANCIS FINN.
Mr Nutt reflected a moment, staring at his left boot; then he called out in
a strong, loud and entirely lifeless voice, in which every syllable sounded
alike: “Miss Barlow, take down a letter to Mr Finn, please.”
DEAR FINN,—I think it would do; copy should reach us second post
Saturday.—Yours, E. NUTT.
This elaborate epistle he articulated as if it were all one word; and Miss
Barlow rattled it down as if it were all one word. Then he took up another
strip of proof and a blue pencil, and altered the word “supernatural” to the

word “marvellous”, and the expression “shoot down” to the expression
“repress”.
In such happy, healthful activities did Mr Nutt disport himself, until the
ensuing Saturday found him at the same desk, dictating to the same typist,
and using the same blue pencil on the first instalment of Mr Finn’s
revelations. The opening was a sound piece of slashing invective about the
evil secrets of princes, and despair in the high places of the earth. Though
written violently, it was in excellent English; but the editor, as usual, had
given to somebody else the task of breaking it up into sub-headings, which
were of a spicier sort, as “Peeress and Poisons”, and “The Eerie Ear”, “The
Eyres in their Eyrie”, and so on through a hundred happy changes. Then
followed the legend of the Ear, amplified from Finn’s first letter, and then
the substance of his later discoveries, as follows:
I know it is the practice of journalists to put the end of the story at the
beginning and call it a headline. I know that journalism largely consists in
saying “Lord Jones Dead” to people who never knew that Lord Jones was
alive. Your present correspondent thinks that this, like many other
journalistic customs, is bad journalism; and that the Daily Reformer has to
set a better example in such things. He proposes to tell his story as it
occurred, step by step. He will use the real names of the parties, who in
most cases are ready to confirm his testimony. As for the headlines, the
sensational proclamations—they will come at the end.
I was walking along a public path that threads through a private
Devonshire orchard and seems to point towards Devonshire cider, when I
came suddenly upon just such a place as the path suggested. It was a long,
low inn, consisting really of a cottage and two barns; thatched all over with
the thatch that looks like brown and grey hair grown before history. But
outside the door was a sign which called it the Blue Dragon; and under the
sign was one of those long rustic tables that used to stand outside most of
the free English inns, before teetotallers and brewers between them
destroyed freedom. And at this table sat three gentlemen, who might have
lived a hundred years ago.
Now that I know them all better, there is no difficulty about disentangling
the impressions; but just then they looked like three very solid ghosts. The
dominant figure, both because he was bigger in all three dimensions, and
because he sat centrally in the length of the table, facing me, was a tall, fat

man dressed completely in black, with a rubicund, even apoplectic visage,
but a rather bald and rather bothered brow. Looking at him again, more
strictly, I could not exactly say what it was that gave me the sense of
antiquity, except the antique cut of his white clerical necktie and the barred
wrinkles across his brow.
It was even less easy to fix the impression in the case of the man at the
right end of the table, who, to say truth, was as commonplace a person as
could be seen anywhere, with a round, brown-haired head and a round snub
nose, but also clad in clerical black, of a stricter cut. It was only when I saw
his broad curved hat lying on the table beside him that I realized why I
connected him with anything ancient. He was a Roman Catholic priest.
Perhaps the third man, at the other end of the table, had really more to do
with it than the rest, though he was both slighter in physical presence and
more inconsiderate in his dress. His lank limbs were clad, I might also say
clutched, in very tight grey sleeves and pantaloons; he had a long, sallow,
aquiline face which seemed somehow all the more saturnine because his
lantern jaws were imprisoned in his collar and neck-cloth more in the style
of the old stock; and his hair (which ought to have been dark brown) was of
an odd dim, russet colour which, in conjunction with his yellow face,
looked rather purple than red. The unobtrusive yet unusual colour was all
the more notable because his hair was almost unnaturally healthy and
curling, and he wore it full. But, after all analysis, I incline to think that
what gave me my first old-fashioned impression was simply a set of tall,
old-fashioned wine-glasses, one or two lemons and two churchwarden
pipes. And also, perhaps, the old-world errand on which I had come.
Being a hardened reporter, and it being apparently a public inn, I did not
need to summon much of my impudence to sit down at the long table and
order some cider. The big man in black seemed very learned, especially
about local antiquities; the small man in black, though he talked much less,
surprised me with a yet wider culture. So we got on very well together; but
the third man, the old gentleman in the tight pantaloons, seemed rather
distant and haughty, until I slid into the subject of the Duke of Exmoor and
his ancestry.
I thought the subject seemed to embarrass the other two a little; but it
broke the spell of the third man’s silence most successfully. Speaking with
restraint and with the accent of a highly educated gentleman, and puffing at

intervals at his long churchwarden pipe, he proceeded to tell me some of the
most horrible stories I have ever heard in my life: how one of the Eyres in
the former ages had hanged his own father; and another had his wife
scourged at the cart tail through the village; and another had set fire to a
church full of children, and so on.
Some of the tales, indeed, are not fit for public print—, such as the story
of the Scarlet Nuns, the abominable story of the Spotted Dog, or the thing
that was done in the quarry. And all this red roll of impieties came from his
thin, genteel lips rather primly than otherwise, as he sat sipping the wine out
of his tall, thin glass.
I could see that the big man opposite me was trying, if anything, to stop
him; but he evidently held the old gentleman in considerable respect, and
could not venture to do so at all abruptly. And the little priest at the other
end of the-table, though free from any such air of embarrassment, looked
steadily at the table, and seemed to listen to the recital with great pain—as
well as he might.
“You don’t seem,” I said to the narrator, “to be very fond of the Exmoor
pedigree.”
He looked at me a moment, his lips still prim, but whitening and
tightening; then he deliberately broke his long pipe and glass on the table
and stood up, the very picture of a perfect gentleman with the framing
temper of a fiend.
“These gentlemen,” he said, “will tell you whether I have cause to like it.
The curse of the Eyres of old has lain heavy on this country, and many have
suffered from it. They know there are none who have suffered from it as I
have.” And with that he crushed a piece of the fallen glass under his heel,
and strode away among the green twilight of the twinkling apple-trees.
“That is an extraordinary old gentleman,” I said to the other two; “do you
happen to know what the Exmoor family has done to him? Who is he?”
The big man in black was staring at me with the wild air of a baffled bull;
he did not at first seem to take it in. Then he said at last, “Don’t you know
who he is?”
I reaffirmed my ignorance, and there was another silence; then the little
priest said, still looking at the table, “That is the Duke of Exmoor.”

Then, before I could collect my scattered senses, he added equally
quietly, but with an air of regularizing things: “My friend here is Doctor
Mull, the Duke’s librarian. My name is Brown.”
“But,” I stammered, “if that is the Duke, why does he damn all the old
dukes like that?”
“He seems really to believe,” answered the priest called Brown, “that
they have left a curse on him.” Then he added, with some irrelevance,
“That’s why he wears a wig.”
It was a few moments before his meaning dawned on me. “You don’t
mean that fable about the fantastic ear?” I demanded. “I’ve heard of it, of
course, but surely it must be a superstitious yarn spun out of something
much simpler. I’ve sometimes thought it was a wild version of one of those
mutilation stories. They used to crop criminals’ ears in the sixteenth
century.”
“I hardly think it was that,” answered the little man thoughtfully, “but it
is not outside ordinary science or natural law for a family to have some
deformity frequently reappearing—such as one ear bigger than the other.”
The big librarian had buried his big bald brow in his big red hands, like a
man trying to think out his duty. “No,” he groaned. “You do the man a
wrong after all. Understand, I’ve no reason to defend him, or even keep
faith with him. He has been a tyrant to me as to everybody else. Don’t fancy
because you see him sitting here that he isn’t a great lord in the worst sense
of the word. He would fetch a man a mile to ring a bell a yard off—if it
would summon another man three miles to fetch a matchbox three yards
off. He must have a footman to carry his walking-stick; a body servant to
hold up his opera-glasses—”
“But not a valet to brush his clothes,” cut in the priest, with a curious
dryness, “for the valet would want to brush his wig, too.”
The librarian turned to him and seemed to forget my presence; he was
strongly moved and, I think, a little heated with wine. “I don’t know how
you know it, Father Brown,” he said, “but you are right. He lets the whole
world do everything for him—except dress him. And that he insists on
doing in a literal solitude like a desert. Anybody is kicked out of the house
without a character who is so much as found near his dressing-room door.
“He seems a pleasant old party,” I remarked.

“No,” replied Dr Mull quite simply; “and yet that is just what I mean by
saying you are unjust to him after all. Gentlemen, the Duke does really feel
the bitterness about the curse that he uttered just now. He does, with sincere
shame and terror, hide under that purple wig something he thinks it would
blast the sons of man to see. I know it is so; and I know it is not a mere
natural disfigurement, like a criminal mutilation, or a hereditary
disproportion in the features. I know it is worse than that; because a man
told me who was present at a scene that no man could invent, where a
stronger man than any of us tried to defy the secret, and was scared away
from it.”
I opened my mouth to speak, but Mull went on in oblivion of me,
speaking out of the cavern of his hands. “I don’t mind telling you, Father,
because it’s really more defending the poor Duke than giving him away.
Didn’t you ever hear of the time when he very nearly lost all the estates?”
The priest shook his head; and the librarian proceeded to tell the tale as
he had heard it from his predecessor in the same post, who had been his
patron and instructor, and whom he seemed to trust implicitly. Up to a
certain point it was a common enough tale of the decline of a great family’s
fortunes—the tale of a family lawyer. His lawyer, however, had the sense to
cheat honestly, if the expression explains itself. Instead of using funds he
held in trust, he took advantage of the Duke’s carelessness to put the family
in a financial hole, in which it might be necessary for the Duke to let him
hold them in reality.
The lawyer’s name was Isaac Green, but the Duke always called him
Elisha; presumably in reference to the fact that he was quite bald, though
certainly not more than thirty. He had risen very rapidly, but from very dirty
beginnings; being first a “nark” or informer, and then a money-lender: but
as solicitor to the Eyres he had the sense, as I say, to keep technically
straight until he was ready to deal the final blow. The blow fell at dinner;
and the old librarian said he should never forget the very look of the
lampshades and the decanters, as the little lawyer, with a steady smile,
proposed to the great landlord that they should halve the estates between
them. The sequel certainly could not be overlooked; for the Duke, in dead
silence, smashed a decanter on the man’s bald head as suddenly as I had
seen him smash the glass that day in the orchard. It left a red triangular scar
on the scalp, and the lawyer’s eyes altered, but not his smile.

He rose tottering to his feet, and struck back as such men do strike. “I am
glad of that,” he said, “for now I can take the whole estate. The law will
give it to me.”
Exmoor, it seems, was white as ashes, but his eyes still blazed. “The law
will give it you,” he said; “but you will not take it.... Why not? Why?
because it would mean the crack of doom for me, and if you take it I shall
take off my wig.... Why, you pitiful plucked fowl, anyone can see your bare
head. But no man shall see mine and live.”
Well, you may say what you like and make it mean what you like. But
Mull swears it is the solemn fact that the lawyer, after shaking his knotted
fists in the air for an instant, simply ran from the room and never
reappeared in the countryside; and since then Exmoor has been feared more
for a warlock than even for a landlord and a magistrate.
Now Dr Mull told his story with rather wild theatrical gestures, and with
a passion I think at least partisan. I was quite conscious of the possibility
that the whole was the extravagance of an old braggart and gossip. But
before I end this half of my discoveries, I think it due to Dr Mull to record
that my two first inquiries have confirmed his story. I learned from an old
apothecary in the village that there was a bald man in evening dress, giving
the name of Green, who came to him one night to have a three-cornered cut
on his forehead plastered. And I learnt from the legal records and old
newspapers that there was a lawsuit threatened, and at least begun, by one
Green against the Duke of Exmoor.
Mr Nutt, of the Daily Reformer, wrote some highly incongruous words
across the top of the copy, made some highly mysterious marks down the
side of it, and called to Miss Barlow in the same loud, monotonous voice:
“Take down a letter to Mr Finn.”
DEAR FINN,—Your copy will do, but I have had to headline it a bit; and
our public would never stand a Romanist priest in the story—you must keep
your eye on the suburbs. I’ve altered him to Mr Brown, a Spiritualist.
Yours,
E. NUTT.
A day or two afterward found the active and judicious editor examining,
with blue eyes that seemed to grow rounder and rounder, the second

instalment of Mr Finn’s tale of mysteries in high life. It began with the
words:
I have made an astounding discovery. I freely confess it is quite different
from anything I expected to discover, and will give a much more practical
shock to the public. I venture to say, without any vanity, that the words I
now write will be read all over Europe, and certainly all over America and
the Colonies. And yet I heard all I have to tell before I left this same little
wooden table in this same little wood of apple-trees.
I owe it all to the small priest Brown; he is an extraordinary man. The big
librarian had left the table, perhaps ashamed of his long tongue, perhaps
anxious about the storm in which his mysterious master had vanished:
anyway, he betook himself heavily in the Duke’s tracks through the trees.
Father Brown had picked up one of the lemons and was eyeing it with an
odd pleasure.
“What a lovely colour a lemon is!” he said. “There’s one thing I don’t
like about the Duke’s wig—the colour.”
“I don’t think I understand,” I answered.
“I dare say he’s got good reason to cover his ears, like King Midas,” went
on the priest, with a cheerful simplicity which somehow seemed rather
flippant under the circumstances. “I can quite understand that it’s nicer to
cover them with hair than with brass plates or leather flaps. But if he wants
to use hair, why doesn’t he make it look like hair? There never was hair of
that colour in this world. It looks more like a sunset-cloud coming through
the wood. Why doesn’t he conceal the family curse better, if he’s really so
ashamed of it? Shall I tell you? It’s because he isn’t ashamed of it. He’s
proud of it”
“It’s an ugly wig to be proud of—and an ugly story,” I said.
“Consider,” replied this curious little man, “how you yourself really feel
about such things. I don’t suggest you’re either more snobbish or more
morbid than the rest of us: but don’t you feel in a vague way that a genuine
old family curse is rather a fine thing to have? Would you be ashamed,
wouldn’t you be a little proud, if the heir of the Glamis horror called you his
friend? or if Byron’s family had confided, to you only, the evil adventures
of their race? Don’t be too hard on the aristocrats themselves if their heads
are as weak as ours would be, and they are snobs about their own sorrows.”

“By Jove!” I cried; “and that’s true enough. My own mother’s family had
a banshee; and, now I come to think of it, it has comforted me in many a
cold hour.”
“And think,” he went on, “of that stream of blood and poison that spurted
from his thin lips the instant you so much as mentioned his ancestors. Why
should he show every stranger over such a Chamber of Horrors unless he is
proud of it? He doesn’t conceal his wig, he doesn’t conceal his blood, he
doesn’t conceal his family curse, he doesn’t conceal the family crimes—but
—”
The little man’s voice changed so suddenly, he shut his hand so sharply,
and his eyes so rapidly grew rounder and brighter like a waking owl’s, that
it had all the abruptness of a small explosion on the table.
“But,” he ended, “he does really conceal his toilet.”
It somehow completed the thrill of my fanciful nerves that at that instant
the Duke appeared again silently among the glimmering trees, with his soft
foot and sunset-hued hair, coming round the corner of the house in company
with his librarian. Before he came within earshot, Father Brown had added
quite composedly, “Why does he really hide the secret of what he does with
the purple wig? Because it isn’t the sort of secret we suppose.”
The Duke came round the corner and resumed his seat at the head of the
table with all his native dignity. The embarrassment of the librarian left him
hovering on his hind legs, like a huge bear. The Duke addressed the priest
with great seriousness. “Father Brown,” he said, “Doctor Mull informs me
that you have come here to make a request. I no longer profess an
observance of the religion of my fathers; but for their sakes, and for the
sake of the days when we met before, I am very willing to hear you. But I
presume you would rather be heard in private.”
Whatever I retain of the gentleman made me stand up. Whatever I have
attained of the journalist made me stand still. Before this paralysis could
pass, the priest had made a momentarily detaining motion. “If,” he said,
“your Grace will permit me my real petition, or if I retain any right to
advise you, I would urge that as many people as possible should be present.
All over this country I have found hundreds, even of my own faith and
flock, whose imaginations are poisoned by the spell which I implore you to
break. I wish we could have all Devonshire here to see you do it.”
“To see me do what?” asked the Duke, arching his eyebrows.

“To see you take off your wig,” said Father Brown.
The Duke’s face did not move; but he looked at his petitioner with a
glassy stare which was the most awful expression I have ever seen on a
human face. I could see the librarian’s great legs wavering under him like
the shadows of stems in a pool; and I could not banish from my own brain
the fancy that the trees all around us were filling softly in the silence with
devils instead of birds.
“I spare you,” said the Duke in a voice of inhuman pity. “I refuse. If I
gave you the faintest hint of the load of horror I have to bear alone, you
would lie shrieking at these feet of mine and begging to know no more. I
will spare you the hint. You shall not spell the first letter of what is written
on the altar of the Unknown God.”
“I know the Unknown God,” said the little priest, with an unconscious
grandeur of certitude that stood up like a granite tower. “I know his name; it
is Satan. The true God was made flesh and dwelt among us. And I say to
you, wherever you find men ruled merely by mystery, it is the mystery of
iniquity. If the devil tells you something is too fearful to look at, look at it.
If he says something is too terrible to hear, hear it. If you think some truth
unbearable, bear it. I entreat your Grace to end this nightmare now and here
at this table.”
“If I did,” said the Duke in a low voice, “you and all you believe, and all
by which alone you live, would be the first to shrivel and perish. You would
have an instant to know the great Nothing before you died.”
“The Cross of Christ be between me and harm,” said Father Brown.
“Take off your wig.”
I was leaning over the table in ungovernable excitement; in listening to
this extraordinary duel half a thought had come into my head. “Your
Grace,” I cried, “I call your bluff. Take off that wig or I will knock it off.”
I suppose I can be prosecuted for assault, but I am very glad I did it.
When he said, in the same voice of stone, “I refuse,” I simply sprang on
him. For three long instants he strained against me as if he had all hell to
help him; but I forced his head until the hairy cap fell off it. I admit that,
whilst wrestling, I shut my eyes as it fell.
I was awakened by a cry from Mull, who was also by this time at the
Duke’s side. His head and mine were both bending over the bald head of the

wigless Duke. Then the silence was snapped by the librarian exclaiming:
“What can it mean? Why, the man had nothing to hide. His ears are just like
everybody else’s.”
“Yes,” said Father Brown, “that is what he had to hide.”
The priest walked straight up to him, but strangely enough did not even
glance at his ears. He stared with an almost comical seriousness at his bald
forehead, and pointed to a three-cornered cicatrice, long healed, but still
discernible. “Mr Green, I think.” he said politely, “and he did get the whole
estate after all.”
And now let me tell the readers of the Daily Reformer what I think the
most remarkable thing in the whole affair. This transformation scene, which
will seem to you as wild and purple as a Persian fairy-tale, has been (except
for my technical assault) strictly legal and constitutional from its first
beginnings. This man with the odd scar and the ordinary ears is not an
impostor. Though (in one sense) he wears another man’s wig and claims
another man’s ear, he has not stolen another man’s coronet. He really is the
one and only Duke of Exmoor. What happened was this. The old Duke
really had a slight malformation of the ear, which really was more or less
hereditary. He really was morbid about it; and it is likely enough that he did
invoke it as a kind of curse in the violent scene (which undoubtedly
happened) in which he struck Green with the decanter. But the contest
ended very differently. Green pressed his claim and got the estates; the
dispossessed nobleman shot himself and died without issue. After a decent
interval the beautiful English Government revived the “extinct” peerage of
Exmoor, and bestowed it, as is usual, on the most important person, the
person who had got the property.
This man used the old feudal fables—properly, in his snobbish soul,
really envied and admired them. So that thousands of poor English people
trembled before a mysterious chieftain with an ancient destiny and a diadem
of evil stars—when they are really trembling before a guttersnipe who was
a pettifogger and a pawnbroker not twelve years ago. I think it very typical
of the real case against our aristocracy as it is, and as it will be till God
sends us braver men.
Mr Nutt put down the manuscript and called out with unusual sharpness:
“Miss Barlow, please take down a letter to Mr Finn.”

DEAR FINN,—You must be mad; we can’t touch this. I wanted vampires
and the bad old days and aristocracy hand-in-hand with superstition. They
like that but you must know the Exmoors would never forgive this. And
what would our people say then, I should like to know! Why, Sir Simon is
one of Exmoor’s greatest pals; and it would ruin that cousin of the Eyres
that’s standing for us at Bradford. Besides, old Soap-Suds was sick enough
at not getting his peerage last year; he’d sack me by wire if I lost him it with
such lunacy as this. And what about Duffey? He’s doing us some rattling
articles on “The Heel of the Norman.” And how can he write about
Normans if the man’s only a solicitor? Do be reasonable.—Yours, E.
NUTT.
As Miss Barlow rattled away cheerfully, he crumpled up the copy and
tossed it into the waste-paper basket; but not before he had, automatically
and by force of habit, altered the word “God” to the word “circumstances.”

EIGHT — The Perishing of the Pendragons
FATHER BROWN was in no mood for adventures. He had lately fallen
ill with over-work, and when he began to recover, his friend Flambeau had
taken him on a cruise in a small yacht with Sir Cecil Fanshaw, a young
Cornish squire and an enthusiast for Cornish coast scenery. But Brown was
still rather weak; he was no very happy sailor; and though he was never of
the sort that either grumbles or breaks down, his spirits did not rise above
patience and civility. When the other two men praised the ragged violet
sunset or the ragged volcanic crags, he agreed with them. When Flambeau
pointed out a rock shaped like a dragon, he looked at it and thought it very
like a dragon. When Fanshaw more excitedly indicated a rock that was like
Merlin, he looked at it, and signified assent. When Flambeau asked whether
this rocky gate of the twisted river was not the gate of Fairyland, he said
“Yes.” He heard the most important things and the most trivial with the
same tasteless absorption. He heard that the coast was death to all but
careful seamen; he also heard that the ship’s cat was asleep. He heard that
Fanshaw couldn’t find his cigar-holder anywhere; he also heard the pilot
deliver the oracle “Both eyes bright, she’s all right; one eye winks, down
she sinks.” He heard Flambeau say to Fanshaw that no doubt this meant the
pilot must keep both eyes open and be spry. And he heard Fanshaw say to
Flambeau that, oddly enough, it didn’t mean this: it meant that while they
saw two of the coast lights, one near and the other distant, exactly side by
side, they were in the right river-channel; but that if one light was hidden
behind the other, they were going on the rocks. He heard Fanshaw add that
his country was full of such quaint fables and idioms; it was the very home
of romance; he even pitted this part of Cornwall against Devonshire, as a
claimant to the laurels of Elizabethan seamanship. According to him there
had been captains among these coves and islets compared with whom
Drake was practically a landsman. He heard Flambeau laugh, and ask if,
perhaps, the adventurous title of “Westward Ho!” only meant that all
Devonshire men wished they were living in Cornwall. He heard Fanshaw
say there was no need to be silly; that not only had Cornish captains been
heroes, but that they were heroes still: that near that very spot there was an

old admiral, now retired, who was scarred by thrilling voyages full of
adventures; and who had in his youth found the last group of eight Pacific
Islands that was added to the chart of the world. This Cecil Fanshaw was, in
person, of the kind that commonly urges such crude but pleasing
enthusiasms; a very young man, light-haired, high-coloured, with an eager
profile; with a boyish bravado of spirits, but an almost girlish delicacy of
tint and type. The big shoulders, black brows and black mousquetaire
swagger of Flambeau were a great contrast.
All these trivialities Brown heard and saw; but heard them as a tired man
hears a tune in the railway wheels, or saw them as a sick man sees the
pattern of his wall-paper. No one can calculate the turns of mood in
convalescence: but Father Brown’s depression must have had a great deal to
do with his mere unfamiliarity with the sea. For as the river mouth
narrowed like the neck of a bottle, and the water grew calmer and the air
warmer and more earthly, he seemed to wake up and take notice like a baby.
They had reached that phase just after sunset when air and water both look
bright, but earth and all its growing things look almost black by
comparison. About this particular evening, however, there was something
exceptional. It was one of those rare atmospheres in which a smoked-glass
slide seems to have been slid away from between us and Nature; so that
even dark colours on that day look more gorgeous than bright colours on
cloudier days. The trampled earth of the river-banks and the peaty stain in
the pools did not look drab but glowing umber, and the dark woods astir in
the breeze did not look, as usual, dim blue with mere depth of distance, but
more like wind-tumbled masses of some vivid violet blossom. This magic
clearness and intensity in the colours was further forced on Brown’s slowly
reviving senses by something romantic and even secret in the very form of
the landscape.
The river was still well wide and deep enough for a pleasure boat so
small as theirs; but the curves of the country-side suggested that it was
closing in on either hand; the woods seemed to be making broken and
flying attempts at bridge-building—as if the boat were passing from the
romance of a valley to the romance of a hollow and so to the supreme
romance of a tunnel. Beyond this mere look of things there was little for
Brown’s freshening fancy to feed on; he saw no human beings, except some
gipsies trailing along the river bank, with faggots and osiers cut in the
forest; and one sight no longer unconventional, but in such remote parts still

uncommon: a dark-haired lady, bare-headed, and paddling her own canoe.
If Father Brown ever attached any importance to either of these, he
certainly forgot them at the next turn of the river which brought in sight a
singular object.
The water seemed to widen and split, being cloven by the dark wedge of
a fish-shaped and wooded islet. With the rate at which they went, the islet
seemed to swim towards them like a ship; a ship with a very high prow—or,
to speak more strictly, a very high funnel. For at the extreme point nearest
them stood up an odd-looking building, unlike anything they could
remember or connect with any purpose. It was not specially high, but it was
too high for its breadth to be called anything but a tower. Yet it appeared to
be built entirely of wood, and that in a most unequal and eccentric way.
Some of the planks and beams were of good, seasoned oak; some of such
wood cut raw and recent; some again of white pinewood, and a great deal
more of the same sort of wood painted black with tar. These black beams
were set crooked or crisscross at all kinds of angles, giving the whole a
most patchy and puzzling appearance. There were one or two windows,
which appeared to be coloured and leaded in an old-fashioned but more
elaborate style. The travellers looked at it with that paradoxical feeling we
have when something reminds us of something, and yet we are certain it is
something very different.
Father Brown, even when he was mystified, was clever in analysing his
own mystification. And he found himself reflecting that the oddity seemed
to consist in a particular shape cut out in an incongruous material; as if one
saw a top-hat made of tin, or a frock-coat cut out of tartan. He was sure he
had seen timbers of different tints arranged like that somewhere, but never
in such architectural proportions. The next moment a glimpse through the
dark trees told him all he wanted to know and he laughed. Through a gap in
the foliage there appeared for a moment one of those old wooden houses,
faced with black beams, which are still to be found here and there in
England, but which most of us see imitated in some show called “Old
London” or “Shakespeare’s England’. It was in view only long enough for
the priest to see that, however old-fashioned, it was a comfortable and well-
kept country-house, with flower-beds in front of it. It had none of the
piebald and crazy look of the tower that seemed made out of its refuse.
“What on earth’s this?” said Flambeau, who was still staring at the tower.

Fanshaw’s eyes were shining, and he spoke triumphantly. “Aha! you’ve
not seen a place quite like this before, I fancy; that’s why I’ve brought you
here, my friend. Now you shall see whether I exaggerate about the mariners
of Cornwall. This place belongs to Old Pendragon, whom we call the
Admiral; though he retired before getting the rank. The spirit of Raleigh and
Hawkins is a memory with the Devon folk; it’s a modern fact with the
Pendragons. If Queen Elizabeth were to rise from the grave and come up
this river in a gilded barge, she would be received by the Admiral in a house
exactly such as she was accustomed to, in every corner and casement, in
every panel on the wall or plate on the table. And she would find an English
Captain still talking fiercely of fresh lands to be found in little ships, as
much as if she had dined with Drake.”
“She’d find a rum sort of thing in the garden,” said Father Brown, “which
would not please her Renaissance eye. That Elizabethan domestic
architecture is charming in its way; but it’s against the very nature of it to
break out into turrets.”
“And yet,” answered Fanshaw, “that’s the most romantic and Elizabethan
part of the business. It was built by the Pendragons in the very days of the
Spanish wars; and though it’s needed patching and even rebuilding for
another reason, it’s always been rebuilt in the old way. The story goes that
the lady of Sir Peter Pendragon built it in this place and to this height,
because from the top you can just see the corner where vessels turn into the
river mouth; and she wished to be the first to see her husband’s ship, as he
sailed home from the Spanish Main.”
“For what other reason,” asked Father Brown, “do you mean that it has
been rebuilt?”
“Oh, there’s a strange story about that, too,” said the young squire with
relish. “You are really in a land of strange stories. King Arthur was here and
Merlin and the fairies before him. The story goes that Sir Peter Pendragon,
who (I fear) had some of the faults of the pirates as well as the virtues of the
sailor, was bringing home three Spanish gentlemen in honourable captivity,
intending to escort them to Elizabeth’s court. But he was a man of flaming
and tigerish temper, and coming to high words with one of them, he caught
him by the throat and flung him by accident or design, into the sea. A
second Spaniard, who was the brother of the first, instantly drew his sword
and flew at Pendragon, and after a short but furious combat in which both

got three wounds in as many minutes, Pendragon drove his blade through
the other’s body and the second Spaniard was accounted for. As it happened
the ship had already turned into the river mouth and was close to
comparatively shallow water. The third Spaniard sprang over the side of the
ship, struck out for the shore, and was soon near enough to it to stand up to
his waist in water. And turning again to face the ship, and holding up both
arms to Heaven—like a prophet calling plagues upon a wicked city—he
called out to Pendragon in a piercing and terrible voice, that he at least was
yet living, that he would go on living, that he would live for ever; and that
generation after generation the house of Pendragon should never see him or
his, but should know by very certain signs that he and his vengeance were
alive. With that he dived under the wave, and was either drowned or swam
so long under water that no hair of his head was seen afterwards.”
“There’s that girl in the canoe again,” said Flambeau irrelevantly, for
good-looking young women would call him off any topic. “She seems
bothered by the queer tower just as we were.”
Indeed, the black-haired young lady was letting her canoe float slowly
and silently past the strange islet; and was looking intently up at the strange
tower, with a strong glow of curiosity on her oval and olive face.
“Never mind girls,” said Fanshaw impatiently, “there are plenty of them
in the world, but not many things like the Pendragon Tower. As you may
easily suppose, plenty of superstitions and scandals have followed in the
track of the Spaniard’s curse; and no doubt, as you would put it, any
accident happening to this Cornish family would be connected with it by
rural credulity. But it is perfectly true that this tower has been burnt down
two or three times; and the family can’t be called lucky, for more than two,
I think, of the Admiral’s near kin have perished by shipwreck; and one at
least, to my own knowledge, on practically the same spot where Sir Peter
threw the Spaniard overboard.”
“What a pity!” exclaimed Flambeau. “She’s going.”
“When did your friend the Admiral tell you this family history?” asked
Father Brown, as the girl in the canoe paddled off, without showing the
least intention of extending her interest from the tower to the yacht, which
Fanshaw had already caused to lie alongside the island.
“Many years ago,” replied Fanshaw; “he hasn’t been to sea for some time
now, though he is as keen on it as ever. I believe there’s a family compact or

something. Well, here’s the landing stage; let’s come ashore and see the old
boy.”
They followed him on to the island, just under the tower, and Father
Brown, whether from the mere touch of dry land, or the interest of
something on the other bank of the river (which he stared at very hard for
some seconds), seemed singularly improved in briskness. They entered a
wooded avenue between two fences of thin greyish wood, such as often
enclose parks or gardens, and over the top of which the dark trees tossed to
and fro like black and purple plumes upon the hearse of a giant. The tower,
as they left it behind, looked all the quainter, because such entrances are
usually flanked by two towers; and this one looked lopsided. But for this,
the avenue had the usual appearance of the entrance to a gentleman’s
grounds; and, being so curved that the house was now out of sight,
somehow looked a much larger park than any plantation on such an island
could really be. Father Brown was, perhaps, a little fanciful in his fatigue,
but he almost thought the whole place must be growing larger, as things do
in a nightmare. Anyhow, a mystical monotony was the only character of
their march, until Fanshaw suddenly stopped, and pointed to something
sticking out through the grey fence—something that looked at first rather
like the imprisoned horn of some beast. Closer observation showed that it
was a slightly curved blade of metal that shone faintly in the fading light.
Flambeau, who like all Frenchmen had been a soldier, bent over it and
said in a startled voice: “Why, it’s a sabre! I believe I know the sort, heavy
and curved, but shorter than the cavalry; they used to have them in artillery
and the—”
As he spoke the blade plucked itself out of the crack it had made and
came down again with a more ponderous slash, splitting the fissiparous
fence to the bottom with a rending noise. Then it was pulled out again,
flashed above the fence some feet further along, and again split it halfway
down with the first stroke; and after waggling a little to extricate itself
(accompanied with curses in the darkness) split it down to the ground with a
second. Then a kick of devilish energy sent the whole loosened square of
thin wood flying into the pathway, and a great gap of dark coppice gaped in
the paling.
Fanshaw peered into the dark opening and uttered an exclamation of
astonishment. “My dear Admiral!” he exclaimed, “do you—er—do you

generally cut out a new front door whenever you want to go for a walk?”
The voice in the gloom swore again, and then broke into a jolly laugh.
“No,” it said; “I’ve really got to cut down this fence somehow; it’s spoiling
all the plants, and no one else here can do it. But I’ll only carve another bit
off the front door, and then come out and welcome you.”
And sure enough, he heaved up his weapon once more, and, hacking
twice, brought down another and similar strip of fence, making the opening
about fourteen feet wide in all. Then through this larger forest gateway he
came out into the evening light, with a chip of grey wood sticking to his
sword-blade.
He momentarily fulfilled all Fanshaw’s fable of an old piratical Admiral;
though the details seemed afterwards to decompose into accidents. For
instance, he wore a broad-brimmed hat as protection against the sun; but the
front flap of it was turned up straight to the sky, and the two corners pulled
down lower than the ears, so that it stood across his forehead in a crescent
like the old cocked hat worn by Nelson. He wore an ordinary dark-blue
jacket, with nothing special about the buttons, but the combination of it
with white linen trousers somehow had a sailorish look. He was tall and
loose, and walked with a sort of swagger, which was not a sailor’s roll, and
yet somehow suggested it; and he held in his hand a short sabre which was
like a navy cutlass, but about twice as big. Under the bridge of the hat his
eagle face looked eager, all the more because it was not only clean-shaven,
but without eyebrows. It seemed almost as if all the hair had come off his
face from his thrusting it through a throng of elements. His eyes were
prominent and piercing. His colour was curiously attractive, while partly
tropical; it reminded one vaguely of a blood-orange. That is, that while it
was ruddy and sanguine, there was a yellow in it that was in no way sickly,
but seemed rather to glow like gold apples of the Hesperides—Father
Brown thought he had never seen a figure so expressive of all the romances
about the countries of the Sun.
When Fanshaw had presented his two friends to their host he fell again
into a tone of rallying the latter about his wreckage of the fence and his
apparent rage of profanity. The Admiral pooh-poohed it at first as a piece of
necessary but annoying garden work; but at length the ring of real energy
came back into his laughter, and he cried with a mixture of impatience and
good humour:

“Well, perhaps I do go at it a bit rabidly, and feel a kind of pleasure in
smashing anything. So would you if your only pleasure was in cruising
about to find some new Cannibal Islands, and you had to stick on this
muddy little rockery in a sort of rustic pond. When I remember how I’ve cut
down a mile and a half of green poisonous jungle with an old cutlass half as
sharp as this; and then remember I must stop here and chop this
matchwood, because of some confounded old bargain scribbled in a family
Bible, why, I—”
He swung up the heavy steel again; and this time sundered the wall of
wood from top to bottom at one stroke.
“I feel like that,” he said laughing, but furiously flinging the sword some
yards down the path, “and now let’s go up to the house; you must have
some dinner.”
The semicircle of lawn in front of the house was varied by three circular
garden beds, one of red tulips, a second of yellow tulips, and the third of
some white, waxen-looking blossoms that the visitors did not know and
presumed to be exotic. A heavy, hairy and rather sullen-looking gardener
was hanging up a heavy coil of garden hose. The corners of the expiring
sunset which seemed to cling about the corners of the house gave glimpses
here and there of the colours of remoter flowerbeds; and in a treeless space
on one side of the house opening upon the river stood a tall brass tripod on
which was tilted a big brass telescope. Just outside the steps of the porch
stood a little painted green garden table, as if someone had just had tea
there. The entrance was flanked with two of those half-featured lumps of
stone with holes for eyes that are said to be South Sea idols; and on the
brown oak beam across the doorway were some confused carvings that
looked almost as barbaric.
As they passed indoors, the little cleric hopped suddenly on to the table,
and standing on it peered unaffectedly through his spectacles at the
mouldings in the oak. Admiral Pendragon looked very much astonished,
though not particularly annoyed; while Fanshaw was so amused with what
looked like a performing pigmy on his little stand, that he could not control
his laughter. But Father Brown was not likely to notice either the laughter
or the astonishment.
He was gazing at three carved symbols, which, though very worn and
obscure, seemed still to convey some sense to him. The first seemed to be

the outline of some tower or other building, crowned with what looked like
curly-pointed ribbons. The second was clearer: an old Elizabethan galley
with decorative waves beneath it, but interrupted in the middle by a curious
jagged rock, which was either a fault in the wood or some conventional
representation of the water coming in. The third represented the upper half
of a human figure, ending in an escalloped line like the waves; the face was
rubbed and featureless, and both arms were held very stiffly up in the air.
“Well,” muttered Father Brown, blinking, “here is the legend of the
Spaniard plain enough. Here he is holding up his arms and cursing in the
sea; and here are the two curses: the wrecked ship and the burning of
Pendragon Tower.”
Pendragon shook his head with a kind of venerable amusement. “And
how many other things might it not be?” he said. “Don’t you know that that
sort of half-man, like a half-lion or half-stag, is quite common in heraldry?
Might not that line through the ship be one of those parti-per-pale lines,
indented, I think they call it? And though the third thing isn’t so very
heraldic, it would be more heraldic to suppose it a tower crowned with
laurel than with fire; and it looks just as like it.”
“But it seems rather odd,” said Flambeau, “that it should exactly confirm
the old legend.”
“Ah,” replied the sceptical traveller, “but you don’t know how much of
the old legend may have been made up from the old figures. Besides, it isn’t
the only old legend. Fanshaw, here, who is fond of such things, will tell you
there are other versions of the tale, and much more horrible ones. One story
credits my unfortunate ancestor with having had the Spaniard cut in two;
and that will fit the pretty picture also. Another obligingly credits our family
with the possession of a tower full of snakes and explains those little,
wriggly things in that way. And a third theory supposes the crooked line on
the ship to be a conventionalized thunderbolt; but that alone, if seriously
examined, would show what a very little way these unhappy coincidences
really go.”
“Why, how do you mean?” asked Fanshaw.
“It so happens,” replied his host coolly, “that there was no thunder and
lightning at all in the two or three shipwrecks I know of in our family.”
“Oh!” said Father Brown, and jumped down from the little table.

There was another silence in which they heard the continuous murmur of
the river; then Fanshaw said, in a doubtful and perhaps disappointed tone:
“Then you don’t think there is anything in the tales of the tower in flames?”
“There are the tales, of course,” said the Admiral, shrugging his
shoulders; “and some of them, I don’t deny, on evidence as decent as one
ever gets for such things. Someone saw a blaze hereabout, don’t you know,
as he walked home through a wood; someone keeping sheep on the uplands
inland thought he saw a flame hovering over Pendragon Tower. Well, a
damp dab of mud like this confounded island seems the last place where
one would think of fires.”
“What is that fire over there?” asked Father Brown with a gentle
suddenness, pointing to the woods on the left river-bank. They were all
thrown a little off their balance, and the more fanciful Fanshaw had even
some difficulty in recovering his, as they saw a long, thin stream of blue
smoke ascending silently into the end of the evening light.
Then Pendragon broke into a scornful laugh again. “Gipsies!” he said;
“they’ve been camping about here for about a week. Gentlemen, you want
your dinner,” and he turned as if to enter the house.
But the antiquarian superstition in Fanshaw was still quivering, and he
said hastily: “But, Admiral, what’s that hissing noise quite near the island?
It’s very like fire.”
“It’s more like what it is,” said the Admiral, laughing as he led the way;
“it’s only some canoe going by.”
Almost as he spoke, the butler, a lean man in black, with very black hair
and a very long, yellow face, appeared in the doorway and told him that
dinner was served.
The dining-room was as nautical as the cabin of a ship; but its note was
rather that of the modern than the Elizabethan captain. There were, indeed,
three antiquated cutlasses in a trophy over the fireplace, and one brown
sixteenth-century map with Tritons and little ships dotted about a curly sea.
But such things were less prominent on the white panelling than some cases
of quaint-coloured South American birds, very scientifically stuffed,
fantastic shells from the Pacific, and several instruments so rude and queer
in shape that savages might have used them either to kill their enemies or to
cook them. But the alien colour culminated in the fact that, besides the
butler, the Admiral’s only servants were two negroes, somewhat quaintly

clad in tight uniforms of yellow. The priest’s instinctive trick of analysing
his own impressions told him that the colour and the little neat coat-tails of
these bipeds had suggested the word “Canary,” and so by a mere pun
connected them with southward travel. Towards the end of the dinner they
took their yellow clothes and black faces out of the room, leaving only the
black clothes and yellow face of the butler.
“I’m rather sorry you take this so lightly,” said Fanshaw to the host; “for
the truth is, I’ve brought these friends of mine with the idea of their helping
you, as they know a good deal of these things. Don’t you really believe in
the family story at all?”
“I don’t believe in anything,” answered Pendragon very briskly, with a
bright eye cocked at a red tropical bird. “I’m a man of science.”
Rather to Flambeau’s surprise, his clerical friend, who seemed to have
entirely woken up, took up the digression and talked natural history with his
host with a flow of words and much unexpected information, until the
dessert and decanters were set down and the last of the servants vanished.
Then he said, without altering his tone.
“Please don’t think me impertinent, Admiral Pendragon. I don’t ask for
curiosity, but really for my guidance and your convenience. Have I made a
bad shot if I guess you don’t want these old things talked of before your
butler?”
The Admiral lifted the hairless arches over his eyes and exclaimed:
“Well, I don’t know where you got it, but the truth is I can’t stand the
fellow, though I’ve no excuse for discharging a family servant. Fanshaw,
with his fairy tales, would say my blood moved against men with that black,
Spanish-looking hair.”
Flambeau struck the table with his heavy fist. “By Jove!” he cried; “and
so had that girl!”
“I hope it’ll all end tonight,” continued the Admiral, “when my nephew
comes back safe from his ship. You looked surprised. You won’t
understand, I suppose, unless I tell you the story. You see, my father had
two sons; I remained a bachelor, but my elder brother married, and had a
son who became a sailor like all the rest of us, and will inherit the proper
estate. Well, my father was a strange man; he somehow combined
Fanshaw’s superstition with a good deal of my scepticism—they were
always fighting in him; and after my first voyages, he developed a notion

which he thought somehow would settle finally whether the curse was truth
or trash. If all the Pendragons sailed about anyhow, he thought there would
be too much chance of natural catastrophes to prove anything. But if we
went to sea one at a time in strict order of succession to the property, he
thought it might show whether any connected fate followed the family as a
family. It was a silly notion, I think, and I quarrelled with my father pretty
heartily; for I was an ambitious man and was left to the last, coming, by
succession, after my own nephew.”
“And your father and brother,” said the priest, very gently, “died at sea, I
fear.”
“Yes,” groaned the Admiral; “by one of those brutal accidents on which
are built all the lying mythologies of mankind, they were both shipwrecked.
My father, coming up this coast out of the Atlantic, was washed up on these
Cornish rocks. My brother’s ship was sunk, no one knows where, on the
voyage home from Tasmania. His body was never found. I tell you it was
from perfectly natural mishap; lots of other people besides Pendragons were
drowned; and both disasters are discussed in a normal way by navigators.
But, of course, it set this forest of superstition on fire; and men saw the
flaming tower everywhere. That’s why I say it will be all right when Walter
returns. The girl he’s engaged to was coming today; but I was so afraid of
some chance delay frightening her that I wired her not to come till she
heard from me. But he’s practically sure to be here some time tonight, and
then it’ll all end in smoke—tobacco smoke. We’ll crack that old lie when
we crack a bottle of this wine.”
“Very good wine,” said Father Brown, gravely lifting his glass, “but, as
you see, a very bad wine-bibber. I most sincerely beg your pardon”: for he
had spilt a small spot of wine on the table-cloth. He drank and put down the
glass with a composed face; but his hand had started at the exact moment
when he became conscious of a face looking in through the garden window
just behind the Admiral—the face of a woman, swarthy, with southern hair
and eyes, and young, but like a mask of tragedy.
After a pause the priest spoke again in his mild manner. “Admiral,” he
said, “will you do me a favour? Let me, and my friends if they like, stop in
that tower of yours just for tonight? Do you know that in my business
you’re an exorcist almost before anything else?”

Pendragon sprang to his feet and paced swiftly to and fro across the
window, from which the face had instantly vanished. “I tell you there is
nothing in it,” he cried, with ringing violence. “There is one thing I know
about this matter. You may call me an atheist. I am an atheist.” Here he
swung round and fixed Father Brown with a face of frightful concentration.
“This business is perfectly natural. There is no curse in it at all.”
Father Brown smiled. “In that case,” he said, “there can’t be any
objection to my sleeping in your delightful summer-house.”
“The idea is utterly ridiculous,” replied the Admiral, beating a tattoo on
the back of his chair.
“Please forgive me for everything,” said Brown in his most sympathetic
tone, “including spilling the wine. But it seems to me you are not quite so
easy about the flaming tower as you try to be.”
Admiral Pendragon sat down again as abruptly as he had risen; but he sat
quite still, and when he spoke again it was in a lower voice. “You do it at
your own peril,” he said; “but wouldn’t you be an atheist to keep sane in all
this devilry?”
Some three hours afterwards Fanshaw, Flambeau and the priest were still
dawdling about the garden in the dark; and it began to dawn on the other
two that Father Brown had no intention of going to bed either in the tower
or the house.
“I think the lawn wants weeding,” said he dreamily. “If I could find a
spud or something I’d do it myself.”
They followed him, laughing and half remonstrating; but he replied with
the utmost solemnity, explaining to them, in a maddening little sermon, that
one can always find some small occupation that is helpful to others. He did
not find a spud; but he found an old broom made of twigs, with which he
began energetically to brush the fallen leaves off the grass.
“Always some little thing to be done,” he said with idiotic cheerfulness;
“as George Herbert says: ‘Who sweeps an Admiral’s garden in Cornwall as
for Thy laws makes that and the action fine.’ And now,” he added, suddenly
slinging the broom away, “Let’s go and water the flowers.”
With the same mixed emotions they watched him uncoil some
considerable lengths of the large garden hose, saying with an air of wistful

discrimination: “The red tulips before the yellow, I think. Look a bit dry,
don’t you think?”
He turned the little tap on the instrument, and the water shot out straight
and solid as a long rod of steel.
“Look out, Samson,” cried Flambeau; “why, you’ve cut off the tulip’s
head.”
Father Brown stood ruefully contemplating the decapitated plant.
“Mine does seem to be a rather kill or cure sort of watering,” he
admitted, scratching his head. “I suppose it’s a pity I didn’t find the spud.
You should have seen me with the spud! Talking of tools, you’ve got that
swordstick, Flambeau, you always carry? That’s right; and Sir Cecil could
have that sword the Admiral threw away by the fence here. How grey
everything looks!”
“The mist’s rising from the river,” said the staring Flambeau.
Almost as he spoke the huge figure of the hairy gardener appeared on a
higher ridge of the trenched and terraced lawn, hailing them with a
brandished rake and a horribly bellowing voice. “Put down that hose,” he
shouted; “put down that hose and go to your—”
“I am fearfully clumsy,” replied the reverend gentleman weakly; “do you
know, I upset some wine at dinner.” He made a wavering half-turn of
apology towards the gardener, with the hose still spouting in his hand. The
gardener caught the cold crash of the water full in his face like the crash of
a cannon-ball; staggered, slipped and went sprawling with his boots in the
air.
“How very dreadful!” said Father Brown, looking round in a sort of
wonder. “Why, I’ve hit a man!”
He stood with his head forward for a moment as if looking or listening;
and then set off at a trot towards the tower, still trailing the hose behind
him. The tower was quite close, but its outline was curiously dim.
“Your river mist,” he said, “has a rum smell.”
“By the Lord it has,” cried Fanshaw, who was very white. “But you can’t
mean—”
“I mean,” said Father Brown, “that one of the Admiral’s scientific
predictions is coming true tonight. This story is going to end in smoke.”

As he spoke a most beautiful rose-red light seemed to burst into blossom
like a gigantic rose; but accompanied with a crackling and rattling noise
that was like the laughter of devils.
“My God! what is this?” cried Sir Cecil Fanshaw.
“The sign of the flaming tower,” said Father Brown, and sent the driving
water from his hose into the heart of the red patch.
“Lucky we hadn’t gone to bed!” ejaculated Fanshaw. “I suppose it can’t
spread to the house.”
“You may remember,” said the priest quietly, “that the wooden fence that
might have carried it was cut away.”
Flambeau turned electrified eyes upon his friend, but Fanshaw only said
rather absently: “Well, nobody can be killed, anyhow.”
“This is rather a curious kind of tower,” observed Father Brown, “when it
takes to killing people, it always kills people who are somewhere else.”
At the same instant the monstrous figure of the gardener with the
streaming beard stood again on the green ridge against the sky, waving
others to come on; but now waving not a rake but a cutlass. Behind him
came the two negroes, also with the old crooked cutlasses out of the trophy.
But in the blood-red glare, with their black faces and yellow figures, they
looked like devils carrying instruments of torture. In the dim garden behind
them a distant voice was heard calling out brief directions. When the priest
heard the voice, a terrible change came over his countenance.
But he remained composed; and never took his eye off the patch of flame
which had begun by spreading, but now seemed to shrink a little as it hissed
under the torch of the long silver spear of water. He kept his finger along
the nozzle of the pipe to ensure the aim, and attended to no other business,
knowing only by the noise and that semi-conscious corner of the eye, the
exciting incidents that began to tumble themselves about the island garden.
He gave two brief directions to his friends. One was: “Knock these fellows
down somehow and tie them up, whoever they are; there’s rope down by
those faggots. They want to take away my nice hose.” The other was: “As
soon as you get a chance, call out to that canoeing girl; she’s over on the
bank with the gipsies. Ask her if they could get some buckets across and fill
them from the river.” Then he closed his mouth and continued to water the
new red flower as ruthlessly as he had watered the red tulip.

He never turned his head to look at the strange fight that followed
between the foes and friends of the mysterious fire. He almost felt the
island shake when Flambeau collided with the huge gardener; he merely
imagined how it would whirl round them as they wrestled. He heard the
crashing fall; and his friend’s gasp of triumph as he dashed on to the first
negro; and the cries of both the blacks as Flambeau and Fanshaw bound
them. Flambeau’s enormous strength more than redressed the odds in the
fight, especially as the fourth man still hovered near the house, only a
shadow and a voice. He heard also the water broken by the paddles of a
canoe; the girl’s voice giving orders, the voices of gipsies answering and
coming nearer, the plumping and sucking noise of empty buckets plunged
into a full stream; and finally the sound of many feet around the fire. But all
this was less to him than the fact that the red rent, which had lately once
more increased, had once more slightly diminished.
Then came a cry that very nearly made him turn his head. Flambeau and
Fanshaw, now reinforced by some of the gipsies, had rushed after the
mysterious man by the house; and he heard from the other end of the garden
the Frenchman’s cry of horror and astonishment. It was echoed by a howl
not to be called human, as the being broke from their hold and ran along the
garden. Three times at least it raced round the whole island, in a way that
was as horrible as the chase of a lunatic, both in the cries of the pursued and
the ropes carried by the pursuers; but was more horrible still, because it
somehow suggested one of the chasing games of children in a garden. Then,
finding them closing in on every side, the figure sprang upon one of the
higher river banks and disappeared with a splash into the dark and driving
river.
“You can do no more, I fear,” said Brown in a voice cold with pain. “He
has been washed down to the rocks by now, where he has sent so many
others. He knew the use of a family legend.”
“Oh, don’t talk in these parables,” cried Flambeau impatiently. “Can’t
you put it simply in words of one syllable?”
“Yes,” answered Brown, with his eye on the hose. “‘Both eyes bright,
she’s all right; one eye blinks, down she sinks.’”
The fire hissed and shrieked more and more, like a strangled thing, as it
grew narrower and narrower under the flood from the pipe and buckets, but
Father Brown still kept his eye on it as he went on speaking:

“I thought of asking this young lady, if it were morning yet, to look
through that telescope at the river mouth and the river. She might have seen
something to interest her: the sign of the ship, or Mr Walter Pendragon
coming home, and perhaps even the sign of the half-man, for though he is
certainly safe by now, he may very well have waded ashore. He has been
within a shave of another shipwreck; and would never have escaped it, if
the lady hadn’t had the sense to suspect the old Admiral’s telegram and
come down to watch him. Don’t let’s talk about the old Admiral. Don’t let’s
talk about anything. It’s enough to say that whenever this tower, with its
pitch and resin-wood, really caught fire, the spark on the horizon always
looked like the twin light to the coast light-house.”
“And that,” said Flambeau, “is how the father and brother died. The
wicked uncle of the legends very nearly got his estate after all.”
Father Brown did not answer; indeed, he did not speak again, save for
civilities, till they were all safe round a cigar-box in the cabin of the yacht.
He saw that the frustrated fire was extinguished; and then refused to linger,
though he actually heard young Pendragon, escorted by an enthusiastic
crowd, come tramping up the river bank; and might (had he been moved by
romantic curiosities) have received the combined thanks of the man from
the ship and the girl from the canoe. But his fatigue had fallen on him once
more, and he only started once, when Flambeau abruptly told him he had
dropped cigar-ash on his trousers.
“That’s no cigar-ash,” he said rather wearily. “That’s from the fire, but
you don’t think so because you’re all smoking cigars. That’s just the way I
got my first faint suspicion about the chart.”
“Do you mean Pendragon’s chart of his Pacific Islands?” asked Fanshaw.
“You thought it was a chart of the Pacific Islands,” answered Brown.
“Put a feather with a fossil and a bit of coral and everyone will think it’s a
specimen. Put the same feather with a ribbon and an artificial flower and
everyone will think it’s for a lady’s hat. Put the same feather with an ink-
bottle, a book and a stack of writing-paper, and most men will swear
they’ve seen a quill pen. So you saw that map among tropic birds and shells
and thought it was a map of Pacific Islands. It was the map of this river.”
“But how do you know?” asked Fanshaw.
“I saw the rock you thought was like a dragon, and the one like Merlin,
and—”

“You seem to have noticed a lot as we came in,” cried Fanshaw. “We
thought you were rather abstracted.”
“I was sea-sick,” said Father Brown simply. “I felt simply horrible. But
feeling horrible has nothing to do with not seeing things.” And he closed his
eyes.
“Do you think most men would have seen that?” asked Flambeau. He
received no answer: Father Brown was asleep.

NINE — The God of the Gongs
IT was one of those chilly and empty afternoons in early winter, when the
daylight is silver rather than gold and pewter rather than silver. If it was
dreary in a hundred bleak offices and yawning drawing-rooms, it was
drearier still along the edges of the flat Essex coast, where the monotony
was the more inhuman for being broken at very long intervals by a lamp-
post that looked less civilized than a tree, or a tree that looked more ugly
than a lamp-post. A light fall of snow had half-melted into a few strips, also
looking leaden rather than silver, when it had been fixed again by the seal of
frost; no fresh snow had fallen, but a ribbon of the old snow ran along the
very margin of the coast, so as to parallel the pale ribbon of the foam.
The line of the sea looked frozen in the very vividness of its violet-blue,
like the vein of a frozen finger. For miles and miles, forward and back, there
was no breathing soul, save two pedestrians, walking at a brisk pace, though
one had much longer legs and took much longer strides than the other.
It did not seem a very appropriate place or time for a holiday, but Father
Brown had few holidays, and had to take them when he could, and he
always preferred, if possible, to take them in company with his old friend
Flambeau, ex-criminal and ex-detective. The priest had had a fancy for
visiting his old parish at Cobhole, and was going north-eastward along the
coast.
After walking a mile or two farther, they found that the shore was
beginning to be formally embanked, so as to form something like a parade;
the ugly lamp-posts became less few and far between and more ornamental,
though quite equally ugly. Half a mile farther on Father Brown was puzzled
first by little labyrinths of flowerless flower-pots, covered with the low, flat,
quiet-coloured plants that look less like a garden than a tessellated
pavement, between weak curly paths studded with seats with curly backs.
He faintly sniffed the atmosphere of a certain sort of seaside town that he
did not specially care about, and, looking ahead along the parade by the sea,
he saw something that put the matter beyond a doubt. In the grey distance
the big bandstand of a watering-place stood up like a giant mushroom with
six legs.

“I suppose,” said Father Brown, turning up his coat-collar and drawing a
woollen scarf rather closer round his neck, “that we are approaching a
pleasure resort.”
“I fear,” answered Flambeau, “a pleasure resort to which few people just
now have the pleasure of resorting. They try to revive these places in the
winter, but it never succeeds except with Brighton and the old ones. This
must be Seawood, I think—Lord Pooley’s experiment; he had the Sicilian
Singers down at Christmas, and there’s talk about holding one of the great
glove-fights here. But they’ll have to chuck the rotten place into the sea; it’s
as dreary as a lost railway-carriage.”
They had come under the big bandstand, and the priest was looking up at
it with a curiosity that had something rather odd about it, his head a little on
one side, like a bird’s. It was the conventional, rather tawdry kind of
erection for its purpose: a flattened dome or canopy, gilt here and there, and
lifted on six slender pillars of painted wood, the whole being raised about
five feet above the parade on a round wooden platform like a drum. But
there was something fantastic about the snow combined with something
artificial about the gold that haunted Flambeau as well as his friend with
some association he could not capture, but which he knew was at once
artistic and alien.
“I’ve got it,” he said at last. “It’s Japanese. It’s like those fanciful
Japanese prints, where the snow on the mountain looks like sugar, and the
gilt on the pagodas is like gilt on gingerbread. It looks just like a little pagan
temple.”
“Yes,” said Father Brown. “Let’s have a look at the god.” And with an
agility hardly to be expected of him, he hopped up on to the raised platform.
“Oh, very well,” said Flambeau, laughing; and the next instant his own
towering figure was visible on that quaint elevation.
Slight as was the difference of height, it gave in those level wastes a
sense of seeing yet farther and farther across land and sea. Inland the little
wintry gardens faded into a confused grey copse; beyond that, in the
distance, were long low barns of a lonely farmhouse, and beyond that
nothing but the long East Anglian plains. Seawards there was no sail or sign
of life save a few seagulls: and even they looked like the last snowflakes,
and seemed to float rather than fly.

Flambeau turned abruptly at an exclamation behind him. It seemed to
come from lower down than might have been expected, and to be addressed
to his heels rather than his head. He instantly held out his hand, but he could
hardly help laughing at what he saw. For some reason or other the platform
had given way under Father Brown, and the unfortunate little man had
dropped through to the level of the parade. He was just tall enough, or short
enough, for his head alone to stick out of the hole in the broken wood,
looking like St John the Baptist’s head on a charger. The face wore a
disconcerted expression, as did, perhaps, that of St John the Baptist.
In a moment he began to laugh a little. “This wood must be rotten,” said
Flambeau. “Though it seems odd it should bear me, and you go through the
weak place. Let me help you out.”
But the little priest was looking rather curiously at the corners and edges
of the wood alleged to be rotten, and there was a sort of trouble on his brow.
“Come along,” cried Flambeau impatiently, still with his big brown hand
extended. “Don’t you want to get out?”
The priest was holding a splinter of the broken wood between his finger
and thumb, and did not immediately reply. At last he said thoughtfully:
“Want to get out? Why, no. I rather think I want to get in.” And he dived
into the darkness under the wooden floor so abruptly as to knock off his big
curved clerical hat and leave it lying on the boards above, without any
clerical head in it.
Flambeau looked once more inland and out to sea, and once more could
see nothing but seas as wintry as the snow, and snows as level as the sea.
There came a scurrying noise behind him, and the little priest came
scrambling out of the hole faster than he had fallen in. His face was no
longer disconcerted, but rather resolute, and, perhaps only through the
reflections of the snow, a trifle paler than usual.
“Well?” asked his tall friend. “Have you found the god of the temple?”
“No,” answered Father Brown. “I have found what was sometimes more
important. The Sacrifice.”
“What the devil do you mean?” cried Flambeau, quite alarmed.
Father Brown did not answer. He was staring, with a knot in his forehead,
at the landscape; and he suddenly pointed at it. “What’s that house over
there?” he asked.

Following his finger, Flambeau saw for the first time the corners of a
building nearer than the farmhouse, but screened for the most part with a
fringe of trees. It was not a large building, and stood well back from the
shore—, but a glint of ornament on it suggested that it was part of the same
watering-place scheme of decoration as the bandstand, the little gardens and
the curly-backed iron seats.
Father Brown jumped off the bandstand, his friend following; and as they
walked in the direction indicated the trees fell away to right and left, and
they saw a small, rather flashy hotel, such as is common in resorts—the
hotel of the Saloon Bar rather than the Bar Parlour. Almost the whole
frontage was of gilt plaster and figured glass, and between that grey
seascape and the grey, witch-like trees, its gimcrack quality had something
spectral in its melancholy. They both felt vaguely that if any food or drink
were offered at such a hostelry, it would be the paste-board ham and empty
mug of the pantomime.
In this, however, they were not altogether confirmed. As they drew nearer
and nearer to the place they saw in front of the buffet, which was apparently
closed, one of the iron garden-seats with curly backs that had adorned the
gardens, but much longer, running almost the whole length of the frontage.
Presumably, it was placed so that visitors might sit there and look at the sea,
but one hardly expected to find anyone doing it in such weather.
Nevertheless, just in front of the extreme end of the iron seat stood a
small round restaurant table, and on this stood a small bottle of Chablis and
a plate of almonds and raisins. Behind the table and on the seat sat a dark-
haired young man, bareheaded, and gazing at the sea in a state of almost
astonishing immobility.
But though he might have been a waxwork when they were within four
yards of him, he jumped up like a jack-in-the-box when they came within
three, and said in a deferential, though not undignified, manner: “Will you
step inside, gentlemen? I have no staff at present, but I can get you anything
simple myself.”
“Much obliged,” said Flambeau. “So you are the proprietor?”
“Yes,” said the dark man, dropping back a little into his motionless
manner. “My waiters are all Italians, you see, and I thought it only fair they
should see their countryman beat the black, if he really can do it. You know
the great fight between Malvoli and Nigger Ned is coming off after all?”

“I’m afraid we can’t wait to trouble your hospitality seriously,” said
Father Brown. “But my friend would be glad of a glass of sherry, I’m sure,
to keep out the cold and drink success to the Latin champion.”
Flambeau did not understand the sherry, but he did not object to it in the
least. He could only say amiably: “Oh, thank you very much.”
“Sherry, sir—certainly,” said their host, turning to his hostel. “Excuse me
if I detain you a few minutes. As I told you, I have no staff—” And he went
towards the black windows of his shuttered and unlighted inn.
“Oh, it doesn’t really matter,” began Flambeau, but the man turned to
reassure him.
“I have the keys,” he said. “I could find my way in the dark.”
“I didn’t mean—” began Father Brown.
He was interrupted by a bellowing human voice that came out of the
bowels of the uninhabited hotel. It thundered some foreign name loudly but
inaudibly, and the hotel proprietor moved more sharply towards it than he
had done for Flambeau’s sherry. As instant evidence proved, the proprietor
had told, then and after, nothing but the literal truth. But both Flambeau and
Father Brown have often confessed that, in all their (often outrageous)
adventures, nothing had so chilled their blood as that voice of an ogre,
sounding suddenly out of a silent and empty inn.
“My cook!” cried the proprietor hastily. “I had forgotten my cook. He
will be starting presently. Sherry, sir?”
And, sure enough, there appeared in the doorway a big white bulk with
white cap and white apron, as befits a cook, but with the needless emphasis
of a black face. Flambeau had often heard that negroes made good cooks.
But somehow something in the contrast of colour and caste increased his
surprise that the hotel proprietor should answer the call of the cook, and not
the cook the call of the proprietor. But he reflected that head cooks are
proverbially arrogant; and, besides, the host had come back with the sherry,
and that was the great thing.
“I rather wonder,” said Father Brown, “that there are so few people about
the beach, when this big fight is coming on after all. We only met one man
for miles.”
The hotel proprietor shrugged his shoulders. “They come from the other
end of the town, you see—from the station, three miles from here. They are

only interested in the sport, and will stop in hotels for the night only. After
all, it is hardly weather for basking on the shore.”
“Or on the seat,” said Flambeau, and pointed to the little table.
“I have to keep a look-out,” said the man with the motionless face. He
was a quiet, well-featured fellow, rather sallow; his dark clothes had
nothing distinctive about them, except that his black necktie was worn
rather high, like a stock, and secured by a gold pin with some grotesque
head to it. Nor was there anything notable in the face, except something that
was probably a mere nervous trick—a habit of opening one eye more
narrowly than the other, giving the impression that the other was larger, or
was, perhaps, artificial.
The silence that ensued was broken by their host saying quietly:
“Whereabouts did you meet the one man on your march?”
“Curiously enough,” answered the priest, “close by here—just by that
bandstand.”
Flambeau, who had sat on the long iron seat to finish his sherry, put it
down and rose to his feet, staring at his friend in amazement. He opened his
mouth to speak, and then shut it again.
“Curious,” said the dark-haired man thoughtfully. “What was he like?”
“It was rather dark when I saw him,” began Father Brown, “but he was
—”
As has been said, the hotel-keeper can be proved to have told the precise
truth. His phrase that the cook was starting presently was fulfilled to the
letter, for the cook came out, pulling his gloves on, even as they spoke.
But he was a very different figure from the confused mass of white and
black that had appeared for an instant in the doorway. He was buttoned and
buckled up to his bursting eyeballs in the most brilliant fashion. A tall black
hat was tilted on his broad black head—a hat of the sort that the French wit
has compared to eight mirrors. But somehow the black man was like the
black hat. He also was black, and yet his glossy skin flung back the light at
eight angles or more. It is needless to say that he wore white spats and a
white slip inside his waistcoat. The red flower stood up in his buttonhole
aggressively, as if it had suddenly grown there. And in the way he carried
his cane in one hand and his cigar in the other there was a certain attitude—

an attitude we must always remember when we talk of racial prejudices:
something innocent and insolent—the cake walk.
“Sometimes,” said Flambeau, looking after him, “I’m not surprised that
they lynch them.”
“I am never surprised,” said Father Brown, “at any work of hell. But as I
was saying,” he resumed, as the negro, still ostentatiously pulling on his
yellow gloves, betook himself briskly towards the watering-place, a queer
music-hall figure against that grey and frosty scene—“as I was saying, I
couldn’t describe the man very minutely, but he had a flourish and old-
fashioned whiskers and moustachios, dark or dyed, as in the pictures of
foreign financiers, round his neck was wrapped a long purple scarf that
thrashed out in the wind as he walked. It was fixed at the throat rather in the
way that nurses fix children’s comforters with a safety-pin. Only this,”
added the priest, gazing placidly out to sea, “was not a safety-pin.”
The man sitting on the long iron bench was also gazing placidly out to
sea. Now he was once more in repose. Flambeau felt quite certain that one
of his eyes was naturally larger than the other. Both were now well opened,
and he could almost fancy the left eye grew larger as he gazed.
“It was a very long gold pin, and had the carved head of a monkey or
some such thing,” continued the cleric; “and it was fixed in a rather odd
way—he wore pince-nez and a broad black—”
The motionless man continued to gaze at the sea, and the eyes in his head
might have belonged to two different men. Then he made a movement of
blinding swiftness.
Father Brown had his back to him, and in that flash might have fallen
dead on his face. Flambeau had no weapon, but his large brown hands were
resting on the end of the long iron seat. His shoulders abruptly altered their
shape, and he heaved the whole huge thing high over his head, like a
headsman’s axe about to fall. The mere height of the thing, as he held it
vertical, looked like a long iron ladder by which he was inviting men to
climb towards the stars. But the long shadow, in the level evening light,
looked like a giant brandishing the Eiffel Tower. It was the shock of that
shadow, before the shock of the iron crash, that made the stranger quail and
dodge, and then dart into his inn, leaving the flat and shining dagger he had
dropped exactly where it had fallen.

“We must get away from here instantly,” cried Flambeau, flinging the
huge seat away with furious indifference on the beach. He caught the little
priest by the elbow and ran him down a grey perspective of barren back
garden, at the end of which there was a closed back garden door. Flambeau
bent over it an instant in violent silence, and then said: “The door is
locked.”
As he spoke a black feather from one of the ornamental firs fell, brushing
the brim of his hat. It startled him more than the small and distant
detonation that had come just before. Then came another distant detonation,
and the door he was trying to open shook under the bullet buried in it.
Flambeau’s shoulders again filled out and altered suddenly. Three hinges
and a lock burst at the same instant, and he went out into the empty path
behind, carrying the great garden door with him, as Samson carried the
gates of Gaza.
Then he flung the garden door over the garden wall, just as a third shot
picked up a spurt of snow and dust behind his heel. Without ceremony he
snatched up the little priest, slung him astraddle on his shoulders, and went
racing towards Seawood as fast as his long legs could carry him. It was not
until nearly two miles farther on that he set his small companion down. It
had hardly been a dignified escape, in spite of the classic model of
Anchises, but Father Brown’s face only wore a broad grin.
“Well,” said Flambeau, after an impatient silence, as they resumed their
more conventional tramp through the streets on the edge of the town, where
no outrage need be feared, “I don’t know what all this means, but I take it I
may trust my own eyes that you never met the man you have so accurately
described.”
“I did meet him in a way,” Brown said, biting his finger rather nervously
—“I did really. And it was too dark to see him properly, because it was
under that bandstand affair. But I’m afraid I didn’t describe him so very
accurately after all, for his pince-nez was broken under him, and the long
gold pin wasn’t stuck through his purple scarf but through his heart.”
“And I suppose,” said the other in a lower voice, “that glass-eyed guy
had something to do with it.”
“I had hoped he had only a little,” answered Brown in a rather troubled
voice, “and I may have been wrong in what I did. I acted on impulse. But I
fear this business has deep roots and dark.”

They walked on through some streets in silence. The yellow lamps were
beginning to be lit in the cold blue twilight, and they were evidently
approaching the more central parts of the town. Highly coloured bills
announcing the glove-fight between Nigger Ned and Malvoli were slapped
about the walls.
“Well,” said Flambeau, “I never murdered anyone, even in my criminal
days, but I can almost sympathize with anyone doing it in such a dreary
place. Of all God-forsaken dustbins of Nature, I think the most heart-
breaking are places like that bandstand, that were meant to be festive and
are forlorn. I can fancy a morbid man feeling he must kill his rival in the
solitude and irony of such a scene. I remember once taking a tramp in your
glorious Surrey hills, thinking of nothing but gorse and skylarks, when I
came out on a vast circle of land, and over me lifted a vast, voiceless
structure, tier above tier of seats, as huge as a Roman amphitheatre and as
empty as a new letter-rack. A bird sailed in heaven over it. It was the Grand
Stand at Epsom. And I felt that no one would ever be happy there again.”
“It’s odd you should mention Epsom,” said the priest. “Do you remember
what was called the Sutton Mystery, because two suspected men—ice-
cream men, I think—happened to live at Sutton? They were eventually
released. A man was found strangled, it was said, on the Downs round that
part. As a fact, I know (from an Irish policeman who is a friend of mine)
that he was found close up to the Epsom Grand Stand—in fact, only hidden
by one of the lower doors being pushed back.”
“That is queer,” assented Flambeau. “But it rather confirms my view that
such pleasure places look awfully lonely out of season, or the man wouldn’t
have been murdered there.”
“I’m not so sure he—” began Brown, and stopped.
“Not so sure he was murdered?” queried his companion.
“Not so sure he was murdered out of the season,” answered the little
priest, with simplicity. “Don’t you think there’s something rather tricky
about this solitude, Flambeau? Do you feel sure a wise murderer would
always want the spot to be lonely? It’s very, very seldom a man is quite
alone. And, short of that, the more alone he is, the more certain he is to be
seen. No; I think there must be some other—Why, here we are at the
Pavilion or Palace, or whatever they call it.”

They had emerged on a small square, brilliantly lighted, of which the
principal building was gay with gilding, gaudy with posters, and flanked
with two giant photographs of Malvoli and Nigger Ned.
“Hallo!” cried Flambeau in great surprise, as his clerical friend stumped
straight up the broad steps. “I didn’t know pugilism was your latest hobby.
Are you going to see the fight?”
“I don’t think there will be any fight,” replied Father Brown.
They passed rapidly through ante-rooms and inner rooms; they passed
through the hall of combat itself, raised, roped, and padded with
innumerable seats and boxes, and still the cleric did not look round or pause
till he came to a clerk at a desk outside a door marked “Committee”. There
he stopped and asked to see Lord Pooley.
The attendant observed that his lordship was very busy, as the fight was
coming on soon, but Father Brown had a good-tempered tedium of
reiteration for which the official mind is generally not prepared. In a few
moments the rather baffled Flambeau found himself in the presence of a
man who was still shouting directions to another man going out of the
room. “Be careful, you know, about the ropes after the fourth—Well, and
what do you want, I wonder!”
Lord Pooley was a gentleman, and, like most of the few remaining to our
race, was worried—especially about money. He was half grey and half
flaxen, and he had the eyes of fever and a high-bridged, frost-bitten nose.
“Only a word,” said Father Brown. “I have come to prevent a man being
killed.”
Lord Pooley bounded off his chair as if a spring had flung him from it.
“I’m damned if I’ll stand any more of this!” he cried. “You and your
committees and parsons and petitions! Weren’t there parsons in the old
days, when they fought without gloves? Now they’re fighting with the
regulation gloves, and there’s not the rag of a possibility of either of the
boxers being killed.”
“I didn’t mean either of the boxers,” said the little priest.
“Well, well, well!” said the nobleman, with a touch of frosty humour.
“Who’s going to be killed? The referee?”
“I don’t know who’s going to be killed,” replied Father Brown, with a
reflective stare. “If I did I shouldn’t have to spoil your pleasure. I could

simply get him to escape. I never could see anything wrong about prize-
fights. As it is, I must ask you to announce that the fight is off for the
present.”
“Anything else?” jeered the gentleman with feverish eyes. “And what do
you say to the two thousand people who have come to see it?”
“I say there will be one thousand nine-hundred and ninety-nine of them
left alive when they have seen it,” said Father Brown.
Lord Pooley looked at Flambeau. “Is your friend mad?” he asked.
“Far from it,” was the reply.
“And look here,” resumed Pooley in his restless way, “it’s worse than
that. A whole pack of Italians have turned up to back Malvoli—swarthy,
savage fellows of some country, anyhow. You know what these
Mediterranean races are like. If I send out word that it’s off we shall have
Malvoli storming in here at the head of a whole Corsican clan.”
“My lord, it is a matter of life and death,” said the priest. “Ring your bell.
Give your message. And see whether it is Malvoli who answers.”
The nobleman struck the bell on the table with an odd air of new
curiosity. He said to the clerk who appeared almost instantly in the
doorway: “I have a serious announcement to make to the audience shortly.
Meanwhile, would you kindly tell the two champions that the fight will
have to be put off.”
The clerk stared for some seconds as if at a demon and vanished.
“What authority have you for what you say?” asked Lord Pooley
abruptly. “Whom did you consult?”
“I consulted a bandstand,” said Father Brown, scratching his head. “But,
no, I’m wrong; I consulted a book, too. I picked it up on a bookstall in
London—very cheap, too.”
He had taken out of his pocket a small, stout, leather-bound volume, and
Flambeau, looking over his shoulder, could see that it was some book of old
travels, and had a leaf turned down for reference.
“‘The only form in which Voodoo—‘” began Father Brown, reading
aloud.
“In which what?” inquired his lordship.

“‘In which Voodoo,’” repeated the reader, almost with relish, “‘is widely
organized outside Jamaica itself is in the form known as the Monkey, or the
God of the Gongs, which is powerful in many parts of the two American
continents, especially among half-breeds, many of whom look exactly like
white men. It differs from most other forms of devil-worship and human
sacrifice in the fact that the blood is not shed formally on the altar, but by a
sort of assassination among the crowd. The gongs beat with a deafening din
as the doors of the shrine open and the monkey-god is revealed; almost the
whole congregation rivet ecstatic eyes on him. But after—‘”
The door of the room was flung open, and the fashionable negro stood
framed in it, his eyeballs rolling, his silk hat still insolently tilted on his
head. “Huh!” he cried, showing his apish teeth. “What this? Huh! Huh! You
steal a coloured gentleman’s prize—prize his already—yo’ think yo’ jes’
save that white ‘Talian trash—”
“The matter is only deferred,” said the nobleman quietly. “I will be with
you to explain in a minute or two.”
“Who you to—” shouted Nigger Ned, beginning to storm.
“My name is Pooley,” replied the other, with a creditable coolness. “I am
the organizing secretary, and I advise you just now to leave the room.”
“Who this fellow?” demanded the dark champion, pointing to the priest
disdainfully.
“My name is Brown,” was the reply. “And I advise you just now to leave
the country.”
The prize-fighter stood glaring for a few seconds, and then, rather to the
surprise of Flambeau and the others, strode out, sending the door to with a
crash behind him.
“Well,” asked Father Brown rubbing his dusty hair up, “what do you
think of Leonardo da Vinci? A beautiful Italian head.”
“Look here,” said Lord Pooley, “I’ve taken a considerable responsibility,
on your bare word. I think you ought to tell me more about this.”
“You are quite right, my lord,” answered Brown. “And it won’t take long
to tell.” He put the little leather book in his overcoat pocket. “I think we
know all that this can tell us, but you shall look at it to see if I’m right. That
negro who has just swaggered out is one of the most dangerous men on
earth, for he has the brains of a European, with the instincts of a cannibal.

He has turned what was clean, common-sense butchery among his fellow-
barbarians into a very modern and scientific secret society of assassins. He
doesn’t know I know it, nor, for the matter of that, that I can’t prove it.”
There was a silence, and the little man went on.
“But if I want to murder somebody, will it really be the best plan to make
sure I’m alone with him?”
Lord Pooley’s eyes recovered their frosty twinkle as he looked at the
little clergyman. He only said: “If you want to murder somebody, I should
advise it.”
Father Brown shook his head, like a murderer of much riper experience.
“So Flambeau said,” he replied, with a sigh. “But consider. The more a man
feels lonely the less he can be sure he is alone. It must mean empty spaces
round him, and they are just what make him obvious. Have you never seen
one ploughman from the heights, or one shepherd from the valleys? Have
you never walked along a cliff, and seen one man walking along the sands?
Didn’t you know when he’s killed a crab, and wouldn’t you have known if
it had been a creditor? No! No! No! For an intelligent murderer, such as you
or I might be, it is an impossible plan to make sure that nobody is looking at
you.”
“But what other plan is there?”
“There is only one,” said the priest. “To make sure that everybody is
looking at something else. A man is throttled close by the big stand at
Epsom. Anybody might have seen it done while the stand stood empty—
any tramp under the hedges or motorist among the hills. But nobody would
have seen it when the stand was crowded and the whole ring roaring, when
the favourite was coming in first—or wasn’t. The twisting of a neck-cloth,
the thrusting of a body behind a door could be done in an instant—so long
as it was that instant. It was the same, of course,” he continued turning to
Flambeau, “with that poor fellow under the bandstand. He was dropped
through the hole (it wasn’t an accidental hole) just at some very dramatic
moment of the entertainment, when the bow of some great violinist or the
voice of some great singer opened or came to its climax. And here, of
course, when the knock-out blow came—it would not be the only one. That
is the little trick Nigger Ned has adopted from his old God of Gongs.”
“By the way, Malvoli—” Pooley began.

“Malvoli,” said the priest, “has nothing to do with it. I dare say he has
some Italians with him, but our amiable friends are not Italians. They are
octoroons and African half-bloods of various shades, but I fear we English
think all foreigners are much the same so long as they are dark and dirty.
Also,” he added, with a smile, “I fear the English decline to draw any fine
distinction between the moral character produced by my religion and that
which blooms out of Voodoo.”
The blaze of the spring season had burst upon Seawood, littering its
foreshore with famines and bathing-machines, with nomadic preachers and
nigger minstrels, before the two friends saw it again, and long before the
storm of pursuit after the strange secret society had died away. Almost on
every hand the secret of their purpose perished with them. The man of the
hotel was found drifting dead on the sea like so much seaweed; his right eye
was closed in peace, but his left eye was wide open, and glistened like glass
in the moon. Nigger Ned had been overtaken a mile or two away, and
murdered three policemen with his closed left hand. The remaining officer
was surprised—nay, pained—and the negro got away. But this was enough
to set all the English papers in a flame, and for a month or two the main
purpose of the British Empire was to prevent the buck nigger (who was so
in both senses) escaping by any English port. Persons of a figure remotely
reconcilable with his were subjected to quite extraordinary inquisitions,
made to scrub their faces before going on board ship, as if each white
complexion were made up like a mask, of greasepaint. Every negro in
England was put under special regulations and made to report himself; the
outgoing ships would no more have taken a nigger than a basilisk. For
people had found out how fearful and vast and silent was the force of the
savage secret society, and by the time Flambeau and Father Brown were
leaning on the parade parapet in April, the Black Man meant in England
almost what he once meant in Scotland.
“He must be still in England,” observed Flambeau, “and horridly well
hidden, too. They must have found him at the ports if he had only whitened
his face.”
“You see, he is really a clever man,” said Father Brown apologetically.
“And I’m sure he wouldn’t whiten his face.”
“Well, but what would he do?”
“I think,” said Father Brown, “he would blacken his face.”

Flambeau, leaning motionless on the parapet, laughed and said: “My dear
fellow!”
Father Brown, also leaning motionless on the parapet, moved one finger
for an instant into the direction of the soot-masked niggers singing on the
sands.

TEN — The Salad of Colonel Cray
FATHER BROWN was walking home from Mass on a white weird
morning when the mists were slowly lifting—one of those mornings when
the very element of light appears as something mysterious and new. The
scattered trees outlined themselves more and more out of the vapour, as if
they were first drawn in grey chalk and then in charcoal. At yet more distant
intervals appeared the houses upon the broken fringe of the suburb; their
outlines became clearer and clearer until he recognized many in which he
had chance acquaintances, and many more the names of whose owners he
knew. But all the windows and doors were sealed; none of the people were
of the sort that would be up at such a time, or still less on such an errand.
But as he passed under the shadow of one handsome villa with verandas
and wide ornate gardens, he heard a noise that made him almost
involuntarily stop. It was the unmistakable noise of a pistol or carbine or
some light firearm discharged; but it was not this that puzzled him most.
The first full noise was immediately followed by a series of fainter noises—
as he counted them, about six. He supposed it must be the echo; but the odd
thing was that the echo was not in the least like the original sound. It was
not like anything else that he could think of; the three things nearest to it
seemed to be the noise made by siphons of soda-water, one of the many
noises made by an animal, and the noise made by a person attempting to
conceal laughter. None of which seemed to make much sense.
Father Brown was made of two men. There was a man of action, who
was as modest as a primrose and as punctual as a clock; who went his small
round of duties and never dreamed of altering it. There was also a man of
reflection, who was much simpler but much stronger, who could not easily
be stopped; whose thought was always (in the only intelligent sense of the
words) free thought. He could not help, even unconsciously, asking himself
all the questions that there were to be asked, and answering as many of
them as he could; all that went on like his breathing or circulation. But he
never consciously carried his actions outside the sphere of his own duty;
and in this case the two attitudes were aptly tested. He was just about to
resume his trudge in the twilight, telling himself it was no affair of his, but

instinctively twisting and untwisting twenty theories about what the odd
noises might mean. Then the grey sky-line brightened into silver, and in the
broadening light he realized that he had been to the house which belonged
to an Anglo-Indian Major named Putnam; and that the Major had a native
cook from Malta who was of his communion. He also began to remember
that pistol-shots are sometimes serious things; accompanied with
consequences with which he was legitimately concerned. He turned back
and went in at the garden gate, making for the front door.
Half-way down one side of the house stood out a projection like a very
low shed; it was, as he afterwards discovered, a large dustbin. Round the
corner of this came a figure, at first a mere shadow in the haze, apparently
bending and peering about. Then, coming nearer, it solidified into a figure
that was, indeed, rather unusually solid. Major Putnam was a bald-headed,
bull-necked man, short and very broad, with one of those rather apoplectic
faces that are produced by a prolonged attempt to combine the oriental
climate with the occidental luxuries. But the face was a good-humoured
one, and even now, though evidently puzzled and inquisitive, wore a kind of
innocent grin. He had a large palm-leaf hat on the back of his head
(suggesting a halo that was by no means appropriate to the face), but
otherwise he was clad only in a very vivid suit of striped scarlet and yellow
pyjamas; which, though glowing enough to behold, must have been, on a
fresh morning, pretty chilly to wear. He had evidently come out of his house
in a hurry, and the priest was not surprised when he called out without
further ceremony: “Did you hear that noise?”
“Yes,” answered Father Brown; “I thought I had better look in, in case
anything was the matter.”
The Major looked at him rather queerly with his good-humoured
gooseberry eyes. “What do you think the noise was?” he asked.
“It sounded like a gun or something,” replied the other, with some
hesitation; “but it seemed to have a singular sort of echo.”
The Major was still looking at him quietly, but with protruding eyes,
when the front door was flung open, releasing a flood of gaslight on the
face of the fading mist; and another figure in pyjamas sprang or tumbled out
into the garden. The figure was much longer, leaner, and more athletic; the
pyjamas, though equally tropical, were comparatively tasteful, being of
white with a light lemon-yellow stripe. The man was haggard, but

handsome, more sunburned than the other; he had an aquiline profile and
rather deep-sunken eyes, and a slight air of oddity arising from the
combination of coal-black hair with a much lighter moustache. All this
Father Brown absorbed in detail more at leisure. For the moment he only
saw one thing about the man; which was the revolver in his hand.
“Cray!” exclaimed the Major, staring at him; “did you fire that shot?”
“Yes, I did,” retorted the black-haired gentleman hotly; “and so would
you in my place. If you were chased everywhere by devils and nearly—”
The Major seemed to intervene rather hurriedly. “This is my friend
Father Brown,” he said. And then to Brown: “I don’t know whether you’ve
met Colonel Cray of the Royal Artillery.”
“I have heard of him, of course,” said the priest innocently. “Did you—
did you hit anything?”
“I thought so,” answered Cray with gravity.
“Did he—” asked Major Putnam in a lowered voice, “did he fall or cry
out, or anything?”
Colonel Cray was regarding his host with a strange and steady stare. “I’ll
tell you exactly what he did,” he said. “He sneezed.”
Father Brown’s hand went half-way to his head, with the gesture of a
man remembering somebody’s name. He knew now what it was that was
neither soda-water nor the snorting of a dog.
“Well,” ejaculated the staring Major, “I never heard before that a service
revolver was a thing to be sneezed at.”
“Nor I,” said Father Brown faintly. “It’s lucky you didn’t turn your
artillery on him or you might have given him quite a bad cold.” Then, after
a bewildered pause, he said: “Was it a burglar?”
“Let us go inside,” said Major Putnam, rather sharply, and led the way
into his house.
The interior exhibited a paradox often to be marked in such morning
hours: that the rooms seemed brighter than the sky outside; even after the
Major had turned out the one gaslight in the front hall. Father Brown was
surprised to see the whole dining-table set out as for a festive meal, with
napkins in their rings, and wine-glasses of some six unnecessary shapes set
beside every plate. It was common enough, at that time of the morning, to

find the remains of a banquet over-night; but to find it freshly spread so
early was unusual.
While he stood wavering in the hall Major Putnam rushed past him and
sent a raging eye over the whole oblong of the tablecloth. At last he spoke,
spluttering: “All the silver gone!” he gasped. “Fish-knives and forks gone.
Old cruet-stand gone. Even the old silver cream-jug gone. And now, Father
Brown, I am ready to answer your question of whether it was a burglar.”
“They’re simply a blind,” said Cray stubbornly. “I know better than you
why people persecute this house; I know better than you why—”
The Major patted him on the shoulder with a gesture almost peculiar to
the soothing of a sick child, and said: “It was a burglar. Obviously it was a
burglar.”
“A burglar with a bad cold,” observed Father Brown, “that might assist
you to trace him in the neighbourhood.”
The Major shook his head in a sombre manner. “He must be far beyond
trace now, I fear,” he said.
Then, as the restless man with the revolver turned again towards the door
in the garden, he added in a husky, confidential voice: “I doubt whether I
should send for the police, for fear my friend here has been a little too free
with his bullets, and got on the wrong side of the law. He’s lived in very
wild places; and, to be frank with you, I think he sometimes fancies things.”
“I think you once told me,” said Brown, “that he believes some Indian
secret society is pursuing him.”
Major Putnam nodded, but at the same time shrugged his shoulders. “I
suppose we’d better follow him outside,” he said. “I don’t want any more—
shall we say, sneezing?”
They passed out into the morning light, which was now even tinged with
sunshine, and saw Colonel Cray’s tall figure bent almost double, minutely
examining the condition of gravel and grass. While the Major strolled
unobtrusively towards him, the priest took an equally indolent turn, which
took him round the next corner of the house to within a yard or two of the
projecting dustbin.
He stood regarding this dismal object for some minute and a half—, then
he stepped towards it, lifted the lid and put his head inside. Dust and other
discolouring matter shook upwards as he did so; but Father Brown never

observed his own appearance, whatever else he observed. He remained thus
for a measurable period, as if engaged in some mysterious prayers. Then he
came out again, with some ashes on his hair, and walked unconcernedly
away.
By the time he came round to the garden door again he found a group
there which seemed to roll away morbidities as the sunlight had already
rolled away the mists. It was in no way rationally reassuring; it was simply
broadly comic, like a cluster of Dickens’s characters. Major Putnam had
managed to slip inside and plunge into a proper shirt and trousers, with a
crimson cummerbund, and a light square jacket over all; thus normally set
off, his red festive face seemed bursting with a commonplace cordiality. He
was indeed emphatic, but then he was talking to his cook—the swarthy son
of Malta, whose lean, yellow and rather careworn face contrasted quaintly
with his snow-white cap and costume. The cook might well be careworn,
for cookery was the Major’s hobby. He was one of those amateurs who
always know more than the professional. The only other person he even
admitted to be a judge of an omelette was his friend Cray—and as Brown
remembered this, he turned to look for the other officer. In the new presence
of daylight and people clothed and in their right mind, the sight of him was
rather a shock. The taller and more elegant man was still in his night-garb,
with tousled black hair, and now crawling about the garden on his hands
and knees, still looking for traces of the burglar; and now and again, to all
appearance, striking the ground with his hand in anger at not finding him.
Seeing him thus quadrupedal in the grass, the priest raised his eyebrows
rather sadly; and for the first time guessed that “fancies things” might be an
euphemism.
The third item in the group of the cook and the epicure was also known
to Father Brown; it was Audrey Watson, the Major’s ward and housekeeper;
and at this moment, to judge by her apron, tucked-up sleeves and resolute
manner, much more the housekeeper than the ward.
“It serves you right,” she was saying: “I always told you not to have that
old-fashioned cruet-stand.”
“I prefer it,” said Putnam, placably. “I’m old-fashioned myself; and the
things keep together.”
“And vanish together, as you see,” she retorted. “Well, if you are not
going to bother about the burglar, I shouldn’t bother about the lunch. It’s

Sunday, and we can’t send for vinegar and all that in the town; and you
Indian gentlemen can’t enjoy what you call a dinner without a lot of hot
things. I wish to goodness now you hadn’t asked Cousin Oliver to take me
to the musical service. It isn’t over till half-past twelve, and the Colonel has
to leave by then. I don’t believe you men can manage alone.”
“Oh yes, we can, my dear,” said the Major, looking at her very amiably.
“Marco has all the sauces, and we’ve often done ourselves well in very
rough places, as you might know by now. And it’s time you had a treat,
Audrey; you mustn’t be a housekeeper every hour of the day; and I know
you want to hear the music.”
“I want to go to church,” she said, with rather severe eyes.
She was one of those handsome women who will always be handsome,
because the beauty is not in an air or a tint, but in the very structure of the
head and features. But though she was not yet middle-aged and her auburn
hair was of a Titianesque fullness in form and colour, there was a look in
her mouth and around her eyes which suggested that some sorrows wasted
her, as winds waste at last the edges of a Greek temple. For indeed the little
domestic difficulty of which she was now speaking so decisively was rather
comic than tragic. Father Brown gathered, from the course of the
conversation, that Cray, the other gourmet, had to leave before the usual
lunch-time; but that Putnam, his host, not to be done out of a final feast with
an old crony, had arranged for a special dejeuner to be set out and
consumed in the course of the morning, while Audrey and other graver
persons were at morning service. She was going there under the escort of a
relative and old friend of hers, Dr Oliver Oman, who, though a scientific
man of a somewhat bitter type, was enthusiastic for music, and would go
even to church to get it. There was nothing in all this that could conceivably
concern the tragedy in Miss Watson’s face; and by a half conscious instinct,
Father Brown turned again to the seeming lunatic grubbing about in the
grass.
When he strolled across to him, the black, unbrushed head was lifted
abruptly, as if in some surprise at his continued presence. And indeed,
Father Brown, for reasons best known to himself, had lingered much longer
than politeness required; or even, in the ordinary sense, permitted.
“Well!” cried Cray, with wild eyes. “I suppose you think I’m mad, like
the rest?”

“I have considered the thesis,” answered the little man, composedly.
“And I incline to think you are not.”
“What do you mean?” snapped Cray quite savagely.
“Real madmen,” explained Father Brown, “always encourage their own
morbidity. They never strive against it. But you are trying to find traces of
the burglar; even when there aren’t any. You are struggling against it. You
want what no madman ever wants.”
“And what is that?”
“You want to be proved wrong,” said Brown.
During the last words Cray had sprung or staggered to his feet and was
regarding the cleric with agitated eyes. “By hell, but that is a true word!” he
cried. “They are all at me here that the fellow was only after the silver—as
if I shouldn’t be only too pleased to think so! She’s been at me,” and he
tossed his tousled black head towards Audrey, but the other had no need of
the direction, “she’s been at me today about how cruel I was to shoot a poor
harmless house-breaker, and how I have the devil in me against poor
harmless natives. But I was a good-natured man once—as good-natured as
Putnam.”
After a pause he said: “Look here, I’ve never seen you before; but you
shall judge of the whole story. Old Putnam and I were friends in the same
mess; but, owing to some accidents on the Afghan border, I got my
command much sooner than most men; only we were both invalided home
for a bit. I was engaged to Audrey out there; and we all travelled back
together. But on the journey back things happened. Curious things. The
result of them was that Putnam wants it broken off, and even Audrey keeps
it hanging on—and I know what they mean. I know what they think I am.
So do you.
“Well, these are the facts. The last day we were in an Indian city I asked
Putnam if I could get some Trichinopoli cigars, he directed me to a little
place opposite his lodgings. I have since found he was quite right; but
‘opposite’ is a dangerous word when one decent house stands opposite five
or six squalid ones; and I must have mistaken the door. It opened with
difficulty, and then only on darkness; but as I turned back, the door behind
me sank back and settled into its place with a noise as of innumerable bolts.
There was nothing to do but to walk forward; which I did through passage
after passage, pitch-dark. Then I came to a flight of steps, and then to a

blind door, secured by a latch of elaborate Eastern ironwork, which I could
only trace by touch, but which I loosened at last. I came out again upon
gloom, which was half turned into a greenish twilight by a multitude of
small but steady lamps below. They showed merely the feet or fringes of
some huge and empty architecture. Just in front of me was something that
looked like a mountain. I confess I nearly fell on the great stone platform on
which I had emerged, to realize that it was an idol. And worst of all, an idol
with its back to me.
“It was hardly half human, I guessed; to judge by the small squat head,
and still more by a thing like a tail or extra limb turned up behind and
pointing, like a loathsome large finger, at some symbol graven in the centre
of the vast stone back. I had begun, in the dim light, to guess at the
hieroglyphic, not without horror, when a more horrible thing happened. A
door opened silently in the temple wall behind me and a man came out,
with a brown face and a black coat. He had a carved smile on his face, of
copper flesh and ivory teeth; but I think the most hateful thing about him
was that he was in European dress. I was prepared, I think, for shrouded
priests or naked fakirs. But this seemed to say that the devilry was over all
the earth. As indeed I found it to be.
“‘If you had only seen the Monkey’s Feet,’ he said, smiling steadily, and
without other preface, ‘we should have been very gentle—you would only
be tortured and die. If you had seen the Monkey’s Face, still we should be
very moderate, very tolerant—you would only be tortured and live. But as
you have seen the Monkey’s Tail, we must pronounce the worst sentence,
which is—Go Free.’
“When he said the words I heard the elaborate iron latch with which I
had struggled, automatically unlock itself: and then, far down the dark
passages I had passed, I heard the heavy street-door shifting its own bolts
backwards.
“‘It is vain to ask for mercy; you must go free,’ said the smiling man.
‘Henceforth a hair shall slay you like a sword, and a breath shall bite you
like an adder; weapons shall come against you out of nowhere; and you
shall die many times.’ And with that he was swallowed once more in the
wall behind; and I went out into the street.”
Cray paused; and Father Brown unaffectedly sat down on the lawn and
began to pick daisies.

Then the soldier continued: “Putnam, of course, with his jolly common
sense, pooh-poohed all my fears; and from that time dates his doubt of my
mental balance. Well, I’ll simply tell you, in the fewest words, the three
things that have happened since; and you shall judge which of us is right.
“The first happened in an Indian village on the edge of the jungle, but
hundreds of miles from the temple, or town, or type of tribes and customs
where the curse had been put on me. I woke in black midnight, and lay
thinking of nothing in particular, when I felt a faint tickling thing, like a
thread or a hair, trailed across my throat. I shrank back out of its way, and
could not help thinking of the words in the temple. But when I got up and
sought lights and a mirror, the line across my neck was a line of blood.
“The second happened in a lodging in Port Said, later, on our journey
home together. It was a jumble of tavern and curiosity-shop; and though
there was nothing there remotely suggesting the cult of the Monkey, it is, of
course, possible that some of its images or talismans were in such a place.
Its curse was there, anyhow. I woke again in the dark with a sensation that
could not be put in colder or more literal words than that a breath bit like an
adder. Existence was an agony of extinction; I dashed my head against
walls until I dashed it against a window; and fell rather than jumped into the
garden below. Putnam, poor fellow, who had called the other thing a chance
scratch, was bound to take seriously the fact of finding me half insensible
on the grass at dawn. But I fear it was my mental state he took seriously;
and not my story.
“The third happened in Malta. We were in a fortress there; and as it
happened our bedrooms overlooked the open sea, which almost came up to
our window-sills, save for a flat white outer wall as bare as the sea. I woke
up again; but it was not dark. There was a full moon, as I walked to the
window; I could have seen a bird on the bare battlement, or a sail on the
horizon. What I did see was a sort of stick or branch circling, self-
supported, in the empty sky. It flew straight in at my window and smashed
the lamp beside the pillow I had just quitted. It was one of those queer-
shaped war-clubs some Eastern tribes use. But it had come from no human
hand.”
Father Brown threw away a daisy-chain he was making, and rose with a
wistful look. “Has Major Putnam,” he asked, “got any Eastern curios, idols,
weapons and so on, from which one might get a hint?”

“Plenty of those, though not much use, I fear,” replied Cray; “but by all
means come into his study.”
As they entered they passed Miss Watson buttoning her gloves for
church, and heard the voice of Putnam downstairs still giving a lecture on
cookery to the cook. In the Major’s study and den of curios they came
suddenly on a third party, silk-hatted and dressed for the street, who was
poring over an open book on the smoking-table—a book which he dropped
rather guiltily, and turned.
Cray introduced him civilly enough, as Dr Oman, but he showed such
disfavour in his very face that Brown guessed the two men, whether Audrey
knew it or not, were rivals. Nor was the priest wholly unsympathetic with
the prejudice. Dr Oman was a very well-dressed gentleman indeed; well-
featured, though almost dark enough for an Asiatic. But Father Brown had
to tell himself sharply that one should be in charity even with those who
wax their pointed beards, who have small gloved hands, and who speak
with perfectly modulated voices.
Cray seemed to find something specially irritating in the small prayer-
book in Oman’s dark-gloved hand. “I didn’t know that was in your line,” he
said rather rudely.
Oman laughed mildly, but without offence. “This is more so, I know,” he
said, laying his hand on the big book he had dropped, “a dictionary of drugs
and such things. But it’s rather too large to take to church.” Then he closed
the larger book, and there seemed again the faintest touch of hurry and
embarrassment.
“I suppose,” said the priest, who seemed anxious to change the subject,
“all these spears and things are from India?”
“From everywhere,” answered the doctor. “Putnam is an old soldier, and
has been in Mexico and Australia, and the Cannibal Islands for all I know.”
“I hope it was not in the Cannibal Islands,” said Brown, “that he learnt
the art of cookery.” And he ran his eyes over the stew-pots or other strange
utensils on the wall.
At this moment the jolly subject of their conversation thrust his laughing,
lobsterish face into the room. “Come along, Cray,” he cried. “Your lunch is
just coming in. And the bells are ringing for those who want to go to
church.”

Cray slipped upstairs to change; Dr Oman and Miss Watson betook
themselves solemnly down the street, with a string of other churchgoers;
but Father Brown noticed that the doctor twice looked back and scrutinized
the house; and even came back to the corner of the street to look at it again.
The priest looked puzzled. “He can’t have been at the dustbin,” he
muttered. “Not in those clothes. Or was he there earlier today?”
Father Brown, touching other people, was as sensitive as a barometer; but
today he seemed about as sensitive as a rhinoceros. By no social law, rigid
or implied, could he be supposed to linger round the lunch of the Anglo-
Indian friends; but he lingered, covering his position with torrents of
amusing but quite needless conversation. He was the more puzzling because
he did not seem to want any lunch. As one after another of the most
exquisitely balanced kedgerees of curries, accompanied with their
appropriate vintages, were laid before the other two, he only repeated that it
was one of his fast-days, and munched a piece of bread and sipped and then
left untasted a tumbler of cold water. His talk, however, was exuberant.
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do for you,” he cried—, “I’ll mix you a salad! I
can’t eat it, but I’ll mix it like an angel! You’ve got a lettuce there.”
“Unfortunately it’s the only thing we have got,” answered the good-
humoured Major. “You must remember that mustard, vinegar, oil and so on
vanished with the cruet and the burglar.”
“I know,” replied Brown, rather vaguely. “That’s what I’ve always been
afraid would happen. That’s why I always carry a cruet-stand about with
me. I’m so fond of salads.”
And to the amazement of the two men he took a pepper-pot out of his
waistcoat pocket and put it on the table.
“I wonder why the burglar wanted mustard, too,” he went on, taking a
mustard-pot from another pocket. “A mustard plaster, I suppose. And
vinegar”—and producing that condiment—“haven’t I heard something
about vinegar and brown paper? As for oil, which I think I put in my left—”
His garrulity was an instant arrested; for lifting his eyes, he saw what no
one else saw—the black figure of Dr Oman standing on the sunlit lawn and
looking steadily into the room. Before he could quite recover himself Cray
had cloven in.

“You’re an astounding card,” he said, staring. “I shall come and hear your
sermons, if they’re as amusing as your manners.” His voice changed a little,
and he leaned back in his chair.
“Oh, there are sermons in a cruet-stand, too,” said Father Brown, quite
gravely. “Have you heard of faith like a grain of mustard-seed; or charity
that anoints with oil? And as for vinegar, can any soldiers forget that
solitary soldier, who, when the sun was darkened—”
Colonel Cray leaned forward a little and clutched the tablecloth.
Father Brown, who was making the salad, tipped two spoonfuls of the
mustard into the tumbler of water beside him; stood up and said in a new,
loud and sudden voice—“Drink that!”
At the same moment the motionless doctor in the garden came running,
and bursting open a window cried: “Am I wanted? Has he been poisoned?”
“Pretty near,” said Brown, with the shadow of a smile; for the emetic had
very suddenly taken effect. And Cray lay in a deck-chair, gasping as for life,
but alive.
Major Putnam had sprung up, his purple face mottled. “A crime!” he
cried hoarsely. “I will go for the police!”
The priest could hear him dragging down his palm-leaf hat from the peg
and tumbling out of the front door; he heard the garden gate slam. But he
only stood looking at Cray; and after a silence said quietly:
“I shall not talk to you much; but I will tell you what you want to know.
There is no curse on you. The Temple of the Monkey was either a
coincidence or a part of the trick; the trick was the trick of a white man.
There is only one weapon that will bring blood with that mere feathery
touch: a razor held by a white man. There is one way of making a common
room full of invisible, overpowering poison: turning on the gas—the crime
of a white man. And there is only one kind of club that can be thrown out of
a window, turn in mid-air and come back to the window next to it: the
Australian boomerang. You’ll see some of them in the Major’s study.”
With that he went outside and spoke for a moment to the doctor. The
moment after, Audrey Watson came rushing into the house and fell on her
knees beside Cray’s chair. He could not hear what they said to each other;
but their faces moved with amazement, not unhappiness. The doctor and the
priest walked slowly towards the garden gate.

“I suppose the Major was in love with her, too,” he said with a sigh; and
when the other nodded, observed: “You were very generous, doctor. You did
a fine thing. But what made you suspect?”
“A very small thing,” said Oman; “but it kept me restless in church till I
came back to see that all was well. That book on his table was a work on
poisons; and was put down open at the place where it stated that a certain
Indian poison, though deadly and difficult to trace, was particularly easily
reversible by the use of the commonest emetics. I suppose he read that at
the last moment—”
“And remembered that there were emetics in the cruet-stand,” said Father
Brown. “Exactly. He threw the cruet in the dustbin—where I found it, along
with other silver—for the sake of a burglary blind. But if you look at that
pepper-pot I put on the table, you’ll see a small hole. That’s where Cray’s
bullet struck, shaking up the pepper and making the criminal sneeze.”
There was a silence. Then Dr Oman said grimly: “The Major is a long
time looking for the police.”
“Or the police in looking for the Major?” said the priest. “Well, good-
bye.”

ELEVEN — The Strange Crime of John Boulnois
MR CALHOUN KIDD was a very young gentleman with a very old
face, a face dried up with its own eagerness, framed in blue-black hair and a
black butterfly tie. He was the emissary in England of the colossal
American daily called the Western Sun—also humorously described as the
“Rising Sunset”. This was in allusion to a great journalistic declaration
(attributed to Mr Kidd himself) that “he guessed the sun would rise in the
west yet, if American citizens did a bit more hustling.” Those, however,
who mock American journalism from the standpoint of somewhat mellower
traditions forget a certain paradox which partly redeems it. For while the
journalism of the States permits a pantomimic vulgarity long past anything
English, it also shows a real excitement about the most earnest mental
problems, of which English papers are innocent, or rather incapable. The
Sun was full of the most solemn matters treated in the most farcical way.
William James figured there as well as “Weary Willie,” and pragmatists
alternated with pugilists in the long procession of its portraits.
Thus, when a very unobtrusive Oxford man named John Boulnois wrote
in a very unreadable review called the Natural Philosophy Quarterly a series
of articles on alleged weak points in Darwinian evolution, it fluttered no
corner of the English papers; though Boulnois’s theory (which was that of a
comparatively stationary universe visited occasionally by convulsions of
change) had some rather faddy fashionableness at Oxford, and got so far as
to be named “Catastrophism”. But many American papers seized on the
challenge as a great event; and the Sun threw the shadow of Mr Boulnois
quite gigantically across its pages. By the paradox already noted, articles of
valuable intelligence and enthusiasm were presented with headlines
apparently written by an illiterate maniac, headlines such as “Darwin
Chews Dirt; Critic Boulnois says He Jumps the Shocks”—or “Keep
Catastrophic, says Thinker Boulnois.” And Mr Calhoun Kidd, of the
Western Sun, was bidden to take his butterfly tie and lugubrious visage
down to the little house outside Oxford where Thinker Boulnois lived in
happy ignorance of such a title.

That fated philosopher had consented, in a somewhat dazed manner, to
receive the interviewer, and had named the hour of nine that evening. The
last of a summer sunset clung about Cumnor and the low wooded hills; the
romantic Yankee was both doubtful of his road and inquisitive about his
surroundings; and seeing the door of a genuine feudal old-country inn, The
Champion Arms, standing open, he went in to make inquiries.
In the bar parlour he rang the bell, and had to wait some little time for a
reply to it. The only other person present was a lean man with close red hair
and loose, horsey-looking clothes, who was drinking very bad whisky, but
smoking a very good cigar. The whisky, of course, was the choice brand of
The Champion Arms; the cigar he had probably brought with him from
London. Nothing could be more different than his cynical negligence from
the dapper dryness of the young American; but something in his pencil and
open notebook, and perhaps in the expression of his alert blue eye, caused
Kidd to guess, correctly, that he was a brother journalist.
“Could you do me the favour,” asked Kidd, with the courtesy of his
nation, “of directing me to the Grey Cottage, where Mr Boulnois lives, as I
understand?”
“It’s a few yards down the road,” said the red-haired man, removing his
cigar; “I shall be passing it myself in a minute, but I’m going on to
Pendragon Park to try and see the fun.”
“What is Pendragon Park?” asked Calhoun Kidd.
“Sir Claude Champion’s place—haven’t you come down for that, too?”
asked the other pressman, looking up. “You’re a journalist, aren’t you?”
“I have come to see Mr Boulnois,” said Kidd.
“I’ve come to see Mrs Boulnois,” replied the other. “But I shan’t catch
her at home.” And he laughed rather unpleasantly.
“Are you interested in Catastrophism?” asked the wondering Yankee.
“I’m interested in catastrophes; and there are going to be some,” replied
his companion gloomily. “Mine’s a filthy trade, and I never pretend it isn’t.”
With that he spat on the floor; yet somehow in the very act and instant
one could realize that the man had been brought up as a gentleman.
The American pressman considered him with more attention. His face
was pale and dissipated, with the promise of formidable passions yet to be
loosed; but it was a clever and sensitive face; his clothes were coarse and

careless, but he had a good seal ring on one of his long, thin fingers. His
name, which came out in the course of talk, was James Dalroy; he was the
son of a bankrupt Irish landlord, and attached to a pink paper which he
heartily despised, called Smart Society, in the capacity of reporter and of
something painfully like a spy.
Smart Society, I regret to say, felt none of that interest in Boulnois on
Darwin which was such a credit to the head and hearts of the Western Sun.
Dalroy had come down, it seemed, to snuff up the scent of a scandal which
might very well end in the Divorce Court, but which was at present
hovering between Grey Cottage and Pendragon Park.
Sir Claude Champion was known to the readers of the Western Sun as
well as Mr Boulnois. So were the Pope and the Derby Winner; but the idea
of their intimate acquaintanceship would have struck Kidd as equally
incongruous. He had heard of (and written about, nay, falsely pretended to
know) Sir Claude Champion, as “one of the brightest and wealthiest of
England’s Upper Ten”; as the great sportsman who raced yachts round the
world; as the great traveller who wrote books about the Himalayas, as the
politician who swept constituencies with a startling sort of Tory Democracy,
and as the great dabbler in art, music, literature, and, above all, acting. Sir
Claude was really rather magnificent in other than American eyes. There
was something of the Renascence Prince about his omnivorous culture and
restless publicity—, he was not only a great amateur, but an ardent one.
There was in him none of that antiquarian frivolity that we convey by the
word “dilettante”.
That faultless falcon profile with purple-black Italian eye, which had
been snap-shotted so often both for Smart Society and the Western Sun,
gave everyone the impression of a man eaten by ambition as by a fire, or
even a disease. But though Kidd knew a great deal about Sir Claude—a
great deal more, in fact, than there was to know—it would never have
crossed his wildest dreams to connect so showy an aristocrat with the
newly-unearthed founder of Catastrophism, or to guess that Sir Claude
Champion and John Boulnois could be intimate friends. Such, according to
Dalroy’s account, was nevertheless the fact. The two had hunted in couples
at school and college, and, though their social destinies had been very
different (for Champion was a great landlord and almost a millionaire,
while Boulnois was a poor scholar and, until just lately, an unknown one),

they still kept in very close touch with each other. Indeed, Boulnois’s
cottage stood just outside the gates of Pendragon Park.
But whether the two men could be friends much longer was becoming a
dark and ugly question. A year or two before, Boulnois had married a
beautiful and not unsuccessful actress, to whom he was devoted in his own
shy and ponderous style; and the proximity of the household to Champion’s
had given that flighty celebrity opportunities for behaving in a way that
could not but cause painful and rather base excitement. Sir Claude had
carried the arts of publicity to perfection; and he seemed to take a crazy
pleasure in being equally ostentatious in an intrigue that could do him no
sort of honour. Footmen from Pendragon were perpetually leaving bouquets
for Mrs Boulnois; carriages and motor-cars were perpetually calling at the
cottage for Mrs Boulnois; balls and masquerades perpetually filled the
grounds in which the baronet paraded Mrs Boulnois, like the Queen of Love
and Beauty at a tournament. That very evening, marked by Mr Kidd for the
exposition of Catastrophism, had been marked by Sir Claude Champion for
an open-air rendering of Romeo and Juliet, in which he was to play Romeo
to a Juliet it was needless to name.
“I don’t think it can go on without a smash,” said the young man with red
hair, getting up and shaking himself. “Old Boulnois may be squared—or he
may be square. But if he’s square he’s thick—what you might call cubic.
But I don’t believe it’s possible.”
“He is a man of grand intellectual powers,” said Calhoun Kidd in a deep
voice.
“Yes,” answered Dalroy; “but even a man of grand intellectual powers
can’t be such a blighted fool as all that. Must you be going on? I shall be
following myself in a minute or two.”
But Calhoun Kidd, having finished a milk and soda, betook himself
smartly up the road towards the Grey Cottage, leaving his cynical informant
to his whisky and tobacco. The last of the daylight had faded; the skies were
of a dark, green-grey, like slate, studded here and there with a star, but
lighter on the left side of the sky, with the promise of a rising moon.
The Grey Cottage, which stood entrenched, as it were, in a square of stiff,
high thorn-hedges, was so close under the pines and palisades of the Park
that Kidd at first mistook it for the Park Lodge. Finding the name on the
narrow wooden gate, however, and seeing by his watch that the hour of the

“Thinker’s” appointment had just struck, he went in and knocked at the
front door. Inside the garden hedge, he could see that the house, though
unpretentious enough, was larger and more luxurious than it looked at first,
and was quite a different kind of place from a porter’s lodge. A dog-kennel
and a beehive stood outside, like symbols of old English country-life; the
moon was rising behind a plantation of prosperous pear trees, the dog that
came out of the kennel was reverend-looking and reluctant to bark; and the
plain, elderly man-servant who opened the door was brief but dignified.
“Mr Boulnois asked me to offer his apologies, sir,” he said, “but he has
been obliged to go out suddenly.”
“But see here, I had an appointment,” said the interviewer, with a rising
voice. “Do you know where he went to?”
“To Pendragon Park, sir,” said the servant, rather sombrely, and began to
close the door.
Kidd started a little.
“Did he go with Mrs—with the rest of the party?” he asked rather
vaguely.
“No, sir,” said the man shortly; “he stayed behind, and then went out
alone.” And he shut the door, brutally, but with an air of duty not done.
The American, that curious compound of impudence and sensitiveness,
was annoyed. He felt a strong desire to hustle them all along a bit and teach
them business habits; the hoary old dog and the grizzled, heavy-faced old
butler with his prehistoric shirt-front, and the drowsy old moon, and above
all the scatter-brained old philosopher who couldn’t keep an appointment.
“If that’s the way he goes on he deserves to lose his wife’s purest
devotion,” said Mr Calhoun Kidd. “But perhaps he’s gone over to make a
row. In that case I reckon a man from the Western Sun will be on the spot.”
And turning the corner by the open lodge-gates, he set off, stumping up
the long avenue of black pine-woods that pointed in abrupt perspective
towards the inner gardens of Pendragon Park. The trees were as black and
orderly as plumes upon a hearse; there were still a few stars. He was a man
with more literary than direct natural associations; the word “Ravenswood”
came into his head repeatedly. It was partly the raven colour of the pine-
woods; but partly also an indescribable atmosphere almost described in
Scott’s great tragedy; the smell of something that died in the eighteenth

century; the smell of dank gardens and broken urns, of wrongs that will
never now be righted; of something that is none the less incurably sad
because it is strangely unreal.
More than once, as he went up that strange, black road of tragic artifice,
he stopped, startled, thinking he heard steps in front of him. He could see
nothing in front but the twin sombre walls of pine and the wedge of starlit
sky above them. At first he thought he must have fancied it or been mocked
by a mere echo of his own tramp. But as he went on he was more and more
inclined to conclude, with the remains of his reason, that there really were
other feet upon the road. He thought hazily of ghosts; and was surprised
how swiftly he could see the image of an appropriate and local ghost, one
with a face as white as Pierrot’s, but patched with black. The apex of the
triangle of dark-blue sky was growing brighter and bluer, but he did not
realize as yet that this was because he was coming nearer to the lights of the
great house and garden. He only felt that the atmosphere was growing more
intense, there was in the sadness more violence and secrecy—more—he
hesitated for the word, and then said it with a jerk of laughter—
Catastrophism.
More pines, more pathway slid past him, and then he stood rooted as by a
blast of magic. It is vain to say that he felt as if he had got into a dream; but
this time he felt quite certain that he had got into a book. For we human
beings are used to inappropriate things; we are accustomed to the clatter of
the incongruous; it is a tune to which we can go to sleep. If one appropriate
thing happens, it wakes us up like the pang of a perfect chord. Something
happened such as would have happened in such a place in a forgotten tale.
Over the black pine-wood came flying and flashing in the moon a naked
sword—such a slender and sparkling rapier as may have fought many an
unjust duel in that ancient park. It fell on the pathway far in front of him
and lay there glistening like a large needle. He ran like a hare and bent to
look at it. Seen at close quarters it had rather a showy look: the big red
jewels in the hilt and guard were a little dubious. But there were other red
drops upon the blade which were not dubious.
He looked round wildly in the direction from which the dazzling missile
had come, and saw that at this point the sable facade of fir and pine was
interrupted by a smaller road at right angles; which, when he turned it,
brought him in full view of the long, lighted house, with a lake and

fountains in front of it. Nevertheless, he did not look at this, having
something more interesting to look at.
Above him, at the angle of the steep green bank of the terraced garden,
was one of those small picturesque surprises common in the old landscape
gardening; a kind of small round hill or dome of grass, like a giant mole-
hill, ringed and crowned with three concentric fences of roses, and having a
sundial in the highest point in the centre. Kidd could see the finger of the
dial stand up dark against the sky like the dorsal fin of a shark and the vain
moonlight clinging to that idle clock. But he saw something else clinging to
it also, for one wild moment—the figure of a man.
Though he saw it there only for a moment, though it was outlandish and
incredible in costume, being clad from neck to heel in tight crimson, with
glints of gold, yet he knew in one flash of moonlight who it was. That white
face flung up to heaven, clean-shaven and so unnaturally young, like Byron
with a Roman nose, those black curls already grizzled—he had seen the
thousand public portraits of Sir Claude Champion. The wild red figure
reeled an instant against the sundial; the next it had rolled down the steep
bank and lay at the American’s feet, faintly moving one arm. A gaudy,
unnatural gold ornament on the arm suddenly reminded Kidd of Romeo and
Juliet; of course the tight crimson suit was part of the play. But there was a
long red stain down the bank from which the man had rolled—that was no
part of the play. He had been run through the body.
Mr Calhoun Kidd shouted and shouted again. Once more he seemed to
hear phantasmal footsteps, and started to find another figure already near
him. He knew the figure, and yet it terrified him. The dissipated youth who
had called himself Dalroy had a horribly quiet way with him; if Boulnois
failed to keep appointments that had been made, Dalroy had a sinister air of
keeping appointments that hadn’t. The moonlight discoloured everything,
against Dalroy’s red hair his wan face looked not so much white as pale
green.
All this morbid impressionism must be Kidd’s excuse for having cried
out, brutally and beyond all reason: “Did you do this, you devil?”
James Dalroy smiled his unpleasing smile; but before he could speak, the
fallen figure made another movement of the arm, waving vaguely towards
the place where the sword fell; then came a moan, and then it managed to
speak.

“Boulnois.... Boulnois, I say.... Boulnois did it... jealous of me...he was
jealous, he was, he was...”
Kidd bent his head down to hear more, and just managed to catch the
words:
“Boulnois...with my own sword...he threw it...”
Again the failing hand waved towards the sword, and then fell rigid with
a thud. In Kidd rose from its depth all that acrid humour that is the strange
salt of the seriousness of his race.
“See here,” he said sharply and with command, “you must fetch a doctor.
This man’s dead.”
“And a priest, too, I suppose,” said Dalroy in an undecipherable manner.
“All these Champions are papists.”
The American knelt down by the body, felt the heart, propped up the head
and used some last efforts at restoration; but before the other journalist
reappeared, followed by a doctor and a priest, he was already prepared to
assert they were too late.
“Were you too late also?” asked the doctor, a solid prosperous-looking
man, with conventional moustache and whiskers, but a lively eye, which
darted over Kidd dubiously.
“In one sense,” drawled the representative of the Sun. “I was too late to
save the man, but I guess I was in time to hear something of importance. I
heard the dead man denounce his assassin.”
“And who was the assassin?” asked the doctor, drawing his eyebrows
together.
“Boulnois,” said Calhoun Kidd, and whistled softly.
The doctor stared at him gloomily with a reddening brow—, but he did
not contradict. Then the priest, a shorter figure in the background, said
mildly: “I understood that Mr Boulnois was not coming to Pendragon Park
this evening.”
“There again,” said the Yankee grimly, “I may be in a position to give the
old country a fact or two. Yes, sir, John Boulnois was going to stay in all
this evening; he fixed up a real good appointment there with me. But John
Boulnois changed his mind; John Boulnois left his home abruptly and all
alone, and came over to this darned Park an hour or so ago. His butler told

me so. I think we hold what the all-wise police call a clue—have you sent
for them?”
“Yes,” said the doctor, “but we haven’t alarmed anyone else yet.”
“Does Mrs Boulnois know?” asked James Dalroy, and again Kidd was
conscious of an irrational desire to hit him on his curling mouth.
“I have not told her,” said the doctor gruffly—, “but here come the
police.”
The little priest had stepped out into the main avenue, and now returned
with the fallen sword, which looked ludicrously large and theatrical when
attached to his dumpy figure, at once clerical and commonplace. “Just
before the police come,” he said apologetically, “has anyone got a light?”
The Yankee journalist took an electric torch from his pocket, and the
priest held it close to the middle part of the blade, which he examined with
blinking care. Then, without glancing at the point or pommel, he handed the
long weapon to the doctor.
“I fear I’m no use here,” he said, with a brief sigh. “I’ll say good night to
you, gentlemen.” And he walked away up the dark avenue towards the
house, his hands clasped behind him and his big head bent in cogitation.
The rest of the group made increased haste towards the lodge-gates,
where an inspector and two constables could already be seen in consultation
with the lodge-keeper. But the little priest only walked slower and slower in
the dim cloister of pine, and at last stopped dead, on the steps of the house.
It was his silent way of acknowledging an equally silent approach; for there
came towards him a presence that might have satisfied even Calhoun Kidd’s
demands for a lovely and aristocratic ghost. It was a young woman in
silvery satins of a Renascence design; she had golden hair in two long
shining ropes, and a face so startingly pale between them that she might
have been chryselephantine—made, that is, like some old Greek statues, out
of ivory and gold. But her eyes were very bright, and her voice, though low,
was confident.
“Father Brown?” she said.
“Mrs Boulnois?” he replied gravely. Then he looked at her and
immediately said: “I see you know about Sir Claude.”
“How do you know I know?” she asked steadily.

He did not answer the question, but asked another: “Have you seen your
husband?”
“My husband is at home,” she said. “He has nothing to do with this.”
Again he did not answer; and the woman drew nearer to him, with a
curiously intense expression on her face.
“Shall I tell you something more?” she said, with a rather fearful smile.
“I don’t think he did it, and you don’t either.” Father Brown returned her
gaze with a long, grave stare, and then nodded, yet more gravely.
“Father Brown,” said the lady, “I am going to tell you all I know, but I
want you to do me a favour first. Will you tell me why you haven’t jumped
to the conclusion of poor John’s guilt, as all the rest have done? Don’t mind
what you say: I—I know about the gossip and the appearances that are
against me.”
Father Brown looked honestly embarrassed, and passed his hand across
his forehead. “Two very little things,” he said. “At least, one’s very trivial
and the other very vague. But such as they are, they don’t fit in with Mr
Boulnois being the murderer.”
He turned his blank, round face up to the stars and continued
absentmindedly: “To take the vague idea first. I attach a good deal of
importance to vague ideas. All those things that ‘aren’t evidence’ are what
convince me. I think a moral impossibility the biggest of all impossibilities.
I know your husband only slightly, but I think this crime of his, as generally
conceived, something very like a moral impossibility. Please do not think I
mean that Boulnois could not be so wicked. Anybody can be wicked—as
wicked as he chooses. We can direct our moral wills; but we can’t generally
change our instinctive tastes and ways of doing things. Boulnois might
commit a murder, but not this murder. He would not snatch Romeo’s sword
from its romantic scabbard; or slay his foe on the sundial as on a kind of
altar; or leave his body among the roses, or fling the sword away among the
pines. If Boulnois killed anyone he’d do it quietly and heavily, as he’d do
any other doubtful thing—take a tenth glass of port, or read a loose Greek
poet. No, the romantic setting is not like Boulnois. It’s more like
Champion.”
“Ah!” she said, and looked at him with eyes like diamonds.

“And the trivial thing was this,” said Brown. “There were finger-prints
on that sword; finger-prints can be detected quite a time after they are made
if they’re on some polished surface like glass or steel. These were on a
polished surface. They were half-way down the blade of the sword. Whose
prints they were I have no earthly clue; but why should anybody hold a
sword half-way down? It was a long sword, but length is an advantage in
lunging at an enemy. At least, at most enemies. At all enemies except one.”
“Except one,” she repeated.
“There is only one enemy,” said Father Brown, “whom it is easier to kill
with a dagger than a sword.”
“I know,” said the woman. “Oneself.”
There was a long silence, and then the priest said quietly but abruptly:
“Am I right, then? Did Sir Claude kill himself?”
“Yes” she said, with a face like marble. “I saw him do it.”
“He died,” said Father Brown, “for love of you?”
An extraordinary expression flashed across her face, very different from
pity, modesty, remorse, or anything her companion had expected: her voice
became suddenly strong and full. “I don’t believe,” she said, “he ever cared
about me a rap. He hated my husband.”
“Why?” asked the other, and turned his round face from the sky to the
lady.
“He hated my husband because...it is so strange I hardly know how to say
it...because...”
“Yes?” said Brown patiently.
“Because my husband wouldn’t hate him.”
Father Brown only nodded, and seemed still to be listening; he differed
from most detectives in fact and fiction in a small point—he never
pretended not to understand when he understood perfectly well.
Mrs Boulnois drew near once more with the same contained glow of
certainty. “My husband,” she said, “is a great man. Sir Claude Champion
was not a great man: he was a celebrated and successful man. My husband
has never been celebrated or successful; and it is the solemn truth that he
has never dreamed of being so. He no more expects to be famous for
thinking than for smoking cigars. On all that side he has a sort of splendid

stupidity. He has never grown up. He still liked Champion exactly as he
liked him at school; he admired him as he would admire a conjuring trick
done at the dinner-table. But he couldn’t be got to conceive the notion of
envying Champion. And Champion wanted to be envied. He went mad and
killed himself for that.”
“Yes,” said Father Brown; “I think I begin to understand.”
“Oh, don’t you see?” she cried; “the whole picture is made for that—the
place is planned for it. Champion put John in a little house at his very door,
like a dependant—to make him feel a failure. He never felt it. He thinks no
more about such things than—than an absent-minded lion. Champion
would burst in on John’s shabbiest hours or homeliest meals with some
dazzling present or announcement or expedition that made it like the visit of
Haroun Alraschid, and John would accept or refuse amiably with one eye
off, so to speak, like one lazy schoolboy agreeing or disagreeing with
another. After five years of it John had not turned a hair; and Sir Claude
Champion was a monomaniac.”
“And Haman began to tell them,” said Father Brown, “of all the things
wherein the king had honoured him; and he said: ‘All these things profit me
nothing while I see Mordecai the Jew sitting in the gate.’”
“The crisis came,” Mrs Boulnois continued, “when I persuaded John to
let me take down some of his speculations and send them to a magazine.
They began to attract attention, especially in America, and one paper
wanted to interview him. When Champion (who was interviewed nearly
every day) heard of this late little crumb of success falling to his
unconscious rival, the last link snapped that held back his devilish hatred.
Then he began to lay that insane siege to my own love and honour which
has been the talk of the shire. You will ask me why I allowed such atrocious
attentions. I answer that I could not have declined them except by
explaining to my husband, and there are some things the soul cannot do, as
the body cannot fly. Nobody could have explained to my husband. Nobody
could do it now. If you said to him in so many words, ‘Champion is stealing
your wife,’ he would think the joke a little vulgar: that it could be anything
but a joke—that notion could find no crack in his great skull to get in by.
Well, John was to come and see us act this evening, but just as we were
starting he said he wouldn’t; he had got an interesting book and a cigar. I
told this to Sir Claude, and it was his death-blow. The monomaniac

suddenly saw despair. He stabbed himself, crying out like a devil that
Boulnois was slaying him; he lies there in the garden dead of his own
jealousy to produce jealousy, and John is sitting in the dining-room reading
a book.”
There was another silence, and then the little priest said: “There is only
one weak point, Mrs Boulnois, in all your very vivid account. Your husband
is not sitting in the dining-room reading a book. That American reporter
told me he had been to your house, and your butler told him Mr Boulnois
had gone to Pendragon Park after all.”
Her bright eyes widened to an almost electric glare; and yet it seemed
rather bewilderment than confusion or fear. “Why, what can you mean?”
she cried. “All the servants were out of the house, seeing the theatricals.
And we don’t keep a butler, thank goodness!”
Father Brown started and spun half round like an absurd teetotum.
“What, what?” he cried seeming galvanized into sudden life. “Look here—I
say—can I make your husband hear if I go to the house?”
“Oh, the servants will be back by now,” she said, wondering.
“Right, right!” rejoined the cleric energetically, and set off scuttling up
the path towards the Park gates. He turned once to say: “Better get hold of
that Yankee, or ‘Crime of John Boulnois’ will be all over the Republic in
large letters.”
“You don’t understand,” said Mrs Boulnois. “He wouldn’t mind. I don’t
think he imagines that America really is a place.”
When Father Brown reached the house with the beehive and the drowsy
dog, a small and neat maid-servant showed him into the dining-room, where
Boulnois sat reading by a shaded lamp, exactly as his wife described him. A
decanter of port and a wineglass were at his elbow; and the instant the priest
entered he noted the long ash stand out unbroken on his cigar.
“He has been here for half an hour at least,” thought Father Brown. In
fact, he had the air of sitting where he had sat when his dinner was cleared
away.
“Don’t get up, Mr Boulnois,” said the priest in his pleasant, prosaic way.
“I shan’t interrupt you a moment. I fear I break in on some of your scientific
studies.”

“No,” said Boulnois; “I was reading ‘The Bloody Thumb.’” He said it
with neither frown nor smile, and his visitor was conscious of a certain deep
and virile indifference in the man which his wife had called greatness. He
laid down a gory yellow “shocker” without even feeling its incongruity
enough to comment on it humorously. John Boulnois was a big, slow-
moving man with a massive head, partly grey and partly bald, and blunt,
burly features. He was in shabby and very old-fashioned evening-dress,
with a narrow triangular opening of shirt-front: he had assumed it that
evening in his original purpose of going to see his wife act Juliet.
“I won’t keep you long from ‘The Bloody Thumb’ or any other
catastrophic affairs,” said Father Brown, smiling. “I only came to ask you
about the crime you committed this evening.”
Boulnois looked at him steadily, but a red bar began to show across his
broad brow; and he seemed like one discovering embarrassment for the first
time.
“I know it was a strange crime,” assented Brown in a low voice.
“Stranger than murder perhaps—to you. The little sins are sometimes
harder to confess than the big ones—but that’s why it’s so important to
confess them. Your crime is committed by every fashionable hostess six
times a week: and yet you find it sticks to your tongue like a nameless
atrocity.”
“It makes one feel,” said the philosopher slowly, “such a damned fool.”
“I know,” assented the other, “but one often has to choose between
feeling a damned fool and being one.”
“I can’t analyse myself well,” went on Boulnois; “but sitting in that chair
with that story I was as happy as a schoolboy on a half-holiday. It was
security, eternity—I can’t convey it... the cigars were within reach...the
matches were within reach... the Thumb had four more appearances to...it
was not only a peace, but a plenitude. Then that bell rang, and I thought for
one long, mortal minute that I couldn’t get out of that chair—literally,
physically, muscularly couldn’t. Then I did it like a man lifting the world,
because I knew all the servants were out. I opened the front door, and there
was a little man with his mouth open to speak and his notebook open to
write in. I remembered the Yankee interviewer I had forgotten. His hair was
parted in the middle, and I tell you that murder—”
“I understand,” said Father Brown. “I’ve seen him.”

“I didn’t commit murder,” continued the Catastrophist mildly, “but only
perjury. I said I had gone across to Pendragon Park and shut the door in his
face. That is my crime, Father Brown, and I don’t know what penance you
would inflict for it.”
“I shan’t inflict any penance,” said the clerical gentleman, collecting his
heavy hat and umbrella with an air of some amusement; “quite the contrary.
I came here specially to let you off the little penance which would
otherwise have followed your little offence.”
“And what,” asked Boulnois, smiling, “is the little penance I have so
luckily been let off?”
“Being hanged,” said Father Brown.

TWELVE — The Fairy Tale of Father Brown
THE picturesque city and state of Heiligwaldenstein was one of those toy
kingdoms of which certain parts of the German Empire still consist. It had
come under the Prussian hegemony quite late in history—hardly fifty years
before the fine summer day when Flambeau and Father Brown found
themselves sitting in its gardens and drinking its beer. There had been not a
little of war and wild justice there within living memory, as soon will be
shown. But in merely looking at it one could not dismiss that impression of
childishness which is the most charming side of Germany—those little
pantomime, paternal monarchies in which a king seems as domestic as a
cook. The German soldiers by the innumerable sentry-boxes looked
strangely like German toys, and the clean-cut battlements of the castle,
gilded by the sunshine, looked the more like the gilt gingerbread. For it was
brilliant weather. The sky was as Prussian a blue as Potsdam itself could
require, but it was yet more like that lavish and glowing use of the colour
which a child extracts from a shilling paint-box. Even the grey-ribbed trees
looked young, for the pointed buds on them were still pink, and in a pattern
against the strong blue looked like innumerable childish figures.
Despite his prosaic appearance and generally practical walk of life,
Father Brown was not without a certain streak of romance in his
composition, though he generally kept his daydreams to himself, as many
children do. Amid the brisk, bright colours of such a day, and in the heraldic
framework of such a town, he did feel rather as if he had entered a fairy
tale. He took a childish pleasure, as a younger brother might, in the
formidable sword-stick which Flambeau always flung as he walked, and
which now stood upright beside his tall mug of Munich. Nay, in his sleepy
irresponsibility, he even found himself eyeing the knobbed and clumsy head
of his own shabby umbrella, with some faint memories of the ogre’s club in
a coloured toy-book. But he never composed anything in the form of
fiction, unless it be the tale that follows:
“I wonder,” he said, “whether one would have real adventures in a place
like this, if one put oneself in the way? It’s a splendid back-scene for them,

but I always have a kind of feeling that they would fight you with
pasteboard sabres more than real, horrible swords.”
“You are mistaken,” said his friend. “In this place they not only fight with
swords, but kill without swords. And there’s worse than that.”
“Why, what do you mean?” asked Father Brown.
“Why,” replied the other, “I should say this was the only place in Europe
where a man was ever shot without firearms.”
“Do you mean a bow and arrow?” asked Brown in some wonder.
“I mean a bullet in the brain,” replied Flambeau. “Don’t you know the
story of the late Prince of this place? It was one of the great police
mysteries about twenty years ago. You remember, of course, that this place
was forcibly annexed at the time of Bismarck’s very earliest schemes of
consolidation—forcibly, that is, but not at all easily. The empire (or what
wanted to be one) sent Prince Otto of Grossenmark to rule the place in the
Imperial interests. We saw his portrait in the gallery there—a handsome old
gentleman if he’d had any hair or eyebrows, and hadn’t been wrinkled all
over like a vulture; but he had things to harass him, as I’ll explain in a
minute. He was a soldier of distinguished skill and success, but he didn’t
have altogether an easy job with this little place. He was defeated in several
battles by the celebrated Arnhold brothers—the three guerrilla patriots to
whom Swinburne wrote a poem, you remember:

Wolves with the hair of the ermine,
Crows that are crowned and kings—
These things be many as vermin,
Yet Three shall abide these things.

Or something of that kind. Indeed, it is by no means certain that the
occupation would ever have been successful had not one of the three
brothers, Paul, despicably, but very decisively declined to abide these things
any longer, and, by surrendering all the secrets of the insurrection, ensured
its overthrow and his own ultimate promotion to the post of chamberlain to
Prince Otto. After this, Ludwig, the one genuine hero among Mr
Swinburne’s heroes, was killed, sword in hand, in the capture of the city;
and the third, Heinrich, who, though not a traitor, had always been tame and
even timid compared with his active brothers, retired into something like a
hermitage, became converted to a Christian quietism which was almost
Quakerish, and never mixed with men except to give nearly all he had to the

poor. They tell me that not long ago he could still be seen about the
neighbourhood occasionally, a man in a black cloak, nearly blind, with very
wild, white hair, but a face of astonishing softness.”
“I know,” said Father Brown. “I saw him once.”
His friend looked at him in some surprise. “I didn’t know you’d been
here before,” he said. “Perhaps you know as much about it as I do. Anyhow,
that’s the story of the Arnholds, and he was the last survivor of them. Yes,
and of all the men who played parts in that drama.”
“You mean that the Prince, too, died long before?”
“Died,” repeated Flambeau, “and that’s about as much as we can say. You
must understand that towards the end of his life he began to have those
tricks of the nerves not uncommon with tyrants. He multiplied the ordinary
daily and nightly guard round his castle till there seemed to be more sentry-
boxes than houses in the town, and doubtful characters were shot without
mercy. He lived almost entirely in a little room that was in the very centre
of the enormous labyrinth of all the other rooms, and even in this he erected
another sort of central cabin or cupboard, lined with steel, like a safe or a
battleship. Some say that under the floor of this again was a secret hole in
the earth, no more than large enough to hold him, so that, in his anxiety to
avoid the grave, he was willing to go into a place pretty much like it. But he
went further yet. The populace had been supposed to be disarmed ever since
the suppression of the revolt, but Otto now insisted, as governments very
seldom insist, on an absolute and literal disarmament. It was carried out,
with extraordinary thoroughness and severity, by very well-organized
officials over a small and familiar area, and, so far as human strength and
science can be absolutely certain of anything, Prince Otto was absolutely
certain that nobody could introduce so much as a toy pistol into
Heiligwaldenstein.”
“Human science can never be quite certain of things like that,” said
Father Brown, still looking at the red budding of the branches over his head,
“if only because of the difficulty about definition and connotation. What is
a weapon? People have been murdered with the mildest domestic comforts;
certainly with tea-kettles, probably with tea-cosies. On the other hand, if
you showed an Ancient Briton a revolver, I doubt if he would know it was a
weapon—until it was fired into him, of course. Perhaps somebody

introduced a firearm so new that it didn’t even look like a firearm. Perhaps
it looked like a thimble or something. Was the bullet at all peculiar?”
“Not that I ever heard of,” answered Flambeau; “but my information is
fragmentary, and only comes from my old friend Grimm. He was a very
able detective in the German service, and he tried to arrest me; I arrested
him instead, and we had many interesting chats. He was in charge here of
the inquiry about Prince Otto, but I forgot to ask him anything about the
bullet. According to Grimm, what happened was this.” He paused a moment
to drain the greater part of his dark lager at a draught, and then resumed:
“On the evening in question, it seems, the Prince was expected to appear
in one of the outer rooms, because he had to receive certain visitors whom
he really wished to meet. They were geological experts sent to investigate
the old question of the alleged supply of gold from the rocks round here,
upon which (as it was said) the small city-state had so long maintained its
credit and been able to negotiate with its neighbours even under the
ceaseless bombardment of bigger armies. Hitherto it had never been found
by the most exacting inquiry which could—”
“Which could be quite certain of discovering a toy pistol,” said Father
Brown with a smile. “But what about the brother who ratted? Hadn’t he
anything to tell the Prince?”
“He always asseverated that he did not know,” replied Flambeau; “that
this was the one secret his brothers had not told him. It is only right to say
that it received some support from fragmentary words—spoken by the great
Ludwig in the hour of death, when he looked at Heinrich but pointed at
Paul, and said, ‘You have not told him...’ and was soon afterwards incapable
of speech. Anyhow, the deputation of distinguished geologists and
mineralogists from Paris and Berlin were there in the most magnificent and
appropriate dress, for there are no men who like wearing their decorations
so much as the men of science—as anybody knows who has ever been to a
soiree of the Royal Society. It was a brilliant gathering, but very late, and
gradually the Chamberlain—you saw his portrait, too: a man with black
eyebrows, serious eyes, and a meaningless sort of smile underneath—the
Chamberlain, I say, discovered there was everything there except the Prince
himself. He searched all the outer salons; then, remembering the man’s mad
fits of fear, hurried to the inmost chamber. That also was empty, but the
steel turret or cabin erected in the middle of it took some time to open.

When it did open it was empty, too. He went and looked into the hole in the
ground, which seemed deeper and somehow all the more like a grave—that
is his account, of course. And even as he did so he heard a burst of cries and
tumult in the long rooms and corridors without.
“First it was a distant din and thrill of something unthinkable on the
horizon of the crowd, even beyond the castle. Next it was a wordless
clamour startlingly close, and loud enough to be distinct if each word had
not killed the other. Next came words of a terrible clearness, coming nearer,
and next one man, rushing into the room and telling the news as briefly as
such news is told.
“Otto, Prince of Heiligwaldenstein and Grossenmark, was lying in the
dews of the darkening twilight in the woods beyond the castle, with his
arms flung out and his face flung up to the moon. The blood still pulsed
from his shattered temple and jaw, but it was the only part of him that
moved like a living thing. He was clad in his full white and yellow uniform,
as to receive his guests within, except that the sash or scarf had been
unbound and lay rather crumpled by his side. Before he could be lifted he
was dead. But, dead or alive, he was a riddle—he who had always hidden in
the inmost chamber out there in the wet woods, unarmed and alone.”
“Who found his body?” asked Father Brown.
“Some girl attached to the Court named Hedwig von something or other,”
replied his friend, “who had been out in the wood picking wild flowers.”
“Had she picked any?” asked the priest, staring rather vacantly at the veil
of the branches above him.
“Yes,” replied Flambeau. “I particularly remember that the Chamberlain,
or old Grimm or somebody, said how horrible it was, when they came up at
her call, to see a girl holding spring flowers and bending over that—that
bloody collapse. However, the main point is that before help arrived he was
dead, and the news, of course, had to be carried back to the castle. The
consternation it created was something beyond even that natural in a Court
at the fall of a potentate. The foreign visitors, especially the mining experts,
were in the wildest doubt and excitement, as well as many important
Prussian officials, and it soon began to be clear that the scheme for finding
the treasure bulked much bigger in the business than people had supposed.
Experts and officials had been promised great prizes or international
advantages, and some even said that the Prince’s secret apartments and

strong military protection were due less to fear of the populace than to the
pursuit of some private investigation of—”
“Had the flowers got long stalks?” asked Father Brown.
Flambeau stared at him. “What an odd person you are!” he said. “That’s
exactly what old Grimm said. He said the ugliest part of it, he thought—
uglier than the blood and bullet—was that the flowers were quite short,
plucked close under the head.”
“Of course,” said the priest, “when a grown up girl is really picking
flowers, she picks them with plenty of stalk. If she just pulled their heads
off, as a child does, it looks as if—” And he hesitated.
“Well?” inquired the other.
“Well, it looks rather as if she had snatched them nervously, to make an
excuse for being there after—well, after she was there.”
“I know what you’re driving at,” said Flambeau rather gloomily. “But
that and every other suspicion breaks down on the one point—the want of a
weapon. He could have been killed, as you say, with lots of other things—
even with his own military sash; but we have to explain not how he was
killed, but how he was shot. And the fact is we can’t. They had the girl most
ruthlessly searched; for, to tell the truth, she was a little suspect, though the
niece and ward of the wicked old Chamberlain, Paul Arnhold. But she was
very romantic, and was suspected of sympathy with the old revolutionary
enthusiasm in her family. All the same, however romantic you are, you
can’t imagine a big bullet into a man’s jaw or brain without using a gun or
pistol. And there was no pistol, though there were two pistol shots. I leave it
to you, my friend.”
“How do you know there were two shots?” asked the little priest.
“There was only one in his head,” said his companion, “but there was
another bullet-hole in the sash.”
Father Brown’s smooth brow became suddenly constricted. “Was the
other bullet found?” he demanded.
Flambeau started a little. “I don’t think I remember,” he said.
“Hold on! Hold on! Hold on!” cried Brown, frowning more and more,
with a quite unusual concentration of curiosity. “Don’t think me rude. Let
me think this out for a moment.”

“All right,” said Flambeau, laughing, and finished his beer. A slight
breeze stirred the budding trees and blew up into the sky cloudlets of white
and pink that seemed to make the sky bluer and the whole coloured scene
more quaint. They might have been cherubs flying home to the casements
of a sort of celestial nursery. The oldest tower of the castle, the Dragon
Tower, stood up as grotesque as the ale-mug, but as homely. Only beyond
the tower glimmered the wood in which the man had lain dead.
“What became of this Hedwig eventually?” asked the priest at last.
“She is married to General Schwartz,” said Flambeau. “No doubt you’ve
heard of his career, which was rather romantic. He had distinguished
himself even, before his exploits at Sadowa and Gravelotte; in fact, he rose
from the ranks, which is very unusual even in the smallest of the German...”
Father Brown sat up suddenly.
“Rose from the ranks!” he cried, and made a mouth as if to whistle.
“Well, well, what a queer story! What a queer way of killing a man; but I
suppose it was the only one possible. But to think of hate so patient—”
“What do you mean?” demanded the other. “In what way did they kill the
man?”
“They killed him with the sash,” said Brown carefully; and then, as
Flambeau protested: “Yes, yes, I know about the bullet. Perhaps I ought to
say he died of having a sash. I know it doesn’t sound like having a disease.”
“I suppose,” said Flambeau, “that you’ve got some notion in your head,
but it won’t easily get the bullet out of his. As I explained before, he might
easily have been strangled. But he was shot. By whom? By what?”
“He was shot by his own orders,” said the priest.
“You mean he committed suicide?”
“I didn’t say by his own wish,” replied Father Brown. “I said by his own
orders.”
“Well, anyhow, what is your theory?”
Father Brown laughed. “I am only on my holiday,” he said. “I haven’t got
any theories. Only this place reminds me of fairy stories, and, if you like,
I’ll tell you a story.”
The little pink clouds, that looked rather like sweet-stuff, had floated up
to crown the turrets of the gilt gingerbread castle, and the pink baby fingers

of the budding trees seemed spreading and stretching to reach them; the
blue sky began to take a bright violet of evening, when Father Brown
suddenly spoke again:
“It was on a dismal night, with rain still dropping from the trees and dew
already clustering, that Prince Otto of Grossenmark stepped hurriedly out of
a side door of the castle and walked swiftly into the wood. One of the
innumerable sentries saluted him, but he did not notice it. He had no wish to
be specially noticed himself. He was glad when the great trees, grey and
already greasy with rain, swallowed him up like a swamp. He had
deliberately chosen the least frequented side of his palace, but even that was
more frequented than he liked. But there was no particular chance of
officious or diplomatic pursuit, for his exit had been a sudden impulse. All
the full-dressed diplomatists he left behind were unimportant. He had
realized suddenly that he could do without them.
“His great passion was not the much nobler dread of death, but the
strange desire of gold. For this legend of the gold he had left Grossenmark
and invaded Heiligwaldenstein. For this and only this he had bought the
traitor and butchered the hero, for this he had long questioned and cross-
questioned the false Chamberlain, until he had come to the conclusion that,
touching his ignorance, the renegade really told the truth. For this he had,
somewhat reluctantly, paid and promised money on the chance of gaining
the larger amount; and for this he had stolen out of his palace like a thief in
the rain, for he had thought of another way to get the desire of his eyes, and
to get it cheap.
“Away at the upper end of a rambling mountain path to which he was
making his way, among the pillared rocks along the ridge that hangs above
the town, stood the hermitage, hardly more than a cavern fenced with thorn,
in which the third of the great brethren had long hidden himself from the
world. He, thought Prince Otto, could have no real reason for refusing to
give up the gold. He had known its place for years, and made no effort to
find it, even before his new ascetic creed had cut him off from property or
pleasures. True, he had been an enemy, but he now professed a duty of
having no enemies. Some concession to his cause, some appeal to his
principles, would probably get the mere money secret out of him. Otto was
no coward, in spite of his network of military precautions, and, in any case,
his avarice was stronger than his fears. Nor was there much cause for fear.

Since he was certain there were no private arms in the whole principality, he
was a hundred times more certain there were none in the Quaker’s little
hermitage on the hill, where he lived on herbs, with two old rustic servants,
and with no other voice of man for year after year. Prince Otto looked down
with something of a grim smile at the bright, square labyrinths of the lamp-
lit city below him. For as far as the eye could see there ran the rifles of his
friends, and not one pinch of powder for his enemies. Rifles ranked so close
even to that mountain path that a cry from him would bring the soldiers
rushing up the hill, to say nothing of the fact that the wood and ridge were
patrolled at regular intervals; rifles so far away, in the dim woods, dwarfed
by distance, beyond the river, that an enemy could not slink into the town
by any detour. And round the palace rifles at the west door and the east
door, at the north door and the south, and all along the four facades linking
them. He was safe.
“It was all the more clear when he had crested the ridge and found how
naked was the nest of his old enemy. He found himself on a small platform
of rock, broken abruptly by the three corners of precipice. Behind was the
black cave, masked with green thorn, so low that it was hard to believe that
a man could enter it. In front was the fall of the cliffs and the vast but
cloudy vision of the valley. On the small rock platform stood an old bronze
lectern or reading-stand, groaning under a great German Bible. The bronze
or copper of it had grown green with the eating airs of that exalted place,
and Otto had instantly the thought, ‘Even if they had arms, they must be
rusted by now.’ Moonrise had already made a deathly dawn behind the
crests and crags, and the rain had ceased.
“Behind the lectern, and looking across the valley, stood a very old man
in a black robe that fell as straight as the cliffs around him, but whose white
hair and weak voice seemed alike to waver in the wind. He was evidently
reading some daily lesson as part of his religious exercises. ‘They trust in
their horses...’
“‘Sir,’ said the Prince of Heiligwaldenstein, with quite unusual courtesy,
‘I should like only one word with you.’
“‘...and in their chariots,’ went on the old man weakly, ‘but we will trust
in the name of the Lord of Hosts....’ His last words were inaudible, but he
closed the book reverently and, being nearly blind, made a groping
movement and gripped the reading-stand. Instantly his two servants slipped

out of the low-browed cavern and supported him. They wore dull-black
gowns like his own, but they had not the frosty silver on the hair, nor the
frost-bitten refinement of the features. They were peasants, Croat or
Magyar, with broad, blunt visages and blinking eyes. For the first time
something troubled the Prince, but his courage and diplomatic sense stood
firm.
“‘I fear we have not met,’ he said, ‘since that awful cannonade in which
your poor brother died.’
“‘All my brothers died,’ said the old man, still looking across the valley.
Then, for one instant turning on Otto his drooping, delicate features, and the
wintry hair that seemed to drip over his eyebrows like icicles, he added:
‘You see, I am dead, too.’
“‘I hope you’ll understand,’ said the Prince, controlling himself almost to
a point of conciliation, ‘that I do not come here to haunt you, as a mere
ghost of those great quarrels. We will not talk about who was right or wrong
in that, but at least there was one point on which we were never wrong,
because you were always right. Whatever is to be said of the policy of your
family, no one for one moment imagines that you were moved by the mere
gold; you have proved yourself above the suspicion that...’
“The old man in the black gown had hitherto continued to gaze at him
with watery blue eyes and a sort of weak wisdom in his face. But when the
word ‘gold’ was said he held out his hand as if in arrest of something, and
turned away his face to the mountains.
“‘He has spoken of gold,’ he said. ‘He has spoken of things not lawful.
Let him cease to speak.’
“Otto had the vice of his Prussian type and tradition, which is to regard
success not as an incident but as a quality. He conceived himself and his
like as perpetually conquering peoples who were perpetually being
conquered. Consequently, he was ill acquainted with the emotion of
surprise, and ill prepared for the next movement, which startled and
stiffened him. He had opened his mouth to answer the hermit, when the
mouth was stopped and the voice strangled by a strong, soft gag suddenly
twisted round his head like a tourniquet. It was fully forty seconds before he
even realized that the two Hungarian servants had done it, and that they had
done it with his own military scarf.

“The old man went again weakly to his great brazen-supported Bible,
turned over the leaves, with a patience that had something horrible about it,
till he came to the Epistle of St James, and then began to read: ‘The tongue
is a little member, but—’
“Something in the very voice made the Prince turn suddenly and plunge
down the mountain-path he had climbed. He was half-way towards the
gardens of the palace before he even tried to tear the strangling scarf from
his neck and jaws. He tried again and again, and it was impossible; the men
who had knotted that gag knew the difference between what a man can do
with his hands in front of him and what he can do with his hands behind his
head. His legs were free to leap like an antelope on the mountains, his arms
were free to use any gesture or wave any signal, but he could not speak. A
dumb devil was in him.
“He had come close to the woods that walled in the castle before he had
quite realized what his wordless state meant and was meant to mean. Once
more he looked down grimly at the bright, square labyrinths of the lamp-lit
city below him, and he smiled no more. He felt himself repeating the
phrases of his former mood with a murderous irony. Far as the eye could
see ran the rifles of his friends, every one of whom would shoot him dead if
he could not answer the challenge. Rifles were so near that the wood and
ridge could be patrolled at regular intervals; therefore it was useless to hide
in the wood till morning. Rifles were ranked so far away that an enemy
could not slink into the town by any detour; therefore it was vain to return
to the city by any remote course. A cry from him would bring his soldiers
rushing up the hill. But from him no cry would come.
“The moon had risen in strengthening silver, and the sky showed in
stripes of bright, nocturnal blue between the black stripes of the pines about
the castle. Flowers of some wide and feathery sort—for he had never
noticed such things before—were at once luminous and discoloured by the
moonshine, and seemed indescribably fantastic as they clustered, as if
crawling about the roots of the trees. Perhaps his reason had been suddenly
unseated by the unnatural captivity he carried with him, but in that wood he
felt something unfathomably German—the fairy tale. He knew with half his
mind that he was drawing near to the castle of an ogre—he had forgotten
that he was the ogre. He remembered asking his mother if bears lived in the
old park at home. He stooped to pick a flower, as if it were a charm against

enchantment. The stalk was stronger than he expected, and broke with a
slight snap. Carefully trying to place it in his scarf, he heard the halloo,
‘Who goes there?’ Then he remembered the scarf was not in its usual place.
“He tried to scream and was silent. The second challenge came; and then
a shot that shrieked as it came and then was stilled suddenly by impact. Otto
of Grossenmark lay very peacefully among the fairy trees, and would do no
more harm either with gold or steel; only the silver pencil of the moon
would pick out and trace here and there the intricate ornament of his
uniform, or the old wrinkles on his brow. May God have mercy on his soul.
“The sentry who had fired, according to the strict orders of the garrison,
naturally ran forward to find some trace of his quarry. He was a private
named Schwartz, since not unknown in his profession, and what he found
was a bald man in uniform, but with his face so bandaged by a kind of mask
made of his own military scarf that nothing but open, dead eyes could be
seen, glittering stonily in the moonlight. The bullet had gone through the
gag into the jaw; that is why there was a shot-hole in the scarf, but only one
shot. Naturally, if not correctly, young Schwartz tore off the mysterious
silken mask and cast it on the grass; and then he saw whom he had slain.
“We cannot be certain of the next phase. But I incline to believe that
there was a fairy tale, after all, in that little wood, horrible as was its
occasion. Whether the young lady named Hedwig had any previous
knowledge of the soldier she saved and eventually married, or whether she
came accidentally upon the accident and their intimacy began that night, we
shall probably never know. But we can know, I fancy, that this Hedwig was
a heroine, and deserved to marry a man who became something of a hero.
She did the bold and the wise thing. She persuaded the sentry to go back to
his post, in which place there was nothing to connect him with the disaster;
he was but one of the most loyal and orderly of fifty such sentries within
call. She remained by the body and gave the alarm; and there was nothing
to connect her with the disaster either, since she had not got, and could not
have, any firearms.
“Well,” said Father Brown rising cheerfully “I hope they’re happy.”
“Where are you going?” asked his friend.
“I’m going to have another look at that portrait of the Chamberlain, the
Arnhold who betrayed his brethren,” answered the priest. “I wonder what
part—I wonder if a man is less a traitor when he is twice a traitor?”

And he ruminated long before the portrait of a white-haired man with
black eyebrows and a pink, painted sort of smile that seemed to contradict
the black warning in his eyes.

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