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Title: The Garotters
Author: William D. Howells
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Contents
The Blue Cross
The Secret Garden
The Queer Feet
The Flying Stars
The Invisible Man
The Honour of Israel Gow
The Wrong Shape
The Sins of Prince Saradine
The Hammer of God
The Eye of Apollo
The Sign of the Broken Sword
The Three Tools of Death
The Blue Cross
Between the silver ribbon of morning and the green glittering ribbon of sea,
the boat touched Harwich and let loose a swarm of folk like flies,
among whom the man we must follow was by no means conspicuous--nor wished
to be.
There was nothing notable about him,
except a slight contrast between the holiday gaiety of his clothes and the official gravity of his face.
His clothes included a slight,
pale grey jacket,
a white waistcoat,
and a silver straw hat
with a grey-blue ribbon.
His lean face was dark by contrast,
and ended in a curt black beard that looked Spanish and suggested an Elizabethan ruff.
He was smoking a cigarette
with the seriousness of an idler.
There was nothing about him
to indicate the fact that the grey jacket covered a loaded revolver,
that the white waistcoat covered a police card,
or that the straw hat covered one of the most powerful intellects in Europe.
For this was Valentin himself,
the head of the Paris police and the most famous investigator of the world;
and he was coming from Brussels
to London
to make the greatest arrest of the century.
Flambeau was in England.
The police of three countries had tracked the great criminal at last from Ghent
to Brussels,
from Brussels
to the Hook of Holland;
and it was conjectured that he would take some advantage of the unfamiliarity and confusion of the Eucharistic Congress,
then taking place in London.
Probably he would travel as some minor clerk or secretary connected
with it;
but,
of course,
Valentin could not be certain;
nobody could be certain about Flambeau.
It is many years now since this colossus of crime suddenly ceased keeping the world in a turmoil;
and when he ceased,
as they said after the death of Roland,
there was a great quiet upon the earth.
But in his best days
(I mean,
of course,
his worst)
Flambeau was a figure as statuesque and international as the Kaiser.
Almost every morning the daily paper announced that he had escaped the consequences of one extraordinary crime by committing another.
He was a Gascon of gigantic stature and bodily daring;
and the wildest tales were told of his outbursts of athletic humour;
how he turned the juge d'instruction upside down and stood him on his head,
"to clear his mind";
how he ran down the Rue de Rivoli
with a policeman under each arm.
It is due
to him
to say that his fantastic physical strength was generally employed in such bloodless though undignified scenes;
his real crimes were chiefly those of ingenious and wholesale robbery.
But each of his thefts was almost a new sin,
and would make a story by itself.
It was he who ran the great Tyrolean Dairy Company in London,
with no dairies,
no cows,
no carts,
no milk,
but
with some thousand subscribers.
These he served by the simple operation of moving the little milk cans outside people's doors
to the doors of his own customers.
It was he who had kept up an unaccountable and close correspondence
with a young lady whose whole letter-bag was intercepted,
by the extraordinary trick of photographing his messages infinitesimally small upon the slides of a microscope.
A sweeping simplicity,
however,
marked many of his experiments.
It is said that he once repainted all the numbers in a street in the dead of night merely
to divert one traveller into a trap.
It is quite certain that he invented a portable pillar-box,
which he put up at corners in quiet suburbs on the chance of strangers dropping postal orders into it.
Lastly,
he was known
to be a startling acrobat;
despite his huge figure,
he could leap like a grasshopper and melt into the tree-tops like a monkey.
Hence the great Valentin,
when he set out
to find Flambeau,
was perfectly aware that his adventures would not end when he had found him.
But how was he
to find him?
On this the great Valentin's ideas were still in process of settlement.
There was one thing which Flambeau,
with all his dexterity of disguise,
could not cover,
and that was his singular height.
If Valentin's quick eye had caught a tall apple-woman,
a tall grenadier,
or even a tolerably tall duchess,
he might have arrested them on the spot.
But all along his train there was nobody that could be a disguised Flambeau,
any more than a cat could be a disguised giraffe.
About the people on the boat he had already satisfied himself;
and the people picked up at Harwich or on the journey limited themselves
with certainty
to six.
There was a short railway official travelling up
to the terminus,
three fairly short market gardeners picked up two stations afterwards,
one very short widow lady going up from a small Essex town,
and a very short Roman Catholic priest going up from a small Essex village.
When it came
to the last case,
Valentin gave it up and almost laughed.
The little priest was so much the essence of those Eastern flats;
he had a face as round and dull as a Norfolk dumpling;
he had eyes as empty as the North Sea;
he had several brown paper parcels,
which he was quite incapable of collecting.
The Eucharistic Congress had doubtless sucked out of their local stagnation many such creatures,
blind and helpless,
like moles disinterred.
Valentin was a sceptic in the severe style of France,
and could have no love
for priests.
But he could have pity
for them,
and this one might have provoked pity in anybody.
He had a large,
shabby umbrella,
which constantly fell on the floor.
He did not seem
to know which was the right end of his return ticket.
He explained
with a moon-calf simplicity
to everybody in the carriage that he had
to be careful,
because he had something made of real silver
"with blue stones"
in one of his brown-paper parcels.
His quaint blending of Essex flatness
with saintly simplicity continuously amused the Frenchman till the priest arrived
(somehow)
at Tottenham
with all his parcels,
and came back
for his umbrella.
When he did the last,
Valentin even had the good nature
to warn him not
to take care of the silver by telling everybody about it.
But
to whomever he talked,
Valentin kept his eye open
for someone else;
he looked out steadily
for anyone,
rich or poor,
male or female,
who was well up
to six feet;
for Flambeau was four inches above it.
He alighted at Liverpool Street,
however,
quite conscientiously secure that he had not missed the criminal so far.
He then went
to Scotland Yard
to regularise his position and arrange
for help in case of need;
he then lit another cigarette and went
for a long stroll in the streets of London.
As he was walking in the streets and squares beyond Victoria,
he paused suddenly and stood.
It was a quaint,
quiet square,
very typical of London,
full of an accidental stillness.
The tall,
flat houses round looked at once prosperous and uninhabited;
the square of shrubbery in the centre looked as deserted as a green Pacific islet.
One of the four sides was much higher than the rest,
like a dais;
and the line of this side was broken by one of London's admirable accidents--a restaurant that looked as if it had strayed from Soho.
It was an unreasonably attractive object,
with dwarf plants in pots and long,
striped blinds of lemon yellow and white.
It stood specially high above the street,
and in the usual patchwork way of London,
a flight of steps from the street ran up
to meet the front door almost as a fire-escape might run up
to a first-floor window.
Valentin stood and smoked in front of the yellow-white blinds and considered them long.
The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen.
A few clouds in heaven do come together into the staring shape of one human eye.
A tree does stand up in the landscape of a doubtful journey in the exact and elaborate shape of a note of interrogation.
I have seen both these things myself within the last few days.
Nelson does die in the instant of victory;
and a man named Williams does quite accidentally murder a man named Williamson;
it sounds like a sort of infanticide.
In short,
there is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people reckoning on the prosaic may perpetually miss.
As it has been well expressed in the paradox of Poe,
wisdom should reckon on the unforeseen.
Aristide Valentin was unfathomably French;
and the French intelligence is intelligence specially and solely.
He was not
"a thinking machine";
for that is a brainless phrase of modern fatalism and materialism.
A machine only is a machine because it cannot think.
But he was a thinking man,
and a plain man at the same time.
All his wonderful successes,
that looked like conjuring,
had been gained by plodding logic,
by clear and commonplace French thought.
The French electrify the world not by starting any paradox,
they electrify it by carrying out a truism.
They carry a truism so far--as in the French Revolution.
But exactly because Valentin understood reason,
he understood the limits of reason.
Only a man who knows nothing of motors talks of motoring without petrol;
only a man who knows nothing of reason talks of reasoning without strong,
undisputed first principles.
Here he had no strong first principles.
Flambeau had been missed at Harwich;
and if he was in London at all,
he might be anything from a tall tramp on Wimbledon Common
to a tall toast-master at the Hotel Metropole.
In such a naked state of nescience,
Valentin had a view and a method of his own.
In such cases he reckoned on the unforeseen.
In such cases,
when he could not follow the train of the reasonable,
he coldly and carefully followed the train of the unreasonable.
Instead of going
to the right places--banks,
police stations,
rendezvous-- he systematically went
to the wrong places;
knocked at every empty house,
turned down every cul de sac,
went up every lane blocked
with rubbish,
went round every crescent that led him uselessly out of the way.
He defended this crazy course quite logically.
He said that if one had a clue this was the worst way;
but if one had no clue at all it was the best,
because there was just the chance that any oddity that caught the eye of the pursuer might be the same that had caught the eye of the pursued.
Somewhere a man must begin,
and it had better be just where another man might stop.
Something about that flight of steps up
to the shop,
something about the quietude and quaintness of the restaurant,
roused all the detective's rare romantic fancy and made him resolve
to strike at random.
He went up the steps,
and sitting down at a table by the window,
asked
for a cup of black coffee.
It was half-way through the morning,
and he had not breakfasted;
the slight litter of other breakfasts stood about on the table
to remind him of his hunger;
and adding a poached egg
to his order,
he proceeded musingly
to shake some white sugar into his coffee,
thinking all the time about Flambeau.
He remembered how Flambeau had escaped,
once by a pair of nail scissors,
and once by a house on fire;
once by having
to pay
for an unstamped letter,
and once by getting people
to look through a telescope at a comet that might destroy the world.
He thought his detective brain as good as the criminal's,
which was true.
But he fully realised the disadvantage.
"The criminal is the creative artist;
the detective only the critic,"
he said
with a sour smile,
and lifted his coffee cup
to his lips slowly,
and put it down very quickly.
He had put salt in it.
He looked at the vessel from which the silvery powder had come;
it was certainly a sugar-basin;
as unmistakably meant
for sugar as a champagne-bottle
for champagne.
He wondered why they should keep salt in it.
He looked
to see if there were any more orthodox vessels.
Yes;
there were two salt-cellars quite full.
Perhaps there was some speciality in the condiment in the salt-cellars.
He tasted it;
it was sugar.
Then he looked round at the restaurant
with a refreshed air of interest,
to see if there were any other traces of that singular artistic taste which puts the sugar in the salt-cellars and the salt in the sugar-basin.
Except
for an odd splash of some dark fluid on one of the white-papered walls,
the whole place appeared neat,
cheerful and ordinary.
He rang the bell
for the waiter.
When that official hurried up,
fuzzy-haired and somewhat blear-eyed at that early hour,
the detective
(who was not without an appreciation of the simpler forms of humour)
asked him
to taste the sugar and see if it was up
to the high reputation of the hotel.
The result was that the waiter yawned suddenly and woke up.
"Do you play this delicate joke on your customers every morning?"
inquired Valentin.
"Does changing the salt and sugar never pall on you as a jest?"
The waiter,
when this irony grew clearer,
stammeringly assured him that the establishment had certainly no such intention;
it must be a most curious mistake.
He picked up the sugar-basin and looked at it;
he picked up the salt-cellar and looked at that,
his face growing more and more bewildered.
At last he abruptly excused himself,
and hurrying away,
returned in a few seconds
with the proprietor.
The proprietor also examined the sugar-basin and then the salt-cellar;
the proprietor also looked bewildered.
Suddenly the waiter seemed
to grow inarticulate
with a rush of words.
"I zink,"
he stuttered eagerly,
"I zink it is those two clergy-men."
"What two clergymen?"
"The two clergymen,"
said the waiter,
"that threw soup at the wall."
"Threw soup at the wall?"
repeated Valentin,
feeling sure this must be some singular Italian metaphor.
"Yes,
yes,"
said the attendant excitedly,
and pointed at the dark splash on the white paper;
"threw it over there on the wall."
Valentin looked his query at the proprietor,
who came
to his rescue
with fuller reports.
"Yes,
sir,"
he said,
"it's quite true,
though I don't suppose it has anything
to do
with the sugar and salt.
Two clergymen came in and drank soup here very early,
as soon as the shutters were taken down.
They were both very quiet,
respectable people;
one of them paid the bill and went out;
the other,
who seemed a slower coach altogether,
was some minutes longer getting his things together.
But he went at last.
Only,
the instant before he stepped into the street he deliberately picked up his cup,
which he had only half emptied,
and threw the soup slap on the wall.
I was in the back room myself,
and so was the waiter;
so I could only rush out in time
to find the wall splashed and the shop empty.
It don't do any particular damage,
but it was confounded cheek;
and I tried
to catch the men in the street.
They were too far off though;
I only noticed they went round the next corner into Carstairs Street."
The detective was on his feet,
hat settled and stick in hand.
He had already decided that in the universal darkness of his mind he could only follow the first odd finger that pointed;
and this finger was odd enough.
Paying his bill and clashing the glass doors behind him,
he was soon swinging round into the other street.
It was fortunate that even in such fevered moments his eye was cool and quick.
Something in a shop-front went by him like a mere flash;
yet he went back
to look at it.
The shop was a popular greengrocer and fruiterer's,
an array of goods set out in the open air and plainly ticketed
with their names and prices.
In the two most prominent compartments were two heaps,
of oranges and of nuts respectively.
On the heap of nuts lay a scrap of cardboard,
on which was written in bold,
blue chalk,
"Best tangerine oranges,
two a penny."
On the oranges was the equally clear and exact description,
"Finest Brazil nuts,
4d.
a lb."
M.
Valentin looked at these two placards and fancied he had met this highly subtle form of humour before,
and that somewhat recently.
He drew the attention of the red-faced fruiterer,
who was looking rather sullenly up and down the street,
to this inaccuracy in his advertisements.
The fruiterer said nothing,
but sharply put each card into its proper place.
The detective,
leaning elegantly on his walking-cane,
continued
to scrutinise the shop.
At last he said,
"Pray excuse my apparent irrelevance,
my good sir,
but I should like
to ask you a question in experimental psychology and the association of ideas."
The red-faced shopman regarded him
with an eye of menace;
but he continued gaily,
swinging his cane,
"Why,"
he pursued,
"why are two tickets wrongly placed in a greengrocer's shop like a shovel hat that has come
to London
for a holiday?
Or,
in case I do not make myself clear,
what is the mystical association which connects the idea of nuts marked as oranges
with the idea of two clergymen,
one tall and the other short?"
The eyes of the tradesman stood out of his head like a snail's;
he really seemed
for an instant likely
to fling himself upon the stranger.
At last he stammered angrily:
"I don't know what you
'ave
to do
with it,
but if you're one of their friends,
you can tell
'em from me that I'll knock their silly
'eads off,
parsons or no parsons,
if they upset my apples again."
"Indeed?"
asked the detective,
with great sympathy.
"Did they upset your apples?"
"One of
'em did,"
said the heated shopman;
"rolled
'em all over the street.
I'd
'ave caught the fool but
for havin'
to pick
'em up."
"Which way did these parsons go?"
asked Valentin.
"Up that second road on the left-hand side,
and then across the square,"
said the other promptly.
"Thanks,"
replied Valentin,
and vanished like a fairy.
On the other side of the second square he found a policeman,
and said:
"This is urgent,
constable;
have you seen two clergymen in shovel hats?"
The policeman began
to chuckle heavily.
"I
'ave,
sir;
and if you arst me,
one of
'em was drunk.
He stood in the middle of the road that bewildered that--"
"Which way did they go?"
snapped Valentin.
"They took one of them yellow buses over there,"
answered the man;
"them that go
to Hampstead."
Valentin produced his official card and said very rapidly:
"Call up two of your men
to come
with me in pursuit,"
and crossed the road
with such contagious energy that the ponderous policeman was moved
to almost agile obedience.
In a minute and a half the French detective was joined on the opposite pavement by an inspector and a man in plain clothes.
"Well,
sir,"
began the former,
with smiling importance,
"and what may--?"
Valentin pointed suddenly
with his cane.
"I'll tell you on the top of that omnibus,"
he said,
and was darting and dodging across the tangle of the traffic.
When all three sank panting on the top seats of the yellow vehicle,
the inspector said:
"We could go four times as quick in a taxi."
"Quite true,"
replied their leader placidly,
"if we only had an idea of where we were going."
"Well,
where are you going?"
asked the other,
staring.
Valentin smoked frowningly
for a few seconds;
then,
removing his cigarette,
he said:
"If you know what a man's doing,
get in front of him;
but if you want
to guess what he's doing,
keep behind him.
Stray when he strays;
stop when he stops;
travel as slowly as he.
Then you may see what he saw and may act as he acted.
All we can do is
to keep our eyes skinned
for a queer thing."
"What sort of queer thing do you mean?"
asked the inspector.
"Any sort of queer thing,"
answered Valentin,
and relapsed into obstinate silence.
The yellow omnibus crawled up the northern roads
for what seemed like hours on end;
the great detective would not explain further,
and perhaps his assistants felt a silent and growing doubt of his errand.
Perhaps,
also,
they felt a silent and growing desire
for lunch,
for the hours crept long past the normal luncheon hour,
and the long roads of the North London suburbs seemed
to shoot out into length after length like an infernal telescope.
It was one of those journeys on which a man perpetually feels that now at last he must have come
to the end of the universe,
and then finds he has only come
to the beginning of Tufnell Park.
London died away in draggled taverns and dreary scrubs,
and then was unaccountably born again in blazing high streets and blatant hotels.
It was like passing through thirteen separate vulgar cities all just touching each other.
But though the winter twilight was already threatening the road ahead of them,
the Parisian detective still sat silent and watchful,
eyeing the frontage of the streets that slid by on either side.
By the time they had left Camden Town behind,
the policemen were nearly asleep;
at least,
they gave something like a jump as Valentin leapt erect,
struck a hand on each man's shoulder,
and shouted
to the driver
to stop.
They tumbled down the steps into the road without realising why they had been dislodged;
when they looked round
for enlightenment they found Valentin triumphantly pointing his finger towards a window on the left side of the road.
It was a large window,
forming part of the long facade of a gilt and palatial public-house;
it was the part reserved
for respectable dining,
and labelled
"Restaurant."
This window,
like all the rest along the frontage of the hotel,
was of frosted and figured glass;
but in the middle of it was a big,
black smash,
like a star in the ice.
"Our cue at last,"
cried Valentin,
waving his stick;
"the place
with the broken window."
"What window?
What cue?"
asked his principal assistant.
"Why,
what proof is there that this has anything
to do
with them?"
Valentin almost broke his bamboo stick
with rage.
"Proof!"
he cried.
"Good God! the man is looking
for proof! Why,
of course,
the chances are twenty
to one that it has nothing
to do
with them.
But what else can we do?
Don't you see we must either follow one wild possibility or else go home
to bed?"
He banged his way into the restaurant,
followed by his companions,
and they were soon seated at a late luncheon at a little table,
and looked at the star of smashed glass from the inside.
Not that it was very informative
to them even then.
"Got your window broken,
I see,"
said Valentin
to the waiter as he paid the bill.
"Yes,
sir,"
answered the attendant,
bending busily over the change,
to which Valentin silently added an enormous tip.
The waiter straightened himself
with mild but unmistakable animation.
"Ah,
yes,
sir,"
he said.
"Very odd thing,
that,
sir."
"Indeed?"
Tell us about it,"
said the detective
with careless curiosity.
"Well,
two gents in black came in,"
said the waiter;
"two of those foreign parsons that are running about.
They had a cheap and quiet little lunch,
and one of them paid
for it and went out.
The other was just going out
to join him when I looked at my change again and found he'd paid me more than three times too much.
`Here,'
I says
to the chap who was nearly out of the door,
`you've paid too much.'
`Oh,'
he says,
very cool,
`have we?'
'Yes,'
I says,
and picks up the bill
to show him.
Well,
that was a knock-out."
"What do you mean?"
asked his interlocutor.
"Well,
I'd have sworn on seven Bibles that I'd put 4s.
on that bill.
But now I saw I'd put 14s.,
as plain as paint."
"Well?"
cried Valentin,
moving slowly,
but
with burning eyes,
"and then?"
"The parson at the door he says all serene,
`Sorry
to confuse your accounts,
but it'll pay
for the window.'
`What window?'
I says.
`The one I'm going
to break,'
he says,
and smashed that blessed pane
with his umbrella."
All three inquirers made an exclamation;
and the inspector said under his breath,
"Are we after escaped lunatics?"
The waiter went on
with some relish
for the ridiculous story:
"I was so knocked silly
for a second,
I couldn't do anything.
The man marched out of the place and joined his friend just round the corner.
Then they went so quick up Bullock Street that I couldn't catch them,
though I ran round the bars
to do it."
"Bullock Street,"
said the detective,
and shot up that thoroughfare as quickly as the strange couple he pursued.
Their journey now took them through bare brick ways like tunnels;
streets
with few lights and even
with few windows;
streets that seemed built out of the blank backs of everything and everywhere.
Dusk was deepening,
and it was not easy even
for the London policemen
to guess in what exact direction they were treading.
The inspector,
however,
was pretty certain that they would eventually strike some part of Hampstead Heath.
Abruptly one bulging gas-lit window broke the blue twilight like a bull's-eye lantern;
and Valentin stopped an instant before a little garish sweetstuff shop.
After an instant's hesitation he went in;
he stood amid the gaudy colours of the confectionery
with entire gravity and bought thirteen chocolate cigars
with a certain care.
He was clearly preparing an opening;
but he did not need one.
An angular,
elderly young woman in the shop had regarded his elegant appearance
with a merely automatic inquiry;
but when she saw the door behind him blocked
with the blue uniform of the inspector,
her eyes seemed
to wake up.
"Oh,"
she said,
"if you've come about that parcel,
I've sent it off already."
"Parcel?"
repeated Valentin;
and it was his turn
to look inquiring.
"I mean the parcel the gentleman left--the clergyman gentleman."
"For goodness'
sake,"
said Valentin,
leaning forward
with his first real confession of eagerness,
"for Heaven's sake tell us what happened exactly."
"Well,"
said the woman a little doubtfully,
"the clergymen came in about half an hour ago and bought some peppermints and talked a bit,
and then went off towards the Heath.
But a second after,
one of them runs back into the shop and says,
`Have I left a parcel!'
Well,
I looked everywhere and couldn't see one;
so he says,
`Never mind;
but if it should turn up,
please post it
to this address,'
and he left me the address and a shilling
for my trouble.
And sure enough,
though I thought I'd looked everywhere,
I found he'd left a brown paper parcel,
so I posted it
to the place he said.
I can't remember the address now;
it was somewhere in Westminster.
But as the thing seemed so important,
I thought perhaps the police had come about it."
"So they have,"
said Valentin shortly.
"Is Hampstead Heath near here?"
"Straight on
for fifteen minutes,"
said the woman,
"and you'll come right out on the open."
Valentin sprang out of the shop and began
to run.
The other detectives followed him at a reluctant trot.
The street they threaded was so narrow and shut in by shadows that when they came out unexpectedly into the void common and vast sky they were startled
to find the evening still so light and clear.
A perfect dome of peacock-green sank into gold amid the blackening trees and the dark violet distances.
The glowing green tint was just deep enough
to pick out in points of crystal one or two stars.
All that was left of the daylight lay in a golden glitter across the edge of Hampstead and that popular hollow which is called the Vale of Health.
The holiday makers who roam this region had not wholly dispersed;
a few couples sat shapelessly on benches;
and here and there a distant girl still shrieked in one of the swings.
The glory of heaven deepened and darkened around the sublime vulgarity of man;
and standing on the slope and looking across the valley,
Valentin beheld the thing which he sought.
Among the black and breaking groups in that distance was one especially black which did not break--a group of two figures clerically clad.
Though they seemed as small as insects,
Valentin could see that one of them was much smaller than the other.
Though the other had a student's stoop and an inconspicuous manner,
he could see that the man was well over six feet high.
He shut his teeth and went forward,
whirling his stick impatiently.
By the time he had substantially diminished the distance and magnified the two black figures as in a vast microscope,
he had perceived something else;
something which startled him,
and yet which he had somehow expected.
Whoever was the tall priest,
there could be no doubt about the identity of the short one.
It was his friend of the Harwich train,
the stumpy little cure of Essex whom he had warned about his brown paper parcels.
Now,
so far as this went,
everything fitted in finally and rationally enough.
Valentin had learned by his inquiries that morning that a Father Brown from Essex was bringing up a silver cross
with sapphires,
a relic of considerable value,
to show some of the foreign priests at the congress.
This undoubtedly was the
"silver
with blue stones";
and Father Brown undoubtedly was the little greenhorn in the train.
Now there was nothing wonderful about the fact that what Valentin had found out Flambeau had also found out;
Flambeau found out everything.
Also there was nothing wonderful in the fact that when Flambeau heard of a sapphire cross he should try
to steal it;
that was the most natural thing in all natural history.
And most certainly there was nothing wonderful about the fact that Flambeau should have it all his own way
with such a silly sheep as the man
with the umbrella and the parcels.
He was the sort of man whom anybody could lead on a string
to the North Pole;
it was not surprising that an actor like Flambeau,
dressed as another priest,
could lead him
to Hampstead Heath.
So far the crime seemed clear enough;
and while the detective pitied the priest
for his helplessness,
he almost despised Flambeau
for condescending
to so gullible a victim.
But when Valentin thought of all that had happened in between,
of all that had led him
to his triumph,
he racked his brains
for the smallest rhyme or reason in it.
What had the stealing of a blue-and-silver cross from a priest from Essex
to do
with chucking soup at wall paper?
What had it
to do
with calling nuts oranges,
or
with paying
for windows first and breaking them afterwards?
He had come
to the end of his chase;
yet somehow he had missed the middle of it.
When he failed
(which was seldom),
he had usually grasped the clue,
but nevertheless missed the criminal.
Here he had grasped the criminal,
but still he could not grasp the clue.
The two figures that they followed were crawling like black flies across the huge green contour of a hill.
They were evidently sunk in conversation,
and perhaps did not notice where they were going;
but they were certainly going
to the wilder and more silent heights of the Heath.
As their pursuers gained on them,
the latter had
to use the undignified attitudes of the deer-stalker,
to crouch behind clumps of trees and even
to crawl prostrate in deep grass.
By these ungainly ingenuities the hunters even came close enough
to the quarry
to hear the murmur of the discussion,
but no word could be distinguished except the word
"reason"
recurring frequently in a high and almost childish voice.
Once over an abrupt dip of land and a dense tangle of thickets,
the detectives actually lost the two figures they were following.
They did not find the trail again
for an agonising ten minutes,
and then it led round the brow of a great dome of hill overlooking an amphitheatre of rich and desolate sunset scenery.
Under a tree in this commanding yet neglected spot was an old ramshackle wooden seat.
On this seat sat the two priests still in serious speech together.
The gorgeous green and gold still clung
to the darkening horizon;
but the dome above was turning slowly from peacock-green
to peacock-blue,
and the stars detached themselves more and more like solid jewels.
Mutely motioning
to his followers,
Valentin contrived
to creep up behind the big branching tree,
and,
standing there in deathly silence,
heard the words of the strange priests
for the first time.
After he had listened
for a minute and a half,
he was gripped by a devilish doubt.
Perhaps he had dragged the two English policemen
to the wastes of a nocturnal heath on an errand no saner than seeking figs on its thistles.
For the two priests were talking exactly like priests,
piously,
with learning and leisure,
about the most aerial enigmas of theology.
The little Essex priest spoke the more simply,
with his round face turned
to the strengthening stars;
the other talked
with his head bowed,
as if he were not even worthy
to look at them.
But no more innocently clerical conversation could have been heard in any white Italian cloister or black Spanish cathedral.
The first he heard was the tail of one of Father Brown's sentences,
which ended:
"...
what they really meant in the Middle Ages by the heavens being incorruptible."
The taller priest nodded his bowed head and said:
"Ah,
yes,
these modern infidels appeal
to their reason;
but who can look at those millions of worlds and not feel that there may well be wonderful universes above us where reason is utterly unreasonable?"
"No,"
said the other priest;
"reason is always reasonable,
even in the last limbo,
in the lost borderland of things.
I know that people charge the Church
with lowering reason,
but it is just the other way.
Alone on earth,
the Church makes reason really supreme.
Alone on earth,
the Church affirms that God himself is bound by reason."
The other priest raised his austere face
to the spangled sky and said:
"Yet who knows if in that infinite universe--?"
"Only infinite physically,"
said the little priest,
turning sharply in his seat,
"not infinite in the sense of escaping from the laws of truth."
Valentin behind his tree was tearing his fingernails
with silent fury.
He seemed almost
to hear the sniggers of the English detectives whom he had brought so far on a fantastic guess only
to listen
to the metaphysical gossip of two mild old parsons.
In his impatience he lost the equally elaborate answer of the tall cleric,
and when he listened again it was again Father Brown who was speaking:
"Reason and justice grip the remotest and the loneliest star.
Look at those stars.
Don't they look as if they were single diamonds and sapphires?
Well,
you can imagine any mad botany or geology you please.
Think of forests of adamant
with leaves of brilliants.
Think the moon is a blue moon,
a single elephantine sapphire.
But don't fancy that all that frantic astronomy would make the smallest difference
to the reason and justice of conduct.
On plains of opal,
under cliffs cut out of pearl,
you would still find a notice-board,
`Thou shalt not steal.'
"
Valentin was just in the act of rising from his rigid and crouching attitude and creeping away as softly as might be,
felled by the one great folly of his life.
But something in the very silence of the tall priest made him stop until the latter spoke.
When at last he did speak,
he said simply,
his head bowed and his hands on his knees:
"Well,
I think that other worlds may perhaps rise higher than our reason.
The mystery of heaven is unfathomable,
and I
for one can only bow my head."
Then,
with brow yet bent and without changing by the faintest shade his attitude or voice,
he added:
"Just hand over that sapphire cross of yours,
will you?
We're all alone here,
and I could pull you
to pieces like a straw doll."
The utterly unaltered voice and attitude added a strange violence
to that shocking change of speech.
But the guarder of the relic only seemed
to turn his head by the smallest section of the compass.
He seemed still
to have a somewhat foolish face turned
to the stars.
Perhaps he had not understood.
Or,
perhaps,
he had understood and sat rigid
with terror.
"Yes,"
said the tall priest,
in the same low voice and in the same still posture,
"yes,
I am Flambeau."
Then,
after a pause,
he said:
"Come,
will you give me that cross?"
"No,"
said the other,
and the monosyllable had an odd sound.
Flambeau suddenly flung off all his pontifical pretensions.
The great robber leaned back in his seat and laughed low but long.
"No,"
he cried,
"you won't give it me,
you proud prelate.
You won't give it me,
you little celibate simpleton.
Shall I tell you why you won't give it me?
Because I've got it already in my own breast-pocket."
The small man from Essex turned what seemed
to be a dazed face in the dusk,
and said,
with the timid eagerness of
"The Private Secretary":
"Are--are you sure?"
Flambeau yelled
with delight.
"Really,
you're as good as a three-act farce,"
he cried.
"Yes,
you turnip,
I am quite sure.
I had the sense
to make a duplicate of the right parcel,
and now,
my friend,
you've got the duplicate and I've got the jewels.
An old dodge,
Father Brown-- a very old dodge."
"Yes,"
said Father Brown,
and passed his hand through his hair
with the same strange vagueness of manner.
"Yes,
I've heard of it before."
The colossus of crime leaned over
to the little rustic priest
with a sort of sudden interest.
"You have heard of it?"
he asked.
"Where have you heard of it?"
"Well,
I mustn't tell you his name,
of course,"
said the little man simply.
"He was a penitent,
you know.
He had lived prosperously
for about twenty years entirely on duplicate brown paper parcels.
And so,
you see,
when I began
to suspect you,
I thought of this poor chap's way of doing it at once."
"Began
to suspect me?"
repeated the outlaw
with increased intensity.
"Did you really have the gumption
to suspect me just because I brought you up
to this bare part of the heath?"
"No,
no,"
said Brown
with an air of apology.
"You see,
I suspected you when we first met.
It's that little bulge up the sleeve where you people have the spiked bracelet."
"How in Tartarus,"
cried Flambeau,
"did you ever hear of the spiked bracelet?"
"Oh,
one's little flock,
you know!"
said Father Brown,
arching his eyebrows rather blankly.
"When I was a curate in Hartlepool,
there were three of them
with spiked bracelets.
So,
as I suspected you from the first,
don't you see,
I made sure that the cross should go safe,
anyhow.
I'm afraid I watched you,
you know.
So at last I saw you change the parcels.
Then,
don't you see,
I changed them back again.
And then I left the right one behind."
"Left it behind?"
repeated Flambeau,
and
for the first time there was another note in his voice beside his triumph.
"Well,
it was like this,"
said the little priest,
speaking in the same unaffected way.
"I went back
to that sweet-shop and asked if I'd left a parcel,
and gave them a particular address if it turned up.
Well,
I knew I hadn't;
but when I went away again I did.
So,
instead of running after me
with that valuable parcel,
they have sent it flying
to a friend of mine in Westminster."
Then he added rather sadly:
"I learnt that,
too,
from a poor fellow in Hartlepool.
He used
to do it
with handbags he stole at railway stations,
but he's in a monastery now.
Oh,
one gets
to know,
you know,"
he added,
rubbing his head again
with the same sort of desperate apology.
"We can't help being priests.
People come and tell us these things."
Flambeau tore a brown-paper parcel out of his inner pocket and rent it in pieces.
There was nothing but paper and sticks of lead inside it.
He sprang
to his feet
with a gigantic gesture,
and cried:
"I don't believe you.
I don't believe a bumpkin like you could manage all that.
I believe you've still got the stuff on you,
and if you don't give it up--why,
we're all alone,
and I'll take it by force!"
"No,"
said Father Brown simply,
and stood up also,
"you won't take it by force.
First,
because I really haven't still got it.
And,
second,
because we are not alone."
Flambeau stopped in his stride forward.
"Behind that tree,"
said Father Brown,
pointing,
"are two strong policemen and the greatest detective alive.
How did they come here,
do you ask?
Why,
I brought them,
of course! How did I do it?
Why,
I'll tell you if you like! Lord bless you,
we have
to know twenty such things when we work among the criminal classes! Well,
I wasn't sure you were a thief,
and it would never do
to make a scandal against one of our own clergy.
So I just tested you
to see if anything would make you show yourself.
A man generally makes a small scene if he finds salt in his coffee;
if he doesn't,
he has some reason
for keeping quiet.
I changed the salt and sugar,
and you kept quiet.
A man generally objects if his bill is three times too big.
If he pays it,
he has some motive
for passing unnoticed.
I altered your bill,
and you paid it."
The world seemed waiting
for Flambeau
to leap like a tiger.
But he was held back as by a spell;
he was stunned
with the utmost curiosity.
"Well,"
went on Father Brown,
with lumbering lucidity,
"as you wouldn't leave any tracks
for the police,
of course somebody had to.
At every place we went to,
I took care
to do something that would get us talked about
for the rest of the day.
I didn't do much harm--a splashed wall,
spilt apples,
a broken window;
but I saved the cross,
as the cross will always be saved.
It is at Westminster by now.
I rather wonder you didn't stop it
with the Donkey's Whistle."
"With the what?"
asked Flambeau.
"I'm glad you've never heard of it,"
said the priest,
making a face.
"It's a foul thing.
I'm sure you're too good a man
for a Whistler.
I couldn't have countered it even
with the Spots myself;
I'm not strong enough in the legs."
"What on earth are you talking about?"
asked the other.
"Well,
I did think you'd know the Spots,"
said Father Brown,
agreeably surprised.
"Oh,
you can't have gone so very wrong yet!"
"How in blazes do you know all these horrors?"
cried Flambeau.
The shadow of a smile crossed the round,
simple face of his clerical opponent.
"Oh,
by being a celibate simpleton,
I suppose,"
he said.
"Has it never struck you that a man who does next
to nothing but hear men's real sins is not likely
to be wholly unaware of human evil?
But,
as a matter of fact,
another part of my trade,
too,
made me sure you weren't a priest."
"What?"
asked the thief,
almost gaping.
"You attacked reason,"
said Father Brown.
"It's bad theology."
And even as he turned away
to collect his property,
the three policemen came out from under the twilight trees.
Flambeau was an artist and a sportsman.
He stepped back and swept Valentin a great bow.
"Do not bow
to me,
mon ami,"
said Valentin
with silver clearness.
"Let us both bow
to our master."
And they both stood an instant uncovered while the little Essex priest blinked about
for his umbrella.
The Secret Garden Aristide Valentin,
Chief of the Paris Police,
was late
for his dinner,
and some of his guests began
to arrive before him.
These were,
however,
reassured by his confidential servant,
Ivan,
the old man
with a scar,
and a face almost as grey as his moustaches,
who always sat at a table in the entrance hall--a hall hung
with weapons.
Valentin's house was perhaps as peculiar and celebrated as its master.
It was an old house,
with high walls and tall poplars almost overhanging the Seine;
but the oddity--and perhaps the police value--of its architecture was this:
that there was no ultimate exit at all except through this front door,
which was guarded by Ivan and the armoury.
The garden was large and elaborate,
and there were many exits from the house into the garden.
But there was no exit from the garden into the world outside;
all round it ran a tall,
smooth,
unscalable wall
with special spikes at the top;
no bad garden,
perhaps,
for a man
to reflect in whom some hundred criminals had sworn
to kill.
As Ivan explained
to the guests,
their host had telephoned that he was detained
for ten minutes.
He was,
in truth,
making some last arrangements about executions and such ugly things;
and though these duties were rootedly repulsive
to him,
he always performed them
with precision.
Ruthless in the pursuit of criminals,
he was very mild about their punishment.
Since he had been supreme over French--and largely over European--policial methods,
his great influence had been honourably used
for the mitigation of sentences and the purification of prisons.
He was one of the great humanitarian French freethinkers;
and the only thing wrong
with them is that they make mercy even colder than justice.
When Valentin arrived he was already dressed in black clothes and the red rosette--an elegant figure,
his dark beard already streaked
with grey.
He went straight through his house
to his study,
which opened on the grounds behind.
The garden door of it was open,
and after he had carefully locked his box in its official place,
he stood
for a few seconds at the open door looking out upon the garden.
A sharp moon was fighting
with the flying rags and tatters of a storm,
and Valentin regarded it
with a wistfulness unusual in such scientific natures as his.
Perhaps such scientific natures have some psychic prevision of the most tremendous problem of their lives.
From any such occult mood,
at least,
he quickly recovered,
for he knew he was late,
and that his guests had already begun
to arrive.
A glance at his drawing-room when he entered it was enough
to make certain that his principal guest was not there,
at any rate.
He saw all the other pillars of the little party;
he saw Lord Galloway,
the English Ambassador--a choleric old man
with a russet face like an apple,
wearing the blue ribbon of the Garter.
He saw Lady Galloway,
slim and threadlike,
with silver hair and a face sensitive and superior.
He saw her daughter,
Lady Margaret Graham,
a pale and pretty girl
with an elfish face and copper-coloured hair.
He saw the Duchess of Mont St. Michel,
black-eyed and opulent,
and
with her her two daughters,
black-eyed and opulent also.
He saw Dr. Simon,
a typical French scientist,
with glasses,
a pointed brown beard,
and a forehead barred
with those parallel wrinkles which are the penalty of superciliousness,
since they come through constantly elevating the eyebrows.
He saw Father Brown,
of Cobhole,
in Essex,
whom he had recently met in England.
He saw--perhaps
with more interest than any of these--a tall man in uniform,
who had bowed
to the Galloways without receiving any very hearty acknowledgment,
and who now advanced alone
to pay his respects
to his host.
This was Commandant O'Brien,
of the French Foreign Legion.
He was a slim yet somewhat swaggering figure,
clean-shaven,
dark-haired,
and blue-eyed,
and,
as seemed natural in an officer of that famous regiment of victorious failures and successful suicides,
he had an air at once dashing and melancholy.
He was by birth an Irish gentleman,
and in boyhood had known the Galloways--especially Margaret Graham.
He had left his country after some crash of debts,
and now expressed his complete freedom from British etiquette by swinging about in uniform,
sabre and spurs.
When he bowed
to the Ambassador's family,
Lord and Lady Galloway bent stiffly,
and Lady Margaret looked away.
But
for whatever old causes such people might be interested in each other,
their distinguished host was not specially interested in them.
No one of them at least was in his eyes the guest of the evening.
Valentin was expecting,
for special reasons,
a man of world-wide fame,
whose friendship he had secured during some of his great detective tours and triumphs in the United States.
He was expecting Julius K.
Brayne,
that multi-millionaire whose colossal and even crushing endowments of small religions have occasioned so much easy sport and easier solemnity
for the American and English papers.
Nobody could quite make out whether Mr. Brayne was an atheist or a Mormon or a Christian Scientist;
but he was ready
to pour money into any intellectual vessel,
so long as it was an untried vessel.
One of his hobbies was
to wait
for the American Shakespeare--a hobby more patient than angling.
He admired Walt Whitman,
but thought that Luke P.
Tanner,
of Paris,
Pa.,
was more
"progressive"
than Whitman any day.
He liked anything that he thought
"progressive."
He thought Valentin
"progressive,"
thereby doing him a grave injustice.
The solid appearance of Julius K.
Brayne in the room was as decisive as a dinner bell.
He had this great quality,
which very few of us can claim,
that his presence was as big as his absence.
He was a huge fellow,
as fat as he was tall,
clad in complete evening black,
without so much relief as a watch-chain or a ring.
His hair was white and well brushed back like a German's;
his face was red,
fierce and cherubic,
with one dark tuft under the lower lip that threw up that otherwise infantile visage
with an effect theatrical and even Mephistophelean.
Not long,
however,
did that salon merely stare at the celebrated American;
his lateness had already become a domestic problem,
and he was sent
with all speed into the dining-room
with Lady Galloway on his arm.
Except on one point the Galloways were genial and casual enough.
So long as Lady Margaret did not take the arm of that adventurer O'Brien,
her father was quite satisfied;
and she had not done so,
she had decorously gone in
with Dr. Simon.
Nevertheless,
old Lord Galloway was restless and almost rude.
He was diplomatic enough during dinner,
but when,
over the cigars,
three of the younger men--Simon the doctor,
Brown the priest,
and the detrimental O'Brien,
the exile in a foreign uniform--all melted away
to mix
with the ladies or smoke in the conservatory,
then the English diplomatist grew very undiplomatic indeed.
He was stung every sixty seconds
with the thought that the scamp O'Brien might be signalling
to Margaret somehow;
he did not attempt
to imagine how.
He was left over the coffee
with Brayne,
the hoary Yankee who believed in all religions,
and Valentin,
the grizzled Frenchman who believed in none.
They could argue
with each other,
but neither could appeal
to him.
After a time this
"progressive"
logomachy had reached a crisis of tedium;
Lord Galloway got up also and sought the drawing-room.
He lost his way in long passages
for some six or eight minutes:
till he heard the high-pitched,
didactic voice of the doctor,
and then the dull voice of the priest,
followed by general laughter.
They also,
he thought
with a curse,
were probably arguing about
"science and religion."
But the instant he opened the salon door he saw only one thing--he saw what was not there.
He saw that Commandant O'Brien was absent,
and that Lady Margaret was absent too.
Rising impatiently from the drawing-room,
as he had from the dining-room,
he stamped along the passage once more.
His notion of protecting his daughter from the Irish-Algerian n'er-do-weel had become something central and even mad in his mind.
As he went towards the back of the house,
where was Valentin's study,
he was surprised
to meet his daughter,
who swept past
with a white,
scornful face,
which was a second enigma.
If she had been
with O'Brien,
where was O'Brien! If she had not been
with O'Brien,
where had she been?
With a sort of senile and passionate suspicion he groped his way
to the dark back parts of the mansion,
and eventually found a servants'
entrance that opened on
to the garden.
The moon
with her scimitar had now ripped up and rolled away all the storm-wrack.
The argent light lit up all four corners of the garden.
A tall figure in blue was striding across the lawn towards the study door;
a glint of moonlit silver on his facings picked him out as Commandant O'Brien.
He vanished through the French windows into the house,
leaving Lord Galloway in an indescribable temper,
at once virulent and vague.
The blue-and-silver garden,
like a scene in a theatre,
seemed
to taunt him
with all that tyrannic tenderness against which his worldly authority was at war.
The length and grace of the Irishman's stride enraged him as if he were a rival instead of a father;
the moonlight maddened him.
He was trapped as if by magic into a garden of troubadours,
a Watteau fairyland;
and,
willing
to shake off such amorous imbecilities by speech,
he stepped briskly after his enemy.
As he did so he tripped over some tree or stone in the grass;
looked down at it first
with irritation and then a second time
with curiosity.
The next instant the moon and the tall poplars looked at an unusual sight --an elderly English diplomatist running hard and crying or bellowing as he ran.
His hoarse shouts brought a pale face
to the study door,
the beaming glasses and worried brow of Dr. Simon,
who heard the nobleman's first clear words.
Lord Galloway was crying:
"A corpse in the grass--a blood-stained corpse."
O'Brien at last had gone utterly out of his mind.
"We must tell Valentin at once,"
said the doctor,
when the other had brokenly described all that he had dared
to examine.
"It is fortunate that he is here";
and even as he spoke the great detective entered the study,
attracted by the cry.
It was almost amusing
to note his typical transformation;
he had come
with the common concern of a host and a gentleman,
fearing that some guest or servant was ill.
When he was told the gory fact,
he turned
with all his gravity instantly bright and businesslike;
for this,
however abrupt and awful,
was his business.
"Strange,
gentlemen,"
he said as they hurried out into the garden,
"that I should have hunted mysteries all over the earth,
and now one comes and settles in my own back-yard.
But where is the place?"
They crossed the lawn less easily,
as a slight mist had begun
to rise from the river;
but under the guidance of the shaken Galloway they found the body sunken in deep grass--the body of a very tall and broad-shouldered man.
He lay face downwards,
so they could only see that his big shoulders were clad in black cloth,
and that his big head was bald,
except
for a wisp or two of brown hair that clung
to his skull like wet seaweed.
A scarlet serpent of blood crawled from under his fallen face.
"At least,"
said Simon,
with a deep and singular intonation,
"he is none of our party."
"Examine him,
doctor,"
cried Valentin rather sharply.
"He may not be dead."
The doctor bent down.
"He is not quite cold,
but I am afraid he is dead enough,"
he answered.
"Just help me
to lift him up."
They lifted him carefully an inch from the ground,
and all doubts as
to his being really dead were settled at once and frightfully.
The head fell away.
It had been entirely sundered from the body;
whoever had cut his throat had managed
to sever the neck as well.
Even Valentin was slightly shocked.
"He must have been as strong as a gorilla,"
he muttered.
Not without a shiver,
though he was used
to anatomical abortions,
Dr. Simon lifted the head.
It was slightly slashed about the neck and jaw,
but the face was substantially unhurt.
It was a ponderous,
yellow face,
at once sunken and swollen,
with a hawk-like nose and heavy lids--a face of a wicked Roman emperor,
with,
perhaps,
a distant touch of a Chinese emperor.
All present seemed
to look at it
with the coldest eye of ignorance.
Nothing else could be noted about the man except that,
as they had lifted his body,
they had seen underneath it the white gleam of a shirt-front defaced
with a red gleam of blood.
As Dr. Simon said,
the man had never been of their party.
But he might very well have been trying
to join it,
for he had come dressed
for such an occasion.
Valentin went down on his hands and knees and examined
with his closest professional attention the grass and ground
for some twenty yards round the body,
in which he was assisted less skillfully by the doctor,
and quite vaguely by the English lord.
Nothing rewarded their grovellings except a few twigs,
snapped or chopped into very small lengths,
which Valentin lifted
for an instant's examination and then tossed away.
"Twigs,"
he said gravely;
"twigs,
and a total stranger
with his head cut off;
that is all there is on this lawn."
There was an almost creepy stillness,
and then the unnerved Galloway called out sharply:
"Who's that! Who's that over there by the garden wall!"
A small figure
with a foolishly large head drew waveringly near them in the moonlit haze;
looked
for an instant like a goblin,
but turned out
to be the harmless little priest whom they had left in the drawing-room.
"I say,"
he said meekly,
"there are no gates
to this garden,
do you know."
Valentin's black brows had come together somewhat crossly,
as they did on principle at the sight of the cassock.
But he was far too just a man
to deny the relevance of the remark.
"You are right,"
he said.
"Before we find out how he came
to be killed,
we may have
to find out how he came
to be here.
Now listen
to me,
gentlemen.
If it can be done without prejudice
to my position and duty,
we shall all agree that certain distinguished names might well be kept out of this.
There are ladies,
gentlemen,
and there is a foreign ambassador.
If we must mark it down as a crime,
then it must be followed up as a crime.
But till then I can use my own discretion.
I am the head of the police;
I am so public that I can afford
to be private.
Please Heaven,
I will clear everyone of my own guests before I call in my men
to look
for anybody else.
Gentlemen,
upon your honour,
you will none of you leave the house till tomorrow at noon;
there are bedrooms
for all.
Simon,
I think you know where
to find my man,
Ivan,
in the front hall;
he is a confidential man.
Tell him
to leave another servant on guard and come
to me at once.
Lord Galloway,
you are certainly the best person
to tell the ladies what has happened,
and prevent a panic.
They also must stay.
Father Brown and I will remain
with the body."
When this spirit of the captain spoke in Valentin he was obeyed like a bugle.
Dr. Simon went through
to the armoury and routed out Ivan,
the public detective's private detective.
Galloway went
to the drawing-room and told the terrible news tactfully enough,
so that by the time the company assembled there the ladies were already startled and already soothed.
Meanwhile the good priest and the good atheist stood at the head and foot of the dead man motionless in the moonlight,
like symbolic statues of their two philosophies of death.
Ivan,
the confidential man
with the scar and the moustaches,
came out of the house like a cannon ball,
and came racing across the lawn
to Valentin like a dog
to his master.
His livid face was quite lively
with the glow of this domestic detective story,
and it was
with almost unpleasant eagerness that he asked his master's permission
to examine the remains.
"Yes;
look,
if you like,
Ivan,"
said Valentin,
"but don't be long.
We must go in and thrash this out in the house."
Ivan lifted the head,
and then almost let it drop.
"Why,"
he gasped,
"it's--no,
it isn't;
it can't be.
Do you know this man,
sir?"
"No,"
said Valentin indifferently;
"we had better go inside."
Between them they carried the corpse
to a sofa in the study,
and then all made their way
to the drawing-room.
The detective sat down at a desk quietly,
and even without hesitation;
but his eye was the iron eye of a judge at assize.
He made a few rapid notes upon paper in front of him,
and then said shortly:
"Is everybody here?"
"Not Mr. Brayne,"
said the Duchess of Mont St. Michel,
looking round.
"No,"
said Lord Galloway in a hoarse,
harsh voice.
"And not Mr. Neil O'Brien,
I fancy.
I saw that gentleman walking in the garden when the corpse was still warm."
"Ivan,"
said the detective,
"go and fetch Commandant O'Brien and Mr. Brayne.
Mr. Brayne,
I know,
is finishing a cigar in the dining-room;
Commandant O'Brien,
I think,
is walking up and down the conservatory.
I am not sure."
The faithful attendant flashed from the room,
and before anyone could stir or speak Valentin went on
with the same soldierly swiftness of exposition.
"Everyone here knows that a dead man has been found in the garden,
his head cut clean from his body.
Dr. Simon,
you have examined it.
Do you think that
to cut a man's throat like that would need great force?
Or,
perhaps,
only a very sharp knife?"
"I should say that it could not be done
with a knife at all,"
said the pale doctor.
"Have you any thought,"
resumed Valentin,
"of a tool
with which it could be done?"
"Speaking within modern probabilities,
I really haven't,"
said the doctor,
arching his painful brows.
"It's not easy
to hack a neck through even clumsily,
and this was a very clean cut.
It could be done
with a battle-axe or an old headsman's axe,
or an old two-handed sword."
"But,
good heavens!"
cried the Duchess,
almost in hysterics,
"there aren't any two-handed swords and battle-axes round here."
Valentin was still busy
with the paper in front of him.
"Tell me,"
he said,
still writing rapidly,
"could it have been done
with a long French cavalry sabre?"
A low knocking came at the door,
which,
for some unreasonable reason,
curdled everyone's blood like the knocking in Macbeth.
Amid that frozen silence Dr. Simon managed
to say:
"A sabre-- yes,
I suppose it could."
"Thank you,"
said Valentin.
"Come in,
Ivan."
The confidential Ivan opened the door and ushered in Commandant Neil O'Brien,
whom he had found at last pacing the garden again.
The Irish officer stood up disordered and defiant on the threshold.
"What do you want
with me?"
he cried.
"Please sit down,"
said Valentin in pleasant,
level tones.
"Why,
you aren't wearing your sword.
Where is it?"
"I left it on the library table,"
said O'Brien,
his brogue deepening in his disturbed mood.
"It was a nuisance,
it was getting--"
"Ivan,"
said Valentin,
"please go and get the Commandant's sword from the library."
Then,
as the servant vanished,
"Lord Galloway says he saw you leaving the garden just before he found the corpse.
What were you doing in the garden?"
The Commandant flung himself recklessly into a chair.
"Oh,"
he cried in pure Irish,
"admirin'
the moon.
Communing
with Nature,
me bhoy."
A heavy silence sank and endured,
and at the end of it came again that trivial and terrible knocking.
Ivan reappeared,
carrying an empty steel scabbard.
"This is all I can find,"
he said.
"Put it on the table,"
said Valentin,
without looking up.
There was an inhuman silence in the room,
like that sea of inhuman silence round the dock of the condemned murderer.
The Duchess's weak exclamations had long ago died away.
Lord Galloway's swollen hatred was satisfied and even sobered.
The voice that came was quite unexpected.
"I think I can tell you,"
cried Lady Margaret,
in that clear,
quivering voice
with which a courageous woman speaks publicly.
"I can tell you what Mr. O'Brien was doing in the garden,
since he is bound
to silence.
He was asking me
to marry him.
I refused;
I said in my family circumstances I could give him nothing but my respect.
He was a little angry at that;
he did not seem
to think much of my respect.
I wonder,"
she added,
with rather a wan smile,
"if he will care at all
for it now.
For I offer it him now.
I will swear anywhere that he never did a thing like this."
Lord Galloway had edged up
to his daughter,
and was intimidating her in what he imagined
to be an undertone.
"Hold your tongue,
Maggie,"
he said in a thunderous whisper.
"Why should you shield the fellow?
Where's his sword?
Where's his confounded cavalry--"
He stopped because of the singular stare
with which his daughter was regarding him,
a look that was indeed a lurid magnet
for the whole group.
"You old fool!"
she said in a low voice without pretence of piety,
"what do you suppose you are trying
to prove?
I tell you this man was innocent while
with me.
But if he wasn't innocent,
he was still
with me.
If he murdered a man in the garden,
who was it who must have seen--who must at least have known?
Do you hate Neil so much as
to put your own daughter--"
Lady Galloway screamed.
Everyone else sat tingling at the touch of those satanic tragedies that have been between lovers before now.
They saw the proud,
white face of the Scotch aristocrat and her lover,
the Irish adventurer,
like old portraits in a dark house.
The long silence was full of formless historical memories of murdered husbands and poisonous paramours.
In the centre of this morbid silence an innocent voice said:
"Was it a very long cigar?"
The change of thought was so sharp that they had
to look round
to see who had spoken.
"I mean,"
said little Father Brown,
from the corner of the room,
"I mean that cigar Mr. Brayne is finishing.
It seems nearly as long as a walking-stick."
Despite the irrelevance there was assent as well as irritation in Valentin's face as he lifted his head.
"Quite right,"
he remarked sharply.
"Ivan,
go and see about Mr. Brayne again,
and bring him here at once."
The instant the factotum had closed the door,
Valentin addressed the girl
with an entirely new earnestness.
"Lady Margaret,"
he said,
"we all feel,
I am sure,
both gratitude and admiration
for your act in rising above your lower dignity and explaining the Commandant's conduct.
But there is a hiatus still.
Lord Galloway,
I understand,
met you passing from the study
to the drawing-room,
and it was only some minutes afterwards that he found the garden and the Commandant still walking there."
"You have
to remember,"
replied Margaret,
with a faint irony in her voice,
"that I had just refused him,
so we should scarcely have come back arm in arm.
He is a gentleman,
anyhow;
and he loitered behind--and so got charged
with murder."
"In those few moments,"
said Valentin gravely,
"he might really--"
The knock came again,
and Ivan put in his scarred face.
"Beg pardon,
sir,"
he said,
"but Mr. Brayne has left the house."
"Left!"
cried Valentin,
and rose
for the first time
to his feet.
"Gone.
Scooted.
Evaporated,"
replied Ivan in humorous French.
"His hat and coat are gone,
too,
and I'll tell you something
to cap it all.
I ran outside the house
to find any traces of him,
and I found one,
and a big trace,
too."
"What do you mean?"
asked Valentin.
"I'll show you,"
said his servant,
and reappeared
with a flashing naked cavalry sabre,
streaked
with blood about the point and edge.
Everyone in the room eyed it as if it were a thunderbolt;
but the experienced Ivan went on quite quietly:
"I found this,"
he said,
"flung among the bushes fifty yards up the road
to Paris.
In other words,
I found it just where your respectable Mr. Brayne threw it when he ran away."
There was again a silence,
but of a new sort.
Valentin took the sabre,
examined it,
reflected
with unaffected concentration of thought,
and then turned a respectful face
to O'Brien.
"Commandant,"
he said,
"we trust you will always produce this weapon if it is wanted
for police examination.
Meanwhile,"
he added,
slapping the steel back in the ringing scabbard,
"let me return you your sword."
At the military symbolism of the action the audience could hardly refrain from applause.
For Neil O'Brien,
indeed,
that gesture was the turning-point of existence.
By the time he was wandering in the mysterious garden again in the colours of the morning the tragic futility of his ordinary mien had fallen from him;
he was a man
with many reasons
for happiness.
Lord Galloway was a gentleman,
and had offered him an apology.
Lady Margaret was something better than a lady,
a woman at least,
and had perhaps given him something better than an apology,
as they drifted among the old flowerbeds before breakfast.
The whole company was more lighthearted and humane,
for though the riddle of the death remained,
the load of suspicion was lifted off them all,
and sent flying off
to Paris
with the strange millionaire--a man they hardly knew.
The devil was cast out of the house--he had cast himself out.
Still,
the riddle remained;
and when O'Brien threw himself on a garden seat beside Dr. Simon,
that keenly scientific person at once resumed it.
He did not get much talk out of O'Brien,
whose thoughts were on pleasanter things.
"I can't say it interests me much,"
said the Irishman frankly,
"especially as it seems pretty plain now.
Apparently Brayne hated this stranger
for some reason;
lured him into the garden,
and killed him
with my sword.
Then he fled
to the city,
tossing the sword away as he went.
By the way,
Ivan tells me the dead man had a Yankee dollar in his pocket.
So he was a countryman of Brayne's,
and that seems
to clinch it.
I don't see any difficulties about the business."
"There are five colossal difficulties,"
said the doctor quietly;
"like high walls within walls.
Don't mistake me.
I don't doubt that Brayne did it;
his flight,
I fancy,
proves that.
But as
to how he did it.
First difficulty:
Why should a man kill another man
with a great hulking sabre,
when he can almost kill him
with a pocket knife and put it back in his pocket?
Second difficulty:
Why was there no noise or outcry?
Does a man commonly see another come up waving a scimitar and offer no remarks?
Third difficulty:
A servant watched the front door all the evening;
and a rat cannot get into Valentin's garden anywhere.
How did the dead man get into the garden?
Fourth difficulty:
Given the same conditions,
how did Brayne get out of the garden?"
"And the fifth,"
said Neil,
with eyes fixed on the English priest who was coming slowly up the path.
"Is a trifle,
I suppose,"
said the doctor,
"but I think an odd one.
When I first saw how the head had been slashed,
I supposed the assassin had struck more than once.
But on examination I found many cuts across the truncated section;
in other words,
they were struck after the head was off.
Did Brayne hate his foe so fiendishly that he stood sabring his body in the moonlight?"
"Horrible!"
said O'Brien,
and shuddered.
The little priest,
Brown,
had arrived while they were talking,
and had waited,
with characteristic shyness,
till they had finished.
Then he said awkwardly:
"I say,
I'm sorry
to interrupt.
But I was sent
to tell you the news!"
"News?"
repeated Simon,
and stared at him rather painfully through his glasses.
"Yes,
I'm sorry,"
said Father Brown mildly.
"There's been another murder,
you know."
Both men on the seat sprang up,
leaving it rocking.
"And,
what's stranger still,"
continued the priest,
with his dull eye on the rhododendrons,
"it's the same disgusting sort;
it's another beheading.
They found the second head actually bleeding into the river,
a few yards along Brayne's road
to Paris;
so they suppose that he--"
"Great Heaven!"
cried O'Brien.
"Is Brayne a monomaniac?"
"There are American vendettas,"
said the priest impassively.
Then he added:
"They want you
to come
to the library and see it."
Commandant O'Brien followed the others towards the inquest,
feeling decidedly sick.
As a soldier,
he loathed all this secretive carnage;
where were these extravagant amputations going
to stop?
First one head was hacked off,
and then another;
in this case
(he told himself bitterly)
it was not true that two heads were better than one.
As he crossed the study he almost staggered at a shocking coincidence.
Upon Valentin's table lay the coloured picture of yet a third bleeding head;
and it was the head of Valentin himself.
A second glance showed him it was only a Nationalist paper,
called The Guillotine,
which every week showed one of its political opponents
with rolling eyes and writhing features just after execution;
for Valentin was an anti-clerical of some note.
But O'Brien was an Irishman,
with a kind of chastity even in his sins;
and his gorge rose against that great brutality of the intellect which belongs only
to France.
He felt Paris as a whole,
from the grotesques on the Gothic churches
to the gross caricatures in the newspapers.
He remembered the gigantic jests of the Revolution.
He saw the whole city as one ugly energy,
from the sanguinary sketch lying on Valentin's table up
to where,
above a mountain and forest of gargoyles,
the great devil grins on Notre Dame.
The library was long,
low,
and dark;
what light entered it shot from under low blinds and had still some of the ruddy tinge of morning.
Valentin and his servant Ivan were waiting
for them at the upper end of a long,
slightly-sloping desk,
on which lay the mortal remains,
looking enormous in the twilight.
The big black figure and yellow face of the man found in the garden confronted them essentially unchanged.
The second head,
which had been fished from among the river reeds that morning,
lay streaming and dripping beside it;
Valentin's men were still seeking
to recover the rest of this second corpse,
which was supposed
to be afloat.
Father Brown,
who did not seem
to share O'Brien's sensibilities in the least,
went up
to the second head and examined it
with his blinking care.
It was little more than a mop of wet white hair,
fringed
with silver fire in the red and level morning light;
the face,
which seemed of an ugly,
empurpled and perhaps criminal type,
had been much battered against trees or stones as it tossed in the water.
"Good morning,
Commandant O'Brien,"
said Valentin,
with quiet cordiality.
"You have heard of Brayne's last experiment in butchery,
I suppose?"
Father Brown was still bending over the head
with white hair,
and he said,
without looking up:
"I suppose it is quite certain that Brayne cut off this head,
too."
"Well,
it seems common sense,"
said Valentin,
with his hands in his pockets.
"Killed in the same way as the other.
Found within a few yards of the other.
And sliced by the same weapon which we know he carried away."
"Yes,
yes;
I know,"
replied Father Brown submissively.
"Yet,
you know,
I doubt whether Brayne could have cut off this head."
"Why not?"
inquired Dr. Simon,
with a rational stare.
"Well,
doctor,"
said the priest,
looking up blinking,
"can a man cut off his own head?
I don't know."
O'Brien felt an insane universe crashing about his ears;
but the doctor sprang forward
with impetuous practicality and pushed back the wet white hair.
"Oh,
there's no doubt it's Brayne,"
said the priest quietly.
"He had exactly that chip in the left ear."
The detective,
who had been regarding the priest
with steady and glittering eyes,
opened his clenched mouth and said sharply:
"You seem
to know a lot about him,
Father Brown."
"I do,"
said the little man simply.
"I've been about
with him
for some weeks.
He was thinking of joining our church."
The star of the fanatic sprang into Valentin's eyes;
he strode towards the priest
with clenched hands.
"And,
perhaps,"
he cried,
with a blasting sneer,
"perhaps he was also thinking of leaving all his money
to your church."
"Perhaps he was,"
said Brown stolidly;
"it is possible."
"In that case,"
cried Valentin,
with a dreadful smile,
"you may indeed know a great deal about him.
About his life and about his--"
Commandant O'Brien laid a hand on Valentin's arm.
"Drop that slanderous rubbish,
Valentin,"
he said,
"or there may be more swords yet."
But Valentin
(under the steady,
humble gaze of the priest)
had already recovered himself.
"Well,"
he said shortly,
"people's private opinions can wait.
You gentlemen are still bound by your promise
to stay;
you must enforce it on yourselves--and on each other.
Ivan here will tell you anything more you want
to know;
I must get
to business and write
to the authorities.
We can't keep this quiet any longer.
I shall be writing in my study if there is any more news."
"Is there any more news,
Ivan?"
asked Dr. Simon,
as the chief of police strode out of the room.
"Only one more thing,
I think,
sir,"
said Ivan,
wrinkling up his grey old face,
"but that's important,
too,
in its way.
There's that old buffer you found on the lawn,"
and he pointed without pretence of reverence at the big black body
with the yellow head.
"We've found out who he is,
anyhow."
"Indeed!"
cried the astonished doctor,
"and who is he?"
"His name was Arnold Becker,"
said the under-detective,
"though he went by many aliases.
He was a wandering sort of scamp,
and is known
to have been in America;
so that was where Brayne got his knife into him.
We didn't have much
to do
with him ourselves,
for he worked mostly in Germany.
We've communicated,
of course,
with the German police.
But,
oddly enough,
there was a twin brother of his,
named Louis Becker,
whom we had a great deal
to do with.
In fact,
we found it necessary
to guillotine him only yesterday.
Well,
it's a rum thing,
gentlemen,
but when I saw that fellow flat on the lawn I had the greatest jump of my life.
If I hadn't seen Louis Becker guillotined
with my own eyes,
I'd have sworn it was Louis Becker lying there in the grass.
Then,
of course,
I remembered his twin brother in Germany,
and following up the clue--"
The explanatory Ivan stopped,
for the excellent reason that nobody was listening
to him.
The Commandant and the doctor were both staring at Father Brown,
who had sprung stiffly
to his feet,
and was holding his temples tight like a man in sudden and violent pain.
"Stop,
stop,
stop!"
he cried;
"stop talking a minute,
for I see half.
Will God give me strength?
Will my brain make the one jump and see all?
Heaven help me! I used
to be fairly good at thinking.
I could paraphrase any page in Aquinas once.
Will my head split--or will it see?
I see half--I only see half."
He buried his head in his hands,
and stood in a sort of rigid torture of thought or prayer,
while the other three could only go on staring at this last prodigy of their wild twelve hours.
When Father Brown's hands fell they showed a face quite fresh and serious,
like a child's.
He heaved a huge sigh,
and said:
"Let us get this said and done
with as quickly as possible.
Look here,
this will be the quickest way
to convince you all of the truth."
He turned
to the doctor.
"Dr. Simon,"
he said,
"you have a strong head-piece,
and I heard you this morning asking the five hardest questions about this business.
Well,
if you will ask them again,
I will answer them."
Simon's pince-nez dropped from his nose in his doubt and wonder,
but he answered at once.
"Well,
the first question,
you know,
is why a man should kill another
with a clumsy sabre at all when a man can kill
with a bodkin?"
"A man cannot behead
with a bodkin,"
said Brown calmly,
"and
for this murder beheading was absolutely necessary."
"Why?"
asked O'Brien,
with interest.
"And the next question?"
asked Father Brown.
"Well,
why didn't the man cry out or anything?"
asked the doctor;
"sabres in gardens are certainly unusual."
"Twigs,"
said the priest gloomily,
and turned
to the window which looked on the scene of death.
"No one saw the point of the twigs.
Why should they lie on that lawn
(look at it)
so far from any tree?
They were not snapped off;
they were chopped off.
The murderer occupied his enemy
with some tricks
with the sabre,
showing how he could cut a branch in mid-air,
or what-not.
Then,
while his enemy bent down
to see the result,
a silent slash,
and the head fell."
"Well,"
said the doctor slowly,
"that seems plausible enough.
But my next two questions will stump anyone."
The priest still stood looking critically out of the window and waited.
"You know how all the garden was sealed up like an air-tight chamber,"
went on the doctor.
"Well,
how did the strange man get into the garden?"
Without turning round,
the little priest answered:
"There never was any strange man in the garden."
There was a silence,
and then a sudden cackle of almost childish laughter relieved the strain.
The absurdity of Brown's remark moved Ivan
to open taunts.
"Oh!"
he cried;
"then we didn't lug a great fat corpse on
to a sofa last night?
He hadn't got into the garden,
I suppose?"
"Got into the garden?"
repeated Brown reflectively.
"No,
not entirely."
"Hang it all,"
cried Simon,
"a man gets into a garden,
or he doesn't."
"Not necessarily,"
said the priest,
with a faint smile.
"What is the nest question,
doctor?"
"I fancy you're ill,"
exclaimed Dr. Simon sharply;
"but I'll ask the next question if you like.
How did Brayne get out of the garden?"
"He didn't get out of the garden,"
said the priest,
still looking out of the window.
"Didn't get out of the garden?"
exploded Simon.
"Not completely,"
said Father Brown.
Simon shook his fists in a frenzy of French logic.
"A man gets out of a garden,
or he doesn't,"
he cried.
"Not always,"
said Father Brown.
Dr. Simon sprang
to his feet impatiently.
"I have no time
to spare on such senseless talk,"
he cried angrily.
"If you can't understand a man being on one side of a wall or the other,
I won't trouble you further."
"Doctor,"
said the cleric very gently,
"we have always got on very pleasantly together.
If only
for the sake of old friendship,
stop and tell me your fifth question."
The impatient Simon sank into a chair by the door and said briefly:
"The head and shoulders were cut about in a queer way.
It seemed
to be done after death."
"Yes,"
said the motionless priest,
"it was done so as
to make you assume exactly the one simple falsehood that you did assume.
It was done
to make you take
for granted that the head belonged
to the body."
The borderland of the brain,
where all the monsters are made,
moved horribly in the Gaelic O'Brien.
He felt the chaotic presence of all the horse-men and fish-women that man's unnatural fancy has begotten.
A voice older than his first fathers seemed saying in his ear:
"Keep out of the monstrous garden where grows the tree
with double fruit.
Avoid the evil garden where died the man
with two heads."
Yet,
while these shameful symbolic shapes passed across the ancient mirror of his Irish soul,
his Frenchified intellect was quite alert,
and was watching the odd priest as closely and incredulously as all the rest.
Father Brown had turned round at last,
and stood against the window,
with his face in dense shadow;
but even in that shadow they could see it was pale as ashes.
Nevertheless,
he spoke quite sensibly,
as if there were no Gaelic souls on earth.
"Gentlemen,"
he said,
"you did not find the strange body of Becker in the garden.
You did not find any strange body in the garden.
In face of Dr. Simon's rationalism,
I still affirm that Becker was only partly present.
Look here!"
(pointing
to the black bulk of the mysterious corpse)
"you never saw that man in your lives.
Did you ever see this man?"
He rapidly rolled away the bald,
yellow head of the unknown,
and put in its place the white-maned head beside it.
And there,
complete,
unified,
unmistakable,
lay Julius K.
Brayne.
"The murderer,"
went on Brown quietly,
"hacked off his enemy's head and flung the sword far over the wall.
But he was too clever
to fling the sword only.
He flung the head over the wall also.
Then he had only
to clap on another head
to the corpse,
and
(as he insisted on a private inquest)
you all imagined a totally new man."
"Clap on another head!"
said O'Brien staring.
"What other head?
Heads don't grow on garden bushes,
do they?"
"No,"
said Father Brown huskily,
and looking at his boots;
"there is only one place where they grow.
They grow in the basket of the guillotine,
beside which the chief of police,
Aristide Valentin,
was standing not an hour before the murder.
Oh,
my friends,
hear me a minute more before you tear me in pieces.
Valentin is an honest man,
if being mad
for an arguable cause is honesty.
But did you never see in that cold,
grey eye of his that he is mad! He would do anything,
anything,
to break what he calls the superstition of the Cross.
He has fought
for it and starved
for it,
and now he has murdered
for it.
Brayne's crazy millions had hitherto been scattered among so many sects that they did little
to alter the balance of things.
But Valentin heard a whisper that Brayne,
like so many scatter-brained sceptics,
was drifting
to us;
and that was quite a different thing.
Brayne would pour supplies into the impoverished and pugnacious Church of France;
he would support six Nationalist newspapers like The Guillotine.
The battle was already balanced on a point,
and the fanatic took flame at the risk.
He resolved
to destroy the millionaire,
and he did it as one would expect the greatest of detectives
to commit his only crime.
He abstracted the severed head of Becker on some criminological excuse,
and took it home in his official box.
He had that last argument
with Brayne,
that Lord Galloway did not hear the end of;
that failing,
he led him out into the sealed garden,
talked about swordsmanship,
used twigs and a sabre
for illustration,
and--"
Ivan of the Scar sprang up.
"You lunatic,"
he yelled;
"you'll go
to my master now,
if I take you by--"
"Why,
I was going there,"
said Brown heavily;
"I must ask him
to confess,
and all that."
Driving the unhappy Brown before them like a hostage or sacrifice,
they rushed together into the sudden stillness of Valentin's study.
The great detective sat at his desk apparently too occupied
to hear their turbulent entrance.
They paused a moment,
and then something in the look of that upright and elegant back made the doctor run forward suddenly.
A touch and a glance showed him that there was a small box of pills at Valentin's elbow,
and that Valentin was dead in his chair;
and on the blind face of the suicide was more than the pride of Cato.
The Queer Feet If you meet a member of that select club,
"The Twelve True Fishermen,"
entering the Vernon Hotel
for the annual club dinner,
you will observe,
as he takes off his overcoat,
that his evening coat is green and not black.
If
(supposing that you have the star-defying audacity
to address such a being)
you ask him why,
he will probably answer that he does it
to avoid being mistaken
for a waiter.
You will then retire crushed.
But you will leave behind you a mystery as yet unsolved and a tale worth telling.
If
(to pursue the same vein of improbable conjecture)
you were
to meet a mild,
hard-working little priest,
named Father Brown,
and were
to ask him what he thought was the most singular luck of his life,
he would probably reply that upon the whole his best stroke was at the Vernon Hotel,
where he had averted a crime and,
perhaps,
saved a soul,
merely by listening
to a few footsteps in a passage.
He is perhaps a little proud of this wild and wonderful guess of his,
and it is possible that he might refer
to it.
But since it is immeasurably unlikely that you will ever rise high enough in the social world
to find
"The Twelve True Fishermen,"
or that you will ever sink low enough among slums and criminals
to find Father Brown,
I fear you will never hear the story at all unless you hear it from me.
The Vernon Hotel at which The Twelve True Fishermen held their annual dinners was an institution such as can only exist in an oligarchical society which has almost gone mad on good manners.
It was that topsy-turvy product--an
"exclusive"
commercial enterprise.
That is,
it was a thing which paid not by attracting people,
but actually by turning people away.
In the heart of a plutocracy tradesmen become cunning enough
to be more fastidious than their customers.
They positively create difficulties so that their wealthy and weary clients may spend money and diplomacy in overcoming them.
If there were a fashionable hotel in London which no man could enter who was under six foot,
society would meekly make up parties of six-foot men
to dine in it.
If there were an expensive restaurant which by a mere caprice of its proprietor was only open on Thursday afternoon,
it would be crowded on Thursday afternoon.
The Vernon Hotel stood,
as if by accident,
in the corner of a square in Belgravia.
It was a small hotel;
and a very inconvenient one.
But its very inconveniences were considered as walls protecting a particular class.
One inconvenience,
in particular,
was held
to be of vital importance:
the fact that practically only twenty-four people could dine in the place at once.
The only big dinner table was the celebrated terrace table,
which stood open
to the air on a sort of veranda overlooking one of the most exquisite old gardens in London.
Thus it happened that even the twenty-four seats at this table could only be enjoyed in warm weather;
and this making the enjoyment yet more difficult made it yet more desired.
The existing owner of the hotel was a Jew named Lever;
and he made nearly a million out of it,
by making it difficult
to get into.
Of course he combined
with this limitation in the scope of his enterprise the most careful polish in its performance.
The wines and cooking were really as good as any in Europe,
and the demeanour of the attendants exactly mirrored the fixed mood of the English upper class.
The proprietor knew all his waiters like the fingers on his hand;
there were only fifteen of them all told.
It was much easier
to become a Member of Parliament than
to become a waiter in that hotel.
Each waiter was trained in terrible silence and smoothness,
as if he were a gentleman's servant.
And,
indeed,
there was generally at least one waiter
to every gentleman who dined.
The club of The Twelve True Fishermen would not have consented
to dine anywhere but in such a place,
for it insisted on a luxurious privacy;
and would have been quite upset by the mere thought that any other club was even dining in the same building.
On the occasion of their annual dinner the Fishermen were in the habit of exposing all their treasures,
as if they were in a private house,
especially the celebrated set of fish knives and forks which were,
as it were,
the insignia of the society,
each being exquisitely wrought in silver in the form of a fish,
and each loaded at the hilt
with one large pearl.
These were always laid out
for the fish course,
and the fish course was always the most magnificent in that magnificent repast.
The society had a vast number of ceremonies and observances,
but it had no history and no object;
that was where it was so very aristocratic.
You did not have
to be anything in order
to be one of the Twelve Fishers;
unless you were already a certain sort of person,
you never even heard of them.
It had been in existence twelve years.
Its president was Mr. Audley.
Its vice-president was the Duke of Chester.
If I have in any degree conveyed the atmosphere of this appalling hotel,
the reader may feel a natural wonder as
to how I came
to know anything about it,
and may even speculate as
to how so ordinary a person as my friend Father Brown came
to find himself in that golden galley.
As far as that is concerned,
my story is simple,
or even vulgar.
There is in the world a very aged rioter and demagogue who breaks into the most refined retreats
with the dreadful information that all men are brothers,
and wherever this leveller went on his pale horse it was Father Brown's trade
to follow.
One of the waiters,
an Italian,
had been struck down
with a paralytic stroke that afternoon;
and his Jewish employer,
marvelling mildly at such superstitions,
had consented
to send
for the nearest Popish priest.
With what the waiter confessed
to Father Brown we are not concerned,
for the excellent reason that that cleric kept it
to himself;
but apparently it involved him in writing out a note or statement
for the conveying of some message or the righting of some wrong.
Father Brown,
therefore,
with a meek impudence which he would have shown equally in Buckingham Palace,
asked
to be provided
with a room and writing materials.
Mr. Lever was torn in two.
He was a kind man,
and had also that bad imitation of kindness,
the dislike of any difficulty or scene.
At the same time the presence of one unusual stranger in his hotel that evening was like a speck of dirt on something just cleaned.
There was never any borderland or anteroom in the Vernon Hotel,
no people waiting in the hall,
no customers coming in on chance.
There were fifteen waiters.
There were twelve guests.
It would be as startling
to find a new guest in the hotel that night as
to find a new brother taking breakfast or tea in one's own family.
Moreover,
the priest's appearance was second-rate and his clothes muddy;
a mere glimpse of him afar off might precipitate a crisis in the club.
Mr. Lever at last hit on a plan
to cover,
since he might not obliterate,
the disgrace.
When you enter
(as you never will)
the Vernon Hotel,
you pass down a short passage decorated
with a few dingy but important pictures,
and come
to the main vestibule and lounge which opens on your right into passages leading
to the public rooms,
and on your left
to a similar passage pointing
to the kitchens and offices of the hotel.
Immediately on your left hand is the corner of a glass office,
which abuts upon the lounge--a house within a house,
so
to speak,
like the old hotel bar which probably once occupied its place.
In this office sat the representative of the proprietor
(nobody in this place ever appeared in person if he could help it),
and just beyond the office,
on the way
to the servants'
quarters,
was the gentlemen's cloak room,
the last boundary of the gentlemen's domain.
But between the office and the cloak room was a small private room without other outlet,
sometimes used by the proprietor
for delicate and important matters,
such as lending a duke a thousand pounds or declining
to lend him sixpence.
It is a mark of the magnificent tolerance of Mr. Lever that he permitted this holy place
to be
for about half an hour profaned by a mere priest,
scribbling away on a piece of paper.
The story which Father Brown was writing down was very likely a much better story than this one,
only it will never be known.
I can merely state that it was very nearly as long,
and that the last two or three paragraphs of it were the least exciting and absorbing.
For it was by the time that he had reached these that the priest began a little
to allow his thoughts
to wander and his animal senses,
which were commonly keen,
to awaken.
The time of darkness and dinner was drawing on;
his own forgotten little room was without a light,
and perhaps the gathering gloom,
as occasionally happens,
sharpened the sense of sound.
As Father Brown wrote the last and least essential part of his document,
he caught himself writing
to the rhythm of a recurrent noise outside,
just as one sometimes thinks
to the tune of a railway train.
When he became conscious of the thing he found what it was:
only the ordinary patter of feet passing the door,
which in an hotel was no very unlikely matter.
Nevertheless,
he stared at the darkened ceiling,
and listened
to the sound.
After he had listened
for a few seconds dreamily,
he got
to his feet and listened intently,
with his head a little on one side.
Then he sat down again and buried his brow in his hands,
now not merely listening,
but listening and thinking also.
The footsteps outside at any given moment were such as one might hear in any hotel;
and yet,
taken as a whole,
there was something very strange about them.
There were no other footsteps.
It was always a very silent house,
for the few familiar guests went at once
to their own apartments,
and the well-trained waiters were told
to be almost invisible until they were wanted.
One could not conceive any place where there was less reason
to apprehend anything irregular.
But these footsteps were so odd that one could not decide
to call them regular or irregular.
Father Brown followed them
with his finger on the edge of the table,
like a man trying
to learn a tune on the piano.
First,
there came a long rush of rapid little steps,
such as a light man might make in winning a walking race.
At a certain point they stopped and changed
to a sort of slow,
swinging stamp,
numbering not a quarter of the steps,
but occupying about the same time.
The moment the last echoing stamp had died away would come again the run or ripple of light,
hurrying feet,
and then again the thud of the heavier walking.
It was certainly the same pair of boots,
partly because
(as has been said)
there were no other boots about,
and partly because they had a small but unmistakable creak in them.
Father Brown had the kind of head that cannot help asking questions;
and on this apparently trivial question his head almost split.
He had seen men run in order
to jump.
He had seen men run in order
to slide.
But why on earth should a man run in order
to walk?
Or,
again,
why should he walk in order
to run?
Yet no other description would cover the antics of this invisible pair of legs.
The man was either walking very fast down one-half of the corridor in order
to walk very slow down the other half;
or he was walking very slow at one end
to have the rapture of walking fast at the other.
Neither suggestion seemed
to make much sense.
His brain was growing darker and darker,
like his room.
Yet,
as he began
to think steadily,
the very blackness of his cell seemed
to make his thoughts more vivid;
he began
to see as in a kind of vision the fantastic feet capering along the corridor in unnatural or symbolic attitudes.
Was it a heathen religious dance?
Or some entirely new kind of scientific exercise?
Father Brown began
to ask himself
with more exactness what the steps suggested.
Taking the slow step first:
it certainly was not the step of the proprietor.
Men of his type walk
with a rapid waddle,
or they sit still.
It could not be any servant or messenger waiting
for directions.
It did not sound like it.
The poorer orders
(in an oligarchy)
sometimes lurch about when they are slightly drunk,
but generally,
and especially in such gorgeous scenes,
they stand or sit in constrained attitudes.
No;
that heavy yet springy step,
with a kind of careless emphasis,
not specially noisy,
yet not caring what noise it made,
belonged
to only one of the animals of this earth.
It was a gentleman of western Europe,
and probably one who had never worked
for his living.
Just as he came
to this solid certainty,
the step changed
to the quicker one,
and ran past the door as feverishly as a rat.
The listener remarked that though this step was much swifter it was also much more noiseless,
almost as if the man were walking on tiptoe.
Yet it was not associated in his mind
with secrecy,
but
with something else--something that he could not remember.
He was maddened by one of those half-memories that make a man feel half-witted.
Surely he had heard that st