by G. K. Datlow
Professor Wadham prided himself on his quietude; some would say his insensibility. He did not turn a hair on his flattened flaxen head, but stood looking down at the dead men with a shade of something like indifference on his large froglike face. Only when he looked at the cigar-ash, which the priest had preserved, he touched it with one finger; then he seemed to stand even stiller than before; but in the shadow of his face his eyes for an instant seemed to shoot out telescopically like one of his own microscopes. He had certainly realized or recognized something; but he said nothing.
“I don’t know where anyone is to begin in this business,” said the Master.
“I should begin,” said Father Brown, “by asking where these unfortunate men had been most of the time today.”
“They were messing about in my laboratory for a good time,” said Wadham, speaking for the first time. “Baker often comes up to have a chat, and this time he brought his two patrons to inspect my department. But I think they went everywhere; real tourists. I know they went to the chapel and even into the tunnel under the crypt, where you have to light candles; instead of digesting their food like sane men. Baker seems to have taken them everywhere.”
“Were they interested in anything particular in your department?” asked the priest. “What were you doing there just then?”
The Professor of Chemistry murmured a chemical formula beginning with “sulphate,” and ending with something that sounded like “silenium”; unintelligible to both his hearers. He then wandered wearily away and sat on a remote bench in the sun, closing his eyes, but turning up his large face with heavy forbearance.
At his point, by a sharp contrast, the lawns were crossed by a brisk figure travelling as rapidly and as straight as a bullet; and Father Brown recognized the neat black clothes and shrewd doglike face of a police-surgeon whom he had met in the poorer parts of town. He was the first to arrive of the official contingent.
“Look here,” said the Master to the priest, before the doctor was within earshot. “I must know something. Did you mean what you said about Communism being a real danger and leading to crime?”
“Yes,” said Father Brown smiling rather grimly, “I have really noticed the spread of some Communist ways and influences; and, in one sense, this is a Communist crime.”
“Thank you,” said the Master. “Then I must go off and see to something at once. Tell the authorities I’ll be back in ten minutes.”
The Master had vanished into one of the Tudor archways at just about the moment when the police-doctor had reached the table and cheerfully recognized Father Brown. On the latter’s suggestion that they should sit down at the tragic table, Dr Blake threw one sharp and doubtful glance at the big, bland and seemingly somnolent chemist, who occupied a more remote seat. He was duly informed of the Professor’s identity, and what had so far been gathered of the Professor’s evidence; and listened to it silently while conducting a preliminary examination of the dead bodies. Naturally, he seemed more concentrated on the actual corpses than on the hearsay evidence, until one detail suddenly distracted him entirely from the science of anatomy.
“What did the Professor say he was working at?” he inquired.
Father Brown patiently repeated the chemical formula he did not understand.
“What?” snapped Dr Blake, like a pistol-shot. “Gosh! This is pretty frightful!”
“Because it’s poison?” inquired Father Brown.
“Because it’s piffle,” replied Dr Blake. “It’s simply nonsense. The Professor is quite a famous chemist. Why is a famous chemist deliberately talking nonsense?”
“Well, I think I know that one,” answered Father Brown mildly. “He is talking nonsense, because he is telling lies. He is concealing something; and he wanted specially to conceal it from these two men and their representatives.”
The doctor lifted his eyes from the two men and looked across at the almost unnaturally immobile figure of the great chemist. He might almost have been asleep; a garden butterfly had settled upon him and seemed to turn his stillness into that of a stone idol. The large folds of his froglike face reminded the doctor of the hanging skins of a rhinoceros.
“Yes,” said Father Brown, in a very low voice. “He is a wicked man.”
“God damn it all!” cried the doctor, suddenly moved to his very depths. “Do you mean that a great scientific man like that deals in murder?”
“Fastidious critics would have complained of his dealing in murder,” said the priest dispassionately. “I don’t say I’m very fond of people dealing in murder in that way myself. But what’s much more to the point—I’m sure that these poor fellows were among his fastidious critics.”
“You mean they found his secret and he silenced them?” said Blake frowning. “But what in hell was his secret? How could a man murder on a large scale in a place like this?”
“I have told you his secret,” said the priest. “It is a secret of the soul. He is a bad man. For heaven’s sake don’t fancy I say that because he and I are of opposite schools or traditions. I have a crowd of scientific friends; and most of them are heroically disinterested. Even of the most sceptical, I would only say they are rather irrationally disinterested. But now and then you do get a man who is a materialist, in the sense of a beast. I repeat he’s a bad man. Much worse than—” And Father Brown seemed to hesitate for a word.
“You mean much worse than the Communist?” suggested the other.
“No; I mean much worse than the murderer,” said Father Brown.
He got to his feet in an abstracted manner; and hardly realized that his companion was staring at him.
“But didn’t you mean,” asked Blake at last, “that this Wadham is the murderer?”
“Oh, no,” said Father Brown more cheerfully. “The murderer is a much more sympathetic and understandable person. He at least was desperate; and had the excuses of sudden rage and despair.”
“Why,” cried the doctor, “do you mean it was the Communist after all?”
It was at this very moment, appropriately enough, that the police officials appeared with an announcement that seemed to conclude the case in a most decisive and satisfactory manner. They had been somewhat delayed in reaching the scene of the crime, by the simple fact that they had already captured the criminal. Indeed, they had captured him almost at the gates of their own official residence. They had already had reason to suspect the activities of Craken the Communist during various disorders in the town; when they heard of the outrage they felt it safe to arrest him; and found the arrest thoroughly justified. For, as Inspector Cook radiantly explained to dons and doctors on the lawn of Mandeville garden, no sooner was the notorious Communist searched, than it was found that he was actually carrying a box of poisoned matches.
The moment Father Brown heard the word “matches,” he jumped from his seat as if a match had been lighted under him.
“Ah,” he cried, with a sort of universal radiance, “and now it’s all clear.”
“What do you mean by all clear?” demanded the Master of Mandeville, who had returned in all the pomp of his own officialism to match the pomp of the police officials now occupying the College like a victorious army. “Do you mean you are convinced now that the case against Craken is clear?”
“I mean that Craken is cleared,” said Father Brown firmly, “and the case against Craken is cleared away. Do you really believe Craken is the kind of man who would go about poisoning people with matches?”
“That’s all very well,” replied the Master, with the troubled expression he had never lost since the first sensation occurred. “But it was you yourself who said that fanatics with false principles may do wicked things. For that matter, it was you yourself who said that Communism is creeping up everywhere and Communistic habits spreading.”
Father Brown laughed in a rather shamefaced manner.
“As to the last point,” he said, “I suppose I owe you all an apology. I seem to be always making a mess of things with my silly litt
le jokes.”
“Jokes!” repeated the Master, staring rather indignantly.
“Well,” explained the priest, rubbing his head. “When I talked about a Communist habit spreading, I only meant a habit I happen to have noticed about two or three times even today. It is a Communist habit by no means confined to Communists. It is the extraordinary habit of so many men, especially Englishmen, of putting other people’s matchboxes in their pockets without remembering to return them. Of course, it seems an awfully silly little trifle to talk about. But it does happen to be the way the crime was committed.”
“It sounds to me quite crazy,” said the doctor.
“Well, if almost any man may forget to return matches, you can bet your boots that Craken would forget to return them. So the poisoner who had prepared the matches got rid of them on to Craken, by the simple process of lending them and not getting them back. A really admirable way of shedding responsibility; because Craken himself would be perfectly unable to imagine where he had got them from. But when he used them quite innocently to light the cigars he offered to our two visitors, he was caught in an obvious trap; one of those too obvious traps. He was the bold bad Revolutionist murdering two millionaires.”
“Well, who else would want to murder them?” growled the doctor.
“Ah, who indeed?” replied the priest; and his voice changed to much greater gravity. “There we come to the other thing I told you; and that, let me tell you, was not a joke. I told you that heresies and false doctrines had become common and conversational; that everybody was used to them; that nobody really noticed them. Did you think I meant Communism when I said that? Why, it was just the other way. You were all as nervous as cats about Communism; and you watched Craken like a wolf. Of course. Communism is a heresy; but it isn’t a heresy that you people take for granted. It is Capitalism you take for granted; or rather the vices of Capitalism disguised as a dead Darwinism. Do you recall what you were all saying in the Common Room, about life being only a scramble, and nature demanding the survival of the fittest, and how it doesn’t matter whether the poor are paid justly or not? Why, that is the heresy that you have grown accustomed to, my friends; and it’s every bit as much a heresy as Communism. That’s the anti-Christian morality or immorality that you take quite naturally. And that’s the immorality that has made a man a murderer today.”
“What man?” cried the Master, and his voice cracked with a sudden weakness.
“Let me approach it another way,” said the priest placidly. “You all talk as if Craken ran away; but he didn’t. When the two men toppled over, he ran down the street, summoned the doctor merely by shouting through the window, and shortly afterwards was trying to summon the police. That was how he was arrested. But doesn’t it strike you, now one comes to think of it, that Mr Baker the Bursar is rather a long time looking for the police?”
“What is he doing then?” asked the Master sharply.
“I fancy he’s destroying papers; or perhaps ransacking these men’s rooms to see they haven’t left us a letter. Or it may have something to do with our friend Wadham. Where does he come in? That is really very simple and a sort of joke too. Mr Wadham is experimenting in poisons for the next war; and has something of which a whiff of flame will stiffen a man dead. Of course, he had nothing to do with killing these men; but he did conceal his chemical secret for a very simple reason. One of them was a Puritan Yankee and the other a cosmopolitan Jew; and those two types are often fanatical Pacifists. They would have called it planning murder and probably refused to help the College. But Baker was a friend of Wadham and it was easy for him to dip matches in the new material.”
Another peculiarity of the little priest was that his mind was all of a piece, and he was unconscious of many incongruities; he would change the note of his talk from something quite public to something quite private, without any particular embarrassment. On this occasion, he made most of the company stare with mystification, by beginning to talk to one person when he had just been talking to ten; quite indifferent to the fact that only the one could have any notion of what he was talking about.
“I’m sorry if I misled you, doctor, by that maundering metaphysical digression on the man of sin,” he said apologetically. “Of course it had nothing to do with the murder; but the truth is I’d forgotten all about the murder for the moment. I’d forgotten everything, you see, but a sort of vision of that fellow, with his vast unhuman face, squatting among the flowers like some blind monster of the Stone Age. And I was thinking that some men are pretty monstrous, like men of stone; but it was all irrelevant. Being bad inside has very little to do with committing crimes outside. The worst criminals have committed no crimes. The practical point is why did the practical criminal commit this crime. Why did Baker the Bursar want to kill these men? That’s all that concerns us now. The answer is the answer to the question I’ve asked twice. Where were these men most of the time, apart from nosing in chapels or laboratories? By the Bursar’s own account, they were talking business with the Bursar.
“Now, with all respect to the dead, I do not exactly grovel before the intellect of these two financiers. Their views on economics and ethics were heathen and heartless. Their views on Peace were tosh. Their views on Port were even more deplorable. But one thing they did understand; and that was business. And it took them a remarkably short time to discover that the business man in charge of the funds of this College was a swindler. Or shall I say, a true follower of the doctrine of the unlimited struggle for life and the survival of the fittest.”
“You mean they were going to expose him and he killed them before they could speak,” said the doctor frowning. “There are a lot of details I don’t understand.”
“There are some details I’m not sure of myself,” said the priest frankly. “I suspect all that business of candles underground had something to do with abstracting the millionaires’ own matches, or perhaps making sure they had no matches. But I’m sure of the main gesture, the gay and careless gesture of Baker tossing his matches to the careless Craken. That gesture was the murderous blow.”
“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” said the Inspector. “How did Baker know that Craken wouldn’t light up himself then and there at the table and become an unwanted corpse?”
The face of Father Brown became almost heavy with reproach; and his voice had a sort of mournful yet generous warmth in it.
“Well, hang it all,” he said, “he was only an atheist.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean,” said the Inspector, politely.
“He only wanted to abolish God,” explained Father Brown in a temperate and reasonable tone. “He only wanted to destroy the Ten Commandments and root up all the religion and civilization that had made him, and wash out all the common sense of ownership and honesty; and let his culture and his country be flattened out by savages from the ends of the earth. That’s all he wanted. You have no right to accuse him of anything beyond that. Hang it all, everybody draws the line somewhere! And you come here and calmly suggest that a Mandeville Man of the old generation (for Craken was of the old generation, whatever his views) would have begun to smoke, or even strike a match, while he was still drinking the College Port, of the vintage of ’08—no, no; men are not so utterly without laws and limits as all that! I was there; I saw him; he had not finished his wine, and you ask me why he did not smoke! No such anarchic question has ever shaken the arches of Mandeville College Funny place, Mandeville College. Funny place, Oxford. Funny place, England.”
“But you haven’t anything particular to do with Oxford?” asked the doctor curiously.
“I have to do with England,” said Father Brown. “I come from there. And the funniest thing of all is that even if you love it and belong to it, you still can’t make head or tail of it.”
The Point of a Pin
Father Brown always declared that he solved this problem in his sleep. And this was true, though in rather an odd fashion; because it occurred at a
time when his sleep was rather disturbed. It was disturbed very early in the morning by the hammering that began in the huge building, or half-building, that was in process of erection opposite to his rooms; a colossal pile of flats still mostly covered with scaffolding and with boards announcing Messrs Swindon & Sand as the builders and owners. The hammering was renewed at regular intervals and was easily recognizable: because Messrs Swindon & Sand specialized in some new American system of cement flooring which, in spite of its subsequent smoothness, solidity, impenetrability and permanent comfort (as described in the advertisements), had to be clamped down at certain points with heavy tools. Father Brown endeavoured, however, to extract exiguous comfort from it; saying that it always woke him up in time for the very earliest Mass, and was therefore something almost in the nature of a carillon. After all, he said, it was almost as poetic that Christians should be awakened by hammers as by bells. As a fact, however, the building operations were a little on his nerves, for another reason. For there was hanging like a cloud over the half-built skyscraper the possibility of a Labour crisis, which the newspapers doggedly insisted on describing as a Strike. As a matter of fact, if it ever happened, it would be a Lock-out. But he worried a good deal about whether it would happen. And it might be questioned whether hammering is more of a strain on the attention because it may go on for ever, or because it may stop at any minute.
“As a mere matter of taste and fancy,” said Father Brown, staring up at the edifice with his owlish spectacles, “I rather wish it would stop. I wish all houses would stop while they still have the scaffolding up. It seems almost a pity that houses are ever finished. They look so fresh and hopeful with all that fairy filigree of white wood, all light and bright in the sun; and a man so often only finishes a house by turning it into a tomb.”