The Complete Father Brown Mysteries Collection

by G. K. Chesterton

  “But we know he did go out of the house,” replied his companion, puzzled. “We know he went out of the house, because he was found in the garden.”

  “He never went out of the house, because he never was in the house,” said Father Brown. “Not that evening, I mean. He was sitting in that bungalow. I read that lesson in the dark, at the beginning, in red and golden stars across the garden. They were worked from the hut; they wouldn’t have been burning at all if he hadn’t been in the hut. He was trying to run across to the house and the telephone, when the murderer shot him beside the pond.”

  “But what about the pot and the palm and the broken mirror?” cried Bagshaw. “Why, it was you who found them! It was you yourself who said there must have been a struggle in the hall.”

  The priest blinked rather painfully. “Did I?” he muttered. “Surely, I didn’t say that. I never thought that. What I think I said, was that something had happened in the hall. And something did happen; but it wasn’t a struggle.”

  “Then what broke the mirror?” asked Bagshaw shortly.

  “A bullet broke the mirror,” answered Father Brown gravely; “a bullet fired by the criminal. The big fragments of falling glass were quite enough to knock over the pot and the palm.”

  “Well, what else could he have been firing at except Gwynne?” asked the detective.

  “It’s rather a fine metaphysical point,” answered his clerical companion almost dreamily. “In one sense, of course, he was firing at Gwynne. But Gwynne wasn’t there to be fired at. The criminal was alone in the hall.”

  He was silent for a moment, and then went on quietly. “Imagine the looking-glass at the end of the passage, before it was broken, and the tall palm arching over it. In the half-light, reflecting these monochrome walls, it would look like the end of the passage. A man reflected in it would look like a man coming from inside the house. It would look like the master of the house — if only the reflection were a little like him.”

  “Stop a minute,” cried Bagshaw. “I believe I begin — — ”

  “You begin to see,” said Father Brown. “You begin to see why all the suspects in this case must be innocent. Not one of them could possibly have mistaken his own reflection for old Gwynne. Orm would have known at once that his bush of yellow hair was not a bald head. Flood would have seen his own red head, and Green his own red waistcoat. Besides, they’re all short and shabby; none of them could have thought his own image was a tall, thin, old gentleman in evening-dress. We want another, equally tall and thin, to match him. That’s what I meant by saying that I knew what the murderer looked like.”

  “And what do you argue from that?” asked Bagshaw, looking at him steadily.

  The priest uttered a sort of sharp, crisp laugh, oddly different from his ordinary mild manner of speech.

  “I am going to argue,” he said, “the very thing that you said was so ludicrous and impossible.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m going to base the defence,” said Father Brown, “on the fact that the prosecuting counsel has a bald head.”

  “Oh, my God!” said the detective quietly, and got to his feet, staring.

  Father Brown had resumed his monologue in an unruffled manner.

  “You’ve been following the movements of a good many people in this business; you policemen were prodigiously interested in the movements of the poet, and the servant, and the Irishman. The man whose movements seem to have been rather forgotten is the dead man himself. His servant was quite honestly astonished at finding his master had returned. His master had gone to a great dinner of all the leaders of the legal profession, but had left it abruptly and come home. He was not ill, for he summoned no assistance; he had almost certainly quarrelled with some leader of the legal profession. It’s among the leaders of that profession that we should have looked first for his enemy. He returned, and shut himself up in the bungalow, where he kept all his private documents about treasonable practices. But the leader of the legal profession, who knew there was something against him in those documents, was thoughtful enough to follow his accuser home; he also being in evening-dress, but with a pistol in his pocket. That is all; and nobody could ever have guessed it except for the mirror.”

  He seemed to be gazing into vacancy for a moment, and then added:

  “A queer thing is a mirror; a picture frame that holds hundreds of different pictures, all vivid and all vanished for ever. Yet, there was something specially strange about the glass that hung at the end of that grey corridor under that green palm. It is as if it was a magic glass and had a different fate from others, as if its picture could somehow survive it, hanging in the air of that twilight house like a spectre; or at least like an abstract diagram, the skeleton of an argument. We could, at least, conjure out of the void the thing that Sir Arthur Travers saw. And by the way, there was one very true thing that you said about him.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” said Bagshaw with grim good-nature. “what was it?”

  “You said,” observed the priest, “that Sir Arthur must have some good reason for wanting to get Orm hanged.”

  A week later the priest met the police detective once more, and learned that the authorities had already been moving on the new lines of inquiry when they were interrupted by a sensational event.

  “Sir Arthur Travers,” began Father Brown.

  “Sir Arthur Travers is dead,” said Bagshaw, briefly.

  “Ah!” said the other, with a little catch in his voice; “you mean that he — ”

  “Yes,” said Bagshaw, “he shot at the same man again, but not in a mirror.”

  The Man With Two Beards

  THIS tale was told by Father Brown to Professor Crake, the celebrated criminologist, after dinner at a club, where the two were introduced to each other as sharing a harmless hobby of murder and robbery. But, as Father Brown’s version rather minimized his own part in the matter, it is here re-told in a more impartial style. It arose out of a playful passage of arms, in which the professor was very scientific and the priest rather sceptical.

  “My good sir,” said the professor in remonstrance, “don’t you believe that criminology is a science?”

  “I’m not sure,” replied Father Brown. “Do you believe that hagiology is a science?”

  “What’s that?” asked the specialist sharply.

  “No; it’s not the study of hags, and has nothing to do with burning witches,” said the priest, smiling. “It’s the study of holy things, saints and so on. You see, the Dark Ages tried to make a science about good people. But our own humane and enlightened age is only interested in a science about bad ones. Yet I think our general experience is that every conceivable sort of man has been a saint. And I suspect you will find, too, that every conceivable sort of man has been a murderer.”

  “Well, we believe murderers can be pretty well classified,” observed Crake. “The list sounds rather long and dull; but I think it’s exhaustive. First, all killing can be divided into rational and irrational, and we’ll take the last first, because they are much fewer. There is such a thing as homicidal mania, or love of butchery in the abstract. There is such a thing as irrational antipathy, though it’s very seldom homicidal. Then we come to the true motives: of these, some are less rational in the sense of being merely romantic and retrospective. Acts of pure revenge are acts of hopeless revenge. Thus a lover will sometimes kill a rival he could never supplant, or a rebel assassinate a tyrant after the conquest is complete. But, more often, even these acts have a rational explanation. They are hopeful murders. They fall into the larger section of the second division, of what we may call prudential crimes. These, again, fall chiefly under two descriptions. A man kills either in order to obtain what the other man possesses, either by theft or inheritance, or to stop the other man from acting in some way: as in the case of killing a blackmailer or a political opponent; or, in the case of a rather more passive obstacle, a husband or wife whose continued functioning, as such, interferes w
ith other things. We believe that classification is pretty thoroughly thought out and, properly applied, covers the whole ground — But I’m afraid that it perhaps sounds rather dull; I hope I’m not boring you.”

  “Not at all,” said Father Brown. “If I seemed a little absent-minded I must apologize; the truth is, I was thinking of a man I once knew. He was a murderer; but I can’t see where he fits into your museum of murderers. He was not mad, nor did he like killing. He did not hate the man he killed; he hardly knew him, and certainly had nothing to avenge on him. The other man did not possess anything that he could possibly want. The other man was not behaving in any way which the murderer wanted to stop. The murdered man was not in a position to hurt, or hinder, or even affect the murderer in any way. There was no woman in the case. There were no politics in the case. This man killed a fellow-creature who was practically a stranger, and that for a very strange reason; which is possibly unique in human history.”

  And so, in his own more conversational fashion, he told the story. The story may well begin in a sufficiently respectable setting, at the breakfast table of a worthy though wealthy suburban family named Bankes, where the normal discussion of the newspaper had, for once, been silenced by the discussion about a mystery nearer home. Such people are sometimes accused of gossip about their neighbours, but they are in that matter almost inhumanly innocent. Rustic villagers tell tales about their neighbours, true and false; but the curious culture of the modern suburb will believe anything it is told in the papers about the wickedness of the Pope, or the martyrdom of the King of the Cannibal Islands, and, in the excitement of these topics, never knows what is happening next door. In this case, however, the two forms of interest actually coincided in a coincidence of thrilling intensity. Their own suburb had actually been mentioned in their favourite newspaper. It seemed to them like a new proof of their own existence when they saw the name in print. It was almost as if they had been unconscious and invisible before; and now they were as real as the King of the Cannibal Islands.

  It was stated in the paper that a once famous criminal, known as Michael Moonshine, and many other names that were presumably not his own, had recently been released after a long term of imprisonment for his numerous burglaries; that his whereabouts was being kept quiet, but that he was believed to have settled down in the suburb in question, which we will call for convenience Chisham. A resume of some of his famous and daring exploits and escapes was given in the same issue. For it is a character of that kind of press, intended for that kind of public, that it assumes that its reader have no memories. While the peasant will remember an outlaw like Robin Hood or Rob Roy for centuries, the clerk will hardly remember the name of the criminal about whom he argued in trams and tubes two years before. Yet, Michael Moonshine had really shown some of the heroic rascality of Rob Roy or Robin Hood. He was worthy to be turned into legend and not merely into news. He was far too capable a burglar to be a murderer. But his terrific strength and the ease with which he knocked policemen over like ninepins, stunned people, and bound and gagged them, gave something almost like a final touch of fear or mystery to the fact that he never killed them. People almost felt that he would have been more human if he had.

  Mr. Simon Bankes, the father of the family, was at once better read and more old-fashioned than the rest. He was a sturdy man, with a short grey beard and a brow barred with wrinkles. He had a turn for anecdotes and reminiscence, and he distinctly remembered the days when Londoners had lain awake listening for Mike Moonshine as they did for Spring-heeled Jack. Then there was his wife, a thin, dark lady. There was a sort of acid elegance about her, for her family had much more money than her husband’s, if rather less education; and she even possessed a very valuable emerald necklace upstairs, that gave her a right to prominence in a discussion about thieves. There was his daughter, Opal, who was also thin and dark and supposed to be psychic — at any rate, by herself; for she had little domestic encouragement. Spirits of an ardently astral turn will be well advised not to materialize as members of a large family. There was her brother John, a burly youth, particularly boisterous in his indifference to her spiritual development; and otherwise distinguishable only by his interest in motor-cars. He seemed to be always in the act of selling one car and buying another; and by some process, hard for the economic theorist to follow, it was always possible to buy a much better article by selling the one that was damaged or discredited. There was his brother Philip, a young man with dark curly hair, distinguished by his attention to dress; which is doubtless part of the duty of a stockbroker’s clerk, but, as the stockbroker was prone to hint, hardly the whole of it. Finally, there was present at this family scene his friend, Daniel Devine, who was also dark and exquisitely dressed, but bearded in a fashion that was somewhat foreign, and therefore, for many, slightly menacing.

  It was Devine who had introduced the topic of the newspaper paragraph, tactfully insinuating so effective an instrument of distraction at what looked like the beginning of a small family quarrel; for the psychic lady had begun the description of a vision she had had of pale faces floating in empty night outside her window, and John Bankes was trying to roar down this revelation of a higher state with more than his usual heartiness.

  But the newspaper reference to their new and possibly alarming neighbour soon put both controversialists out of court.

  “How frightful,” cried Mrs. Bankes. “He must be quite a new-comer; but who can he possibly be?”

  “I don’t know any particularly new-comers,” said her husband, “except Sir Leopold Pulman, at Beechwood House.”

  “My dear,” said the lady, “how absurd you are — Sir Leopold!” Then, after a pause, she added: “If anybody suggested his secretary now — that man with the whiskers; I’ve always said, ever since he got the place Philip ought to have had — — ”

  “Nothing doing,” said Philip languidly, making his sole contribution to the conversation. “Not good enough.”

  “The only one I know,” observed Devine, “is that man called Carver, who is stopping at Smith’s Farm. He lives a very quiet life, but he’s quite interesting to talk to. I think John has had some business with him.”

  “Knows a bit about cars,” conceded the monomaniac John. “He’ll know a bit more when he’s been in my new car.”

  Devine smiled slightly; everybody had been threatened with the hospitality of John’s new car. Then he added reflectively:

  “That’s a little what I feel about him. He knows a lot about motoring and travelling, and the active ways of the world, and yet he always stays at home pottering about round old Smith’s beehives. Says he’s only interested in bee culture, and that’s why he’s staying with Smith. It seems a very quiet hobby for a man of his sort. However, I’ve no doubt John’s car will shake him up a bit.”

  As Devine walked away from the house that evening his dark face wore an expression of concentrated thought. His thoughts would, perhaps, have been worthy of our attention, even at this stage; but it is enough to say that their practical upshot was a resolution to pay an immediate visit to Mr. Carver at the house of Mr. Smith. As he was making his way thither he encountered Barnard, the secretary at Beechwood House, conspicuous by his lanky figure and the large side whiskers which Mrs. Bankes counted among her private wrongs. Their acquaintance was slight, and their conversation brief and casual; but Devine seemed to find in it food for further cogitation.

  “Look here,” he said abruptly, “excuse my asking, but is it true that Lady Pulman has some very famous jewellery up at the House? I’m not a professional thief, but I’ve just heard there’s one hanging about.”

  “I’ll get her to give an eye to them,” answered the secretary. “To tell the truth, I’ve ventured to warn her about them already myself. I hope she has attended to it.”

  As they spoke, there came the hideous cry of a motor-horn just behind, and John Bankes came to a stop beside them, radiant at his own steering-wheel. When he heard of Devine’s destination he claimed
it as his own, though his tone suggested rather an abstract relish for offering people a ride. The ride was consumed in continuous praises of the car, now mostly in the matter of its adaptability to weather.

  “Shuts up as tight as a box,” he said, “and opens as easy — as easy as opening your mouth.”

  Devine’s mouth, at the moment, did not seem so easy to open, and they arrived at Smith’s farm to the sound of a soliloquy. Passing the outer gate, Devine found the man he was looking for without going into the house. The man was walking about in the garden, with his hands in his pockets, wearing a large, limp straw hat; a man with a long face and a large chin. The wide brim cut off the upper part of his face with a shadow that looked a little like a mask. In the background was a row of sunny beehives, along which an elderly man, presumably Mr. Smith, was moving accompanied by a short, commonplace-looking companion in black clerical costume.

  “I say,” burst in the irrepressible John, before Devine could offer any polite greeting, “I’ve brought her round to give you a little run. You see if she isn’t better than a ‘Thunderbolt.’”

  Mr Carver’s mouth set into a smile that may have been meant to be gracious, but looked rather grim. “I’m afraid I shall be too busy for pleasure this evening,” he said.

  “How doth the little busy bee,” observed Devine, equally enigmatically. “Your bees must be very busy if they keep you at it all night. I was wondering if — — ”