The innocence of Father Brown
voice, which came from the little Roman priest who had joined the group.
“As a matter of fact, he is coming up the road at this moment.”
The little priest was not an interesting man to look at, having stubbly
brown hair and a round and stolid face. But if he had been as splendid
as Apollo no one would have looked at him at that moment. Everyone
turned round and peered at the pathway which wound across the plain
below, along which was indeed walking, at his own huge stride and with
a hammer on his shoulder, Simeon the smith. He was a bony and gigantic
man, with deep, dark, sinister eyes and a dark chin beard. He was
walking and talking quietly with two other men; and though he was never
specially cheerful, he seemed quite at his ease.
“My God!” cried the atheistic cobbler, “and there’s the hammer he did it
with.”
“No,” said the inspector, a sensible-looking man with a sandy moustache,
speaking for the first time. “There’s the hammer he did it with over
there by the church wall. We have left it and the body exactly as they
are.”
All glanced round and the short priest went across and looked down in
silence at the tool where it lay. It was one of the smallest and the
lightest of the hammers, and would not have caught the eye among the
rest; but on the iron edge of it were blood and yellow hair.
After a silence the short priest spoke without looking up, and there was
a new note in his dull voice. “Mr. Gibbs was hardly right,” he said, “in
saying that there is no mystery. There is at least the mystery of why so
big a man should attempt so big a blow with so little a hammer.”
“Oh, never mind that,” cried Gibbs, in a fever. “What are we to do with
Simeon Barnes?”
“Leave him alone,” said the priest quietly. “He is coming here of
himself. I know those two men with him. They are very good fellows from
Greenford, and they have come over about the Presbyterian chapel.”
Even as he spoke the tall smith swung round the corner of the church,
and strode into his own yard. Then he stood there quite still, and the
hammer fell from his hand. The inspector, who had preserved impenetrable
propriety, immediately went up to him.
“I won’t ask you, Mr. Barnes,” he said, “whether you know anything about
what has happened here. You are not bound to say. I hope you don’t know,
and that you will be able to prove it. But I must go through the form
of arresting you in the King’s name for the murder of Colonel Norman
Bohun.”
“You are not bound to say anything,” said the cobbler in officious
excitement. “They’ve got to prove everything. They haven’t proved yet
that it is Colonel Bohun, with the head all smashed up like that.”
“That won’t wash,” said the doctor aside to the priest. “That’s out of
the detective stories. I was the colonel’s medical man, and I knew his
body better than he did. He had very fine hands, but quite peculiar
ones. The second and third fingers were the same length. Oh, that’s the
colonel right enough.”
As he glanced at the brained corpse upon the ground the iron eyes of the
motionless blacksmith followed them and rested there also.
“Is Colonel Bohun dead?” said the smith quite calmly. “Then he’s
damned.”
“Don’t say anything! Oh, don’t say anything,” cried the atheist cobbler,
dancing about in an ecstasy of admiration of the English legal system.
For no man is such a legalist as the good Secularist.
The blacksmith turned on him over his shoulder the august face of a
fanatic.
“It’s well for you infidels to dodge like foxes because the world’s law
favours you,” he said; “but God guards His own in His pocket, as you
shall see this day.”
Then he pointed to the colonel and said: “When did this dog die in his
sins?”
“Moderate your language,” said the doctor.
“Moderate the Bible’s language, and I’ll moderate mine. When did he
die?”
“I saw him alive at six o’clock this morning,” stammered Wilfred Bohun.
“God is good,” said the smith. “Mr. Inspector, I have not the slightest
objection to being arrested. It is you who may object to arresting me.
I don’t mind leaving the court without a stain on my character. You do
mind perhaps leaving the court with a bad set-back in your career.”
The solid inspector for the first time looked at the blacksmith with a
lively eye; as did everybody else, except the short, strange priest, who
was still looking down at the little hammer that had dealt the dreadful
blow.
“There are two men standing outside this shop,” went on the blacksmith
with ponderous lucidity, “good tradesmen in Greenford whom you all know,
who will swear that they saw me from before midnight till daybreak and
long after in the committee room of our Revival Mission, which sits all
night, we save souls so fast. In Greenford itself twenty people could
swear to me for all that time. If I were a heathen, Mr. Inspector, I
would let you walk on to your downfall. But as a Christian man I feel
bound to give you your chance, and ask you whether you will hear my
alibi now or in court.”
The inspector seemed for the first time disturbed, and said, “Of course
I should be glad to clear you altogether now.”
The smith walked out of his yard with the same long and easy stride, and
returned to his two friends from Greenford, who were indeed friends of
nearly everyone present. Each of them said a few words which no one ever
thought of disbelieving. When they had spoken, the innocence of Simeon
stood up as solid as the great church above them.
One of those silences struck the group which are more strange and
insufferable than any speech. Madly, in order to make conversation, the
curate said to the Catholic priest:
“You seem very much interested in that hammer, Father Brown.”
“Yes, I am,” said Father Brown; “why is it such a small hammer?”
The doctor swung round on him.
“By George, that’s true,” he cried; “who would use a little hammer with
ten larger hammers lying about?”
Then he lowered his voice in the curate’s ear and said: “Only the kind
of person that can’t lift a large hammer. It is not a question of force
or courage between the sexes. It’s a question of lifting power in the
shoulders. A bold woman could commit ten murders with a light hammer and
never turn a hair. She could not kill a beetle with a heavy one.”
Wilfred Bohun was staring at him with a sort of hypnotised horror,
while Father Brown listened with his head a little on one side, really
interested and attentive. The doctor went on with more hissing emphasis:
“Why do these idiots always assume that the only person who hates the
wife’s lover is the wife’s husband? Nine times out of ten the person
who most hates the wife’s lover is the wife. Who knows what insolence or
treachery he had shown her--look there!”
He made a momentary gesture towards the red-haired woman on the bench.
She had lifted her head at last and the tears were drying on her
splendid face. But the eyes were fixed on the corpse with an electric
glare that had in it something of idiocy.
The Rev. Wilfred Bohun made a limp gesture as if waving away all desire
to know; but Father Brown, dusting off his sleeve some ashes blown from
the furnace, spoke in his indifferent way.
“You are like so many doctors,” he said; “your mental science is really
suggestive. It is your physical science that is utterly impossible. I
agree that the woman wants to kill the co-respondent much more than the
petitioner does. And I agree that a woman will always pick up a small
hammer instead of a big one. But the difficulty is one of physical
impossibility. No woman ever born could have smashed a man’s skull
out flat like that.” Then he added reflectively, after a pause: “These
people haven’t grasped the whole of it. The man was actually wearing an
iron helmet, and the blow scattered it like broken glass. Look at that
woman. Look at her arms.”
Silence held them all up again, and then the doctor said rather sulkily:
“Well, I may be wrong; there are objections to everything. But I stick
to the main point. No man but an idiot would pick up that little hammer
if he could use a big hammer.”
With that the lean and quivering hands of Wilfred Bohun went up to his
head and seemed to clutch his scanty yellow hair. After an instant they
dropped, and he cried: “That was the word I wanted; you have said the
word.”
Then he continued, mastering his discomposure: “The words you said were,
‘No man but an idiot would pick up the small hammer.’”
“Yes,” said the doctor. “Well?”
“Well,” said the curate, “no man but an idiot did.” The rest stared
at him with eyes arrested and riveted, and he went on in a febrile and
feminine agitation.
“I am a priest,” he cried unsteadily, “and a priest should be no shedder
of blood. I--I mean that he should bring no one to the gallows. And I
thank God that I see the criminal clearly now--because he is a criminal
who cannot be brought to the gallows.”
“You will not denounce him?” inquired the doctor.
“He would not be hanged if I did denounce him,” answered Wilfred with
a wild but curiously happy smile. “When I went into the church this
morning I found a madman praying there--that poor Joe, who has been
wrong all his life. God knows what he prayed; but with such strange folk
it is not incredible to suppose that their prayers are all upside down.
Very likely a lunatic would pray before killing a man. When I last saw
poor Joe he was with my brother. My brother was mocking him.”
“By Jove!” cried the doctor, “this is talking at last. But how do you
explain--”
The Rev. Wilfred was almost trembling with the excitement of his
own glimpse of the truth. “Don’t you see; don’t you see,” he cried
feverishly; “that is the only theory that covers both the queer things,
that answers both the riddles. The two riddles are the little hammer and
the big blow. The smith might have struck the big blow, but would not
have chosen the little hammer. His wife would have chosen the little
hammer, but she could not have struck the big blow. But the madman might
have done both. As for the little hammer--why, he was mad and might have
picked up anything. And for the big blow, have you never heard, doctor,
that a maniac in his paroxysm may have the strength of ten men?”
The doctor drew a deep breath and then said, “By golly, I believe you’ve
got it.”
Father Brown had fixed his eyes on the speaker so long and steadily
as to prove that his large grey, ox-like eyes were not quite so
insignificant as the rest of his face. When silence had fallen he said
with marked respect: “Mr. Bohun, yours is the only theory yet propounded
which holds water every way and is essentially unassailable. I think,
therefore, that you deserve to be told, on my positive knowledge, that
it is not the true one.” And with that the old little man walked away
and stared again at the hammer.
“That fellow seems to know more than he ought to,” whispered the doctor
peevishly to Wilfred. “Those popish priests are deucedly sly.”
“No, no,” said Bohun, with a sort of wild fatigue. “It was the lunatic.
It was the lunatic.”
The group of the two clerics and the doctor had fallen away from
the more official group containing the inspector and the man he had
arrested. Now, however, that their own party had broken up, they heard
voices from the others. The priest looked up quietly and then looked
down again as he heard the blacksmith say in a loud voice:
“I hope I’ve convinced you, Mr. Inspector. I’m a strong man, as you say,
but I couldn’t have flung my hammer bang here from Greenford. My hammer
hasn’t got wings that it should come flying half a mile over hedges and
fields.”
The inspector laughed amicably and said: “No, I think you can be
considered out of it, though it’s one of the rummiest coincidences I
ever saw. I can only ask you to give us all the assistance you can in