The innocence of Father Brown
finding a man as big and strong as yourself. By George! you might be
useful, if only to hold him! I suppose you yourself have no guess at the
man?”
“I may have a guess,” said the pale smith, “but it is not at a man.”
Then, seeing the scared eyes turn towards his wife on the bench, he put
his huge hand on her shoulder and said: “Nor a woman either.”
“What do you mean?” asked the inspector jocularly. “You don’t think cows
use hammers, do you?”
“I think no thing of flesh held that hammer,” said the blacksmith in a
stifled voice; “mortally speaking, I think the man died alone.”
Wilfred made a sudden forward movement and peered at him with burning
eyes.
“Do you mean to say, Barnes,” came the sharp voice of the cobbler, “that
the hammer jumped up of itself and knocked the man down?”
“Oh, you gentlemen may stare and snigger,” cried Simeon; “you clergymen
who tell us on Sunday in what a stillness the Lord smote Sennacherib. I
believe that One who walks invisible in every house defended the honour
of mine, and laid the defiler dead before the door of it. I believe the
force in that blow was just the force there is in earthquakes, and no
force less.”
Wilfred said, with a voice utterly undescribable: “I told Norman myself
to beware of the thunderbolt.”
“That agent is outside my jurisdiction,” said the inspector with a
slight smile.
“You are not outside His,” answered the smith; “see you to it,” and,
turning his broad back, he went into the house.
The shaken Wilfred was led away by Father Brown, who had an easy and
friendly way with him. “Let us get out of this horrid place, Mr. Bohun,”
he said. “May I look inside your church? I hear it’s one of the oldest
in England. We take some interest, you know,” he added with a comical
grimace, “in old English churches.”
Wilfred Bohun did not smile, for humour was never his strong point. But
he nodded rather eagerly, being only too ready to explain the
Gothic splendours to someone more likely to be sympathetic than the
Presbyterian blacksmith or the atheist cobbler.
“By all means,” he said; “let us go in at this side.” And he led the way
into the high side entrance at the top of the flight of steps. Father
Brown was mounting the first step to follow him when he felt a hand on
his shoulder, and turned to behold the dark, thin figure of the doctor,
his face darker yet with suspicion.
“Sir,” said the physician harshly, “you appear to know some secrets
in this black business. May I ask if you are going to keep them to
yourself?”
“Why, doctor,” answered the priest, smiling quite pleasantly, “there is
one very good reason why a man of my trade should keep things to himself
when he is not sure of them, and that is that it is so constantly his
duty to keep them to himself when he is sure of them. But if you think
I have been discourteously reticent with you or anyone, I will go to the
extreme limit of my custom. I will give you two very large hints.”
“Well, sir?” said the doctor gloomily.
“First,” said Father Brown quietly, “the thing is quite in your
own province. It is a matter of physical science. The blacksmith is
mistaken, not perhaps in saying that the blow was divine, but certainly
in saying that it came by a miracle. It was no miracle, doctor, except
in so far as man is himself a miracle, with his strange and wicked and
yet half-heroic heart. The force that smashed that skull was a force
well known to scientists--one of the most frequently debated of the laws
of nature.”
The doctor, who was looking at him with frowning intentness, only said:
“And the other hint?”
“The other hint is this,” said the priest. “Do you remember the
blacksmith, though he believes in miracles, talking scornfully of the
impossible fairy tale that his hammer had wings and flew half a mile
across country?”
“Yes,” said the doctor, “I remember that.”
“Well,” added Father Brown, with a broad smile, “that fairy tale was the
nearest thing to the real truth that has been said today.” And with that
he turned his back and stumped up the steps after the curate.
The Reverend Wilfred, who had been waiting for him, pale and impatient,
as if this little delay were the last straw for his nerves, led him
immediately to his favourite corner of the church, that part of the
gallery closest to the carved roof and lit by the wonderful window
with the angel. The little Latin priest explored and admired everything
exhaustively, talking cheerfully but in a low voice all the time.
When in the course of his investigation he found the side exit and the
winding stair down which Wilfred had rushed to find his brother dead,
Father Brown ran not down but up, with the agility of a monkey, and his
clear voice came from an outer platform above.
“Come up here, Mr. Bohun,” he called. “The air will do you good.”
Bohun followed him, and came out on a kind of stone gallery or balcony
outside the building, from which one could see the illimitable plain
in which their small hill stood, wooded away to the purple horizon
and dotted with villages and farms. Clear and square, but quite small
beneath them, was the blacksmith’s yard, where the inspector still stood
taking notes and the corpse still lay like a smashed fly.
“Might be the map of the world, mightn’t it?” said Father Brown.
“Yes,” said Bohun very gravely, and nodded his head.
Immediately beneath and about them the lines of the Gothic building
plunged outwards into the void with a sickening swiftness akin to
suicide. There is that element of Titan energy in the architecture of
the Middle Ages that, from whatever aspect it be seen, it always seems
to be rushing away, like the strong back of some maddened horse. This
church was hewn out of ancient and silent stone, bearded with old
fungoids and stained with the nests of birds. And yet, when they saw it
from below, it sprang like a fountain at the stars; and when they saw
it, as now, from above, it poured like a cataract into a voiceless pit.
For these two men on the tower were left alone with the most terrible
aspect of Gothic; the monstrous foreshortening and disproportion, the
dizzy perspectives, the glimpses of great things small and small things
great; a topsy-turvydom of stone in the mid-air. Details of stone,
enormous by their proximity, were relieved against a pattern of fields
and farms, pygmy in their distance. A carved bird or beast at a corner
seemed like some vast walking or flying dragon wasting the pastures and
villages below. The whole atmosphere was dizzy and dangerous, as if men
were upheld in air amid the gyrating wings of colossal genii; and the
whole of that old church, as tall and rich as a cathedral, seemed to sit
upon the sunlit country like a cloudburst.
“I think there is something rather dangerous about standing on these
high places even to pray,” said Father Brown. “Heights were made to be
looked at, not to be looked from.”
“Do you mean that one may fall over,” asked Wilfred.
“I mean that one’s soul may fall if one’s body doesn’t,” said the other
priest.
“I scarcely understand you,” remarked Bohun indistinctly.
“Look at that blacksmith, for instance,” went on Father Brown calmly; “a
good man, but not a Christian--hard, imperious, unforgiving. Well, his
Scotch religion was made up by men who prayed on hills and high crags,
and learnt to look down on the world more than to look up at heaven.
Humility is the mother of giants. One sees great things from the valley;
only small things from the peak.”
“But he--he didn’t do it,” said Bohun tremulously.
“No,” said the other in an odd voice; “we know he didn’t do it.”
After a moment he resumed, looking tranquilly out over the plain with
his pale grey eyes. “I knew a man,” he said, “who began by worshipping
with others before the altar, but who grew fond of high and lonely
places to pray from, corners or niches in the belfry or the spire. And
once in one of those dizzy places, where the whole world seemed to turn
under him like a wheel, his brain turned also, and he fancied he was
God. So that, though he was a good man, he committed a great crime.”
Wilfred’s face was turned away, but his bony hands turned blue and white
as they tightened on the parapet of stone.
“He thought it was given to him to judge the world and strike down the
sinner. He would never have had such a thought if he had been kneeling
with other men upon a floor. But he saw all men walking about like
insects. He saw one especially strutting just below him, insolent and
evident by a bright green hat--a poisonous insect.”
Rooks cawed round the corners of the belfry; but there was no other
sound till Father Brown went on.
“This also tempted him, that he had in his hand one of the most awful
engines of nature; I mean gravitation, that mad and quickening rush by
which all earth’s creatures fly back to her heart when released. See,
the inspector is strutting just below us in the smithy. If I were to
toss a pebble over this parapet it would be something like a bullet
by the time it struck him. If I were to drop a hammer--even a small
hammer--”
Wilfred Bohun threw one leg over the parapet, and Father Brown had him
in a minute by the collar.
“Not by that door,” he said quite gently; “that door leads to hell.”
Bohun staggered back against the wall, and stared at him with frightful
eyes.
“How do you know all this?” he cried. “Are you a devil?”
“I am a man,” answered Father Brown gravely; “and therefore have all
devils in my heart. Listen to me,” he said after a short pause. “I know
what you did--at least, I can guess the great part of it. When you left
your brother you were racked with no unrighteous rage, to the extent
even that you snatched up a small hammer, half inclined to kill him with
his foulness on his mouth. Recoiling, you thrust it under your buttoned
coat instead, and rushed into the church. You pray wildly in many
places, under the angel window, upon the platform above, and a higher
platform still, from which you could see the colonel’s Eastern hat like
the back of a green beetle crawling about. Then something snapped in
your soul, and you let God’s thunderbolt fall.”
Wilfred put a weak hand to his head, and asked in a low voice: “How did
you know that his hat looked like a green beetle?”
“Oh, that,” said the other with the shadow of a smile, “that was common
sense. But hear me further. I say I know all this; but no one else shall
know it. The next step is for you; I shall take no more steps; I will
seal this with the seal of confession. If you ask me why, there are many
reasons, and only one that concerns you. I leave things to you because
you have not yet gone very far wrong, as assassins go. You did not help
to fix the crime on the smith when it was easy; or on his wife, when
that was easy. You tried to fix it on the imbecile because you knew that
he could not suffer. That was one of the gleams that it is my business
to find in assassins. And now come down into the village, and go your
own way as free as the wind; for I have said my last word.”
They went down the winding stairs in utter silence, and came out into
the sunlight by the smithy. Wilfred Bohun carefully unlatched the wooden
gate of the yard, and going up to the inspector, said: “I wish to give
myself up; I have killed my brother.”
The Eye of Apollo
That singular smoky sparkle, at once a confusion and a transparency,
which is the strange secret of the Thames, was changing more and more
from its grey to its glittering extreme as the sun climbed to the zenith
over Westminster, and two men crossed Westminster Bridge. One man
was very tall and the other very short; they might even have been
fantastically compared to the arrogant clock-tower of Parliament and the