The innocence of Father Brown
“Were you not prepared?” asked Father Brown gently. “He is the god of
this country; half the inns and parks and streets are named after him
and his story.”
“I thought we had done with the leper,” cried Flambeau, and spat on the
road.
“You will never have done with him in England,” said the priest, looking
down, “while brass is strong and stone abides. His marble statues will
erect the souls of proud, innocent boys for centuries, his village tomb
will smell of loyalty as of lilies. Millions who never knew him shall
love him like a father--this man whom the last few that knew him dealt
with like dung. He shall be a saint; and the truth shall never be told
of him, because I have made up my mind at last. There is so much good
and evil in breaking secrets, that I put my conduct to a test. All these
newspapers will perish; the anti-Brazil boom is already over; Olivier
is already honoured everywhere. But I told myself that if anywhere, by
name, in metal or marble that will endure like the pyramids, Colonel
Clancy, or Captain Keith, or President Olivier, or any innocent man was
wrongly blamed, then I would speak. If it were only that St. Clare was
wrongly praised, I would be silent. And I will.”
They plunged into the red-curtained tavern, which was not only cosy, but
even luxurious inside. On a table stood a silver model of the tomb of
St. Clare, the silver head bowed, the silver sword broken. On the
walls were coloured photographs of the same scene, and of the system
of wagonettes that took tourists to see it. They sat down on the
comfortable padded benches.
“Come, it’s cold,” cried Father Brown; “let’s have some wine or beer.”
“Or brandy,” said Flambeau.
The Three Tools of Death
Both by calling and conviction Father Brown knew better than most of us,
that every man is dignified when he is dead. But even he felt a pang of
incongruity when he was knocked up at daybreak and told that Sir Aaron
Armstrong had been murdered. There was something absurd and unseemly
about secret violence in connection with so entirely entertaining and
popular a figure. For Sir Aaron Armstrong was entertaining to the point
of being comic; and popular in such a manner as to be almost legendary.
It was like hearing that Sunny Jim had hanged himself; or that Mr.
Pickwick had died in Hanwell. For though Sir Aaron was a philanthropist,
and thus dealt with the darker side of our society, he prided himself
on dealing with it in the brightest possible style. His political and
social speeches were cataracts of anecdotes and “loud laughter”; his
bodily health was of a bursting sort; his ethics were all optimism; and
he dealt with the Drink problem (his favourite topic) with that immortal
or even monotonous gaiety which is so often a mark of the prosperous
total abstainer.
The established story of his conversion was familiar on the more
puritanic platforms and pulpits, how he had been, when only a boy, drawn
away from Scotch theology to Scotch whisky, and how he had risen out of
both and become (as he modestly put it) what he was. Yet his wide
white beard, cherubic face, and sparkling spectacles, at the numberless
dinners and congresses where they appeared, made it hard to believe,
somehow, that he had ever been anything so morbid as either a
dram-drinker or a Calvinist. He was, one felt, the most seriously merry
of all the sons of men.
He had lived on the rural skirt of Hampstead in a handsome house, high
but not broad, a modern and prosaic tower. The narrowest of its narrow
sides overhung the steep green bank of a railway, and was shaken by
passing trains. Sir Aaron Armstrong, as he boisterously explained, had
no nerves. But if the train had often given a shock to the house, that
morning the tables were turned, and it was the house that gave a shock
to the train.
The engine slowed down and stopped just beyond that point where an angle
of the house impinged upon the sharp slope of turf. The arrest of most
mechanical things must be slow; but the living cause of this had been
very rapid. A man clad completely in black, even (it was remembered)
to the dreadful detail of black gloves, appeared on the ridge above
the engine, and waved his black hands like some sable windmill. This in
itself would hardly have stopped even a lingering train. But there came
out of him a cry which was talked of afterwards as something utterly
unnatural and new. It was one of those shouts that are horridly distinct
even when we cannot hear what is shouted. The word in this case was
“Murder!”
But the engine-driver swears he would have pulled up just the same if he
had heard only the dreadful and definite accent and not the word.
The train once arrested, the most superficial stare could take in many
features of the tragedy. The man in black on the green bank was Sir
Aaron Armstrong’s man-servant Magnus. The baronet in his optimism had
often laughed at the black gloves of this dismal attendant; but no one
was likely to laugh at him just now.
So soon as an inquirer or two had stepped off the line and across the
smoky hedge, they saw, rolled down almost to the bottom of the bank, the
body of an old man in a yellow dressing-gown with a very vivid
scarlet lining. A scrap of rope seemed caught about his leg, entangled
presumably in a struggle. There was a smear or so of blood, though very
little; but the body was bent or broken into a posture impossible to any
living thing. It was Sir Aaron Armstrong. A few more bewildered moments
brought out a big fair-bearded man, whom some travellers could salute
as the dead man’s secretary, Patrick Royce, once well known in Bohemian
society and even famous in the Bohemian arts. In a manner more vague,
but even more convincing, he echoed the agony of the servant. By the
time the third figure of that household, Alice Armstrong, daughter of
the dead man, had come already tottering and waving into the garden, the
engine-driver had put a stop to his stoppage. The whistle had blown and
the train had panted on to get help from the next station.
Father Brown had been thus rapidly summoned at the request of Patrick
Royce, the big ex-Bohemian secretary. Royce was an Irishman by birth;
and that casual kind of Catholic that never remembers his religion
until he is really in a hole. But Royce’s request might have been less
promptly complied with if one of the official detectives had not been a
friend and admirer of the unofficial Flambeau; and it was impossible to
be a friend of Flambeau without hearing numberless stories about Father
Brown. Hence, while the young detective (whose name was Merton) led
the little priest across the fields to the railway, their talk was more
confidential than could be expected between two total strangers.
“As far as I can see,” said Mr. Merton candidly, “there is no sense
to be made of it at all. There is nobody one can suspect. Magnus is a
solemn old fool; far too much of a fool to be an assassin. Royce has
been the baronet’s best friend for years; and his daughter undoubtedly
adored him. Besides, it’s all too absurd. Who would kill such a cheery
old chap as Armstrong? Who could dip his hands in the gore of an
after-dinner speaker? It would be like killing Father Christmas.”
“Yes, it was a cheery house,” assented Father Brown. “It was a cheery
house while he was alive. Do you think it will be cheery now he is
dead?”
Merton started a little and regarded his companion with an enlivened
eye. “Now he is dead?” he repeated.
“Yes,” continued the priest stolidly, “he was cheerful. But did he
communicate his cheerfulness? Frankly, was anyone else in the house
cheerful but he?”
A window in Merton’s mind let in that strange light of surprise in which
we see for the first time things we have known all along. He had often
been to the Armstrongs’, on little police jobs of the philanthropist;
and, now he came to think of it, it was in itself a depressing house.
The rooms were very high and very cold; the decoration mean and
provincial; the draughty corridors were lit by electricity that was
bleaker than moonlight. And though the old man’s scarlet face and silver
beard had blazed like a bonfire in each room or passage in turn, it did
not leave any warmth behind it. Doubtless this spectral discomfort in
the place was partly due to the very vitality and exuberance of its
owner; he needed no stoves or lamps, he would say, but carried his own
warmth with him. But when Merton recalled the other inmates, he was
compelled to confess that they also were as shadows of their lord.
The moody man-servant, with his monstrous black gloves, was almost a
nightmare; Royce, the secretary, was solid enough, a big bull of a
man, in tweeds, with a short beard; but the straw-coloured beard was
startlingly salted with grey like the tweeds, and the broad forehead was
barred with premature wrinkles. He was good-natured enough also, but it
was a sad sort of good-nature, almost a heart-broken sort--he had the
general air of being some sort of failure in life. As for Armstrong’s
daughter, it was almost incredible that she was his daughter; she was so
pallid in colour and sensitive in outline. She was graceful, but there
was a quiver in the very shape of her that was like the lines of an
aspen. Merton had sometimes wondered if she had learnt to quail at the
crash of the passing trains.
“You see,” said Father Brown, blinking modestly, “I’m not sure that the
Armstrong cheerfulness is so very cheerful--for other people. You say
that nobody could kill such a happy old man, but I’m not sure; ne nos
inducas in tentationem. If ever I murdered somebody,” he added quite
simply, “I dare say it might be an Optimist.”
“Why?” cried Merton amused. “Do you think people dislike cheerfulness?”
“People like frequent laughter,” answered Father Brown, “but I don’t
think they like a permanent smile. Cheerfulness without humour is a very
trying thing.”
They walked some way in silence along the windy grassy bank by the rail,
and just as they came under the far-flung shadow of the tall Armstrong
house, Father Brown said suddenly, like a man throwing away a
troublesome thought rather than offering it seriously: “Of course, drink
is neither good nor bad in itself. But I can’t help sometimes feeling
that men like Armstrong want an occasional glass of wine to sadden
them.”
Merton’s official superior, a grizzled and capable detective named
Gilder, was standing on the green bank waiting for the coroner, talking
to Patrick Royce, whose big shoulders and bristly beard and hair towered
above him. This was the more noticeable because Royce walked always
with a sort of powerful stoop, and seemed to be going about his small
clerical and domestic duties in a heavy and humbled style, like a
buffalo drawing a go-cart.
He raised his head with unusual pleasure at the sight of the priest, and
took him a few paces apart. Meanwhile Merton was addressing the
older detective respectfully indeed, but not without a certain boyish
impatience.
“Well, Mr. Gilder, have you got much farther with the mystery?”
“There is no mystery,” replied Gilder, as he looked under dreamy eyelids
at the rooks.
“Well, there is for me, at any rate,” said Merton, smiling.
“It is simple enough, my boy,” observed the senior investigator,
stroking his grey, pointed beard. “Three minutes after you’d gone for
Mr. Royce’s parson the whole thing came out. You know that pasty-faced
servant in the black gloves who stopped the train?”
“I should know him anywhere. Somehow he rather gave me the creeps.”
“Well,” drawled Gilder, “when the train had gone on again, that man had
gone too. Rather a cool criminal, don’t you think, to escape by the very
train that went off for the police?”
“You’re pretty sure, I suppose,” remarked the young man, “that he really