The secret of Father Brown
man with two legs once said to me: 'I only believe in the Holy Ghost in
a spiritual sense.' Naturally, I said: 'In what other sense could you
believe it?' And _then_ he thought I meant he needn't believe in anything
except evolution, or ethical fellowship, or some bilge.... I mean
that I really did see myself, and my real self, committing the murders.
I didn't actually kill the men by material means; but that's not the
point. Any brick or bit of machinery might have killed them by material
means. I mean that I thought and thought about how a man might come to
be like that, until I realized that I really was like that, in
everything except actual final consent to the action. It was once
suggested to me by a friend of mine, as a sort of religious exercise. I
believe he got it from Pope Leo XIII, who was always rather a hero of
mine."
"I'm afraid," said the American, in tones that were still doubtful, and
keeping his eye on the priest rather as if he were a wild animal, "that
you'd have to explain a lot to me before I knew what you were talking
about. The science of detection----"
Father Brown snapped his fingers with the same animated annoyance.
"That's it," he cried; "that's just where we part company. Science is a
grand thing when you can get it; in its real sense one of the grandest
words in the world. But what do these men mean, nine times out often,
when they use it nowadays? When they say detection is a science? When
they say criminology is a science? They mean getting _outside_ a man and
studying him as if he were a gigantic insect: in what they would call a
dry impartial light, in what I should call a dead and dehumanized light.
They mean getting a long way off him, as if he were a distant
prehistoric monster; staring at the shape of his 'criminal skull' as if
it were a sort of eerie growth, like the horn on a rhinoceros's nose.
When the scientist talks about a type, he never means himself, but
always his neighbour; probably his poorer neighbour. I don't deny the
dry light may sometimes do good; though in one sense it's the very
reverse of science. So far from being knowledge, it's actually
suppression of what we know. It's treating a friend as a stranger, and
pretending that something familiar is really remote and mysterious. It's
like saying that a man has a proboscis between the eyes, or that he
falls down in a fit of insensibility once every twenty-four hours. Well,
what you call 'the secret' is exactly the opposite. I don't try to get
outside the man. I try to get inside the murderer.... Indeed it's
much more than that, don't you see? I _am_ inside a man. I am always
inside a man, moving his arms and legs; but I wait till I know I am
inside a murderer, thinking his thoughts, wrestling with his passions;
till I have bent myself into the posture of his hunched and peering
hatred; till I see the world with his bloodshot and squinting eyes,
looking between the blinkers of his half-witted concentration; looking
up the short and sharp perspective of a straight road to a pool of
blood. Till I am really a murderer."
"Oh," said Mr. Chace, regarding him with a long, grim face, and added:
"And that is what you call a religious exercise."
"Yes," said Father Brown; "that is what I call a religious exercise."
After an instant's silence he resumed: "It's so real a religious
exercise that I'd rather not have said anything about it. But I simply
couldn't have you going off and telling all your countrymen that I had a
secret magic connected with Thought-Forms, could I? I've put it badly,
but it's true. No man's really any good till he knows how bad he is, or
might be; till he's realized exactly how much right he has to all this
snobbery, and sneering, and talking about 'criminals,' as if they were
apes in a forest ten thousand miles away; till he's got rid of all the
dirty self-deception of talking about low types and deficient skulls;
till he's squeezed out of his soul the last drop of the oil of the
Pharisees; till his only hope is somehow or other to have captured one
criminal, and kept him safe and sane under his own hat."
Flambeau came forward and filled a great goblet with Spanish wine and
set it before his friend, as he had already set one before his fellow
guest. Then he himself spoke for the first time:
"I believe Father Brown has had a new batch of mysteries. We were
talking about them the other day, I fancy. He has been dealing with some
queer people since we last met."
"Yes; I know the stories more or less--but not the application," said
Chace, lifting his glass thoughtfully. "Can you give me any examples, I
wonder.... I mean, did you deal with this last batch in that
introspective style?"
Father Brown also lifted his glass, and the glow of the fire turned the
red wine transparent, like the glorious blood-red glass of a martyr's
window. The red flame seemed to hold his eyes and absorb his gaze that
sank deeper and deeper into it, as if that single cup held a red sea of
the blood of all men, and his soul were a diver, ever plunging in dark
humility and inverted imagination, lower than its lowest monsters and
its most ancient slime. In that cup, as in a red mirror, he saw many
things; the doings of his last days moved in crimson shadows; the
examples that his companions demanded danced in symbolic shapes; and
there passed before him all the stories that are told here. Now, the
luminous wine was like a vast red sunset upon dark red sands, where
stood dark figures of men; one was fallen and another running towards
him. Then the sunset seemed to break up into patches: red lanterns
swinging from garden trees and a pond gleaming red with reflection; and
then all the colour seemed to cluster again into a great rose of red
crystal, a jewel that irradiated the world like a red sun, save for the
shadow of a tall figure with a high head-dress as of some prehistoric
priest; and then faded again till nothing was left but a flame of wild
red beard blowing in the wind upon a wild grey moor. All these things,
which may be seen later from other angles and in other moods than his
own, rose up in his memory at the challenge and began to form themselves
into anecdotes and arguments.
"Yes," he said, as he raised the wine cup slowly to his lips, "I can
remember pretty well----"
II
THE MIRROR OF THE MAGISTRATE
JAMES BAGSHAW and Wilfred Underhill were old friends,
and were fond of rambling through the streets at night, talking
interminably as they turned corner after corner in the silent and
seemingly lifeless labyrinth of the large suburb in which they lived.
The former, a big, dark, good-humoured man with a strip of black
moustache, was a professional police detective; the latter, a
sharp-faced, sensitive-looking gentleman with light hair, was an
amateur interested in detection. It will come as a shock to the readers
of the best scientific romance to learn that it was the policeman who
was talking and the amateur who was listening, even with a certain
respect.
"Ours is the only trade," said Bagshaw, "in which the professional is
always supposed to be wrong. After all, people don't write stories in
which hairdressers can't cut hair and have to be helped by a customer;
or in which a cabman can't drive a cab until his fare explains to him
the philosophy of cab-driving. For all that, I'd never deny that we
often tend to get into a rut: or, in other words, have the disadvantages
of going by a rule. Where the romancers are wrong is, that they don't
allow us even the advantages of going by a rule."
"Surely," said Underhill, "Sherlock Holmes would say that he went by a
logical rule."
"He may be right," answered the other; "but I mean a collective rule.
It's like the staff work of an army. We pool our information."
"And you don't think detective stories allow for that?" asked his
friend.
"Well, let's take any imaginary case of Sherlock Holmes, and Lestrade,
the official detective. Sherlock Holmes, let us say, can guess that a
total stranger crossing the street is a foreigner, merely because he
seems to look for the traffic to go to the right instead of the left.
I'm quite ready to admit Holmes might guess that. I'm quite sure
Lestrade wouldn't guess anything of the kind. But what they leave out is
the fact that the policeman, who couldn't guess, might very probably
know. Lestrade might know the man was a foreigner merely because his
department has to keep an eye on all foreigners; some would say on all
natives, too. As a policeman I'm glad the police know so much; for every
man wants to do his own job well. But as a citizen, I sometimes wonder
whether they don't know too much."
"You don't seriously mean to say," cried Underhill incredulously, "that
you know anything about strange people in a strange street. That if a
man walked out of that house over there, you would know anything about
him?"
"I should if he was the householder," answered Bagshaw. "That house is
rented by a literary man of Anglo-Roumanian extraction, who generally
lives in Paris, but is over here in connexion with some poetical play of
his. His name's Osric Orm, one of the new poets, and pretty steep to
read, I believe."
"But I mean all the people down the road," said his companion. "I was
thinking how strange and new and nameless everything looks, with these
high blank walls and these houses lost in large gardens. You can't know
all of them."
"I know a few," answered Bagshaw. "This garden wall we're walking under
is at the end of the grounds of Sir Humphrey Gwynne, better known as Mr.
Justice Gwynne, the old judge who made such a row about spying during
the war. The house next door to it belongs to a wealthy cigar merchant.
He comes from Spanish-America and looks very swarthy and Spanish
himself; but he bears the very English name of Buller. The house beyond
that--did you hear that noise?"
"I heard something," said Underhill, "but I really don't know what it
was."
"I know what it was," replied the detective, "it was a rather heavy
revolver, fired twice, followed by a cry for help. And it came straight
out of the back garden of Mr. Justice Gwynne, that paradise of peace and
legality."
He looked up and down the street sharply and then added:
"And the only gate of the back garden is half a mile round on the other
side. I wish this wall were a little lower, or I were a little lighter;
but it's got to be tried."
"It is lower a little farther on," said Underhill, "and there seems to
be a tree that looks helpful."
They moved hastily along and found a place where the wall seemed to
stoop abruptly, almost as if it had half-sunk into the earth; and a
garden tree, flamboyant with the gayest garden blossom, straggled out of
the dark enclosure and was gilded by the gleam of a solitary street-lamp.
Bagshaw caught the crooked branch and threw one leg over the low
wall; and the next moment they stood knee-deep amid the snapping plants
of a garden border.
The garden of Mr. Justice Gwynne by night was rather a singular
spectacle. It was large and lay on the empty edge of the suburb, in the
shadow of a tall, dark house that was the last in its line of houses.
The house was literally dark, being shuttered and unlighted, at least on
the side overlooking the garden. But the garden itself, which lay in its
shadow: and should have been a tract of absolute darkness, showed a
random glitter, like that of fading fireworks; as if a giant rocket had
fallen in fire among the trees. As they advanced they were able to
locate it as the light of several coloured lamps, entangled in the trees
like the jewel fruits of Aladdin, and especially as the light from a
small, round lake or pond, which gleamed, with pale colours as if a lamp
were kindled under it.