The wisdom of Father Brown
“Well,” said Sir Walter patiently, “what was the outline like? Was it,
for instance, like the figure of the murdered woman?”
“Not in the least,” answered Seymour quietly.
“What did it look like to you?”
“It looked to me,” replied the witness, “like a tall man.”
Everyone in court kept his eyes riveted on his pen, or his
umbrella-handle, or his book, or his boots or whatever he happened to be
looking at. They seemed to be holding their eyes away from the prisoner
by main force; but they felt his figure in the dock, and they felt it
as gigantic. Tall as Bruno was to the eye, he seemed to swell taller and
taller when an eyes had been torn away from him.
Cowdray was resuming his seat with his solemn face, smoothing his
black silk robes, and white silk whiskers. Sir Wilson was leaving the
witness-box, after a few final particulars to which there were many
other witnesses, when the counsel for the defence sprang up and stopped
him.
“I shall only detain you a moment,” said Mr Butler, who was a
rustic-looking person with red eyebrows and an expression of partial
slumber. “Will you tell his lordship how you knew it was a man?”
A faint, refined smile seemed to pass over Seymour’s features. “I’m
afraid it is the vulgar test of trousers,” he said. “When I saw daylight
between the long legs I was sure it was a man, after all.”
Butler’s sleepy eyes opened as suddenly as some silent explosion. “After
all!” he repeated slowly. “So you did think at first it was a woman?”
Seymour looked troubled for the first time. “It is hardly a point of
fact,” he said, “but if his lordship would like me to answer for my
impression, of course I shall do so. There was something about the thing
that was not exactly a woman and yet was not quite a man; somehow the
curves were different. And it had something that looked like long hair.”
“Thank you,” said Mr Butler, K.C., and sat down suddenly, as if he had
got what he wanted.
Captain Cutler was a far less plausible and composed witness than Sir
Wilson, but his account of the opening incidents was solidly the same.
He described the return of Bruno to his dressing-room, the dispatching
of himself to buy a bunch of lilies-of-the-valley, his return to the
upper end of the passage, the thing he saw in the passage, his suspicion
of Seymour, and his struggle with Bruno. But he could give little
artistic assistance about the black figure that he and Seymour had seen.
Asked about its outline, he said he was no art critic--with a somewhat
too obvious sneer at Seymour. Asked if it was a man or a woman, he said
it looked more like a beast--with a too obvious snarl at the prisoner.
But the man was plainly shaken with sorrow and sincere anger, and
Cowdray quickly excused him from confirming facts that were already
fairly clear.
The defending counsel also was again brief in his cross-examination;
although (as was his custom) even in being brief, he seemed to take a
long time about it. “You used a rather remarkable expression,” he said,
looking at Cutler sleepily. “What do you mean by saying that it looked
more like a beast than a man or a woman?”
Cutler seemed seriously agitated. “Perhaps I oughtn’t to have said
that,” he said; “but when the brute has huge humped shoulders like a
chimpanzee, and bristles sticking out of its head like a pig--”
Mr Butler cut short his curious impatience in the middle. “Never mind
whether its hair was like a pig’s,” he said, “was it like a woman’s?”
“A woman’s!” cried the soldier. “Great Scott, no!”
“The last witness said it was,” commented the counsel, with unscrupulous
swiftness. “And did the figure have any of those serpentine and
semi-feminine curves to which eloquent allusion has been made? No? No
feminine curves? The figure, if I understand you, was rather heavy and
square than otherwise?”
“He may have been bending forward,” said Cutler, in a hoarse and rather
faint voice.
“Or again, he may not,” said Mr Butler, and sat down suddenly for the
second time.
The third, witness called by Sir Walter Cowdray was the little Catholic
clergyman, so little, compared with the others, that his head seemed
hardly to come above the box, so that it was like cross-examining a
child. But unfortunately Sir Walter had somehow got it into his head
(mostly by some ramifications of his family’s religion) that Father
Brown was on the side of the prisoner, because the prisoner was wicked
and foreign and even partly black. Therefore he took Father Brown up
sharply whenever that proud pontiff tried to explain anything; and told
him to answer yes or no, and tell the plain facts without any jesuitry.
When Father Brown began, in his simplicity, to say who he thought the
man in the passage was, the barrister told him that he did not want his
theories.
“A black shape was seen in the passage. And you say you saw the black
shape. Well, what shape was it?”
Father Brown blinked as under rebuke; but he had long known the literal
nature of obedience. “The shape,” he said, “was short and thick, but had
two sharp, black projections curved upwards on each side of the head or
top, rather like horns, and--”
“Oh! the devil with horns, no doubt,” ejaculated Cowdray, sitting down
in triumphant jocularity. “It was the devil come to eat Protestants.”
“No,” said the priest dispassionately; “I know who it was.”
Those in court had been wrought up to an irrational, but real sense of
some monstrosity. They had forgotten the figure in the dock and thought
only of the figure in the passage. And the figure in the passage,
described by three capable and respectable men who had all seen it, was
a shifting nightmare: one called it a woman, and the other a beast, and
the other a devil....
The judge was looking at Father Brown with level and piercing eyes.
“You are a most extraordinary witness,” he said; “but there is something
about you that makes me think you are trying to tell the truth. Well,
who was the man you saw in the passage?”
“He was myself,” said Father Brown.
Butler, K.C., sprang to his feet in an extraordinary stillness, and said
quite calmly: “Your lordship will allow me to cross-examine?” And then,
without stopping, he shot at Brown the apparently disconnected question:
“You have heard about this dagger; you know the experts say the crime
was committed with a short blade?”
“A short blade,” assented Brown, nodding solemnly like an owl, “but a
very long hilt.”
Before the audience could quite dismiss the idea that the priest had
really seen himself doing murder with a short dagger with a long hilt
(which seemed somehow to make it more horrible), he had himself hurried
on to explain.
“I mean daggers aren’t the only things with short blades. Spears
have short blades. And spears catch at the end of the steel just like
daggers, if they’re that sort of fancy spear they had in theatres; like
the spear poor old Parkinson killed his wife with, just when she’d sent
for me to settle their family troubles--and I came just too late, God
forgive me! But he died penitent--he just died of being penitent. He
couldn’t bear what he’d done.”
The general impression in court was that the little priest, who was
gobbling away, had literally gone mad in the box. But the judge still
looked at him with bright and steady eyes of interest; and the counsel
for the defence went on with his questions unperturbed.
“If Parkinson did it with that pantomime spear,” said Butler, “he
must have thrust from four yards away. How do you account for signs of
struggle, like the dress dragged off the shoulder?” He had slipped into
treating his mere witness as an expert; but no one noticed it now.
“The poor lady’s dress was torn,” said the witness, “because it was
caught in a panel that slid to just behind her. She struggled to free
herself, and as she did so Parkinson came out of the prisoner’s room and
lunged with the spear.”
“A panel?” repeated the barrister in a curious voice.
“It was a looking-glass on the other side,” explained Father Brown.
“When I was in the dressing-room I noticed that some of them could
probably be slid out into the passage.”
There was another vast and unnatural silence, and this time it was the
judge who spoke. “So you really mean that when you looked down that
passage, the man you saw was yourself--in a mirror?”
“Yes, my lord; that was what I was trying to say,” said Brown, “but they
asked me for the shape; and our hats have corners just like horns, and
so I--”
The judge leaned forward, his old eyes yet more brilliant, and said
in specially distinct tones: “Do you really mean to say that when Sir
Wilson Seymour saw that wild what-you-call-him with curves and a woman’s
hair and a man’s trousers, what he saw was Sir Wilson Seymour?”
“Yes, my lord,” said Father Brown.
“And you mean to say that when Captain Cutler saw that chimpanzee with
humped shoulders and hog’s bristles, he simply saw himself?”
“Yes, my lord.”
The judge leaned back in his chair with a luxuriance in which it was
hard to separate the cynicism and the admiration. “And can you tell us
why,” he asked, “you should know your own figure in a looking-glass,
when two such distinguished men don’t?”
Father Brown blinked even more painfully than before; then he stammered:
“Really, my lord, I don’t know unless it’s because I don’t look at it so
often.”
FIVE -- The Mistake of the Machine
FLAMBEAU and his friend the priest were sitting in the Temple Gardens
about sunset; and their neighbourhood or some such accidental influence
had turned their talk to matters of legal process. From the problem
of the licence in cross-examination, their talk strayed to Roman and
mediaeval torture, to the examining magistrate in France and the Third
Degree in America.
“I’ve been reading,” said Flambeau, “of this new psychometric method
they talk about so much, especially in America. You know what I mean;
they put a pulsometer on a man’s wrist and judge by how his heart goes
at the pronunciation of certain words. What do you think of it?”
“I think it very interesting,” replied Father Brown; “it reminds me
of that interesting idea in the Dark Ages that blood would flow from a
corpse if the murderer touched it.”
“Do you really mean,” demanded his friend, “that you think the two
methods equally valuable?”
“I think them equally valueless,” replied Brown. “Blood flows, fast or
slow, in dead folk or living, for so many more million reasons than we
can ever know. Blood will have to flow very funnily; blood will have
to flow up the Matterhorn, before I will take it as a sign that I am to
shed it.”
“The method,” remarked the other, “has been guaranteed by some of the
greatest American men of science.”
“What sentimentalists men of science are!” exclaimed Father Brown, “and
how much more sentimental must American men of science be! Who but a
Yankee would think of proving anything from heart-throbs? Why, they must
be as sentimental as a man who thinks a woman is in love with him if she
blushes. That’s a test from the circulation of the blood, discovered by
the immortal Harvey; and a jolly rotten test, too.”
“But surely,” insisted Flambeau, “it might point pretty straight at
something or other.”
“There’s a disadvantage in a stick pointing straight,” answered the
other. “What is it? Why, the other end of the stick always points the
opposite way. It depends whether you get hold of the stick by the right
end. I saw the thing done once and I’ve never believed in it since.” And
he proceeded to tell the story of his disillusionment.
It happened nearly twenty years before, when he was chaplain to his
co-religionists in a prison in Chicago--where the Irish population
displayed a capacity both for crime and penitence which kept him