The wisdom of Father Brown
people in the same patient and pacific style. Let it be granted--let us
admit, for the sake of argument, that he did all this. If that is so, I
will tell you what he didn’t do. He didn’t storm a spiked wall against a
man with a loaded gun. He didn’t write on the wall with his own hand, to
say he had done it. He didn’t stop to state that his justification was
self-defence. He didn’t explain that he had no quarrel with the poor
warder. He didn’t name the house of the rich man to which he was going
with the gun. He didn’t write his own, initials in a man’s blood. Saints
alive! Can’t you see the whole character is different, in good and evil?
Why, you don’t seem to be like I am a bit. One would think you’d never
had any vices of your own.”
The amazed American had already parted his lips in protest when the
door of his private and official room was hammered and rattled in an
unceremonious way to which he was totally unaccustomed.
The door flew open. The moment before Greywood Usher had been coming to
the conclusion that Father Brown might possibly be mad. The moment after
he began to think he was mad himself. There burst and fell into his
private room a man in the filthiest rags, with a greasy squash hat still
askew on his head, and a shabby green shade shoved up from one of his
eyes, both of which were glaring like a tiger’s. The rest of his face
was almost undiscoverable, being masked with a matted beard and whiskers
through which the nose could barely thrust itself, and further buried in
a squalid red scarf or handkerchief. Mr Usher prided himself on having
seen most of the roughest specimens in the State, but he thought he had
never seen such a baboon dressed as a scarecrow as this. But, above all,
he had never in all his placid scientific existence heard a man like
that speak to him first.
“See here, old man Usher,” shouted the being in the red handkerchief,
“I’m getting tired. Don’t you try any of your hide-and-seek on me; I
don’t get fooled any. Leave go of my guests, and I’ll let up on the
fancy clockwork. Keep him here for a split instant and you’ll feel
pretty mean. I reckon I’m not a man with no pull.”
The eminent Usher was regarding the bellowing monster with an amazement
which had dried up all other sentiments. The mere shock to his eyes had
rendered his ears, almost useless. At last he rang a bell with a hand
of violence. While the bell was still strong and pealing, the voice of
Father Brown fell soft but distinct.
“I have a suggestion to make,” he said, “but it seems a little
confusing. I don’t know this gentleman--but--but I think I know
him. Now, you know him--you know him quite well--but you don’t know
him--naturally. Sounds paradoxical, I know.”
“I reckon the Cosmos is cracked,” said Usher, and fell asprawl in his
round office chair.
“Now, see here,” vociferated the stranger, striking the table, but
speaking in a voice that was all the more mysterious because it was
comparatively mild and rational though still resounding. “I won’t let
you in. I want--”
“Who in hell are you?” yelled Usher, suddenly sitting up straight.
“I think the gentleman’s name is Todd,” said the priest.
Then he picked up the pink slip of newspaper.
“I fear you don’t read the Society papers properly,” he said, and began
to read out in a monotonous voice, “‘Or locked in the jewelled bosoms of
our city’s gayest leaders; but there is talk of a pretty parody of the
manners and customs of the other end of Society’s scale.’ There’s been
a big Slum Dinner up at Pilgrim’s Pond tonight; and a man, one of the
guests, disappeared. Mr Ireton Todd is a good host, and has tracked him
here, without even waiting to take off his fancy-dress.”
“What man do you mean?”
“I mean the man with comically ill-fitting clothes you saw running
across the ploughed field. Hadn’t you better go and investigate him? He
will be rather impatient to get back to his champagne, from which he ran
away in such a hurry, when the convict with the gun hove in sight.”
“Do you seriously mean--” began the official.
“Why, look here, Mr Usher,” said Father Brown quietly, “you said the
machine couldn’t make a mistake; and in one sense it didn’t. But the
other machine did; the machine that worked it. You assumed that the
man in rags jumped at the name of Lord Falconroy, because he was Lord
Falconroy’s murderer. He jumped at the name of Lord Falconroy because he
is Lord Falconroy.”
“Then why the blazes didn’t he say so?” demanded the staring Usher.
“He felt his plight and recent panic were hardly patrician,” replied
the priest, “so he tried to keep the name back at first. But he was
just going to tell it you, when”--and Father Brown looked down at his
boots--“when a woman found another name for him.”
“But you can’t be so mad as to say,” said Greywood Usher, very white,
“that Lord Falconroy was Drugger Davis.”
The priest looked at him very earnestly, but with a baffling and
undecipherable face.
“I am not saying anything about it,” he said. “I leave all the rest to
you. Your pink paper says that the title was recently revived for him;
but those papers are very unreliable. It says he was in the States in
youth; but the whole story seems very strange. Davis and Falconroy are
both pretty considerable cowards, but so are lots of other men. I would
not hang a dog on my own opinion about this. But I think,” he went on
softly and reflectively, “I think you Americans are too modest. I think
you idealize the English aristocracy--even in assuming it to be so
aristocratic. You see a good-looking Englishman in evening-dress; you
know he’s in the House of Lords; and you fancy he has a father. You
don’t allow for our national buoyancy and uplift. Many of our most
influential noblemen have not only risen recently, but--”
“Oh, stop it!” cried Greywood Usher, wringing one lean hand in
impatience against a shade of irony in the other’s face.
“Don’t stay talking to this lunatic!” cried Todd brutally. “Take me to
my friend.”
Next morning Father Brown appeared with the same demure expression,
carrying yet another piece of pink newspaper.
“I’m afraid you neglect the fashionable press rather,” he said, “but
this cutting may interest you.”
Usher read the headlines, “Last-Trick’s Strayed Revellers: Mirthful
Incident near Pilgrim’s Pond.” The paragraph went on: “A laughable
occurrence took place outside Wilkinson’s Motor Garage last night.
A policeman on duty had his attention drawn by larrikins to a man
in prison dress who was stepping with considerable coolness into the
steering-seat of a pretty high-toned Panhard; he was accompanied by a
girl wrapped in a ragged shawl. On the police interfering, the young
woman threw back the shawl, and all recognized Millionaire Todd’s
daughter, who had just come from the Slum Freak Dinner at the Pond,
where all the choicest guests were in a similar deshabille. She and the
gentleman who had donned prison uniform were going for the customary
joy-ride.”
Under the pink slip Mr Usher found a strip of a later paper, headed,
“Astounding Escape of Millionaire’s Daughter with Convict. She had
Arranged Freak Dinner. Now Safe in--”
Mr Greenwood Usher lifted his eyes, but Father Brown was gone.
SIX -- The Head of Caesar
THERE is somewhere in Brompton or Kensington an interminable avenue of
tall houses, rich but largely empty, that looks like a terrace of tombs.
The very steps up to the dark front doors seem as steep as the side of
pyramids; one would hesitate to knock at the door, lest it should be
opened by a mummy. But a yet more depressing feature in the grey facade
is its telescopic length and changeless continuity. The pilgrim walking
down it begins to think he will never come to a break or a corner; but
there is one exception--a very small one, but hailed by the pilgrim
almost with a shout. There is a sort of mews between two of the tall
mansions, a mere slit like the crack of a door by comparison with
the street, but just large enough to permit a pigmy ale-house or
eating-house, still allowed by the rich to their stable-servants, to
stand in the angle. There is something cheery in its very dinginess,
and something free and elfin in its very insignificance. At the feet of
those grey stone giants it looks like a lighted house of dwarfs.
Anyone passing the place during a certain autumn evening, itself almost
fairylike, might have seen a hand pull aside the red half-blind which
(along with some large white lettering) half hid the interior from the
street, and a face peer out not unlike a rather innocent goblin’s. It
was, in fact, the face of one with the harmless human name of Brown,
formerly priest of Cobhole in Essex, and now working in London. His
friend, Flambeau, a semi-official investigator, was sitting opposite
him, making his last notes of a case he had cleared up in the
neighbourhood. They were sitting at a small table, close up to the
window, when the priest pulled the curtain back and looked out. He
waited till a stranger in the street had passed the window, to let the
curtain fall into its place again. Then his round eyes rolled to the
large white lettering on the window above his head, and then strayed to
the next table, at which sat only a navvy with beer and cheese, and a
young girl with red hair and a glass of milk. Then (seeing his friend
put away the pocket-book), he said softly:
“If you’ve got ten minutes, I wish you’d follow that man with the false
nose.”
Flambeau looked up in surprise; but the girl with the red hair also
looked up, and with something that was stronger than astonishment. She
was simply and even loosely dressed in light brown sacking stuff;
but she was a lady, and even, on a second glance, a rather needlessly
haughty one. “The man with the false nose!” repeated Flambeau. “Who’s
he?”
“I haven’t a notion,” answered Father Brown. “I want you to find out;
I ask it as a favour. He went down there”--and he jerked his thumb over
his shoulder in one of his undistinguished gestures--“and can’t have
passed three lamp-posts yet. I only want to know the direction.”
Flambeau gazed at his friend for some time, with an expression between
perplexity and amusement; and then, rising from the table; squeezed his
huge form out of the little door of the dwarf tavern, and melted into
the twilight.
Father Brown took a small book out of his pocket and began to read
steadily; he betrayed no consciousness of the fact that the red-haired
lady had left her own table and sat down opposite him. At last she
leaned over and said in a low, strong voice: “Why do you say that? How
do you know it’s false?”
He lifted his rather heavy eyelids, which fluttered in considerable
embarrassment. Then his dubious eye roamed again to the white lettering
on the glass front of the public-house. The young woman’s eyes followed
his, and rested there also, but in pure puzzledom.
“No,” said Father Brown, answering her thoughts. “It doesn’t say ‘Sela’,
like the thing in the Psalms; I read it like that myself when I was
wool-gathering just now; it says ‘Ales.’”
“Well?” inquired the staring young lady. “What does it matter what it
says?”
His ruminating eye roved to the girl’s light canvas sleeve, round the
wrist of which ran a very slight thread of artistic pattern, just enough
to distinguish it from a working-dress of a common woman and make it
more like the working-dress of a lady art-student. He seemed to find
much food for thought in this; but his reply was very slow and hesitant.
“You see, madam,” he said, “from outside the place looks--well, it is a
perfectly decent place--but ladies like you don’t--don’t generally think
so. They never go into such places from choice, except--”
“Well?” she repeated.
“Except an unfortunate few who don’t go in to drink milk.”