The wisdom of Father Brown
had walked straight off a cliff and still marched steadily in mid-air.
It was as if a house had flown up into the sky or a man’s head had
fallen off. He was only wetting his boots; but he seemed to be a demon
disregarding a law of Nature. If he had hesitated an instant at the
water’s edge it would have been nothing. As it was, he seemed to look so
much at me alone as not to notice the ocean. Philip was some yards away
with his back to me, bending over his net. The stranger came on till
he stood within two yards of me, the water washing half-way up to
his knees. Then he said, with a clearly modulated and rather mincing
articulation: ‘Would it discommode you to contribute elsewhere a coin
with a somewhat different superscription?’
“With one exception there was nothing definably abnormal about him. His
tinted glasses were not really opaque, but of a blue kind common enough,
nor were the eyes behind them shifty, but regarded me steadily. His dark
beard was not really long or wild--, but he looked rather hairy, because
the beard began very high up in his face, just under the cheek-bones.
His complexion was neither sallow nor livid, but on the contrary rather
clear and youthful; yet this gave a pink-and-white wax look which
somehow (I don’t know why) rather increased the horror. The only oddity
one could fix was that his nose, which was otherwise of a good shape,
was just slightly turned sideways at the tip; as if, when it was soft,
it had been tapped on one side with a toy hammer. The thing was hardly
a deformity; yet I cannot tell you what a living nightmare it was to
me. As he stood there in the sunset-stained water he affected me as some
hellish sea-monster just risen roaring out of a sea like blood. I don’t
know why a touch on the nose should affect my imagination so much. I
think it seemed as if he could move his nose like a finger. And as if he
had just that moment moved it.
“‘Any little assistance,’ he continued with the same queer, priggish
accent, ‘that may obviate the necessity of my communicating with the
family.’
“Then it rushed over me that I was being blackmailed for the theft of
the bronze piece; and all my merely superstitious fears and doubts were
swallowed up in one overpowering, practical question. How could he
have found out? I had stolen the thing suddenly and on impulse; I was
certainly alone; for I always made sure of being unobserved when I
slipped out to see Philip in this way. I had not, to all appearance,
been followed in the street; and if I had, they could not ‘X-ray’ the
coin in my closed hand. The man standing on the sand-hills could no more
have seen what I gave Philip than shoot a fly in one eye, like the man
in the fairy-tale.
“‘Philip,’ I cried helplessly, ‘ask this man what he wants.’
“When Philip lifted his head at last from mending his net he looked
rather red, as if sulky or ashamed; but it may have been only the
exertion of stooping and the red evening light; I may have only had
another of the morbid fancies that seemed to be dancing about me. He
merely said gruffly to the man: ‘You clear out of this.’ And, motioning
me to follow, set off wading shoreward without paying further attention
to him. He stepped on to a stone breakwater that ran out from among the
roots of the sand-hills, and so struck homeward, perhaps thinking our
incubus would find it less easy to walk on such rough stones, green and
slippery with seaweed, than we, who were young and used to it. But my
persecutor walked as daintily as he talked; and he still followed
me, picking his way and picking his phrases. I heard his delicate,
detestable voice appealing to me over my shoulder, until at last, when
we had crested the sand-hills, Philip’s patience (which was by no means
so conspicuous on most occasions) seemed to snap. He turned suddenly,
saying, ‘Go back. I can’t talk to you now.’ And as the man hovered and
opened his mouth, Philip struck him a buffet on it that sent him flying
from the top of the tallest sand-hill to the bottom. I saw him crawling
out below, covered with sand.
“This stroke comforted me somehow, though it might well increase my
peril; but Philip showed none of his usual elation at his own prowess.
Though as affectionate as ever, he still seemed cast down; and before
I could ask him anything fully, he parted with me at his own gate,
with two remarks that struck me as strange. He said that, all things
considered, I ought to put the coin back in the Collection; but that
he himself would keep it ‘for the present’. And then he added quite
suddenly and irrelevantly: ‘You know Giles is back from Australia?’”
The door of the tavern opened and the gigantic shadow of the
investigator Flambeau fell across the table. Father Brown presented him
to the lady in his own slight, persuasive style of speech, mentioning
his knowledge and sympathy in such cases; and almost without knowing,
the girl was soon reiterating her story to two listeners. But Flambeau,
as he bowed and sat down, handed the priest a small slip of paper. Brown
accepted it with some surprise and read on it: “Cab to Wagga Wagga, 379,
Mafeking Avenue, Putney.” The girl was going on with her story.
“I went up the steep street to my own house with my head in a whirl; it
had not begun to clear when I came to the doorstep, on which I found a
milk-can--and the man with the twisted nose. The milk-can told me the
servants were all out; for, of course, Arthur, browsing about in his
brown dressing-gown in a brown study, would not hear or answer a bell.
Thus there was no one to help me in the house, except my brother, whose
help must be my ruin. In desperation I thrust two shillings into the
horrid thing’s hand, and told him to call again in a few days, when I
had thought it out. He went off sulking, but more sheepishly than I had
expected--perhaps he had been shaken by his fall--and I watched the
star of sand splashed on his back receding down the road with a horrid
vindictive pleasure. He turned a corner some six houses down.
“Then I let myself in, made myself some tea, and tried to think it out.
I sat at the drawing-room window looking on to the garden, which still
glowed with the last full evening light. But I was too distracted and
dreamy to look at the lawns and flower-pots and flower-beds with any
concentration. So I took the shock the more sharply because I’d seen it
so slowly.
“The man or monster I’d sent away was standing quite still in the middle
of the garden. Oh, we’ve all read a lot about pale-faced phantoms in the
dark; but this was more dreadful than anything of that kind could ever
be. Because, though he cast a long evening shadow, he still stood in
warm sunlight. And because his face was not pale, but had that waxen
bloom still upon it that belongs to a barber’s dummy. He stood quite
still, with his face towards me; and I can’t tell you how horrid
he looked among the tulips and all those tall, gaudy, almost
hothouse-looking flowers. It looked as if we’d stuck up a waxwork
instead of a statue in the centre of our garden.
“Yet almost the instant he saw me move in the window he turned and ran
out of the garden by the back gate, which stood open and by which he had
undoubtedly entered. This renewed timidity on his part was so different
from the impudence with which he had walked into the sea, that I felt
vaguely comforted. I fancied, perhaps, that he feared confronting Arthur
more than I knew. Anyhow, I settled down at last, and had a quiet
dinner alone (for it was against the rules to disturb Arthur when he was
rearranging the museum), and, my thoughts, a little released, fled to
Philip and lost themselves, I suppose. Anyhow, I was looking blankly,
but rather pleasantly than otherwise, at another window, uncurtained,
but by this time black as a slate with the final night-fall. It seemed
to me that something like a snail was on the outside of the window-pane.
But when I stared harder, it was more like a man’s thumb pressed on the
pane; it had that curled look that a thumb has. With my fear and courage
re-awakened together, I rushed at the window and then recoiled with a
strangled scream that any man but Arthur must have heard.
“For it was not a thumb, any more than it was a snail. It was the tip
of a crooked nose, crushed against the glass; it looked white with
the pressure; and the staring face and eyes behind it were at first
invisible and afterwards grey like a ghost. I slammed the shutters
together somehow, rushed up to my room and locked myself in. But, even
as I passed, I could swear I saw a second black window with something on
it that was like a snail.
“It might be best to go to Arthur after all. If the thing was crawling
close all around the house like a cat, it might have purposes worse even
than blackmail. My brother might cast me out and curse me for ever, but
he was a gentleman, and would defend me on the spot. After ten minutes’
curious thinking, I went down, knocked on the door and then went in: to
see the last and worst sight.
“My brother’s chair was empty, and he was obviously out. But the man
with the crooked nose was sitting waiting for his return, with his hat
still insolently on his head, and actually reading one of my brother’s
books under my brother’s lamp. His face was composed and occupied, but
his nose-tip still had the air of being the most mobile part of his
face, as if it had just turned from left to right like an elephant’s
proboscis. I had thought him poisonous enough while he was pursuing and
watching me; but I think his unconsciousness of my presence was more
frightful still.
“I think I screamed loud and long; but that doesn’t matter. What I did
next does matter: I gave him all the money I had, including a good deal
in paper which, though it was mine, I dare say I had no right to touch.
He went off at last, with hateful, tactful regrets all in long words;
and I sat down, feeling ruined in every sense. And yet I was saved that
very night by a pure accident. Arthur had gone off suddenly to London,
as he so often did, for bargains; and returned, late but radiant, having
nearly secured a treasure that was an added splendour even to the
family Collection. He was so resplendent that I was almost emboldened to
confess the abstraction of the lesser gem--, but he bore down all other
topics with his over-powering projects. Because the bargain might still
misfire any moment, he insisted on my packing at once and going up
with him to lodgings he had already taken in Fulham, to be near the
curio-shop in question. Thus in spite of myself, I fled from my foe
almost in the dead of night--but from Philip also.... My brother was
often at the South Kensington Museum, and, in order to make some sort of
secondary life for myself, I paid for a few lessons at the Art Schools.
I was coming back from them this evening, when I saw the abomination of
desolation walking alive down the long straight street and the rest is
as this gentleman has said.
“I’ve got only one thing to say. I don’t deserve to be helped; and I
don’t question or complain of my punishment; it is just, it ought to
have happened. But I still question, with bursting brains, how it can
have happened. Am I punished by miracle? or how can anyone but Philip
and myself know I gave him a tiny coin in the middle of the sea?”
“It is an extraordinary problem,” admitted Flambeau.
“Not so extraordinary as the answer,” remarked Father Brown rather
gloomily. “Miss Carstairs, will you be at home if we call at your Fulham
place in an hour and a half hence?”
The girl looked at him, and then rose and put her gloves on. “Yes,” she
said, “I’ll be there”; and almost instantly left the place.
That night the detective and the priest were still talking of the matter
as they drew near the Fulham house, a tenement strangely mean even for a