The wisdom of Father Brown
happened our bedrooms overlooked the open sea, which almost came up to
our window-sills, save for a flat white outer wall as bare as the sea.
I woke up again; but it was not dark. There was a full moon, as I walked
to the window; I could have seen a bird on the bare battlement, or
a sail on the horizon. What I did see was a sort of stick or branch
circling, self-supported, in the empty sky. It flew straight in at my
window and smashed the lamp beside the pillow I had just quitted. It was
one of those queer-shaped war-clubs some Eastern tribes use. But it had
come from no human hand.”
Father Brown threw away a daisy-chain he was making, and rose with a
wistful look. “Has Major Putnam,” he asked, “got any Eastern curios,
idols, weapons and so on, from which one might get a hint?”
“Plenty of those, though not much use, I fear,” replied Cray; “but by
all means come into his study.”
As they entered they passed Miss Watson buttoning her gloves for church,
and heard the voice of Putnam downstairs still giving a lecture on
cookery to the cook. In the Major’s study and den of curios they came
suddenly on a third party, silk-hatted and dressed for the street,
who was poring over an open book on the smoking-table--a book which he
dropped rather guiltily, and turned.
Cray introduced him civilly enough, as Dr Oman, but he showed such
disfavour in his very face that Brown guessed the two men, whether
Audrey knew it or not, were rivals. Nor was the priest wholly
unsympathetic with the prejudice. Dr Oman was a very well-dressed
gentleman indeed; well-featured, though almost dark enough for an
Asiatic. But Father Brown had to tell himself sharply that one should be
in charity even with those who wax their pointed beards, who have small
gloved hands, and who speak with perfectly modulated voices.
Cray seemed to find something specially irritating in the small
prayer-book in Oman’s dark-gloved hand. “I didn’t know that was in your
line,” he said rather rudely.
Oman laughed mildly, but without offence. “This is more so, I know,” he
said, laying his hand on the big book he had dropped, “a dictionary of
drugs and such things. But it’s rather too large to take to church.”
Then he closed the larger book, and there seemed again the faintest
touch of hurry and embarrassment.
“I suppose,” said the priest, who seemed anxious to change the subject,
“all these spears and things are from India?”
“From everywhere,” answered the doctor. “Putnam is an old soldier, and
has been in Mexico and Australia, and the Cannibal Islands for all I
know.”
“I hope it was not in the Cannibal Islands,” said Brown, “that he learnt
the art of cookery.” And he ran his eyes over the stew-pots or other
strange utensils on the wall.
At this moment the jolly subject of their conversation thrust his
laughing, lobsterish face into the room. “Come along, Cray,” he cried.
“Your lunch is just coming in. And the bells are ringing for those who
want to go to church.”
Cray slipped upstairs to change; Dr Oman and Miss Watson betook
themselves solemnly down the street, with a string of other churchgoers;
but Father Brown noticed that the doctor twice looked back and
scrutinized the house; and even came back to the corner of the street to
look at it again.
The priest looked puzzled. “He can’t have been at the dustbin,” he
muttered. “Not in those clothes. Or was he there earlier today?”
Father Brown, touching other people, was as sensitive as a barometer;
but today he seemed about as sensitive as a rhinoceros. By no social
law, rigid or implied, could he be supposed to linger round the lunch
of the Anglo-Indian friends; but he lingered, covering his position with
torrents of amusing but quite needless conversation. He was the more
puzzling because he did not seem to want any lunch. As one after another
of the most exquisitely balanced kedgerees of curries, accompanied with
their appropriate vintages, were laid before the other two, he only
repeated that it was one of his fast-days, and munched a piece of bread
and sipped and then left untasted a tumbler of cold water. His talk,
however, was exuberant.
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do for you,” he cried--, “I’ll mix you a salad!
I can’t eat it, but I’ll mix it like an angel! You’ve got a lettuce
there.”
“Unfortunately it’s the only thing we have got,” answered the
good-humoured Major. “You must remember that mustard, vinegar, oil and
so on vanished with the cruet and the burglar.”
“I know,” replied Brown, rather vaguely. “That’s what I’ve always been
afraid would happen. That’s why I always carry a cruet-stand about with
me. I’m so fond of salads.”
And to the amazement of the two men he took a pepper-pot out of his
waistcoat pocket and put it on the table.
“I wonder why the burglar wanted mustard, too,” he went on, taking a
mustard-pot from another pocket. “A mustard plaster, I suppose. And
vinegar”--and producing that condiment--“haven’t I heard something about
vinegar and brown paper? As for oil, which I think I put in my left--”
His garrulity was an instant arrested; for lifting his eyes, he saw what
no one else saw--the black figure of Dr Oman standing on the sunlit
lawn and looking steadily into the room. Before he could quite recover
himself Cray had cloven in.
“You’re an astounding card,” he said, staring. “I shall come and hear
your sermons, if they’re as amusing as your manners.” His voice changed
a little, and he leaned back in his chair.
“Oh, there are sermons in a cruet-stand, too,” said Father Brown, quite
gravely. “Have you heard of faith like a grain of mustard-seed; or
charity that anoints with oil? And as for vinegar, can any soldiers
forget that solitary soldier, who, when the sun was darkened--”
Colonel Cray leaned forward a little and clutched the tablecloth.
Father Brown, who was making the salad, tipped two spoonfuls of the
mustard into the tumbler of water beside him; stood up and said in a
new, loud and sudden voice--“Drink that!”
At the same moment the motionless doctor in the garden came running, and
bursting open a window cried: “Am I wanted? Has he been poisoned?”
“Pretty near,” said Brown, with the shadow of a smile; for the emetic
had very suddenly taken effect. And Cray lay in a deck-chair, gasping as
for life, but alive.
Major Putnam had sprung up, his purple face mottled. “A crime!” he cried
hoarsely. “I will go for the police!”
The priest could hear him dragging down his palm-leaf hat from the peg
and tumbling out of the front door; he heard the garden gate slam. But
he only stood looking at Cray; and after a silence said quietly:
“I shall not talk to you much; but I will tell you what you want to
know. There is no curse on you. The Temple of the Monkey was either a
coincidence or a part of the trick; the trick was the trick of a white
man. There is only one weapon that will bring blood with that mere
feathery touch: a razor held by a white man. There is one way of making
a common room full of invisible, overpowering poison: turning on the
gas--the crime of a white man. And there is only one kind of club that
can be thrown out of a window, turn in mid-air and come back to the
window next to it: the Australian boomerang. You’ll see some of them in
the Major’s study.”
With that he went outside and spoke for a moment to the doctor. The
moment after, Audrey Watson came rushing into the house and fell on
her knees beside Cray’s chair. He could not hear what they said to each
other; but their faces moved with amazement, not unhappiness. The doctor
and the priest walked slowly towards the garden gate.
“I suppose the Major was in love with her, too,” he said with a sigh;
and when the other nodded, observed: “You were very generous, doctor.
You did a fine thing. But what made you suspect?”
“A very small thing,” said Oman; “but it kept me restless in church till
I came back to see that all was well. That book on his table was a work
on poisons; and was put down open at the place where it stated that
a certain Indian poison, though deadly and difficult to trace, was
particularly easily reversible by the use of the commonest emetics. I
suppose he read that at the last moment--”
“And remembered that there were emetics in the cruet-stand,” said Father
Brown. “Exactly. He threw the cruet in the dustbin--where I found it,
along with other silver--for the sake of a burglary blind. But if you
look at that pepper-pot I put on the table, you’ll see a small hole.
That’s where Cray’s bullet struck, shaking up the pepper and making the
criminal sneeze.”
There was a silence. Then Dr Oman said grimly: “The Major is a long time
looking for the police.”
“Or the police in looking for the Major?” said the priest. “Well,
good-bye.”
ELEVEN -- The Strange Crime of John Boulnois
MR CALHOUN KIDD was a very young gentleman with a very old face, a face
dried up with its own eagerness, framed in blue-black hair and a black
butterfly tie. He was the emissary in England of the colossal American
daily called the Western Sun--also humorously described as the “Rising
Sunset”. This was in allusion to a great journalistic declaration
(attributed to Mr Kidd himself) that “he guessed the sun would rise
in the west yet, if American citizens did a bit more hustling.” Those,
however, who mock American journalism from the standpoint of somewhat
mellower traditions forget a certain paradox which partly redeems it.
For while the journalism of the States permits a pantomimic vulgarity
long past anything English, it also shows a real excitement about the
most earnest mental problems, of which English papers are innocent, or
rather incapable. The Sun was full of the most solemn matters treated
in the most farcical way. William James figured there as well as
“Weary Willie,” and pragmatists alternated with pugilists in the long
procession of its portraits.
Thus, when a very unobtrusive Oxford man named John Boulnois wrote in a
very unreadable review called the Natural Philosophy Quarterly a series
of articles on alleged weak points in Darwinian evolution, it fluttered
no corner of the English papers; though Boulnois’s theory (which was
that of a comparatively stationary universe visited occasionally by
convulsions of change) had some rather faddy fashionableness at Oxford,
and got so far as to be named “Catastrophism”. But many American papers
seized on the challenge as a great event; and the Sun threw the shadow
of Mr Boulnois quite gigantically across its pages. By the paradox
already noted, articles of valuable intelligence and enthusiasm were
presented with headlines apparently written by an illiterate maniac,
headlines such as “Darwin Chews Dirt; Critic Boulnois says He Jumps the
Shocks”--or “Keep Catastrophic, says Thinker Boulnois.” And Mr Calhoun
Kidd, of the Western Sun, was bidden to take his butterfly tie and
lugubrious visage down to the little house outside Oxford where Thinker
Boulnois lived in happy ignorance of such a title.
That fated philosopher had consented, in a somewhat dazed manner, to
receive the interviewer, and had named the hour of nine that evening.
The last of a summer sunset clung about Cumnor and the low wooded hills;
the romantic Yankee was both doubtful of his road and inquisitive about
his surroundings; and seeing the door of a genuine feudal old-country
inn, The Champion Arms, standing open, he went in to make inquiries.
In the bar parlour he rang the bell, and had to wait some little time
for a reply to it. The only other person present was a lean man with
close red hair and loose, horsey-looking clothes, who was drinking very
bad whisky, but smoking a very good cigar. The whisky, of course, was
the choice brand of The Champion Arms; the cigar he had probably brought