The wisdom of Father Brown
outlook but great mobility of exposition. They were both pupils of the
great Dr Hirsch, scientist, publicist and moralist.
M. Brun had become prominent by his proposal that the common expression
“Adieu” should be obliterated from all the French classics, and a slight
fine imposed for its use in private life. “Then,” he said, “the very
name of your imagined God will have echoed for the last time in the ear
of man.” M. Armagnac specialized rather in a resistance to militarism,
and wished the chorus of the Marseillaise altered from “Aux armes,
citoyens” to “Aux greves, citoyens”. But his antimilitarism was of a
peculiar and Gallic sort. An eminent and very wealthy English Quaker,
who had come to see him to arrange for the disarmament of the whole
planet, was rather distressed by Armagnac’s proposal that (by way of
beginning) the soldiers should shoot their officers.
And indeed it was in this regard that the two men differed most from
their leader and father in philosophy. Dr Hirsch, though born in France
and covered with the most triumphant favours of French education, was
temperamentally of another type--mild, dreamy, humane; and, despite his
sceptical system, not devoid of transcendentalism. He was, in short,
more like a German than a Frenchman; and much as they admired him,
something in the subconsciousness of these Gauls was irritated at his
pleading for peace in so peaceful a manner. To their party throughout
Europe, however, Paul Hirsch was a saint of science. His large and
daring cosmic theories advertised his austere life and innocent, if
somewhat frigid, morality; he held something of the position of Darwin
doubled with the position of Tolstoy. But he was neither an anarchist
nor an antipatriot; his views on disarmament were moderate and
evolutionary--the Republican Government put considerable confidence in
him as to various chemical improvements. He had lately even discovered
a noiseless explosive, the secret of which the Government was carefully
guarding.
His house stood in a handsome street near the Elysee--a street which in
that strong summer seemed almost as full of foliage as the park itself;
a row of chestnuts shattered the sunshine, interrupted only in one place
where a large cafe ran out into the street. Almost opposite to this
were the white and green blinds of the great scientist’s house, an iron
balcony, also painted green, running along in front of the first-floor
windows. Beneath this was the entrance into a kind of court, gay with
shrubs and tiles, into which the two Frenchmen passed in animated talk.
The door was opened to them by the doctor’s old servant, Simon, who
might very well have passed for a doctor himself, having a strict suit
of black, spectacles, grey hair, and a confidential manner. In fact, he
was a far more presentable man of science than his master, Dr Hirsch,
who was a forked radish of a fellow, with just enough bulb of a head to
make his body insignificant. With all the gravity of a great physician
handling a prescription, Simon handed a letter to M. Armagnac. That
gentleman ripped it up with a racial impatience, and rapidly read the
following:
I cannot come down to speak to you. There is a man in this house whom I
refuse to meet. He is a Chauvinist officer, Dubosc. He is sitting on the
stairs. He has been kicking the furniture about in all the other rooms;
I have locked myself in my study, opposite that cafe. If you love me,
go over to the cafe and wait at one of the tables outside. I will try
to send him over to you. I want you to answer him and deal with him. I
cannot meet him myself. I cannot: I will not.
There is going to be another Dreyfus case.
P. HIRSCH
M. Armagnac looked at M. Brun. M. Brun borrowed the letter, read it, and
looked at M. Armagnac. Then both betook themselves briskly to one of the
little tables under the chestnuts opposite, where they procured two tall
glasses of horrible green absinthe, which they could drink apparently in
any weather and at any time. Otherwise the cafe seemed empty, except
for one soldier drinking coffee at one table, and at another a large man
drinking a small syrup and a priest drinking nothing.
Maurice Brun cleared his throat and said: “Of course we must help the
master in every way, but--”
There was an abrupt silence, and Armagnac said: “He may have excellent
reasons for not meeting the man himself, but--”
Before either could complete a sentence, it was evident that the invader
had been expelled from the house opposite. The shrubs under the archway
swayed and burst apart, as that unwelcome guest was shot out of them
like a cannon-ball.
He was a sturdy figure in a small and tilted Tyrolean felt hat, a
figure that had indeed something generally Tyrolean about it. The man’s
shoulders were big and broad, but his legs were neat and active in
knee-breeches and knitted stockings. His face was brown like a nut; he
had very bright and restless brown eyes; his dark hair was brushed
back stiffly in front and cropped close behind, outlining a square and
powerful skull; and he had a huge black moustache like the horns of a
bison. Such a substantial head is generally based on a bull neck; but
this was hidden by a big coloured scarf, swathed round up the man’s ears
and falling in front inside his jacket like a sort of fancy waistcoat.
It was a scarf of strong dead colours, dark red and old gold and purple,
probably of Oriental fabrication. Altogether the man had something a
shade barbaric about him; more like a Hungarian squire than an ordinary
French officer. His French, however, was obviously that of a native;
and his French patriotism was so impulsive as to be slightly absurd.
His first act when he burst out of the archway was to call in a clarion
voice down the street: “Are there any Frenchmen here?” as if he were
calling for Christians in Mecca.
Armagnac and Brun instantly stood up; but they were too late. Men
were already running from the street corners; there was a small but
ever-clustering crowd. With the prompt French instinct for the politics
of the street, the man with the black moustache had already run across
to a corner of the cafe, sprung on one of the tables, and seizing a
branch of chestnut to steady himself, shouted as Camille Desmoulins once
shouted when he scattered the oak-leaves among the populace.
“Frenchmen!” he volleyed; “I cannot speak! God help me, that is why I
am speaking! The fellows in their filthy parliaments who learn to
speak also learn to be silent--silent as that spy cowering in the house
opposite! Silent as he is when I beat on his bedroom door! Silent as he
is now, though he hears my voice across this street and shakes where he
sits! Oh, they can be silent eloquently--the politicians! But the time
has come when we that cannot speak must speak. You are betrayed to the
Prussians. Betrayed at this moment. Betrayed by that man. I am Jules
Dubosc, Colonel of Artillery, Belfort. We caught a German spy in the
Vosges yesterday, and a paper was found on him--a paper I hold in my
hand. Oh, they tried to hush it up; but I took it direct to the man who
wrote it--the man in that house! It is in his hand. It is signed with
his initials. It is a direction for finding the secret of this new
Noiseless Powder. Hirsch invented it; Hirsch wrote this note about it.
This note is in German, and was found in a German’s pocket. ‘Tell the
man the formula for powder is in grey envelope in first drawer to the
left of Secretary’s desk, War Office, in red ink. He must be careful.
P.H.’”
He rattled short sentences like a quick-firing gun, but he was plainly
the sort of man who is either mad or right. The mass of the crowd
was Nationalist, and already in threatening uproar; and a minority of
equally angry Intellectuals, led by Armagnac and Brun, only made the
majority more militant.
“If this is a military secret,” shouted Brun, “why do you yell about it
in the street?”
“I will tell you why I do!” roared Dubosc above the roaring crowd. “I
went to this man in straight and civil style. If he had any explanation
it could have been given in complete confidence. He refuses to explain.
He refers me to two strangers in a cafe as to two flunkeys. He has
thrown me out of the house, but I am going back into it, with the people
of Paris behind me!”
A shout seemed to shake the very facade of mansions and two stones flew,
one breaking a window above the balcony. The indignant Colonel plunged
once more under the archway and was heard crying and thundering inside.
Every instant the human sea grew wider and wider; it surged up against
the rails and steps of the traitor’s house; it was already certain that
the place would be burst into like the Bastille, when the broken french
window opened and Dr Hirsch came out on the balcony. For an instant
the fury half turned to laughter; for he was an absurd figure in such
a scene. His long bare neck and sloping shoulders were the shape of a
champagne bottle, but that was the only festive thing about him. His
coat hung on him as on a peg; he wore his carrot-coloured hair long
and weedy; his cheeks and chin were fully fringed with one of those
irritating beards that begin far from the mouth. He was very pale, and
he wore blue spectacles.
Livid as he was, he spoke with a sort of prim decision, so that the mob
fell silent in the middle of his third sentence.
“...only two things to say to you now. The first is to my foes, the
second to my friends. To my foes I say: It is true I will not meet M.
Dubosc, though he is storming outside this very room. It is true I have
asked two other men to confront him for me. And I will tell you why!
Because I will not and must not see him--because it would be against all
rules of dignity and honour to see him. Before I am triumphantly cleared
before a court, there is another arbitration this gentleman owes me as a
gentleman, and in referring him to my seconds I am strictly--”
Armagnac and Brun were waving their hats wildly, and even the Doctor’s
enemies roared applause at this unexpected defiance. Once more a few
sentences were inaudible, but they could hear him say: “To my friends--I
myself should always prefer weapons purely intellectual, and to these
an evolved humanity will certainly confine itself. But our own most
precious truth is the fundamental force of matter and heredity. My books
are successful; my theories are unrefuted; but I suffer in politics
from a prejudice almost physical in the French. I cannot speak like
Clemenceau and Deroulede, for their words are like echoes of their
pistols. The French ask for a duellist as the English ask for a
sportsman. Well, I give my proofs: I will pay this barbaric bribe, and
then go back to reason for the rest of my life.”
Two men were instantly found in the crowd itself to offer their services
to Colonel Dubosc, who came out presently, satisfied. One was the common
soldier with the coffee, who said simply: “I will act for you, sir. I
am the Duc de Valognes.” The other was the big man, whom his friend the
priest sought at first to dissuade; and then walked away alone.
In the early evening a light dinner was spread at the back of the Cafe
Charlemagne. Though unroofed by any glass or gilt plaster, the guests
were nearly all under a delicate and irregular roof of leaves; for the
ornamental trees stood so thick around and among the tables as to give
something of the dimness and the dazzle of a small orchard. At one of
the central tables a very stumpy little priest sat in complete solitude,
and applied himself to a pile of whitebait with the gravest sort of
enjoyment. His daily living being very plain, he had a peculiar taste
for sudden and isolated luxuries; he was an abstemious epicure. He did
not lift his eyes from his plate, round which red pepper, lemons, brown