The wisdom of Father Brown
Nothing more could be got out of him until the cab swept round the
corner by the Hotel Saint Louis, where they got out, and he led the
party up a side lane already in deep shadow with the growing dusk. Once,
when the Duke impatiently asked whether Hirsch was guilty of treason or
not, he answered rather absently: “No; only of ambition--like Caesar.”
Then he somewhat inconsequently added: “He lives a very lonely life; he
has had to do everything for himself.”
“Well, if he’s ambitious, he ought to be satisfied now,” said Flambeau
rather bitterly. “All Paris will cheer him now our cursed Colonel has
turned tail.”
“Don’t talk so loud,” said Father Brown, lowering his voice, “your
cursed Colonel is just in front.”
The other two started and shrank farther back into the shadow of the
wall, for the sturdy figure of their runaway principal could indeed be
seen shuffling along in the twilight in front, a bag in each hand. He
looked much the same as when they first saw him, except that he had
changed his picturesque mountaineering knickers for a conventional pair
of trousers. It was clear he was already escaping from the hotel.
The lane down which they followed him was one of those that seem to
be at the back of things, and look like the wrong side of the stage
scenery. A colourless, continuous wall ran down one flank of it,
interrupted at intervals by dull-hued and dirt-stained doors, all shut
fast and featureless save for the chalk scribbles of some passing
gamin. The tops of trees, mostly rather depressing evergreens, showed
at intervals over the top of the wall, and beyond them in the grey and
purple gloaming could be seen the back of some long terrace of tall
Parisian houses, really comparatively close, but somehow looking as
inaccessible as a range of marble mountains. On the other side of the
lane ran the high gilt railings of a gloomy park.
Flambeau was looking round him in rather a weird way. “Do you know,” he
said, “there is something about this place that--”
“Hullo!” called out the Duke sharply; “that fellow’s disappeared.
Vanished, like a blasted fairy!”
“He has a key,” explained their clerical friend. “He’s only gone into
one of these garden doors,” and as he spoke they heard one of the dull
wooden doors close again with a click in front of them.
Flambeau strode up to the door thus shut almost in his face, and stood
in front of it for a moment, biting his black moustache in a fury of
curiosity. Then he threw up his long arms and swung himself aloft like
a monkey and stood on the top of the wall, his enormous figure dark
against the purple sky, like the dark tree-tops.
The Duke looked at the priest. “Dubosc’s escape is more elaborate than
we thought,” he said; “but I suppose he is escaping from France.”
“He is escaping from everywhere,” answered Father Brown.
Valognes’s eyes brightened, but his voice sank. “Do you mean suicide?”
he asked.
“You will not find his body,” replied the other.
A kind of cry came from Flambeau on the wall above. “My God,” he
exclaimed in French, “I know what this place is now! Why, it’s the back
of the street where old Hirsch lives. I thought I could recognize the
back of a house as well as the back of a man.”
“And Dubosc’s gone in there!” cried the Duke, smiting his hip. “Why,
they’ll meet after all!” And with sudden Gallic vivacity he hopped up on
the wall beside Flambeau and sat there positively kicking his legs with
excitement. The priest alone remained below, leaning against the wall,
with his back to the whole theatre of events, and looking wistfully
across to the park palings and the twinkling, twilit trees.
The Duke, however stimulated, had the instincts of an aristocrat, and
desired rather to stare at the house than to spy on it; but Flambeau,
who had the instincts of a burglar (and a detective), had already swung
himself from the wall into the fork of a straggling tree from which he
could crawl quite close to the only illuminated window in the back of
the high dark house. A red blind had been pulled down over the light,
but pulled crookedly, so that it gaped on one side, and by risking his
neck along a branch that looked as treacherous as a twig, Flambeau
could just see Colonel Dubosc walking about in a brilliantly-lighted and
luxurious bedroom. But close as Flambeau was to the house, he heard the
words of his colleagues by the wall, and repeated them in a low voice.
“Yes, they will meet now after all!”
“They will never meet,” said Father Brown. “Hirsch was right when he
said that in such an affair the principals must not meet. Have you
read a queer psychological story by Henry James, of two persons who so
perpetually missed meeting each other by accident that they began to
feel quite frightened of each other, and to think it was fate? This is
something of the kind, but more curious.”
“There are people in Paris who will cure them of such morbid fancies,”
said Valognes vindictively. “They will jolly well have to meet if we
capture them and force them to fight.”
“They will not meet on the Day of Judgement,” said the priest. “If God
Almighty held the truncheon of the lists, if St Michael blew the trumpet
for the swords to cross--even then, if one of them stood ready, the
other would not come.”
“Oh, what does all this mysticism mean?” cried the Duc de Valognes,
impatiently; “why on earth shouldn’t they meet like other people?”
“They are the opposite of each other,” said Father Brown, with a queer
kind of smile. “They contradict each other. They cancel out, so to
speak.”
He continued to gaze at the darkening trees opposite, but Valognes
turned his head sharply at a suppressed exclamation from Flambeau. That
investigator, peering into the lighted room, had just seen the Colonel,
after a pace or two, proceed to take his coat off. Flambeau’s first
thought was that this really looked like a fight; but he soon dropped
the thought for another. The solidity and squareness of Dubosc’s chest
and shoulders was all a powerful piece of padding and came off with his
coat. In his shirt and trousers he was a comparatively slim gentleman,
who walked across the bedroom to the bathroom with no more pugnacious
purpose than that of washing himself. He bent over a basin, dried his
dripping hands and face on a towel, and turned again so that the strong
light fell on his face. His brown complexion had gone, his big black
moustache had gone; he--was clean-shaven and very pate. Nothing remained
of the Colonel but his bright, hawk-like, brown eyes. Under the wall
Father Brown was going on in heavy meditation, as if to himself.
“It is all just like what I was saying to Flambeau. These opposites
won’t do. They don’t work. They don’t fight. If it’s white instead of
black, and solid instead of liquid, and so on all along the line--then
there’s something wrong, Monsieur, there’s something wrong. One of these
men is fair and the other dark, one stout and the other slim, one strong
and the other weak. One has a moustache and no beard, so you can’t see
his mouth; the other has a beard and no moustache, so you can’t see his
chin. One has hair cropped to his skull, but a scarf to hide his neck;
the other has low shirt-collars, but long hair to bide his skull. It’s
all too neat and correct, Monsieur, and there’s something wrong. Things
made so opposite are things that cannot quarrel. Wherever the one
sticks out the other sinks in. Like a face and a mask, like a lock and a
key...”
Flambeau was peering into the house with a visage as white as a sheet.
The occupant of the room was standing with his back to him, but in front
of a looking-glass, and had already fitted round his face a sort
of framework of rank red hair, hanging disordered from the head and
clinging round the jaws and chin while leaving the mocking mouth
uncovered. Seen thus in the glass the white face looked like the face of
Judas laughing horribly and surrounded by capering flames of hell. For
a spasm Flambeau saw the fierce, red-brown eyes dancing, then they were
covered with a pair of blue spectacles. Slipping on a loose black coat,
the figure vanished towards the front of the house. A few moments later
a roar of popular applause from the street beyond announced that Dr
Hirsch had once more appeared upon the balcony.
FOUR -- The Man in the Passage
TWO men appeared simultaneously at the two ends of a sort of passage
running along the side of the Apollo Theatre in the Adelphi. The evening
daylight in the streets was large and luminous, opalescent and empty.
The passage was comparatively long and dark, so each man could see the
other as a mere black silhouette at the other end. Nevertheless, each
man knew the other, even in that inky outline; for they were both men of
striking appearance and they hated each other.
The covered passage opened at one end on one of the steep streets of the
Adelphi, and at the other on a terrace overlooking the sunset-coloured
river. One side of the passage was a blank wall, for the building it
supported was an old unsuccessful theatre restaurant, now shut up. The
other side of the passage contained two doors, one at each end. Neither
was what was commonly called the stage door; they were a sort of special
and private stage doors used by very special performers, and in this
case by the star actor and actress in the Shakespearean performance of
the day. Persons of that eminence often like to have such private exits
and entrances, for meeting friends or avoiding them.
The two men in question were certainly two such friends, men who
evidently knew the doors and counted on their opening, for each
approached the door at the upper end with equal coolness and confidence.
Not, however, with equal speed; but the man who walked fast was the man
from the other end of the tunnel, so they both arrived before the secret
stage door almost at the same instant. They saluted each other with
civility, and waited a moment before one of them, the sharper walker who
seemed to have the shorter patience, knocked at the door.
In this and everything else each man was opposite and neither could
be called inferior. As private persons both were handsome, capable and
popular. As public persons, both were in the first public rank. But
everything about them, from their glory to their good looks, was of a
diverse and incomparable kind. Sir Wilson Seymour was the kind of man
whose importance is known to everybody who knows. The more you mixed
with the innermost ring in every polity or profession, the more often
you met Sir Wilson Seymour. He was the one intelligent man on twenty
unintelligent committees--on every sort of subject, from the reform of
the Royal Academy to the project of bimetallism for Greater Britain.
In the Arts especially he was omnipotent. He was so unique that nobody
could quite decide whether he was a great aristocrat who had taken up
Art, or a great artist whom the aristocrats had taken up. But you could
not meet him for five minutes without realizing that you had really been
ruled by him all your life.
His appearance was “distinguished” in exactly the same sense; it was at
once conventional and unique. Fashion could have found no fault with his
high silk hat--, yet it was unlike anyone else’s hat--a little higher,
perhaps, and adding something to his natural height. His tall, slender
figure had a slight stoop yet it looked the reverse of feeble. His hair
was silver-grey, but he did not look old; it was worn longer than the
common yet he did not look effeminate; it was curly but it did not
look curled. His carefully pointed beard made him look more manly and
militant than otherwise, as it does in those old admirals of Velazquez
with whose dark portraits his house was hung. His grey gloves were a