This site is full of FREE ebooks - Project Gutenberg Australia

Title:      The Scandal of Father Brown
Author:     G. K. Chesterton
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
eBook No.:  0201031.txt
Edition:    1
Language:   English
Character set encoding:     Latin-1(ISO-8859-1)--8 bit
Date first posted:          December 2002
Date most recently updated: December 2002

Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks are created from printed editions
which are in the public domain in Australia, unless a copyright notice
is included. We do NOT keep any eBooks in compliance with a particular
paper edition.

Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this
file.

This eBook is made available at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg of Australia License which may be viewed online at
http://gutenberg.net.au/licence.html

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      The Scandal of Father Brown
Author:     G. K. Chesterton





ONE: The Scandal of Father Brown


It would not be fair to record the adventures of Father Brown, without
admitting that he was once involved in a grave scandal. There still are
persons, perhaps even of his own community, who would say that there was
a sort of blot upon his name. It happened in a picturesque Mexican road
- house of rather loose repute, as appeared later; and to some it seemed
that for once the priest had allowed a romantic streak in him, and his
sympathy for human weakness, to lead him into loose and unorthodox
action. The story in itself was a simple one; and perhaps the whole
surprise of it consisted in its simplicity.

Burning Troy began with Helen; this disgraceful story began with the
beauty of Hypatia Potter. Americans have a great power, which Europeans
do not always appreciate, of creating institutions from below; that is
by popular initiative. Like every other good thing, it has its lighter
aspects; one of which, as has been remarked by Mr Wells and others, is
that a person may become a public institution without becoming an
official institution. A girl of great beauty or brilliancy will be a
sort of uncrowned queen, even if she is not a Film Star or the original
of a Gibson Girl. Among those who had the fortune, or misfortune, to
exist beautifully in public in this manner, was a certain Hypatia Hard,
who had passed through the preliminary stage of receiving florid
compliments in society paragraphs of the local press, to the position of
one who is actually interviewed by real pressmen. On War and Peace and
Patriotism and Prohibition and Evolution and the Bible she had made her
pronouncements with a charming smile; and if none of them seemed very
near to the real grounds of her own reputation, it was almost equally
hard to say what the grounds of her reputation really were. Beauty, and
being the daughter of a rich man, are things not rare in her country;
but to these she added whatever it is that attracts the wandering eye of
journalism. Next to none of her admirers had even seen her, or even
hoped to do so; and none of them could possibly derive any sordid
benefit from her father's wealth. It was simply a sort of popular
romance, the modern substitute for mythology; and it laid the first
foundations of the more turgid and tempestuous sort of romance in which
she was to figure later on; and in which many held that the reputation
of Father Brown, as well as of others, had been blown to rags.

It was accepted, sometimes romantically, sometimes resignedly, by those
whom American satire has named the Sob Sisters, that she had already
married a very worthy and respectable business man of the name of
Potter. It was even possible to regard her for a moment as Mrs Potter,
on the universal understanding that her husband was only the husband of
Mrs Potter.

Then came the Great Scandal, by which her friends and enemies were
horrified beyond their wildest hopes. Her name was coupled (as the queer
phrase goes) with a literary man living in Mexico; in status an
American, but in spirit a very Spanish American. Unfortunately his vices
resembled her virtues, in being good copy. He was no less a person than
the famous or infamous Rudel Romanes; the poet whose works had been so
universally popularized by being vetoed by libraries or prosecuted by
the police. Anyhow, her pure and placid star was seen in conjunction
with this comet. He was of the sort to be compared to a comet, being
hairy and hot; the first in his portraits, the second in his poetry. He
was also destructive; the comet's tail was a trail of divorces, which
some called his success as a lover and some his prolonged failure as a
husband. It was hard on Hypatia; there are disadvantages in conducting
the perfect private life in public; like a domestic interior in a shop -
window. Interviewers reported doubtful utterances about Love's Larger
Law of Supreme Self - Realization. The Pagans applauded. The Sob
Sisterhood permitted themselves a note of romantic regret; some having
even the hardened audacity to quote from the poem of Maud Mueller, to
the effect that of all the words of tongue or pen, the saddest are 'It
might have been.' And Mr Agar P. Rock, who hated the Sob Sisterhood with
a holy and righteous hatred, said that in this case he thoroughly agreed
with Bret Harte's emendation of the poem:

'More sad are those we daily see; it is, but it hadn't ought to be.'

For Mr Rock was very firmly and rightly convinced that a very large
number of things hadn't ought to be. He was a slashing and savage critic
of national degeneration, on the Minneapolis Meteor, and a bold and
honest man. He had perhaps come to specialize too much in the spirit of
indignation, but it had had a healthy enough origin in his reaction
against sloppy attempts to confuse right and wrong in modern journalism
and gossip. He expressed it first in the form of a protest against an
unholy halo of romance being thrown round the gunman and the gangster.
Perhaps he was rather too much inclined to assume, in robust impatience,
that all gangsters were Dagos and that all Dagos were gangsters. But his
prejudices, even when they were a little provincial, were rather
refreshing after a certain sort of maudlin and unmanly hero - worship,
which was ready to regard a professional murderer as a leader of
fashion, so long as the pressmen reported that his smile was
irresistible or his tuxedo was all right. Anyhow, the prejudices did not
boil the less in the bosom of Mr Rock, because he was actually in the
land of the Dagos when this story opens; striding furiously up a hill
beyond the Mexican border, to the white hotel, fringed with ornamental
palms, in which it was supposed that the Potters were staying and that
the mysterious Hypatia now held her court. Agar Rock was a good specimen
of a Puritan, even to look at; he might even have been a virile Puritan
of the seventeenth century, rather than the softer and more
sophisticated Puritan of the twentieth. If you had told him that his
antiquated black hat and habitual black frown, and fine flinty features,
cast a gloom over the sunny land of palms and vines, he would have been
very much gratified. He looked to right and left with eyes bright with
universal suspicions. And, as he did so, he saw two figures on the ridge
above him, outlined against the clear sub - tropical sunset; figures in
a momentary posture which might have made even a less suspicious man
suspect something.

One of the figures was rather remarkable in itself. It was poised at the
exact angle of the turning road above the valley, as if by an instinct
for the site as well as the attitude of statuary. It was wrapt in a
great black cloak, in the Byronic manner, and the head that rose above
it in swarthy beauty was remarkably like Byron's. This man had the same
curling hair and curling nostrils; and he seemed to be snorting
something of the same scorn and indignation against the world. He
grasped in his hand a rather long cane or walking - stick, which having
a spike of the sort used for mountaineering, carried at the moment a
fanciful suggestion of a spear. It was rendered all the more fanciful by
something comically contradictory in the figure of the other man, who
carried an umbrella. It was indeed a new and neatly - rolled umbrella,
very different, for instance, from Father Brown's umbrella: and he was
neatly clad like a clerk in light holiday clothes; a stumpy stoutish
bearded man; but the prosaic umbrella was raised and even brandished at
an acute angle of attack. The taller man thrust back at him, but in a
hasty defensive manner; and then the scene rather collapsed into comedy;
for the umbrella opened of itself and its owner almost seemed to sink
behind it, while the other man had the air of pushing his spear through
a great grotesque shield. But the other man did not push it, or the
quarrel, very far; he plucked out the point, turned away impatiently and
strode down the road; while the other, rising and carefully refolding
his umbrella, turned in the opposite direction towards the hotel. Rock
had not heard any of the words of the quarrel, which must have
immediately preceded this brief and rather absurd bodily conflict; but
as he went up the road in the track of the short man with the beard, he
revolved many things. And the romantic cloak and rather operatic good
looks of the one man, combined with the sturdy self - assertion of the
other, fitted in with the whole story which he had come to seek; and he
knew that he could have fixed those two strange figures with their
names: Romanes and Potter.

His view was in every way confirmed when he entered the pillared porch;
and heard the voice of the bearded man raised high in altercation or
command. He was evidently speaking to the manager or staff of the hotel,
and Rock heard enough to know that he was warning them of a wild and
dangerous character in the neighbourhood.

'If he's really been to the hotel already,' the little man was saying,
in answer to some murmur, 'all I can say is that you'd better not let
him in again. Your police ought to be looking after a fellow of that
sort, but anyhow, I won't have the lady pestered with him.'

Rock listened in grim silence and growing conviction; then he slid
across the vestibule to an alcove where he saw the hotel register and
turning to the last page, saw 'the fellow' had indeed been to the hotel
already. There appeared the name of 'Rudel Romanes,' that romantic
public character, in very large and florid foreign lettering; and after
a space under it, rather close together, the names of Hypatia Potter and
Ellis T. Potter, in a correct and quite American handwriting.

Agar Rock looked moodily about him, and saw in the surroundings and even
the small decorations of the hotel everything that he hated most. It is
perhaps unreasonable to complain of oranges growing on orange - trees,
even in small tubs; still more of their only growing on threadbare
curtains or faded wallpapers as a formal scheme of ornament. But to him
those red and golden moons, decoratively alternated with silver moons,
were in a queer way the quintessence of all moonshine. He saw in them
all that sentimental deterioration which his principles deplored in
modern manners, and which his prejudices vaguely connected with the
warmth and softness of the South. It annoyed him even to catch sight of
a patch of dark canvas, half - showing a Watteau shepherd with a guitar,
or a blue tile with a common - place design of a Cupid on a dolphin. His
common sense would have told him that he might have seen these things in
a shop - window on Fifth Avenue; but where they were, they seemed like a
taunting siren voice of the Paganism of the Mediterranean. And then
suddenly, the look of all these things seemed to alter, as a still
mirror will flicker when a figure has flashed past it for a moment; and
he knew the whole room was full of a challenging presence. He turned
almost stiffly, and with a sort of resistance, and knew that he was
facing the famous Hypatia, of whom he had read and heard for so many
years.

Hypatia Potter, nee Hard, was one of those people to whom the word
'radiant' really does apply definitely and derivatively. That is, she
allowed what the papers called her Personality to go out from her in
rays. She would have been equally beautiful, and to some tastes more
attractive, if she had been self - contained; but she had always been
taught to believe that self - containment was only selfishness. She
would have said that she had lost Self in Service; it would perhaps be
truer to say that she had asserted Self in Service; but she was quite in
good faith about the service. Therefore her outstanding starry blue eyes
really struck outwards, as in the old metaphor that made eyes like
Cupid's darts, killing at a distance; but with an abstract conception of
conquest beyond any mere coquetry. Her pale fair hair, though arranged
in a saintly halo, had a look of almost electric radiation. And when she
understood that the stranger before her was Mr Agar Rock, of the
Minneapolis Meteor, her eyes took on themselves the range of long
searchlights, sweeping the horizon of the States.

But in this the lady was mistaken; as she sometimes was. For Agar Rock
was not Agar Rock of the Minneapolis Meteor. He was at that moment
merely Agar Rock; there had surged up in him a great and sincere moral
impulsion, beyond the coarse courage of the interviewer. A feeling
profoundly mixed of a chivalrous and national sensibility to beauty,
with an instant itch for moral action of some definite sort, which was
also national, nerved him to face a great scene; and to deliver a noble
insult. He remembered the original Hypatia, the beautiful Neo -
Platonist, and how he had been thrilled as a boy by Kingsley's romance
in which the young monk denounces her for harlotries and idolatries. He
confronted her with an iron gravity and said:

'If you'll pardon me. Madam, I should like to have a word with you in
private.'

'Well,' she said, sweeping the room with her splendid gaze, 'I don't
know whether you consider this place private.'

Rock also gazed round the room and could see no sign of life less
vegetable than the orange trees, except what looked like a large black
mushroom, which he recognized as the hat of some native priest or other,
stolidly smoking a black local cigar, and otherwise as stagnant as any
vegetable. He looked for a moment at the heavy, expressionless features,
noting the rudeness of that peasant type from which priests so often
come, in Latin and especially Latin - American countries; and lowered
his voice a little as he laughed.

'I don't imagine that Mexican padre knows our language,' he said. 'Catch
those lumps of laziness learning any language but their own. Oh, I can't
swear he's a Mexican; he might be anything; mongrel Indian or nigger, I
suppose. But I'll answer for it he's not an American. Our ministries
don't produce that debased type.'

'As a matter of fact,' said the debased type, removing his black cigar,
'I'm English and my name is Brown. But pray let me leave you if you wish
to be private.'

'If you're English,' said Rock warmly, 'you ought to have some normal
Nordic instinct for protesting against all this nonsense. Well, it's
enough to say now that I'm in a position to testify that there's a
pretty dangerous fellow hanging round this place; a tall fellow in a
cloak, like those pictures of crazy poets.'

'Well, you can't go much by that,' said the priest mildly; 'a lot of
people round here use those cloaks, because the chill strikes very
suddenly after sunset.'

Rock darted a dark and doubtful glance at him; as if suspecting some
evasion in the interests of all that was symbolized to him by mushroom
hats and moonshine. 'It wasn't only the cloak,' he growled, 'though it
was partly the way he wore it. The whole look of the fellow was
theatrical, down to his damned theatrical good looks. And if you'll
forgive me, Madam, I strongly advise you to have nothing to do with him,
if he comes bothering here. Your husband has already told the hotel
people to keep him out - '

Hypatia sprang to her feet and, with a very unusual gesture, covered her
face, thrusting her fingers into her hair. She seemed to be shaken,
possibly with sobs, but by the time she had recovered they had turned
into a sort of wild laughter.

'Oh, you are all too funny,' she said, and, in a way very unusual with
her, ducked and darted to the door and disappeared.

'Bit hysterical when they laugh like that,' said Rock uncomfortably;
then, rather at a loss, and turning to the little priest: 'as I say, if
you're English, you ought really to be on my side against these Dagos,
anyhow. Oh, I'm not one of those who talk tosh about Anglo - Saxons; but
there is such a thing as history. You can always claim that America got
her civilization from England.'

'Also, to temper our pride,' said Father Brown, 'we must always admit
that England got her civilization from Dagos.'

Again there glowed in the other's mind the exasperated sense that his
interlocutor was fencing with him, and fencing on the wrong side, in
some secret and evasive way; and he curtly professed a failure to
comprehend.

'Well, there was a Dago, or possibly a Wop, called Julius Caesar,' said
Father Brown; 'he was afterwards killed in a stabbing match; you know
these Dagos always use knives. And there was another one called
Augustine, who brought Christianity to our little island; and really, I
don't think we should have had much civilization without those two.'

'Anyhow, that's all ancient history,' said the somewhat irritated
journalist, 'and I'm very much interested in modern history. What I see
is that these scoundrels are bringing Paganism to our country, and
destroying all the Christianity there is. Also destroying all the common
sense there is. All settled habits, all solid social order, all the way
in which the farmers who were our fathers and grandfathers did manage to
live in the world, melted into a hot mush by sensations and sensualities
about filmstars who divorced every month or so, and make every silly
girl think that marriage is only a way of getting divorced.'

'You are quite right,' said Father Brown. 'Of course I quite agree with
you there. But you must make some allowances. Perhaps these Southern
people are a little prone to that sort of fault. You must remember that
Northern people have other kinds of faults. Perhaps these surroundings
do encourage people to give too rich an importance to mere romance.'

The whole integral indignation of Agar Rock's life rose up within him at
the word.

'I hate Romance,' he said, hitting the little table before him. 'I've
fought the papers I worked for for forty years about the infernal trash.
Every blackguard bolting with a barmaid is called a romantic elopement
or something; and now our own Hypatia Hard, a daughter of a decent
people, may get dragged into some rotten romantic divorce case, that
will be trumpeted to the whole world as happily as a royal wedding. This
mad poet Romanes is hanging round her; and you bet the spotlight will
follow him, as if he were any rotten little Dago who is called the Great
Lover on the films. I saw him outside; and he's got the regular
spotlight face. Now my sympathies are with decency and common sense. My
sympathies are with poor Potter, a plain straightforward broker from
Pittsburgh, who thinks he has a right to his own home. And he's making a
fight for it, too. I heard him hollering at the management, telling them
to keep that rascal out; and quite right too. The people here seem a sly
and slinky lot; but I rather fancy he's put the fear of God into them
already.'

'As a matter of fact,' said Father Brown, 'I rather agree with you about
the manager and the men in this hotel; but you mustn't judge all
Mexicans by them. Also I fancy the gentleman you speak of has not only
hollered, but handed round dollars enough to get the whole staff on his
side. I saw them locking doors and whispering most excitedly. By the
way, your plain straightforward friend seems to have a lot of money.'

'I've no doubt his business does well,' said Rock. 'He's quite the best
type of sound business man. What do you mean?'

'I fancied it might suggest another thought to you,' said Father Brown;
and, rising with rather heavy civility, he left the room.

Rock watched the Potters very carefully that evening at dinner; and
gained some new impressions, though none that disturbed his deep sense
of the wrong that probably threatened the peace of the Potter home.
Potter himself proved worthy of somewhat closer study; though the
journalist had at first accepted him as prosaic and unpretentious, there
was a pleasure in recognizing finer lines in what he considered the hero
or victim of a tragedy. Potter had really rather a thoughtful and
distinguished face, though worried and occasionally petulant. Rock got
an impression that the man was recovering from an illness; his faded
hair was thin but rather long, as if it had been lately neglected, and
his rather unusual beard gave the onlooker the same notion. Certainly he
spoke once or twice to his wife in a rather sharp and acid manner,
fussing about tablets or some detail of digestive science; but his real
worry was doubtless concerned with the danger from without. His wife
played up to him in the splendid if somewhat condescending manner of a
Patient Griselda; but her eyes also roamed continually to the doors and
shutters, as if in half - hearted fear of an invasion. Rock had only too
good reason to dread, after her curious outbreak, the fact that her fear
might turn out to be only half - hearted.

It was in the middle of the night that the extraordinary event occurred.
Rock, imagining himself to be the last to go up to bed, was surprised to
find Father Brown still tucked obscurely under an orange - tree in the
hall, and placidly reading a book. He returned the other's farewell
without further words, and the journalist had his foot on the lowest
step of the stair, when suddenly the outer door sprang on its hinges and
shook and rattled under the shock of blows planted from without; and a
great voice louder than the blows was heard violently demanding
admission. Somehow the journalist was certain that the blows had been
struck with a pointed stick like an alpenstock. He looked back at the
darkened lower floor, and saw the servants of the hotel sliding here and
there to see that the doors were locked; and not unlocking them. Then he
slowly mounted to his room, and sat down furiously to write his report.

He described the siege of the hotel; the evil atmosphere; the shabby
luxury of the place; the shifty evasions of the priest; above all, that
terrible voice crying without, like a wolf prowling round the house.
Then, as he wrote, he heard a new sound and sat up suddenly. It was a
long repeated whistle, and in his mood he hated it doubly, because it
was like the signal of a conspirator and like the love - call of a bird.
There followed an utter silence, in which he sat rigid; then he rose
abruptly; for he had heard yet another noise. It was a faint swish
followed by a sharp rap or rattle; and he was almost certain that
somebody was throwing something at the window. He walked stiffly
downstairs, to the floor which was now dark and deserted; or nearly
deserted. For the little priest was still sitting under the orange
shrub, lit by a low lamp; and still reading his book.

'You seem to be sitting up late,' he said harshly.

'Quite a dissipated character,' said Father Brown, looking up with a
broad smile, 'reading Economics of Usury at all wild hours of the
night.'

'The place is locked up,' said Rock.

'Very thoroughly locked up,' replied the other. 'Your friend with the
beard seems to have taken every precaution. By the way, your friend with
the beard is a little rattled; I thought he was rather cross at dinner.'

'Natural enough,' growled the other, 'if he thinks savages in this
savage place are out to wreck his home life.'

'Wouldn't it be better,' said Father Brown, 'if a man tried to make his
home life nice inside, while he was protecting it from the things
outside.'

'Oh, I know you will work up all the casuistical excuses,' said the
other; 'perhaps he was rather snappy with his wife; but he's got the
right on his side. Look here, you seem to me to be rather a deep dog. I
believe you know more about this than you say. What the devil is going
on in this infernal place? Why are you sitting up all night to see it
through?'

'Well,' said Father Brown patiently, 'I rather thought my bedroom might
be wanted.'

'Wanted by whom?'

'As a matter of fact, Mrs Potter wanted another room,' explained Father
Brown with limpid clearness. 'I gave her mine, because I could open the
window. Go and see, if you like.'

'I'll see to something else first,' said Rock grinding his teeth. 'You
can play your monkey tricks in this Spanish monkey - house, but I'm
still in touch with civilization.' He strode into the telephone - booth
and rang up his paper; pouring out the whole tale of the wicked priest
who helped the wicked poet. Then he ran upstairs into the priest's room,
in which the priest had just lit a short candle, showing the windows
beyond wide open.

He was just in time to see a sort of rude - ladder unhooked from the
window - sill and rolled up by a laughing gentleman on the lawn below.
The laughing gentleman was a tall and swarthy gentleman, and was
accompanied by a blonde but equally laughing lady. This time, Mr Rock
could not even comfort himself by calling her laughter hysterical. It
was too horribly genuine; and rang down the rambling garden - paths as
she and her troubadour disappeared into the dark thickets.

Agar Rock turned on his companion a face of final and awful justice;
like the Day of Judgement.

'Well, all America is going to hear of this,' he said. 'In plain words,
you helped her to bolt with that curly - haired lover.'

'Yes,' said Father Brown, 'I helped her to bolt with that curly - haired
lover.'

'You call yourself a minister of Jesus Christ,' cried Rock, 'and you
boast of a crime.'

'I have been mixed up with several crimes,' said the priest gently.
'Happily for once this is a story without a crime. This is a simple fire
- side idyll; that ends with a glow of domesticity.'

'And ends with a rope - ladder instead of a rope,' said Rock. 'Isn't she
a married woman?'

'Oh, yes,' said Father Brown.

'Well, oughtn't she to be with her husband?' demanded Rock.

'She is with her husband,' said Father Brown.

The other was startled into anger. 'You lie,' he said. 'The poor little
man is still snoring in bed.'

'You seem to know a lot about his private affairs,' said Father Brown
plaintively. 'You could almost write a life of the Man with a Beard. The
only thing you don't seem ever to have found out about him is his name.'

'Nonsense,' said Rock. 'His name is in the hotel book.'

'I know it is,' answered the priest, nodding gravely, 'in very large
letters; the name of Rudel Romanes. Hypatia Potter, who met him here,
put her name boldly under his, when she meant to elope with him; and her
husband put his name under that, when he pursued them to this place. He
put it very close under hers, by way of protest. The Romanes (who has
pots of money, as a popular misanthrope despising men) bribed the brutes
in this hotel to bar and bolt it and keep the lawful husband out. And I,
as you truly say, helped him to get in.'

When a man is told something that turns things upside - down; that the
tail wags the dog; that the fish has caught the fisherman; that the
earth goes round the moon; he takes some little time before he even asks
seriously if it is true. He is still content with the consciousness that
it is the opposite of the obvious truth. Rock said at last: 'You don't
mean that little fellow is the romantic Rudel we're always reading
about; and that curly haired fellow is Mr Potter of Pittsburgh.'

'Yes,' said Father Brown. 'I knew it the moment I clapped eyes on both
of them. But I verified it afterwards.'

Rock ruminated for a time and said at last: 'I suppose it's barely
possible you're right. But how did you come to have such a notion, in
the face of the facts?'

Father Brown looked rather abashed; subsided into a chair, and stared
into vacancy, until a faint smile began to dawn on his round and rather
foolish face.

'Well,' he said, 'you see - the truth is, I'm not romantic.'

'I don't know what the devil you are,' said Rock roughly.

'Now you are romantic,' said Father Brown helpfully. 'For instance, you
see somebody looking poetical, and you assume he is a poet. Do you know
what the majority of poets look like? What a wild confusion was created
by that coincidence of three good - looking aristocrats at the beginning
of the nineteenth century: Byron and Goethe and Shelley! Believe me, in
the common way, a man may write: “Beauty has laid her flaming lips on
mine,” or whatever that chap wrote, without being himself particularly
beautiful. Besides, do you realize how old a man generally is by the
time his fame has filled the world? Watts painted Swinburne with a halo
of hair; but Swinburne was bald before most of his last American or
Australian admirers had heard of his hyacinthine locks. So was
D'Annunzio. As a fact, Romanes still has rather a fine head, as you will
see if you look at it closely; he looks like an intellectual man; and he
is. Unfortunately, like a good many other intellectual men, he's a fool.
He's let himself go to seed with selfishness and fussing about his
digestion. So that the ambitious American lady, who thought it would be
like soaring to Olympus with the Nine Muses to elope with a poet, found
that a day or so of it was about enough for her. So that when her
husband came after her, and stormed the place, she was delighted to go
back to him.'

'But her husband?' queried Rock. 'I am still rather puzzled about her
husband.'

'Ah, you've been reading too many of your erotic modern novels,' said
Father Brown; and partly closed his eyes in answer to the protesting
glare of the other. 'I know a lot of stories start with a wildly
beautiful woman wedded to some elderly swine in the stock market. But
why? In that, as in most things, modern novels are the very reverse of
modern. I don't say it never happens; but it hardly ever happens now
except by her own fault. Girls nowadays marry whom they like; especially
spoilt girls like Hypatia. And whom do they marry? A beautiful wealthy
girl like that would have a ring of admirers; and whom would she choose?
The chances are a hundred to one that she'd marry very young and choose
the handsomest man she met at a dance or a tennis - party. Well,
ordinary business men are sometimes handsome. A young god appeared
(called Potter) and she wouldn't care if he was a broker or a burglar.
But, given the environment, you will admit it's more likely he would be
a broker; also, it's quite likely that he'd be called Potter. You see,
you are so incurably romantic that your whole case was founded on the
idea that a man looking like a young god couldn't be called Potter.
Believe me, names are not so appropriately distributed.'

'Well,' said the other, after a short pause, 'and what do you suppose
happened after that?'

Father Brown got up rather abruptly from the seat in which he had
collapsed; the candlelight threw the shadow of his short figure across
the wall and ceiling, giving an odd impression that the balance of the
room had been altered.

'Ah,' he muttered, 'that's the devil of it. That's the real devil. Much
worse than the old Indian demons in this jungle. You thought I was only
making out a case for the loose ways of these Latin Americans - well,
the queer thing about you' - and he blinked owlishly at the other
through his spectacles - 'the queerest thing about you is that in a way
you're right.

'You say down with romance. I say I'd take my chance in fighting the
genuine romances - all the more because they are precious few, outside
the first fiery days of youth. I say - take away the Intellectual
Friendships; take away the Platonic Unions; take away the Higher Laws of
Self - Fulfilment and the rest, and I'll risk the normal dangers of the
job. Take away the love that isn't love, but only pride and vainglory
and publicity and making a splash; and we'll take our chance of fighting
the love that is love, when it has to be fought, as well as the love
that is lust and lechery. Priests know young people will have passions,
as doctors know they will have measles. But Hypatia Potter is forty if
she is a day, and she cares no more for that little poet than if he were
her publisher or her publicity man. That's just the point - he was her
publicity man. It's your newspapers that have ruined her; it's living in
the limelight; it's wanting to see herself in the headlines, even in a
scandal if it were only sufficiently psychic and superior. It's wanting
to be George Sand, her name immortally linked with Alfred de Musset.
When her real romance of youth was over, it was the sin of middle age
that got hold of her; the sin of intellectual ambition. She hasn't got
any intellect to speak of; but you don't need any intellect to be an
intellectual.'

'I should say she was pretty brainy in one sense,' observed Rock
reflectively.

'Yes, in one sense,' said Father Brown. 'In only one sense. In a
business sense. Not in any sense that has anything to do with these poor
lounging Dagos down here. You curse the Film Stars and tell me you hate
romance. Do you suppose the Film Star, who is married for the fifth
time, is misled by any romance? Such people are very practical; more
practical than you are. You say you admire the simple solid Business
Man. Do you suppose that Rudel Romanes isn't a Business Man? Can't you
see he knew, quite as well as she did, the advertising advantages of
this grand affair with a famous beauty. He also knew very well that his
hold on it was pretty insecure; hence his fussing about and bribing
servants to lock doors. But what I mean to say, first and last, is that
there'd be a lot less scandal if people didn't idealize sin and pose as
sinners. These poor Mexicans may seem sometimes to live like beasts, or
rather sin like men; but they don't go in for Ideals. You must at least
give them credit for that.'

He sat down again, as abruptly as he had risen, and laughed
apologetically. 'Well, Mr Rock,' he said, 'that is my complete
confession; the whole horrible story of how I helped a romantic
elopement. You can do what you like with it.'

'In that case,' said Rock, rising, 'I will go to my room and make a few
alterations in my report. But, first of all, I must ring up my paper and
tell them I've been telling them a pack of lies.'

Not much more than half an hour had passed, between the time when Rock
had telephoned to say the priest was helping the poet to run away with
the lady, and the time when he telephoned to say that the priest had
prevented the poet from doing precisely the same thing. But in that
short interval of time was born and enlarged and scattered upon the
winds the Scandal of Father Brown. The truth is still half an hour
behind the slander; and nobody can be certain when or where it will
catch up with it. The garrulity of pressmen and the eagerness of enemies
had spread the first story through the city, even before it appeared in
the first printed version. It was instantly corrected and contradicted
by Rock himself, in a second message stating how the story had really
ended; but it was by no means certain that the first story was killed. A
positively incredible number of people seemed to have read the first
issue of the paper and not the second. Again and again, in every corner
of the world, like a flame bursting from blackened ashes, there would
appear the old tale of the Brown Scandal, or Priest Ruins Potter Home.
Tireless apologists of the priest's party watched for it, and patiently
tagged after it with contradictions and exposures and letters of
protest. Sometimes the letters were published in the papers; and
sometimes they were not. But still nobody knew how many people had heard
the story without hearing the contradiction. It was possible to find
whole blocks of blameless and innocent people who thought the Mexican
Scandal was an ordinary recorded historical incident like the Gunpowder
Plot. Then somebody would enlighten these simple people, only to
discover that the old story had started afresh among a few quite
educated people, who would seem the last people on earth to be duped by
it. And so the two Father Browns chase each other round the world for
ever; the first a shameless criminal fleeing from justice; the second a
martyr broken by slander, in a halo of rehabilitation. But neither of
them is very like the real Father Brown, who is not broken at all; but
goes stumping with his stout umbrella through life, liking most of the
people in it; accepting the world as his companion, but never as his
judge.

TWO: The Quick One

The strange story of the incongruous strangers is still remembered along
that strip of the Sussex coast, where the large and quiet hotel called
the Maypole and Garland looks across its own gardens to the sea. Two
quaintly assorted figures did, indeed, enter that quiet hotel on that
sunny afternoon; one being conspicuous in the sunlight, and visible over
the whole shore, by the fact of wearing a lustrous green turban,
surrounding a brown face and a black beard; the other would have seemed
to some even more wild and weird, by reason of his wearing a soft black
clergyman's hat with a yellow moustache and yellow hair of leonine
length. He at least had often been seen preaching on the sands or
conducting Band of Hope services with a little wooden spade; only he had
certainly never been seen going into the bar of an hotel. The arrival of
these quaint companions was the climax of the story, but not the
beginning of it; and, in order to make a rather mysterious story as
clear as possible, it is better to begin at the beginning.

Half an hour before those two conspicuous figures entered the hotel, and
were noticed by everybody, two other very inconspicuous figures had also
entered it, and been noticed by nobody. One was a large man, and
handsome in a heavy style, but he had a knack of taking up very little
room, like a background; only an almost morbidly suspicious examination
of his boots would have told anybody that he was an Inspector of Police
in plain clothes; in very plain clothes. The other was a drab and
insignificant little man, also in plain clothes, only that they happened
to be clerical clothes; but nobody had ever seen him preaching on the
sands.

These travellers also found themselves in a sort of large smoking - room
with a bar, for a reason which determined all the events of that tragic
afternoon. The truth is that the respectable hotel called the Maypole
and Garland was being 'done - up'. Those who had liked it in the past
were moved to say that it was being done down; or possibly done in. This
was the opinion of the local grumbler, Mr Raggley, the eccentric old
gentleman who drank cherry brandy in a corner and cursed. Anyhow, it was
being carefully stripped of all the stray indications that it had once
been an English inn; and being busily turned, yard by yard and room by
room, into something resembling the sham palace of a Levantine usurer in
an American film. It was, in short, being 'decorated'; but the only part
where the decoration was complete, and where customers could yet be made
comfortable, was this large room leading out of the hall. It had once
been honourably known as a Bar Parlour and was now mysteriously known as
a Saloon Lounge, and was newly 'decorated', in the manner of an Asiatic
Divan. For Oriental ornament pervaded the new scheme; and where there
had once been a gun hung on hooks, and sporting prints and a stuffed
fish in a glass case, there were now festoons of Eastern drapery and
trophies of scimitars, tulwards and yataghans, as if in unconscious
preparation for the coming of the gentleman with the turban. The
practical point was, however, that the few guests who did arrive had to
be shepherded into this lounge, now swept and garnished, because all the
more regular and refined parts of the hotel were still in a state of
transition. Perhaps that was also the reason why even those few guests
were somewhat neglected, the manager and others being occupied with
explanations or exhortations elsewhere. Anyhow, the first two travellers
who arrived had to kick their heels for some time unattended. The bar
was at the moment entirely empty, and the Inspector rang and rapped
impatiently on the counter; but the little clergyman had already dropped
into a lounge seat and seemed in no hurry for anything. Indeed his
friend the policeman, turning his head, saw that the round face of the
little cleric had gone quite blank, as it had a way of doing sometimes;
he seemed to be staring through his moonlike spectacles at the newly
decorated wall.

'I may as well offer you a penny for your thoughts,' said Inspector
Greenwood, turning from the counter with a sigh, 'as nobody seems to
want my pennies for anything else. This seems to be the only room in the
house that isn't full of ladders and whitewash; and this is so empty
that there isn't even a potboy to give me a pot of beer.'

'Oh . . . my thoughts are not worth a penny, let alone a pot of beer,'
answered the cleric, wiping his spectacles, 'I don't know why . . . but
I was thinking how easy it would be to commit a murder here.'

'It's all very well for you. Father Brown,' said the Inspector good -
humouredly. 'You've had a lot more murders than your fair share; and we
poor policemen sit starving all our lives, even for a little one. But
why should you say . . . Oh I see, you're looking at all those Turkish
daggers on the wall. There are plenty of things to commit a murder with,
if that's what you mean. But not more than there are in any ordinary
kitchen: carving knives or pokers or what not. That isn't where the snag
of a murder comes in.'

Father Brown seemed to recall his rambling thoughts in some
bewilderment; and said that he supposed so.

'Murder is always easy,' said Inspector Greenwood. 'There can't possibly
be anything more easy than murder. I could murder you at this minute -
more easily than I can get a drink in this damned bar. The only
difficulty is committing a murder without committing oneself as a
murderer. It's this shyness about owning up to a murder; it's this silly
modesty of murderers about their own masterpieces, that makes the
trouble. They will stick to this extraordinary fixed idea of killing
people without being found out; and that's what restrains them, even in
a room full of daggers. Otherwise every cutler's shop would be piled
with corpses. And that, by the way, explains the one kind of murder that
really can't be prevented. Which is why, of course, we poor bobbies are
always blamed for not preventing it. When a madman murders a King or a
President, it can't be prevented. You can't make a King live in a coal -
cellar, or carry about a President in a steel box. Anybody can murder
him who does not mind being a murderer. That is where the madman is like
the martyr - sort of beyond this world. A real fanatic can always kill
anybody he likes.'

Before the priest could reply, a joyous band of bagmen rolled into the
room like a shoal of porpoises; and the magnificent bellow of a big,
beaming man, with an equally big and beaming tie - pin, brought the
eager and obsequious manager running like a dog to the whistle, with a
rapidity which the police in plain clothes had failed to inspire.

'I'm sure I'm very sorry, Mr Jukes,' said the manager, who wore a rather
agitated smile and a wave or curl of very varnished hair across his
forehead. 'We're rather understaffed at present; and I had to attend to
something in the hotel, Mr Jukes.'

Mr Jukes was magnanimous, but in a noisy way; and ordered drinks all
round, conceding one even to the almost cringing manager. Mr Jukes was a
traveller for a very famous and fashionable wine and spirits firm; and
may have conceived himself as lawfully the leader in such a place.
Anyhow, he began a boisterous monologue, rather tending to tell the
manager how to manage his hotel; and the others seemed to accept him as
an authority. The policeman and the priest had retired to a low bench
and small table in the background, from which they watched events, up to
that rather remarkable moment when the policeman had very decisively to
intervene.

For the next thing that happened, as already narrated, was the
astonishing apparition of a brown Asiatic in a green turban, accompanied
by the (if possible) more astonishing apparition of a Noncomformist
minister; omens such as appear before a doom. In this case there was no
doubt about evidence for the portent. A taciturn but observant boy
cleaning the steps for the last hour (being a leisurely worker), the
dark, fat, bulky bar - attendant, even the diplomatic but distracted
manager, all bore witness to the miracle.

The apparitions, as the sceptics say, were due to perfectly natural
causes. The man with the mane of yellow hair and the semi - clerical
clothes was not only familiar as a preacher on the sands, but as a
propagandist throughout the modern world. He was no less a person than
the Rev. David Pryce - Jones, whose far - resounding slogan was
Prohibition and Purification for Our Land and the Britains Overseas. He
as an excellent public speaker and organizer; and an idea had occurred
to him that ought to have occurred to Prohibitionists long ago. It was
the simple idea that, if Prohibition is right, some honour is due to the
Prophet who was perhaps the first Prohibitionist. He had corresponded
with the leaders of Mahommedan religious thought, and had finally
induced a distinguished Moslem (one of whose names was Akbar and the
rest an untranslatable ululation of Allah with attributes) to come and
lecture in England on the ancient Moslem veto on wine. Neither of them
certainly had been in a public - house bar before; but they had come
there by the process already described; driven from the genteel tea -
rooms, shepherded into the newly - decorated saloon. Probably all would
have been well, if the great Prohibitionist, in his innocence, had not
advanced to the counter and asked for a glass of milk.

The commercial travellers, though a kindly race, emitted involuntary
noises of pain; a murmur of suppressed jests was heard, as 'Shun the
bowl,' or 'Better bring out the cow'. But the magnificent Mr Jukes,
feeling it due to his wealth and tie - pin to produce more refined
humour, fanned himself as one about to faint, and said pathetically:
'They know they can knock me down with a feather. They know a breath
will blow me away. They know my doctor says I'm not to have these
shocks. And they come and drink cold milk in cold blood, before my very
eyes.'

The Rev. David Pryce - Jones, accustomed to deal with hecklers at public
meetings, was so unwise as to venture on remonstrance and recrimination,
in this very different and much more popular atmosphere. The Oriental
total abstainer abstained from speech as well as spirits; and certainly
gained in dignity by doing so. In fact, so far as he was concerned, the
Moslem culture certainly scored a silent victory; he was obviously so
much more of a gentleman than the commercial gentlemen, that a faint
irritation began to arise against his aristocratic aloofness; and when
Mr Pryce - Jones began to refer in argument to something of the kind,
the tension became very acute indeed.

'I ask you, friends,' said Mr Pryce - Jones, with expansive platform
gestures, 'why does our friend here set an example to us Christians in
truly Christian self - control and brotherhood? Why does he stand here
as a model of true Christianity, of real refinement, of genuine
gentlemanly behaviour, amid all the quarrels and riots of such places as
these? Because, whatever the doctrinal differences between us, at least
in his soil the evil plant, the accursed hop or vine, has never - '

At this crucial moment of the controversy it was that John Raggley, the
stormy petrel of a hundred storms of controversy, red - faced, white -
haired, his antiquated top - hat on the back of his head, his stick
swinging like a club, entered the house like an invading army.

John Raggley was generally regarded as a crank. He was the sort of man
who writes letters to the newspaper, which generally do not appear in
the newspaper; but which do appear afterwards as pamphlets, printed (or
misprinted) at his own expense; and circulated to a hundred waste -
paper baskets. He had quarrelled alike with the Tory squires and the
Radical County Councils; he hated Jews; and he distrusted nearly
everything that is sold in shops, or even in hotels. But there was a
backing of facts behind his fads; he knew the county in every corner and
curious detail; and he was a sharp observer. Even the manager, a Mr
Wills, had a shadowy respect for Mr Raggley, having a nose for the sort
of lunacy allowed in the gentry; not indeed the prostrate reverence
which he had for the jovial magnificence of Mr Jukes, who was really
good for trade, but a least a disposition to avoid quarrelling with the
old grumbler, partly perhaps out of fear of the old grumbler's tongue.

'And you will have your usual, Sir,' said Mr Wills, leaning and leering
across the counter.

'It's the only decent stuff you've still got,' snorted Mr Raggley,
slapping down his queer and antiquated hat. 'Damn it, I sometimes think
the only English thing left in England is cherry brandy. Cherry brandy
does taste of cherries. Can you find me any beer that tastes of hops, or
any cider that tastes of apples, or any wine that has the remotest
indication of being made out of grapes? There's an infernal swindle
going on now in every inn in the country, that would have raised a
revolution in any other country. I've found out a thing or two about it,
I can tell you. You wait till I can get it printed, and people will sit
up. If I could stop our people being poisoned with all this bad drink -
'

Here again the Rev. David Pryce - Jones showed a certain failure in
tact; though it was a virtue he almost worshipped. He was so unwise as
to attempt to establish an alliance with Mr Raggley, by a fine confusion
between the idea of bad drink and the idea that drink is bad. Once more
he endeavoured to drag his stiff and stately Eastern friend into the
argument, as a refined foreigner superior to our rough English ways. He
was even so foolish as to talk of a broad theological outlook; and
ultimately to mention the name of Mahomet, which was echoed in a sort of
explosion.

'God damn your soul!' roared Mr Raggley, with a less broad theological
outlook. 'Do you mean that Englishmen mustn't drink English beer,
because wine was forbidden in a damned desert by that dirty old humbug
Mahomet?'

In an instant the Inspector of Police had reached the middle of the room
with a stride. For, the instant before that, a remarkable change had
taken place in the demeanour of the Oriental gentleman, who had hitherto
stood perfectly still, with steady and shining eyes. He now proceeded,
as his friend had said, to set an example in truly Christian self -
control and brotherhood by reaching the wall with the bound of a tiger,
tearing down one of the heavy knives hanging there and sending it smack
like a stone from a sling, so that it stuck quivering in the wall
exactly half an inch above Mr Raggley's ear. It would undoubtedly have
stuck quivering in Mr Raggley, if Inspector Greenwood had not been just
in time to jerk the arm and deflect the aim. Father Brown continued in
his seat, watching the scene with screwed - up eyes and a screw of
something almost like a smile at the corners of his mouth, as if he saw
something beyond the mere momentary violence of the quarrel.

And then the quarrel took a curious turn; which may not be understood by
everybody, until men like Mr John Raggley are better understood than
they are. For the red - faced old fanatic was standing up and laughing
uproariously as if it were the best joke he had ever heard. All his
snapping vituperation and bitterness seemed to have gone out of him; and
he regarded the other fanatic, who had just tried to murder him, with a
sort of boisterous benevolence.

'Blast your eyes,' he said, 'you're the first man I've met in twenty
years!'

'Do you charge this man, Sir?' said the Inspector, looking doubtful.

'Charge him, of course not,' said Raggley. 'I'd stand him a drink if he
were allowed any drinks. I hadn't any business to insult his religion;
and I wish to God all you skunks had the guts to kill a man, I won't say
for insulting your religion, because you haven't got any, but for
insulting anything - even your beer.'

'Now he's called us all skunks,' said Father Brown to Greenwood, 'peace
and harmony seem to be restored. I wish that teetotal lecturer could get
himself impaled on his friend's knife; it was he who made all the
mischief.'

As he spoke, the odd groups in the room were already beginning to break
up; it had been found possible to clear the commercial room for the
commercial travellers, and they adjourned to it, the potboy carrying a
new round of drinks after them on a tray. Father Brown stood for a
moment gazing at the glasses left on the counter; recognizing at once
the ill - omened glass of milk, and another which smelt of whisky; and
then turned just in time to see the parting between those two quaint
figures, fanatics of the East and West. Raggley was still ferociously
genial; there was still something a little darkling and sinister about
the Moslem, which was perhaps natural; but he bowed himself out with
grave gestures of dignified reconciliation; and there was every
indication that the trouble was really over.

Some importance, however, continued attached, in the mind of Father
Brown at least, to the memory and interpretation of those last courteous
salutes between the combatants. Because curiously enough, when Father
Brown came down very early next morning, to perform his religious duties
in the neighbourhood, he found the long saloon bar, with its fantastic
Asiatic decoration, filled with a dead white light of daybreak in which
every detail was distinct; and one of the details was the dead body of
John Raggley bent and crushed into a corner of the room, with the heavy
- hilted crooked dagger rammed through his heart.

Father Brown went very softly upstairs again and summoned his friend the
Inspector; and the two stood beside the corpse, in a house in which no
one else was as yet stirring. 'We mustn't either assume or avoid the
obvious,' said Greenwood after a silence, 'but it is well to remember, I
think, what I was saying to you yesterday afternoon. It's rather odd, by
the way, that I should have said it - yesterday afternoon.'

'I know,' said the priest, nodding with an owlish stare.

'I said,' observed Greenwood, 'that the one sort of murder we can't stop
is murder by somebody like a religious fanatic. That brown fellow
probably thinks that if he's hanged, he'll go straight to Paradise for
defending the honour of the Prophet.'

'There is that, of course,' said Father Brown. 'It would be very
reasonable, so to speak, of our Moslem friend to have stabbed him. And
you may say we don't know of anybody else yet, who could at all
reasonably have stabbed him. But. . . but I was thinking . . . ' And his
round face suddenly went blank again and all speech died on his lips.

'What's the matter now?' asked the other.

'Well, I know it sounds funny,' said Father Brown in a forlorn voice.
'But I was thinking ... I was thinking, in a way, it doesn't much matter
who stabbed him.'

'Is this the New Morality?' asked his friend. 'Or the old Casuistry,
perhaps. Are the Jesuits really going in for murder?'

'I didn't say it didn't matter who murdered him,' said Father Brown. 'Of
course the man who stabbed him might possibly be the man who murdered
him. But it might be quite a different man. Anyhow, it was done at quite
a different time. I suppose you'll want to work on the hilt for finger -
prints; but don't take too much notice of them. I can imagine other
reasons for other people sticking this knife in the poor old boy. Not
very edifying reasons, of course, but quite distinct from the murder.
You'll have to put some more knives into him, before you find out about
that.'

'You mean - ' began the other, watching him keenly.

'I mean the autopsy,' said the priest, 'to find the real cause of
death.'

'You're quite right, I believe,' said the Inspector, 'about the
stabbing, anyhow. We must wait for the doctor; but I'm pretty sure he'll
say you're right. There isn't blood enough. This knife was stuck in the
corpse when it had been cold for hours. But why?'

'Possibly to put the blame on the Mahommedan,' answered Father Brown.
'Pretty mean, I admit, but not necessarily murder. I fancy there are
people in this place trying to keep secrets, who are not necessarily
murderers.'

'I haven't speculated on that line yet,' said Greenwood. 'What makes you
think so?'

'What I said yesterday, when we first came into this horrible room. I
said it would be easy to commit a murder here. But I wasn't thinking
about all those stupid weapons, though you thought I was. About
something quite different.'

For the next few hours the Inspector and his friend conducted a close
and thorough investigation into the goings and comings of everybody for
the last twenty - four hours, the way the drinks had been distributed,
the glasses that were washed or unwashed, and every detail about every
individual involved, or apparently not involved. One might have supposed
they thought that thirty people had been poisoned, as well as one.

It seemed certain that nobody had entered the building except by the big
entrance that adjoined the bar; all the others were blocked in one way
or another by the repairs. A boy had been cleaning the steps outside
this entrance; but he had nothing very clear to report. Until the
amazing entry of the Turk in the Turban, with his teetotal lecturer,
there did not seem to have been much custom of any kind, except for the
commercial travellers who came in to take what they called 'quick ones';
and they seemed to have moved together, like Wordsworth's Cloud; there
was a slight difference of opinion between the boy outside and the men
inside about whether one of them had not been abnormally quick in
obtaining a quick one, and come out on the doorstep by himself; but the
manager and the barman had no memory of any such independent individual.
The manager and the barman knew all the travellers quite well, and there
was no doubt about their movements as a whole. They had stood at the bar
chaffing and drinking; they had been involved, through their lordly
leader, Mr Jukes, in a not very serious altercation with Mr Pryce -
Jones; and they had witnessed the sudden and very serious altercation
between Mr Akbar and Mr Raggley. Then they were told they could adjourn
to the Commercial Room and did so, their drinks being borne after them
like a trophy.

'There's precious little to go on,' said Inspector Greenwood. 'Of course
a lot of officious servants must do their duty as usual, and was out all
the glasses; including old Raggley's glass. If it weren't for everybody
else's efficiency, we detectives might be quite efficient.'

'I know,' said Father Brown, and his mouth took on again the twisted
smile. 'I sometimes think criminals invented hygiene. Or perhaps
hygienic reformers invented crime; they look like it, some of them.
Everybody talks about foul dens and filthy slums in which crime can run
riot; but it's just the other way. They are called foul, not because
crimes are committed, but because crimes are discovered. It's in the
neat, spotless, clean and tidy places that crime can run riot; no mud to
make footprints; no dregs to contain poison; kind servants washing out
all traces of the murder; and the murderer killing and cremating six
wives and all for want of a little Christian dirt. Perhaps I express
myself with too much warmth - but look here. As it happens, I do
remember one glass, which has doubtless been cleaned since, but I should
like to know more about it.”

'Do you mean Raggley's glass?' asked Greenwood.

'No; I mean Nobody's glass,' replied the priest. 'It stood near that
glass of milk and it still held an inch or two of whisky. Well, you and
I had no whisky. I happen to remember that the manager, when treated by
the jovial Jukes, had “a drop of gin”. I hope you don't suggest that our
Moslem was a whisky - drinker disguised in a green turban; or that the
Rev. David Pryce - Jones managed to drink whisky and milk together,
without noticing it.'

'Most of the commercial travellers took whisky,' said the Inspector.
'They generally do.'

'Yes; and they generally see they get it too,' answered Father Brown.
'In this case, they had it all carefully carted after them to their own
room. But this glass was left behind.'

'An accident, I suppose,' said Greenwood doubtfully. 'The man could
easily get another in the Commercial Room afterwards.'

Father Brown shook his head. 'You've got to see people as they are. Now
these sort of men - well, some call them vulgar and some common; but
that's all likes and dislikes. I'd be content to say that they are
mostly simple men. Lots of them very good men, very glad to go back to
the missus and the kids; some of them might be blackguards; might have
had several missuses; or even murdered several missuses. But most of
them are simple men; and, mark you, just the least tiny bit drunk. Not
much; there's many a duke or don at Oxford drunker; but when that sort
of man is at that stage of conviviality, he simply can't help noticing
things, and noticing them very loud. Don't you observe that the least
little incident jerks them into speech; if the beer froths over, they
froth over with it, and have to say, “Whoa, Emma,” or “Doing me proud,
aren't you?” Now I should say it's flatly impossible for five of these
festive beings to sit round a table in the Commercial Room, and have
only four glasses set before them, the fifth man being left out, without
making a shout about it. Probably they would make a shout about it.
Certainly he would make a shout about it. He wouldn't wait, like an
Englishman of another class, till he could get a drink quietly later.
The air would resound with things like, “And what about little me?” or,
“Here, George, have I joined the Band of Hope?” or, “Do you see any
green in my turban, George?” But the barman heard no such complaints. I
take it as certain that the glass of whisky left behind had been nearly
emptied by somebody else; somebody we haven't thought about yet.'

'But can you think of any such person?' ask the other.

'It's because the manager and the barman won't hear of any such person,
that you dismiss the one really independent piece of evidence; the
evidence of that boy outside cleaning the steps. He says that a man, who
well may have been a bagman, but who did not, in fact, stick to the
other bagmen, went in and came out again almost immediately. The manager
and the barman never saw him; or say they never saw him. But he got a
glass of whisky from the bar somehow. Let us call him, for the sake of
argument, The Quick One. Now you know I don't often interfere with your
business, which I know you do better than I should do it, or should want
to do it. I've never had anything to do with setting police machinery at
work, or running down criminals, or anything like that. But, for the
first time in my life, I want to do it now. I want you to find The Quick
One; to follow The Quick One to the ends of the earth; to set the whole
infernal official machinery at work like a drag - net across the
nations, and jolly well recapture The Quick One. Because he is the man
we want.'

Greenwood made a despairing gesture. 'Has he face or form or any visible
quality except quickness?' he inquired.

'He was wearing a sort of Inverness cape,' said Father Brown, 'and he
told the boy outside he must reach Edinburgh by next morning. That's all
the boy outside remembers. But I know your organization has got on to
people with less clue than that.'

'You seem very keen on this,' said the Inspector, a little puzzled.

The priest looked puzzled also, as if at his own thoughts; he sat with
knotted brow and then said abruptly: 'You see, it's so easy to be
misunderstood. All men matter. You matter. I matter. It's the hardest
thing in theology to believe.'

The Inspector stared at him without comprehension; but he proceeded.

'We matter to God - God only knows why. But that's the only possible
justification of the existence of policemen.' The policeman did not seem
enlightened as to his own cosmic justification. 'Don't you see, the law
really is right in a way, after all. If all men matter, all murders
matter. That which He has so mysteriously created, we must not suffer to
be mysteriously destroyed. But - '

He said the last word sharply, like one taking a new step in decision.

'But, when once I step off that mystical level of equality, I don't see
that most of your important murders are particularly important. You are
always telling me that this case and that is important. As a plain,
practical man of the world, I must realize that it is the Prime Minister
who has been murdered. As a plain, practical man of the world, I don't
think that the Prime Minister matters at all. As a mere matter of human
importance, I should say he hardly exists at all. Do you suppose if he
and the other public men were shot dead tomorrow, there wouldn't be
other people to stand up and say that every avenue was being explored,
or that the Government had the matter under the gravest consideration?
The masters of the modern world don't matter. Even the real masters
don't matter much. Hardly anybody you ever read about in a newspaper
matters at all.'

He stood up, giving the table a small rap: one of his rare gestures; and
his voice changed again. 'But Raggley did matter. He was one of a great
line of some half a dozen men who might have saved England. They stand
up stark and dark like disregarded sign - posts, down all that smooth
descending road which has ended in this swamp of merely commercial
collapse. Dean Swift and Dr Johnson and old William Cobbett; they had
all without exception the name of being surly or savage, and they were
all loved by their friends, and they all deserved to be. Didn't you see
how that old man, with the heart of a lion, stood up and forgave his
enemy as only fighters can forgive? He jolly well did do what that
temperance lecturer talked about; he set an example to us Christians and
was a model of Christianity. And when there is foul and secret murder of
a man like that - then I do think it matters, matters so much that even
the modern machinery of police will be a thing that any respectable
person may make use of ... Oh, don't mention it. And so, for once in a
way, I really do want to make use of you.'

And so, for some stretch of those strange days and nights, we might
almost say that the little figure of Father Brown drove before him into
action all the armies and engines of the police forces of the Crown, as
the little figure of Napoleon drove the batteries and the battle - lines
of the vast strategy that covered Europe. Police stations and post
offices worked all night; traffic was stopped, correspondence was
intercepted, inquiries were made in a hundred places, in order to track
the flying trail of that ghostly figure, without face or name, with an
Inverness cape and an Edinburgh ticket.

Meanwhile, of course, the other lines of investigation were not
neglected. The full report of the post - mortem had not yet come in; but
everybody seemed certain that it was a case of poisoning. This naturally
threw the primary suspicion upon the cherry brandy; and this again
naturally threw the primary suspicion on the hotel.

'Most probably on the manager of the hotel,' said Greenwood gruffly. 'He
looks a nasty little worm to me. Of course it might be something to do
with some servant, like the barman; he seems rather a sulky specimen,
and Raggley might have cursed him a bit, having a flaming temper, though
he was generally generous enough afterwards. But, after all, as I say,
the primary responsibility, and therefore the primary suspicion, rests
on the manager.'

'Oh, I knew the primary suspicion would rest on the manager,' said
Father Brown. 'That was why I didn't suspect him. You see, I rather
fancied somebody else must have known that the primary suspicion would
rest on the manager; or the servants of the hotel. That is why I said it
would be easy to kill anybody in the hotel . . . But you'd better go and
have it out with him, I suppose.'

The Inspector went; but came back again after a surprisingly short
interview, and found his clerical friend turning over some papers that
seemed to be a sort of dossier of the stormy career of John Raggley.

'This is a rum go,' said the Inspector. 'I thought I should spend hours
cross - examining that slippery little toad there, for we haven't
legally got a thing against him. And instead of that, he went to pieces
all at once, and I really think he's told me all he knows in sheer
funk.'

'I know,' said Father Brown. 'That's the way he went to pieces when he
found Raggley's corpse apparently poisoned in his hotel. That's why he
lost his head enough to do such a clumsy thing as decorate the corpse
with a Turkish knife, to put the blame on the nigger, as he would say.
There never is anything the matter with him but funk; he's the very last
man that ever would really stick a knife into a live person. I bet he
had to nerve himself to stick it into a dead one. But he's the very
first person to be frightened of being charged with what he didn't do;
and to make a fool of himself, as he did.'

'I suppose I must see the barman too,' observed Greenwood.

'I suppose so,' answered the other. 'I don't believe myself it was any
of the hotel people - well, because it was made to look as if it must be
the hotel people . . . But look here, have you seen any of this stuff
they've got together about Raggley? He had a jolly interesting life; I
wonder whether anyone will write his biography.'

'I took a note of everything likely to affect an affair like this,'
answered the official. 'He was a widower; but he did once have a row
with a man about his wife; a Scotch land - agent then in these parts;
and Raggley seems to have been pretty violent. They say he hated
Scotchmen; perhaps that's the reason . . . Oh, I know what you are
smiling grimly about. A Scotchman . . . Perhaps an Edinburgh man.'

'Perhaps,' said Father Brown. 'It's quite likely, though, that he did
dislike Scotchmen, apart from private reasons. It's an odd thing, but
all that tribe of Tory Radicals, or whatever you call them, who resisted
the Whig mercantile movement, all of them did dislike Scotchmen. Cobbett
did; Dr Johnson did; Swift described their accent in one of his
deadliest passages; even Shakespeare has been accused of the prejudice.
But the prejudices of great men generally have something to do with
principles. And there was a reason, I fancy. The Scot came from a poor
agricultural land, that became a rich industrial land. He was able and
active; he thought he was bringing industrial civilization from the
north; he simply didn't know that there had been for centuries a rural
civilization in the south. His own grandfather's land was highly rural
but not civilized . . . Well, well, I suppose we can only wait for more
news.'

'I hardly think you'll get the latest news out of Shakespeare and Dr
Johnson,' grinned the police officer. 'What Shakespeare thought of
Scotchmen isn't exactly evidence.'

Father Brown cocked an eyebrow, as if a new thought had surprised him.
'Why, now I come to think of it,' he said, 'there might be better
evidence, even out of Shakespeare. He doesn't often mention Scotchmen.
But he was rather fond of making fun of Welshmen.'

The Inspector was searching his friend's face; for he fancied he
recognized an alertness behind its demure expression. 'By Jove,' he
said. 'Nobody thought of turning the suspicions that way, anyhow.'

'Well,' said Father Brown, with broad - minded calm, 'you started by
talking about fanatics; and how a fanatic could do anything. Well, I
suppose we had the honour of entertaining in this bar - parlour
yesterday, about the biggest and loudest and most fat - headed fanatic
in the modern world. If being a pig - headed idiot with one idea is the
way to murder, I put in a claim for my reverend brother Pryce - Jones,
the Prohibitionist, in preference to all the fakirs in Asia, and it's
perfectly true, as I told you, that his horrible glass of milk was
standing side by side on the counter with the mysterious glass of
whisky.'

'Which you think was mixed up with the murder,' said Greenwood, staring.
'Look here, I don't know whether you're really serious or not.'

Even as he was looking steadily in his friend's face, finding something
still inscrutable in its expression, the telephone rang stridently
behind the bar. Lifting the flap in the counter Inspector Greenwood
passed rapidly inside, unhooked the receiver, listened for an instant,
and then uttered a shout; not addressed to his interlocutor, but to the
universe in general. Then he listened still more attentively and said
explosively at intervals, 'Yes, yes . . . Come round at once; bring him
round if possible . . . Good piece of work . . . Congratulate you.'

Then Inspector Greenwood came back into the outer lounge, like a man who
has renewed his youth, sat down squarely on his seat, with his hands
planted on his knees, stared at his friend, and said:

'Father Brown, I don't know how you do it. You seem to have known he was
a murderer before anybody else knew he was a man. He was nobody; he was
nothing; he was a slight confusion in the evidence; nobody in the hotel
saw him; the boy on the steps could hardly swear to him; he was just a
fine shade of doubt founded on an extra dirty glass. But we've got him,
and he's the man we want.'

Father Brown had risen with the sense of the crisis, mechanically
clutching the papers destined to be so valuable to the biographer of Mr
Raggley; and stood staring at his friend. Perhaps this gesture jerked
his friend's mind to fresh confirmations.

'Yes, we've got The Quick One. And very quick he was, like quicksilver,
in making his get - away; we only just stopped him - off on a fishing
trip to Orkney, he said. But he's the man, all right; he's the Scotch
land - agent who made love to Raggley's wife; he's the man who drank
Scotch whisky in this bar and then took a train to Edinburgh. And nobody
would have known it but for you.'

'Well, what I meant,' began Father Brown, in a rather dazed tone; and at
that instant there was a rattle and rumble of heavy vehicles outside the
hotel; and two or three other and subordinate policemen blocked the bar
with their presence. One of them, invited by his superior to sit down,
did so in an expansive manner, like one at once happy and fatigued; and
he also regarded Father Brown with admiring eyes.

'Got the murderer. Sir, oh yes,' he said: 'I know he's a murderer,
'cause he bally nearly murdered me. I've captured some tough characters
before now; but never one like this - hit me in the stomach like the
kick of a horse and nearly got away from five men. Oh, you've got a real
killer this time. Inspector.'

'Where is he?' asked Father Brown, staring.

'Outside in the van, in handcuffs,' replied the policeman, 'and, if
you're wise, you'll leave him there - for the present.'

Father Brown sank into a chair in a sort of soft collapse; and the
papers he had been nervously clutching were shed around him, shooting
and sliding about the floor like sheets of breaking snow. Not only his
face, but his whole body, conveyed the impression of a punctured
balloon.

'Oh . . . Oh,' he repeated, as if any further oath would be inadequate.
'Oh . . .I've done it again.'

'If you mean you've caught the criminal again,' began Greenwood. But his
friend stopped him with a feeble explosion, like that of expiring soda -
water.

'I mean,' said Father Brown, 'that it's always happening; and really, I
don't know why. I always try to say what I mean. But everybody else
means such a lot by what I say.'

'What in the world is the matter now?' cried Greenwood, suddenly
exasperated.

'Well, I say things,' said Father Brown in a weak voice, which could
alone convey the weakness of the words. 'I say things, but everybody
seems to know they mean more than they say. Once I saw a broken mirror
and said “Something has happened” and they all answered, “Yes, yes, as
you truly say, two men wrestled and one ran into the garden,” and so on.
I don't understand it, “Something happened,” and “Two men wrestled,”
don't seem to me at all the same; but I dare say I read old books of
logic. Well, it's like that here. You seem to be all certain this man is
a murderer. But I never said he was a murderer. I said he was the man we
wanted. He is. I want him very much. I want him frightfully. I want him
as the one thing we haven't got in the whole of this horrible case - a
witness!'

They all stared at him, but in a frowning fashion, like men trying to
follow a sharp new turn of the argument; and it was he who resumed the
argument.

'From the first minute I entered that big empty bar or saloon, I knew
what was the matter with all this business was emptiness; solitude; too
many chances for anybody to be alone. In a word, the absence of
witnesses. All we knew was that when we came in, the manager and the
barman were not in the bar. But when were they in the bar? What chance
was there of making any sort of time - table of when anybody was
anywhere? The whole thing was blank for want of witnesses. I rather
fancy the barman or somebody was in the bar just before we came; and
that's how the Scotchman got his Scotch whisky. He certainly didn't get
it after we came. But we can't begin to inquire whether anybody in the
hotel poisoned poor Raggley's cherry brandy, till we really know who was
in the bar and when. Now I want you to do me another favour, in spite of
this stupid muddle, which is probably all my fault. I want you to
collect all the people involved in this room - I think they're all still
available, unless the Asiatic has gone back to Asia - and then take the
poor Scotchman out of his handcuffs, and bring him in here, and let him
tell us who did serve him with whisky, and who was in the bar, and who
else was in the room, and all the rest. He's the only man whose evidence
can cover just that period when the crime was done. I don't see the
slightest reason for doubting his word.'

'But look here,' said Greenwood. 'This brings it all back to the hotel
authorities; and I thought you agreed that the manager isn't the
murderer. Is it the barman, or what?'

'I don't know,' said the priest blankly. 'I don't know for certain even
about the manager. I don't know anything about the barman. I fancy the
manager might be a bit of a conspirator, even if he wasn't a murderer.
But I do know there's one solitary witness on earth who may have seem
something; and that's why I set all your police dogs on his trail to the
ends of the earth.'

The mysterious Scotchman, when he finally appeared before the company
thus assembled, was certainly a formidable figure; tall, with a hulking
stride and a long sardonic hatchet face, with tufts of red hair; and
wearing not only an Inverness cape but a Glengarry bonnet, he might well
be excused for a somewhat acrid attitude; but anybody could see he was
of the sort to resist arrest, even with violence. It was not surprising
that he had come to blows with a fighting fellow like Raggley. It was
not even surprising that the police had been convinced, by the mere
details of capture, that he was a tough and a, typical killer. But he
claimed to be a perfectly respectable farmer, in Aberdeenshire, his name
being James Grant; and somehow not only Father Brown, but Inspector
Greenwood, a shrewd man with a great deal of experience, was pretty soon
convinced that the Scot's ferocity was the fury of innocence rather than
guilt.

'Now what we want from you, Mr Grant,' said the Inspector gravely,
dropping without further parley into tones of courtesy, 'is simply your
evidence on one very important fact. I am greatly grieved at the
misunderstanding by which you have suffered, but I am sure you wish to
serve the ends of justice. I believe you came into this bar just after
it opened, at half - past five, and were served with a glass of whisky.
We are not certain what servant of the hotel, whether the barman or the
manager or some subordinate, was in the bar at the time. Will you look
round the room, and tell me whether the bar - attendant who served you
is present here.'

'Aye, he's present,' said Mr Grant, grimly smiling, having swept the
group with a shrewd glance. 'I'd know him anywhere; and ye'll agree he's
big enough to be seen. Do ye have all your inn - servants as grand as
yon?'

The Inspector's eye remained hard and steady, and his voice colourless
and continuous; the face of Father Brown was a blank; but on many other
faces there was a cloud; the barman was not particularly big and not at
all grand; and the manager was decidedly small.

'We only want the barman identified,' said the Inspector calmly. 'Of
course we know him; but we should like you to verify it independently.
You mean . . .?' And he stopped suddenly.

'Weel, there he is plain enough,' said the Scotchman wearily; and made a
gesture, and with that gesture the gigantic Jukes, the prince of
commercial travellers, rose like a trumpeting elephant; and in a flash
had three policemen fastened on him like hounds on a wild beast.

'Well, all that was simple enough,' said Father Brown to his friend
afterwards. 'As I told you, the instant I entered the empty bar - room,
my first thought was that, if the barman left the bar unguarded like
that, there was nothing in the world to stop you or me or anybody else
lifting the flap and walking in, and putting poison in any of the
bottles standing waiting for customers. Of course, a practical poisoner
would probably do it as Jukes did, by substituting a poisoned bottle for
the ordinary bottle; that could be done in a flash. It was easy enough
for him, as he travelled in bottles, to carry a flask of cherry brandy
prepared and of the same pattern. Of course, it requires one condition;
but it's a fairly common condition. It would hardly do to start
poisoning the beer or whisky that scores of people drink; it would cause
a massacre. But when a man is well known as drinking only one special
thing, like cherry brandy, that isn't very widely drunk, it's just like
poisoning him in his own home. Only it's a jolly sight safer. For
practically the whole suspicion instantly falls on the hotel, or
somebody to do with the hotel; and there's no earthly argument to show
that it was done by anyone out of a hundred customers that might come
into the bar: even if people realized that a customer could do it. It
was about as absolutely anonymous and irresponsible a murder as a man
could commit.'

'And why exactly did the murderer commit it?' asked his friend.

Father Brown rose and gravely gathered the papers which he had
previously scattered in a moment of distraction.

'May I recall your attention,' he said smiling, 'to the materials of the
forthcoming Life and Letters of the Late John Raggley? Or, for that
matter, his own spoken words? He said in this very bar that he was going
to expose a scandal about the management of hotels; and the scandal was
the pretty common one of a corrupt agreement between hotel proprietors
and a salesman who took and gave secret commissions, so that his
business had a monopoly of all the drink sold in the place. It wasn't
even an open slavery like an ordinary tied house; it was a swindle at
the expense of everybody the manager was supposed to serve. It was a
legal offence. So the ingenious Jukes, taking the first moment when the
bar was empty, as it often was, stepped inside and made the exchange of
bottles; unfortunately at that very moment a Scotchman in an Inverness
cape came in harshly demanding whisky. Jukes saw his only chance was to
pretend to be the barman and serve the customer. He was very much
relieved that the customer was a Quick One.'

'I think you're rather a Quick One yourself,' observed Greenwood; 'if
you say you smelt something at the start, in the mere air of an empty
room. Did you suspect Jukes at all at the start?'

'Well, he sounded rather rich somehow,' answered Father Brown vaguely.
'You know when a man has a rich voice. And I did sort of ask myself why
he should have such a disgustingly rich voice, when all those honest
fellows were fairly poor. But I think I knew he was a sham when I saw
that big shining breast - pin.'

'You mean because it was sham?' asked Greenwood doubtfully.

'Oh, no; because it was genuine,' said Father Brown.

THREE: The Blast of the Book

Professor Openshaw always lost his temper, with a loud bang, if anybody
called him a Spiritualist; or a believer in Spiritualism. This, however,
did not exhaust his explosive elements; for he also lost his temper if
anybody called him a disbeliever in Spiritualism. It was his pride to
have given his whole life to investigating Psychic Phenomena; it was
also his pride never to have given a hint of whether he thought they
were really psychic or merely phenomenal. He enjoyed nothing so much as
to sit in a circle of devout Spiritualists and give devastating
descriptions of how he had exposed medium after medium and detected
fraud after fraud; for indeed he was a man of much detective talent and
insight, when once he had fixed his eye on an object, and he always
fixed his eye on a medium, as a highly suspicious object. There was a
story of his having spotted the same Spiritualist mountebank under three
different disguises: dressed as a woman, a white - bearded old man, and
a Brahmin of a rich chocolate brown. These recitals made the true
believers rather restless, as indeed they were intended to do; but they
could hardly complain, for no Spiritualist denies the existence of
fraudulent mediums; only the Professor's flowing narrative might well
seem to indicate that all mediums were fraudulent.

But woe to the simple - minded and innocent Materialist (and
Materialists as a race are rather innocent and simple - minded) who,
presuming on this narrative tendency, should advance the thesis that
ghosts were against the laws of nature, or that such things were only
old superstitions; or that it was all tosh, or, alternatively, bunk. Him
would the Professor, suddenly reversing all his scientific batteries,
sweep from the field with a cannonade of unquestionable cases and
unexplained phenomena, of which the wretched rationalist had never heard
in his life, giving all the dates and details, stating all the attempted
and abandoned natural explanations; stating everything, indeed, except
whether he, John Oliver Openshaw, did or did not believe in Spirits, and
that neither Spiritualist nor Materialist could ever boast of finding
out.

Professor Openshaw, a lean figure with pale leonine hair and hypnotic
blue eyes, stood exchanging a few words with Father Brown, who was a
friend of his, on the steps outside the hotel where both had been
breakfasting that morning and sleeping the night before. The Professor
had come back rather late from one of this grand experiments, in general
exasperation, and was still tingling with the fight that he always waged
alone and against both sides.

'Oh, I don't mind you,' he said laughing. 'You don't believe in it even
if it's true. But all these people are perpetually asking me what I'm
trying to prove. They don't seem to understand that I'm a man of
science. A man of science isn't trying to prove anything. He's trying to
find out what will prove itself.'

'But he hasn't found out yet,' said Father Brown.

'Well, I have some little notions of my own, that are not quite so
negative as most people think,' answered the Professor, after an instant
of frowning silence; 'anyhow, I've begun to fancy that if there is
something to be found, they're looking for it along the wrong line. It's
all too theatrical; it's showing off, all their shiny ectoplasm and
trumpets and voices and the rest; all on the model of old melodramas and
mouldy historical novels about the Family Ghost. If they'd go to history
instead of historical novels, I'm beginning to think they'd really find
something. But not Apparitions.'

'After all,' said Father Brown, 'Apparitions are only Appearances. I
suppose you'd say the Family Ghost is only keeping up appearances.'

The Professor's gaze, which had commonly a fine abstracted character,
suddenly fixed and focused itself as it did on a dubious medium. It had
rather the air of a man screwing a strong magnifying - glass into his
eye. Not that he thought the priest was in the least like a dubious
medium; but he was startled into attention by his friend's thought
following so closely on his own.

'Appearances!' he muttered, 'crikey, but it's odd you should say that
just now. The more I learn, the more I fancy they lose by merely looking
for appearances. Now if they'd look a little into Disappearances - '

'Yes,' said Father Brown, 'after all, the real fairy legends weren't so
very much about the appearance of famous fairies; calling up Titania or
exhibiting Oberon by moonlight. But there were no end of legends about
people disappearing, because they were stolen by the fairies. Are you on
the track of Kilmeny or Thomas the Rhymer?'

'I'm on the track of ordinary modern people you've read of in the
newspapers,' answered Openshaw. 'You may well stare; but that's my game
just now; and I've been on it for a long time. Frankly, I think a lot of
psychic appearances could be explained away. It's the disappearances I
can't explain, unless they're psychic. These people in the newspaper who
vanish and are never found - if you knew the details as I do ... and now
only this morning I got confirmation; an extraordinary letter from an
old missionary, quite a respectable old boy. He's coming to see me at my
office this morning. Perhaps you'd lunch with me or something; and I'd
tell the results - in confidence.'

'Thanks; I will - unless,' said Father Brown modestly, 'the fairies have
stolen me by then.'

With that they parted and Openshaw walked round the corner to a small
office he rented in the neighbourhood; chiefly for the publication of a
small periodical, of psychical and psychological notes of the driest and
most agnostic sort. He had only one clerk, who sat at a desk in the
outer office, totting up figures and facts for the purposes of the
printed report; and the Professor paused to ask if Mr Pringle had
called. The clerk answered mechanically in the negative and went on
mechanically adding up figures; and the Professor turned towards the
inner room that was his study. 'Oh, by the way, Berridge,' he added,
without turning round, 'if Mr Pringle comes, send him straight in to me.
You needn't interrupt your work; I rather want those notes finished
tonight if possible. You might leave them on my desk tomorrow, if I am
late.'

And he went into his private office, still brooding on the problem which
the name of Pringle had raised; or rather, perhaps, had ratified and
confirmed in his mind. Even the most perfectly balanced of agnostics is
partially human; and it is possible that the missionary's letter seemed
to have greater weight as promising to support his private and still
tentative hypothesis. He sat down in his large and comfortable chair,
opposite the engraving of Montaigne; and read once more the short letter
from the Rev. Luke Pringle, making the appointment for that morning. No
man knew better than Professor Openshaw the marks of the letter of the
crank; the crowded details; the spidery handwriting; the unnecessary
length and repetition. There were none of these things in this case; but
a brief and businesslike typewritten statement that the writer had
encountered some curious cases of Disappearance, which seemed to fall
within the province of the Professor as a student of psychic problems.
The Professor was favourably impressed; nor had he any unfavourable
impression, in spite of a slight movement of surprise, when he looked up
and saw that the Rev. Luke Pringle was already in the room.

'Your clerk told me to come straight in,' said Mr Pringle
apologetically, but with a broad and rather agreeable grin. The grin was
partly masked by masses of reddish - grey beard and whiskers; a perfect
jungle of a beard, such as is sometimes grown by white men living in the
jungles; but the eyes above the snub nose had nothing about them in the
least wild or outlandish. Openshaw had instantly turned on them that
concentrated spotlight or burning - glass of sceptical scrutiny which he
turned on many men to see if they were mountebanks or maniacs; and, in
this case, he had a rather unusual sense of reassurance. The wild beard
might have belonged to a crank, but the eyes completely contradicted the
beard; they were full of that quite frank and friendly laughter which is
never found in the faces of those who are serious frauds or serious
lunatics. He would have expected a man with those eyes to be a
Philistine, a jolly sceptic, a man who shouted out shallow but hearty
contempt of ghosts and spirits; but anyhow, no professional humbug could
afford to look as frivolous as that. The man was buttoned up to the
throat in a shabby old cape, and only his broad limp hat suggested the
cleric; but missionaries from wild places do not always bother to dress
like clerics.

'You probably think all this another hoax. Professor,' said Mr Pringle,
with a sort of abstract enjoyment, 'and I hope you will forgive my
laughing at your very natural air of disapproval. All the same, I've got
to tell my story to somebody who knows, because it's true. And, all
joking apart, it's tragic as well as true. Well, to cut it short, I was
missionary in Nya - Nya, a station in West Africa, in the thick of the
forests, where almost the only other white man was the officer in
command of the district, Captain Wales; and he and I grew rather thick.
Not that he liked missions; he was, if I may say so, thick in many ways;
one of those square - headed, square - shouldered men of action who
hardly need to think, let alone believe.

That's what makes it all the queerer. One day he came back to his tent
in the forest, after a short leave, and said he had gone through a jolly
rum experience, and didn't know what to do about it. He was holding a
rusty old book in a leather binding, and he put it down on a table
beside his revolver and an old Arab sword he kept, probably as a
curiosity. He said this book had belonged to a man on the boat he had
just come off; and the man swore that nobody must open the book, or look
inside it; or else they would be carried off by the devil, or disappear,
or something. Wales said this was all nonsense, of course; and they had
a quarrel; and the upshot seems to have been that this man, taunted with
cowardice or superstition, actually did look into the book; and
instantly dropped it; walked to the side of the boat - '

'One moment,' said the Professor, who had made one or two notes. 'Before
you tell me anything else. Did this man tell Wales where he had got the
book, or who it originally belonged to?'

'Yes,' replied Pringle, now entirely grave. 'It seems he said he was
bringing it back to Dr Hankey, the Oriental traveller now in England, to
whom it originally belonged, and who had warned him of its strange
properties. Well, Hankey is an able man and a rather crabbed and
sneering sort of man; which makes it queerer still. But the point of
Wales's story is much simpler. It is that the man who had looked into
the book walked straight over the side of the ship, and was never seen
again.'

'Do you believe it yourself?' asked Openshaw after a pause.

'Well, I do,' replied Pringle. 'I believe it for two reasons. First,
that Wales was an entirely unimaginative man; and he added one touch
that only an imaginative man could have added. He said that the man
walked straight over the side on a still and calm day; but there was no
splash.'

The Professor looked at his notes for some seconds in silence; and then
said: 'And your other reason for believing it?'

'My other reason,' answered the Rev. Luke Pringle, 'is what I saw
myself.'

There was another silence; until he continued in the same matter - of -
fact way. Whatever he had, he had nothing of the eagerness with which
the crank, or even the believer, tried to convince others.

'I told you that Wales put down the book on the table beside the sword.
There was only one entrance to the tent; and it happened that I was
standing in it, looking out into the forest, with my back to my
companion. He was standing by the table grumbling and growling about the
whole business; saying it was tomfoolery in the twentieth century to be
frightened of opening a book; asking why the devil he shouldn't open it
himself. Then some instinct stirred in me and I said he had better not
do that, it had better be returned to Dr Hankey. “What harm could it
do?” he said restlessly. “What harm did it do?” I answered obstinately.
“What happened to your friend on the boat?” He didn't answer, indeed I
didn't know what he could answer; but I pressed my logical advantage in
mere vanity. “If it comes to that,” I said, “what is your version of
what really happened on the boat?” Still he didn't answer; and I looked
round and saw that he wasn't there.

'The tent was empty. The book was lying on the table; open, but on its
face, as if he had turned it downwards. But the sword was lying on the
ground near the other side of the tent; and the canvas of the tent
showed a great slash, as if somebody had hacked his way out with the
sword. The gash in the tent gaped at me; but showed only the dark
glimmer of the forest outside. And when I went across and looked through
the rent I could not be certain whether the tangle of the tall plants
and the undergrowth had been bent or broken; at least not farther than a
few feet. I have never seen or heard of Captain Wales from that day.

'I wrapped the book up in brown paper, taking good care not to look at
it; and I brought it back to England, intending at first to return it to
Dr Hankey. Then I saw some notes in your paper suggesting a hypothesis
about such things; and I decided to stop on the way and put the matter
before you; as you have a name for being balanced and having an open
mind.'

Professor Openshaw laid down his pen and looked steadily at the man on
the other side of the table; concentrating in that single stare all his
long experience of many entirely different types of humbug, and even
some eccentric and extraordinary types of honest men. In the ordinary
way, he would have begun with the healthy hypothesis that the story was
a pack of lies. On the whole he did incline to assume that it was a pack
of lies. And yet he could not fit the man into his story; if it were
only that he could not see that sort of liar telling that sort of lie.
The man was not trying to look honest on the surface, as most quacks and
impostors do; somehow, it seemed all the other way; as if the man was
honest, in spite of something else that was merely on the surface. He
thought of a good man with one innocent delusion; but again the symptoms
were not the same; there was even a sort of virile indifference; as if
the man did not care much about his delusion, if it was a delusion.

'Mr Pringle,' he said sharply, like a barrister making a witness jump,
'where is this book of yours now?'

The grin reappeared on the bearded face which had grown grave during the
recital. 'I left it outside,' said Mr Pringle. 'I mean in the outer
office. It was a risk, perhaps; but the less risk of the two.'

'What do you mean?' demanded the Professor. 'Why didn't you bring it
straight in here?'

'Because,' answered the missionary, 'I knew that as soon as you saw it,
you'd open it - before you had heard the story. I thought it possible
you might think twice about opening it - after you'd heard the story.'

Then after a silence he added: 'There was nobody out there but your
clerk; and he looked a stolid steady - going specimen, immersed in
business calculations.'

Openshaw laughed unaffectedly. 'Oh, Babbage,' he cried, 'your magic
tomes are safe enough with him, I assure you. His name's Berridge - but
I often call him Babbage; because he's so exactly like a Calculating
Machine. No human being, if you can call him a human being, would be
less likely to open other people's brown paper parcels. Well, we may as
well go and bring it in now; though I assure you I will consider
seriously the course to be taken with it. Indeed, I tell you frankly,'
and he stared at the man again, 'that I'm not quite sure whether we
ought to open it here and now, or send it to this Dr Hankey.'

The two had passed together out of the inner into the outer office; and
even as they did so, Mr Pringle gave a cry and ran forward towards the
clerk's desk. For the clerk's desk was there; but not the clerk. On the
clerk's desk lay a faded old leather book, torn out of its brown - paper
wrappings, and lying closed, but as if it had just been opened. The
clerk's desk stood against the wide window that looked out into the
street; and the window was shattered with a huge ragged hole in the
glass; as if a human body had been shot through it into the world
without. There was no other trace of Mr Berridge.

Both the two men left in the office stood as still as statues; and then
it was the Professor who slowly came to life. He looked even more
judicial than he had ever looked in his life, as he slowly turned and
held out his hand to the missionary.

'Mr Pringle,' he said, 'I beg your pardon. I beg your pardon only for
thoughts that I have had; and half - thoughts at that. But nobody could
call himself a scientific man and not face a fact like this.'

'I suppose,' said Pringle doubtfully, 'that we ought to make some
inquiries. Can you ring up his house and find out if he has gone home?'

'I don't know that he's on the telephone,' answered Openshaw, rather
absently; 'he lives somewhere up Hampstead way, I think. But I suppose
somebody will inquire here, if his friends or family miss him.'

'Could we furnish a description,' asked the other, 'if the police want
it?'

'The police!' said the Professor, starting from his reverie. 'A
description . . . Well, he looked awfully like everybody else, I'm
afraid, except for goggles. One of those clean - shaven chaps. But the
police . . . look here, what are we to do about this mad business?'

'I know what I ought to do,' said the Rev. Mr Pringle firmly, 'I am
going to take this book straight to the only original Dr Hankey, and ask
him what the devil it's all about. He lives not very far from here, and
I'll come straight back and tell you what he says.'

'Oh, very well,' said the Professor at last, as he sat down rather
wearily; perhaps relieved for the moment to be rid of the
responsibility. But long after the brisk and ringing footsteps of the
little missionary had died away down the street, the Professor sat in
the same posture, staring into vacancy like a man in a trance.

He was still in the same seat and almost in the same attitude, when the
same brisk footsteps were heard on the pavement without and the
missionary entered, this time, as a glance assured him, with empty
hands.

'Dr Hankey,' said Pringle gravely, 'wants to keep the book for an hour
and consider the point. Then he asks us both to call, and he will give
us his decision. He specially desired. Professor, that you should
accompany me on the second visit.'

Openshaw continued to stare in silence; then he said, suddenly: 'Who the
devil is Dr Hankey?'

'You sound rather as if you meant he was the devil,' said Pringle
smiling, 'and I fancy some people have thought so. He had quite a
reputation in your own line; but he gained it mostly in India, studying
local magic and so on, so perhaps he's not so well known here. He is a
yellow skinny little devil with a lame leg, and a doubtful temper; but
he seems to have set up in an ordinary respectable practice in these
parts, and I don't know anything definitely wrong about him - unless
it's wrong to be the only person who can possibly know anything about
all this crazy affair.'

Professor Openshaw rose heavily and went to the telephone; he rang up
Father Brown, changing the luncheon engagement to a dinner, that he
might hold himself free for the expedition to the house of the Anglo -
Indian doctor; after that he sat down again, lit a cigar and sank once
more into his own unfathomable thoughts.

Father Brown went round to the restaurant appointed for dinner, and
kicked his heels for some time in a vestibule full of mirrors and palms
in pots; he had been informed of Openshaw's afternoon engagement, and,
as the evening closed - in dark and stormy round the glass and the green
plants, guessed that it had produced something unexpected and unduly
prolonged. He even wondered for a moment whether the Professor would
turn up at all; but when the Professor eventually did, it was clear that
his own more general guesses had been justified. For it was a very wild
- eyed and even wild - haired Professor who eventually drove back with
Mr Pringle from the expedition to the North of London, where suburbs are
still fringed with heathy wastes and scraps of common, looking more
sombre under the rather thunderstorm sunset. Nevertheless, they had
apparently found the house, standing a little apart though within hail
of other houses; they had verified the brass - plate duly engraved: 'J.
I. Hankey, MD, MRCS.' Only they did not find J. I. Hankey, MD, MRCS.
They found only what a nightmare whisper had already subconsciously
prepared them to find: a commonplace parlour with the accursed volume
lying on the table, as if it had just been read; and beyond, a back door
burst open and a faint trail of footsteps that ran a little way up so
steep a garden - path that it seemed that no lame man could have run up
so lightly. But it was a lame man who had run; for in those few steps
there was the misshapen unequal mark of some sort of surgical boot; then
two marks of that boot alone (as if the creature had hopped) and then
nothing. There was nothing further to be learnt from Dr J. I. Hankey,
except that he had made his decision. He had read the oracle and
received the doom.

When the two came into the entrance under the palms, Pringle put the
book down suddenly on a small table, as if it burned his fingers. The
priest glanced at it curiously; there was only some rude lettering on
the front with a couplet:

They that looked into this book Them the Flying Terror took;

and underneath, as he afterwards discovered, similar warnings in Greek,
Latin and French. The other two had turned away with a natural impulsion
towards drinks, after their exhaustion and bewilderment; and Openshaw
had called to the waiter, who brought cocktails on a tray.

'You will dine with us, I hope,' said the Professor to the missionary;
but Mr Pringle amiably shook his head.

'If you'll forgive me,' he said, 'I'm going off to wrestle with this
book and this business by myself somewhere. I suppose I couldn't use
your office for an hour or so?'

'I suppose - I'm afraid it's locked,' said Openshaw in some surprise.

'You forget there's a hole in the window.' The Rev. Luke Pringle gave
the very broadest of all broad grins and vanished into the darkness
without.

'A rather odd fellow, that, after all,' said the Professor, frowning.

He was rather surprised to find Father Brown talking to the waiter who
had brought the cocktails, apparently about the waiter's most private
affairs; for there was some mention of a baby who was now out of danger.
He commented on the fact with some surprise, wondering how the priest
came to know the man; but the former only said, 'Oh, I dine here every
two or three months, and I've talked to him now and then.'

The Professor, who himself dined there about five times a week, was
conscious that he had never thought of talking to the man; but his
thoughts were interrupted by a strident ringing and a summons to the
telephone. The voice on the telephone said it was Pringle, it was rather
a muffled voice, but it might well be muffled in all those bushes of
beard and whisker. Its message was enough to establish identity.

'Professor,' said the voice, 'I can't stand it any longer. I'm going to
look for myself. I'm speaking from your office and the book is in front
of me. If anything happens to me, this is to say good - bye. No - it's
no good trying to stop me. You wouldn't be in time anyhow. I'm opening
the book now. I . . . '

Openshaw thought he heard something like a sort of thrilling or
shivering yet almost soundless crash; then he shouted the name of
Pringle again and again; but he heard no more. He hung up the receiver,
and, restored to a superb academic calm, rather like the calm of
despair, went back and quietly took his seat at the dinner - table.
Then, as coolly as if he were describing the failure of some small silly
trick at a seance, he told the priest every detail of this monstrous
mystery.

'Five men have now vanished in this impossible way,' he said. 'Every one
is extraordinary; and yet the one case I simply can't get over is my
clerk, Berridge. It's just because he was the quietest creature that
he's the queerest case.'

'Yes,' replied Father Brown, 'it was a queer thing for Berridge to do,
anyway. He was awfully conscientious. He was also so jolly careful to
keep all the office business separate from any fun of his own. Why,
hardly anybody knew he was quite a humorist at home and - '

'Berridge!' cried the Professor. 'What on earth are you talking about?
Did you know him?'

'Oh no,' said Father Brown carelessly, 'only as you say I know the
waiter. I've often had to wait in your office, till you turned up; and
of course I passed the time of day with poor Berridge. He was rather a
card. I remember he once said he would like to collect valueless things,
as collectors did the silly things they thought valuable. You know the
old story about the woman who collected valueless things.'

'I'm not sure I know what you're talking about,' said Openshaw. 'But
even if my clerk was eccentric (and I never knew a man I should have
thought less so), it wouldn't explain what happened to him; and it
certainly wouldn't explain the others.'

'What others?' asked the priest.

The Professor stared at him and spoke distinctly, as if to a child: 'My
dear Father Brown, Five Men have disappeared.'

'My dear Professor Openshaw, no men have disappeared.'

Father Brown gazed back at his host with equal steadiness and spoke with
equal distinctness. Nevertheless, the Professor required the words
repeated, and they were repeated as distinctly. 'I say that no men have
disappeared.'

After a moment's silence, he added, 'I suppose the hardest thing is to
convince anybody that 0+0+0=0. Men believe the oddest things if they are
in a series; that is why Macbeth believed the three words of the three
witches; though the first was something he knew himself; and the last
something he could only bring about himself. But in your case the middle
term is the weakest of all.'

'What do you mean?'

'You saw nobody vanish. You did not see the man vanish from the boat.
You did not see the man vanish from the tent. All that rests on the word
of Mr Pringle, which I will not discuss just now. But you'll admit this;
you would never have taken his word yourself, unless you had seen it
confirmed by your clerk's disappearance; just as Macbeth would never
have believed he would be king, if he had not been confirmed in
believing he would be Cawdor.'

'That may be true,' said the Professor, nodding slowly. 'But when it was
confirmed, I knew it was the truth. You say I saw nothing myself. But I
did; I saw my own clerk disappear. Berridge did disappear.'

'Berridge did not disappear,' said Father Brown. 'On the contrary.'

'What the devil do you mean by “on the contrary”?'

'I mean,' said Father Brown, 'that he never disappeared. He appeared.'

Openshaw stared across at his friend, but the eyes had already altered
in his head, as they did when they concentrated on a new presentation of
a problem. The priest went on: 'He appeared in your study, disguised in
a bushy red beard and buttoned up in a clumsy cape, and announced
himself as the Rev. Luke Pringle. And you had never noticed your own
clerk enough to know him again, when he was in so rough - and - ready a
disguise.'

'But surely,' began the Professor.

'Could you describe him for the police?' asked Father Brown. 'Not you.
You probably knew he was clean - shaven and wore tinted glasses; and
merely taking off those glasses was a better disguise than putting on
anything else. You had never seen his eyes any more than his soul; jolly
laughing eyes. He had planted his absurd book and all the properties;
then he calmly smashed the window, put on the beard and cape and walked
into your study; knowing that you had never looked at him in your life.'

'But why should he play me such an insane trick?' demanded Openshaw.

'Why, because you had never looked at him in your life,' said Father
Brown; and his hand slightly curled and clinched, as if he might have
struck the table, if he had been given to gesture. 'You called him the
Calculating Machine, because that was all you ever used him for. You
never found out even what a stranger strolling into your office could
find out, in five minutes' chat: that he was a character; that he was
full of antics; that he had all sorts of views on you and your theories
and your reputation for “spotting” people. Can't you understand his
itching to prove that you couldn't spot your own clerk? He has nonsense
notions of all sorts. About collecting useless things, for instance.
Don't you know the story of the woman who bought the two most useless
things: an old doctor's brass - plate and a wooden leg? With those your
ingenious clerk created the character of the remarkable Dr Hankey; as
easily as the visionary Captain Wales. Planting them in his own house -
'

'Do you mean that place we visited beyond Hampstead was Berridge's own
house?' asked Openshaw.

'Did you know his house - or even his address?' retorted the priest.
'Look here, don't think I'm speaking disrespectfully of you or your
work. You are a great servant of truth and you know I could never be
disrespectful to that. You've seen through a lot of liars, when you put
your mind to it. But don't only look at liars. Do, just occasionally,
look at honest men - like the waiter.'

'Where is Berridge now?' asked the Professor, after a long silence.

'I haven't the least doubt,' said Father Brown, 'that he is back in your
office. In fact, he came back into your office at the exact moment when
the Rev. Luke Pringle read the awful volume and faded into the void.'

There was another long silence and then Professor Openshaw laughed; with
the laugh of a great man who is great enough to look small. Then he said
abruptly:

'I suppose I do deserve it; for not noticing the nearest helpers I have.
But you must admit the accumulation of incidents was rather formidable.
Did you never feel just a momentary awe of the awful volume?'

'Oh, that,' said Father Brown. 'I opened it as soon as I saw it lying
there. It's all blank pages. You see, I am not superstitious.'

FOUR: The Green Man

A young man in knickerbockers, with an eager sanguine profile, was
playing golf against himself on the links that lay parallel to the sand
and sea, which were all growing grey with twilight. He was not
carelessly knocking a ball about, but rather practising particular
strokes with a sort of microscopic fury; like a neat and tidy whirlwind.
He had learned many games quickly, but he had a disposition to learn
them a little more quickly than they can be learnt. He was rather prone
to be a victim of those remarkable invitations by which a man may learn
the Violin in Six Lessons - or acquire a perfect French accent by a
Correspondence Course. He lived in the breezy atmosphere of such hopeful
advertisement and adventure. He was at present the private secretary of
Admiral Sir Michael Craven, who owned the big house behind the park
abutting on the links. He was ambitious, and had no intention of
continuing indefinitely to be private secretary to anybody. But he was
also reasonable; and he knew that the best way of ceasing to be a
secretary was to be a good secretary. Consequently he was a very good
secretary; dealing with the ever - accumulating arrears of the Admiral's
correspondence with the same swift centripetal concentration with which
he addressed the golf - ball. He had to struggle with the correspondence
alone and at his own discretion at present; for the Admiral had been
with his ship for the last six months, and, though now returning, was
not expected for hours, or possibly days.

With an athletic stride, the young man, whose name was Harold Harker,
crested the rise of turf that was the rampart of the links and, looking
out across the sands to the sea, saw a strange sight. He did not see it
very clearly; for the dusk was darkening every minute under stormy
clouds; but it seemed to him, by a sort of momentary illusion, like a
dream of days long past or a drama played by ghosts, out of another age
in history.

The last of the sunset lay in long bars of copper and gold above the
last dark strip of sea that seemed rather black than blue. But blacker
still against this gleam in the west, there passed in sharp outline,
like figures in a shadow pantomime, two men with three - cornered cocked
hats and swords; as if they had just landed from one of the wooden ships
of Nelson. It was not at all the sort of hallucination that would have
come natural to Mr Harker, had he been prone to hallucinations. He was
of the type that is at once sanguine and scientific; and would be more
likely to fancy the flying - ships of the future than the fighting ships
of the past. He therefore very sensibly came to the conclusion that even
a futurist can believe his eyes.

His illusion did not last more than a moment. On the second glance, what
he saw was unusual but not incredible. The two men who were striding in
single file across the sands, one some fifteen yards behind the other,
were ordinary modern naval officers; but naval officers wearing that
almost extravagant full - dress uniform which naval officers never do
wear if they can possibly help it; only on great ceremonial occasions
such as the visits of Royalty. In the man walking in front, who seemed
more or less unconscious of the man walking behind, Harker recognized at
once the high - bridged nose and spike - shaped beard of his own
employer the Admiral. The other man following in his tracks he did not
know. But he did know something about the circumstances connected with
the ceremonial occasion. He knew that when the Admiral's ship put in at
the adjacent port, it was to be formally visited by a Great Personage;
which was enough, in that sense, to explain the officers being in full
dress. But he did also know the officers; or at any rate the Admiral.
And what could have possessed the Admiral to come on shore in that rig -
out, when one could swear he would seize five minutes to change into
mufti or at least into undress uniform, was more than his secretary
could conceive. It seemed somehow to be the very last thing he would do.
It was indeed to remain for many weeks one of the chief mysteries of
this mysterious business. As it was, the outline of these fantastic
court uniforms against the empty scenery, striped with dark sea and
sand, had something suggestive of comic opera; and reminded the
spectator of Pinafore.

The second figure was much more singular; somewhat singular in
appearance, despite his correct lieutenant's uniform, and still more
extraordinary in behaviour. He walked in a strangely irregular and
uneasy manner; sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly; as if he could
not make up his mind whether to overtake the Admiral or not. The Admiral
was rather deaf and certainly heard no footsteps behind him on the
yielding sand; but the footsteps behind him, if traced in the detective
manner, would have given rise to twenty conjectures from a limp to a
dance. The man's face was swarthy as well as darkened with shadow, and
every now and then the eyes in it shifted and shone, as if to accent his
agitation. Once he began to run and then abruptly relapsed into a
swaggering slowness and carelessness. Then he did something which Mr
Harker could never have conceived any normal naval officer in His
Britannic Majesty's Service doing, even in a lunatic asylum. He drew his
sword.

It was at this bursting - point of the prodigy that the two passing
figures disappeared behind a headland on the shore. The staring
secretary had just time to notice the swarthy stranger, with a
resumption of carelessness, knock off a head of sea - holly with his
glittering blade. He seemed then to have abandoned all idea of catching
the other man up. But Mr Harold Harker's face became very thoughtful
indeed; and he stood there ruminating for some time before he gravely
took himself inland, towards the road that ran past the gates of the
great house and so by a long curve down to the sea.

It was up this curving road from the coast that the Admiral might be
expected to come, considering the direction in which he had been
walking, and making the natural assumption that he was bound for his own
door. The path along the sands, under the links, turned inland just
beyond the headland arid solidifying itself into a road, returned
towards Craven House. It was down this road, therefore, that the
secretary darted, with characteristic impetuosity, to meet his patron
returning home. But the parton was apparently not returning home. What
was still more peculiar, the secretary was not returning home either; at
least until many hours later; a delay quite long enough to arouse alarm
and mystification at Craven House.

Behind the pillars and palms of that rather too palatial country house,
indeed, there was expectancy gradually changing to uneasiness. Gryce the
butler, a big bilious man abnormally silent below as well as above
stairs, showed a certain restlessness as he moved about the main front -
hall and occasionally looked out of the side windows of the porch, on
the white road that swept towards the sea. The Admiral's sister Marion,
who kept house for him, had her brother's high nose with a more sniffy
expression; she was voluble, rather rambling, not without humour, and
capable of sudden emphasis as shrill as a cockatoo. The Admiral's
daughter Olive was dark, dreamy, and as a rule abstractedly silent,
perhaps melancholy; so that her aunt generally conducted most of the
conversation, and that without reluctance. But the girl also had a gift
of sudden laughter that was very engaging.

'I can't think why they're not here already,' said the elder lady. 'The
postman distinctly told me he'd seen the Admiral coming along the beach;
along with that dreadful creature Rook. Why in the world they call him
Lieutenant Rook - '

'Perhaps,' suggested the melancholy young lady, with a momentary
brightness, 'perhaps they call him Lieutenant because he is a
Lieutenant.'

'I can't think why the Admiral keeps him,' snorted her aunt, as if she
were talking of a housemaid. She was very proud of her brother and
always called him the Admiral; but her notions of a commission in the
Senior Service were inexact.

'Well, Roger Rook is sulky and unsociable and all that,' replied Olive,
'but of course that wouldn't prevent him being a capable sailor.'

'Sailor!' cried her aunt with one of her rather startling cockatoo
notes, 'he isn't my notion of a sailor. The Lass that Loved a Sailor, as
they used to sing when I was young . . . Just think of it! He's not gay
and free and whats-its-name. He doesn't sing chanties or dance a
hornpipe.'

'Well,' observed her niece with gravity. 'The Admiral doesn't very often
dance a hornpipe.'

'Oh, you know what I mean - he isn't bright or breezy or anything,'
replied the old lady. 'Why, that secretary fellow could do better than
that.'

Olive's rather tragic face was transfigured by one of her good and
rejuvenating waves of laughter.

'I'm sure Mr Harker would dance a hornpipe for you,' she said, 'and say
he had learnt it in half an hour from the book of instructions. He's
always learning things of that sort.'

She stopped laughing suddenly and looked at her aunt's rather strained
face.

'I can't think why Mr Harker doesn't come,' she added.

'I don't care about Mr Harker,' replied the aunt, and rose and looked
out of the window.

The evening light had a long turned from yellow to grey and was now
turning almost to white under the widening moonlight, over the large
flat landscape by the coast; unbroken by any features save a clump of
sea - twisted trees round a pool and beyond, rather gaunt and dark
against the horizon, the shabby fishermen's tavern on the shore that
bore the name of the Green Man. And all that road and landscape was
empty of any living thing. Nobody had seen the figure in the cocked hat
that had been observed, earlier in the evening, walking by the sea; or
the other and stranger figure that had been seen trailing after him.
Nobody had even seen the secretary who saw them.

It was after midnight when the secretary at last burst in and aroused
the household; and his face, white as a ghost, looked all the paler
against the background of the stolid face and figure of a big Inspector
of Police. Somehow that red, heavy, indifferent face looked, even more
than the white and harassed one, like a mask of doom. The news was
broken to the two women with such consideration or concealments as were
possible. But the news was that the body of Admiral Craven had been
eventually fished out of the foul weeds and scum of the pool under the
trees; and that he was drowned and dead.

Anybody acquainted with Mr Harold Harker, secretary, will realize that,
whatever his agitation, he was by morning in a mood to be tremendously
on the spot. He hustled the Inspector, whom he had met the night before
on the road down by the Green Man, into another room for private and
practical consultation. He questioned the Inspector rather as the
Inspector might have questioned a yokel. But Inspector Burns was a
stolid character; and was either too stupid or too clever to resent such
trifles. It soon began to look as if he were by no means so stupid as he
looked; for he disposed of Harker's eager questions in a manner that was
slow but methodical and rational.

'Well,' said Harker (his head full of many manuals with titles like 'Be
a Detective in Ten Days'). 'Well, it's the old triangle, I suppose.
Accident, Suicide or Murder.'

'I don't see how it could be accident,' answered the policeman. 'It
wasn't even dark yet and the pool's fifty yards from the straight road
that he knew like his own doorstep. He'd no more have got into th