impatiently. "What line he was stuck at, what epithet he was looking
for, what climax he was trying to work up to. If there were any educated
people in court, who know what literature is, they would have known well
enough whether he had had anything genuine to do. You'd have asked a
manufacturer about the conditions of his factory; but nobody seems to
consider the conditions under which poetry is manufactured. It's done by
doing nothing."
"That's all very well," replied the detective; "but why did he hide? Why
did he climb up that crooked little stairway and stop there; it led
nowhere."
"Why, because it led nowhere, of course," cried Father Brown
explosively. "Anybody who clapped eyes on that blind alley ending in
mid-air might have known an artist would want to go there, just as a
child would."
He stood blinking for a moment, and then said apologetically: "I beg
your pardon; but it seems odd that none of them understand these things.
And then there was another thing. Don't you know that everything has,
for an artist, one aspect or angle that is exactly _right_? A tree, a cow,
and a cloud, in a certain relation only, mean something; as three
letters, in one order only, mean a word. Well, the view of that
illuminated garden from that unfinished bridge was the right view of it.
It was as unique as the fourth dimension. It was a sort of fairy
foreshortening; it was like looking _down_ at heaven and seeing all the
stars growing on trees and that luminous pond like a moon fallen flat on
the fields in some happy nursery tale. He could have looked at it for
ever. If you told him the path led nowhere, he would tell you it had led
him to the country at the end of the world. But do you expect him to
tell you that in the witness-box? What would you say to him if he
did? You talk about a man having a jury of his peers. Why don't you have
a jury of poets?"
"You talk as if you were a poet yourself," said Bagshaw.
"Thank your stars I'm not," said Father Brown. "Thank your lucky stars a
priest has to be more charitable than a poet. Lord have mercy on us, if
you knew what a crushing, what a cruel contempt he feels for the lot of
you, you'd feel as if you were under Niagara."
"You may know more about the artistic temperament than I do," said
Bagshaw after a pause; "but, after all, the answer is simple. You can
only show that he might have done what he did, without committing the
crime. But it's equally true that he might have committed the crime. And
who else could have committed it?"
"Have you thought about the servant, Green?" asked Father Brown,
reflectively. "He told a rather queer story."
"Ah," cried Bagshaw quickly, "you think Green did it, after all."
"I'm quite sure he didn't," replied the other. "I only asked if you'd
thought about his queer story. He only went out for some trifle, a drink
or an assignation or what not. But he went out by the garden door and
came back over the garden wall. In other words, he left the door open,
but he came back to find it shut. Why? Because Somebody Else had already
passed out that way."
"The murderer," muttered the detective doubtfully. "Do you know who he
was?"
"I know what he looked like," answered Father Brown quietly. "That's the
only thing I do know. I can almost see him as he came in at the front
door, in the gleam of the hall lamp; his figure, his clothes, even his
face!"
"What's all this?"
"He looked like Sir Humphrey Gwynne," said the priest.
"What the devil do you mean?" demanded Bagshaw. "Gwynne was lying dead
with his head in the pond."
"Oh, yes," said Father Brown.
After a moment he went on: "Let's go back to that theory of yours, which
was a very good one, though I don't quite agree with it. You suppose the
murderer came in at the front door, met the Judge in the front hall,
struggling with him and breaking the mirror; that the judge then
retreated into the garden, where he was finally shot. Somehow, it
doesn't sound natural to me. Granted he retreated down the hall, there
are two exits at the end, one into the garden and one into the house.
Surely, he would be more likely to retreat into the house? His gun was
there; his telephone was there; his servant, so far as he knew, was
there. Even the nearest neighbours were in that direction. Why should he
stop to open the garden door and go out alone on the deserted side of
the house?"
"But we know he did go out of the house," replied his companion,
puzzled. "We know he went out of the house, because he was found in the
garden."
"He never went out of the house, because he never was in the house,"
said Father Brown. "Not that evening, I mean. He was sitting in that
bungalow. I read _that_ lesson in the dark, at the beginning, in red and
golden stars across the garden. They were worked from the hut; they
wouldn't have been burning at all if he hadn't been in the hut. He was
trying to run across to the house and the telephone, when the murderer
shot him beside the pond."
"But what about the pot and the palm and the broken mirror?" cried
Bagshaw. "Why, it was you who found them! It was you yourself who said
there must have been a struggle in the hall."
The priest blinked rather painfully. "Did I?" he muttered. "Surely, I
didn't say that. I never thought that. What I think I said, was that
something had happened in the hall. And something did happen; but it
wasn't a struggle."
"Then what broke the mirror?" asked Bagshaw shortly.
"A bullet broke the mirror," answered Father Brown gravely; "a bullet
fired by the criminal. The big fragments of falling glass were quite
enough to knock over the pot and the palm."
"Well, what else could he have been firing at except Gwynne?" asked the
detective.
"It's rather a fine metaphysical point," answered his clerical companion
almost dreamily. "In one sense, of course, he was firing at Gwynne. But
Gwynne wasn't there to be fired at. The criminal was alone in the hall."
He was silent for a moment, and then went on quietly. "Imagine the
looking-glass at the end of the passage, before it was broken, and the
tall palm arching over it. In the half-light, reflecting these
monochrome walls, it would, look like the end of the passage. A man
reflected in it would look like a man coming from inside the house. It
would look like the master of the house--if only the reflection were a
little like him."
"Stop a minute," cried Bagshaw. "I believe I begin----"
"You begin to see," said Father Brown. "You begin to see why all the
suspects in this case must be innocent. Not one of them could possibly
have mistaken his own reflection for old Gwynne. Orm would have known at
once that his bush of yellow hair was not a bald head. Flood would have
seen his own red head, and Green his own red waistcoat. Besides, they're
all short and shabby; none of them could have thought his own image was
a tall, thin, old gentleman in evening-dress. We want another, equally
tall and thin, to match him. That's what I meant by saying that I knew
what the murderer looked like."
"And what do you argue from that?" asked Bagshaw, looking at him
steadily.
The priest uttered a sort of sharp, crisp laugh, oddly different from
his ordinary mild manner of speech.
"I am going to argue," he said, "the very thing that you said was so
ludicrous and impossible."
"What do you mean?"
"I'm going to base the defence," said Father Brown, "on the fact that
the prosecuting counsel has a bald head."
"Oh, my God!" said the detective quietly, and got to his feet, staring.
Father Brown had resumed his monologue in an unruffled manner.
"You've been following the movements of a good many people in this
business; you policemen were prodigiously interested in the movements of
the poet, and the servant, and the Irishman. The man whose movements
seem to have been rather forgotten is the dead man himself. His servant
was quite honestly astonished at finding his master had returned. His
master had gone to a great dinner of all the leaders of the legal
profession, but had left it abruptly and come home. He was not ill, for
he summoned no assistance; he had almost certainly quarrelled with some
leader of the legal profession. It's among the leaders of that
profession that we should have looked first for his enemy. He returned,
and shut himself up in the bungalow, where he kept all his private
documents about treasonable practices. But the leader of the legal
profession, who knew there was something against him in those documents,
was thoughtful enough to follow his accuser home; he also being in
evening-dress, but with a pistol in his pocket. That is all; and nobody
could ever have guessed it except for the mirror."
He seemed to be gazing into vacancy for a moment, and then added:
"A queer thing is a mirror; a picture frame that holds hundreds of
different pictures, all vivid and all vanished for ever. Yet, there was
something specially strange about the glass that hung at the end of that
grey corridor under that green palm. It is as if it was a magic glass
and had a different fate from others, as if its picture could somehow
survive it, hanging in the air of that twilight house like a spectre; or
at least like an abstract diagram, the skeleton of an argument. We
could, at least, conjure out of the void the thing that Sir Arthur
Travers saw. And by the way, there was one very true thing that you said
about him."
"I'm glad to hear it," said Bagshaw with grim good-nature, "what was
it?"
"You said," observed the priest, "that Sir Arthur must have some good
reason for wanting to get Orm hanged."
A week later the priest met the police detective once more, and learned
that the authorities had already been moving on the new lines of inquiry
when they were interrupted by a sensational event.
"Sir Arthur Travers," began Father Brown.
"Sir Arthur Travers is dead," said Bagshaw, briefly.
"Ah!" said the other, with a little catch in his voice; "you mean that
he----"
"Yes," said Bagshaw, "he shot at the same man again, but not in a
mirror."
II
THE MAN WITH TWO BEARDS
THIS tale was told by Father Brown to Professor Crake, the
celebrated criminologist, after dinner at a club, where the two were
introduced to each other as sharing a harmless hobby of murder and
robbery. But, as Father Brown's version rather minimized his own part in
the matter, it is here re-told in a more impartial style. It arose out
of a playful passage of arms, in which the professor was very scientific
and the priest rather sceptical.
"My good sir," said the professor in remonstrance, "don't you believe
that criminology is a science?"
"I'm not sure," replied Father Brown. "Do you believe that hagiology is
a science?"
"What's that?" asked the specialist sharply.
"No; it's not the study of hags, and has nothing to do with burning
witches," said the priest, smiling. "It's the study of holy things,
saints and so on. You see, the Dark Ages tried to make a science about
good people. But our own humane and enlightened age is only interested
in a science about bad ones. Yet I think our general experience is that
every conceivable sort of man has been a saint. And I suspect you will
find, too, that every conceivable sort of man has been a murderer."
"Well, we believe murderers can be pretty well classified," observed
Crake. "The list sounds rather long and dull; but I think it's
exhaustive. First, all killing can be divided into rational and
irrational, and we'll take the last first, because they are much fewer.
There is such a thing as homicidal mania, or love of butchery in the
abstract. There is such a thing as irrational antipathy, though it's
very seldom homicidal. Then we come to the true motives: of these, some
are less rational in the sense of being merely romantic and
retrospective. Acts of pure revenge are acts of hopeless revenge. Thus a
lover will sometimes kill a rival he could never supplant, or a rebel
assassinate a tyrant after the conquest is complete. But, more often,
even these acts have a rational explanation. They are hopeful murders.
They fall into the larger section of the second division, of what we may
call prudential crimes. These, again, fall chiefly under two
descriptions. A man kills either in order to obtain what the other man
possesses, either by theft or inheritance, or to stop the other man from
acting in some way: as in the case of killing a blackmailer or a
political opponent; or, in the case of a rather more passive obstacle, a
husband or wife whose continued functioning, as such, interferes with
other things. We believe that classification is pretty thoroughly
thought out and, properly applied, covers the whole ground. But I'm
afraid that it perhaps sounds rather dull; I hope I'm not boring you."
"Not at all," said Father Brown. "If I seemed a little absent-minded I
must apologize; the truth is, I was thinking of a man I once knew. He
was a murderer; but I can't see where he fits into your museum of
murderers. He was not mad, nor did he like killing. He did not hate the
man he killed; he hardly knew him, and certainly had nothing to avenge
on him. The other man did not possess anything that he could possibly
want. The other man was not behaving in any way which the murderer
wanted to stop. The murdered man was not in a position to hurt, or
hinder, or even affect the murderer in any way. There was no woman in the
case. There were no politics in the case. This man killed a fellow-creature
who was practically a stranger, and that for a very strange
reason; which is possibly unique in human history."
And so, in his own more conversational fashion, he told the story. The
story may well begin in a sufficiently respectable setting, at the
breakfast table of a worthy though wealthy suburban family named Bankes,
where the normal discussion of the newspaper had, for once, been
silenced by the discussion about a mystery nearer home. Such people are
sometimes accused of gossip about their neighbours, but they are in that
matter almost inhumanly innocent. Rustic villagers tell tales about
their neighbours, true and false; but the curious culture of the modern
suburb will believe anything it is told in the papers about the
wickedness of the Pope, or the martyrdom of the King of the Cannibal
Islands, and, in the excitement of these topics, never knows what is
happening next door. In this case, however, the two forms of interest
actually coincided in a coincidence of thrilling intensity. Their own
suburb had actually been mentioned in their favourite newspaper. It
seemed to them like a new proof of their own existence when they saw the
name in print. It was almost as if they had been unconscious and
invisible before; and now they were as real as the King of the Cannibal
Islands.
It was stated in the paper that a once famous criminal, known as Michael
Moonshine, and many other names that were presumably not his own, had
recently been released after a long term of imprisonment for his
numerous burglaries; that his whereabouts was being kept quiet, but that
he was believed to have settled down in the suburb in question, which we
will call for convenience Chisham. A résumé of some of his famous and
daring exploits and escapes was given in the same issue. For it is a
character of that kind of press, intended for that kind of public, that
it assumes that its reader have no memories. While the peasant will
remember an outlaw like Robin Hood or Rob Roy for centuries, the clerk
will hardly remember the name of the criminal about whom he argued in
trams and tubes two years before. Yet, Michael Moonshine had really
shown some of the heroic rascality of Rob Roy or Robin Hood. He was
worthy to be turned into legend and not merely into news. He was far too
capable a burglar to be a murderer. But his terrific strength and the
ease with which he knocked policemen over like ninepins, stunned people,
and bound and gagged them, gave something almost like a final touch of
fear or mystery to the fact that he never killed them. People almost
felt that he would have been more human if he had.
Mr. Simon Bankes, the father of the family, was at once better read and
more old-fashioned than the rest. He was a sturdy man, with a short grey
beard and a brow barred with wrinkles. He had a turn for anecdotes and
reminiscence, and he distinctly remembered the days when Londoners had
lain awake listening for Mike Moonshine as they did for Spring-heeled
Jack. Then there was his wife, a thin, dark lady. There was a sort of
acid elegance about her, for her family had much more money than her
husband's, if rather less education; and she even possessed a very
valuable emerald necklace upstairs, that gave her a right to prominence
in a discussion about thieves. There was his daughter. Opal, who was
also thin and dark and supposed to be psychic--at any rate, by herself;
for she had little domestic encouragement. Spirits of an ardently astral
turn will be well advised not to materialize as members of a large
family. There was her brother John, a burly youth, particularly
boisterous in his indifference to her spiritual development; and
otherwise distinguishable only by his interest in motor-cars. He seemed
to be always in the act of selling one car and buying another; and by
some process, hard for the economic theorist to follow, it was always
possible to buy a much better article by selling the one that was
damaged or discredited. There was his brother Philip, a young man with
dark curly hair, distinguished by his attention to dress; which is
doubtless part of the duty of a stockbroker's clerk, but, as the
stockbroker was prone to hint, hardly the whole of it. Finally, there
was present at this family scene his friend, Daniel Devine, who was also
dark and exquisitely dressed, but bearded in a fashion that was somewhat
foreign, and therefore, for many, slightly menacing.
It was Devine who had introduced the topic of the newspaper paragraph,
tactfully insinuating so effective an instrument of distraction at what
looked like the beginning of a small family quarrel; for the psychic
lady had begun the description of a vision she had had of pale faces
floating in empty night outside her window, and John Bankes was trying
to roar down this revelation of a higher state with more than his usual
heartiness.
But the newspaper reference to their new and possibly alarming neighbour
soon put both controversialists out of court.
"How frightful," cried Mrs. Bankes. "He must be quite a new-comer; but
who can he possibly be?"
"I don't know any particularly new-comers," said her husband, "except
Sir Leopold Pulman, at Beechwood House."
"My dear," said the lady, "how absurd you are--Sir Leopold!" Then,
after a pause, she added: "If anybody suggested his secretary now--that
man with the whiskers; I've always said, ever since he got the
place Philip ought to have had----"
"Nothing doing," said Philip languidly, making his sole contribution to
the conversation. "Not good enough."
"The only one I know," observed Devine, "is that man called Carver, who
is stopping at Smith's Farm. He lives a very quiet life, but he's quite
interesting to talk to. I think John has had some business with him."
"Knows a bit about cars," conceded the monomaniac John. "He'll know a
bit more when he's been in my new car."
Devine smiled slightly; everybody had been threatened with the
hospitality of John's new car. Then he added reflectively:
"That's a little what I feel about him. He knows a lot about motoring
and travelling, and the active ways of the world, and yet he always
stays at home pottering about round old Smith's beehives. Says he's only
interested in bee culture, and that's why he's staying with Smith. It
seems a very quiet hobby for a man of his sort. However, I've no doubt
John's car will shake him up a bit."
As Devine walked away from the house that evening his dark face wore an
expression of concentrated thought. His thoughts would, perhaps, have
been worthy of our attention, even at this stage; but it is enough to
say that their practical upshot was a resolution to pay an immediate
visit to Mr. Carver at the house of Mr. Smith. As he was making his way
thither he encountered Barnard, the secretary at Beechwood House,
conspicuous by his lanky figure and the large side whiskers which Mrs.
Bankes counted among her private wrongs. Their acquaintance was slight,
and their conversation brief and casual; but Devine seemed to find in it
food for further cogitation.
"Look here," he said abruptly, "excuse my asking, but is it true that
Lady Pulman has some very famous jewellery up at the House? I'm not a
professional thief, but I've just heard there's one hanging about."
"I'll get her to give an eye to them," answered the secretary. "To tell
the truth, I've ventured to warn her about them already myself. I hope
she has attended to it."
As they spoke, there came the hideous cry of a motor-horn just behind,
and John Bankes came to a stop beside them, radiant at his own
steering-wheel. When he heard of Devine's destination he claimed it as
his own, though his tone suggested rather an abstract relish for offering
people a ride. The ride was consumed in continuous praises of the car, now
mostly in the matter of its adaptability to weather.
"Shuts up as tight as a box," he said, "and opens as easy--as easy as
opening your mouth."
Devine's mouth, at the moment, did not seem so easy to open, and they
arrived at Smith's farm to the sound of a soliloquy. Passing the outer
gate, Devine found the man he was looking for without going into the
house. The man was walking about in the garden, with his hands in his
pockets, wearing a large, limp straw hat; a man with a long face and a
large chin. The wide brim cut off the upper part of his face with a
shadow that looked a little like a mask. In the background was a row of
sunny beehives, along which an elderly man, presumably Mr. Smith, was
moving accompanied by a short, commonplace-looking companion in black
clerical costume.
"I say," burst in the irrepressible John, before Devine could offer any
polite greeting, "I've brought her round to give you a little run. You
see if she isn't better than a 'Thunder-bolt.'"
Mr Carver's mouth set into a smile that may have been meant to be
gracious, but looked rather grim. "I'm afraid I shall be too busy for
pleasure this evening," he said.
"How doth the little busy bee," observed Devine, equally enigmatically.
"Your bees must be very busy if they keep you at it all night. I was
wondering if----"
"Well," demanded Carver, with a certain cool defiance.
"Well, they say we should make hay while the sun shines," said Devine.
"Perhaps you make honey while the moon shines."
There came a flash from the shadow of the broad-brimmed hat, as the
whites of the man's eyes shifted and shone.
"Perhaps there is a good deal of moonshine in the business," he said:
"but I warn you my bees do not only make honey. They sting."
"_Are_ you coming along in the car?" insisted the staring John. But
Carver, though he threw off the momentary air of sinister significance
with which he had been answering Devine, was still positive in his
polite refusal.
"I can't possibly go," he said. "Got a lot of writing to do. Perhaps
you'd be kind enough to give some of my friends a run, if you want a
companion. This is my friend, Mr. Smith, Father Brown."
"Of course," cried Bankes; "let 'em all come."
"Thank you very much," said Father Brown. "I'm afraid I shall have to
decline; I've got to go on to Benediction in a few minutes."
"Mr. Smith is your man, then," said Carver, with something almost like
impatience. "I'm sure Smith is longing for a motor ride."
Smith, who wore a broad grin, bore no appearance of longing for
anything. He was an active little old man with a very honest wig; one of
those wigs that look no more natural than a hat. Its tinge of yellow was
out of keeping with his colourless complexion. He shook his head and
answered with amiable obstinacy:
"I remember I went over this road ten years ago--in one of those
contraptions. Came over in it from my sister's place at Holmgate, and
never been over that road in a car since. It was rough going I can tell
you."
"Ten years ago!" scoffed John Bankes. "Two thousand years ago you went
in an ox wagon. Do you think cars haven't changed in ten years--and
roads, too, for that matter? In my little bus you don't know the wheels
are going round. You think you're just flying."
"I'm sure Smith wants to go flying," urged Carver. "It's the dream of
his life. Come, Smith, go over to Holmgate and see your sister. You know
you ought to go and see your sister. Go over and stay the night if you
like."
"Well, I generally walk over, so I generally do stay the night," said
old Smith. "No need to trouble the gentleman to-day, particularly."