ought to outstrip him in a flash with motors and telephones that go a
good deal farther than we should ever get, running through the village
in our nightgowns. But it may be there are things even the police cars
and wires won't outstrip."
While Jameson was talking to the police-station through the telephone in
an agitated voice, Boyle went out again on to the balcony and hastily
scanned that grey landscape of daybreak. There was no trace of the man
in the turban, and no other sign of life, except some faint stirrings an
expert might have recognized in the hotel of the Blue Dragon. Only
Boyle, for the first time, noted consciously something that he had all
along been noting unconsciously. It was like a fact struggling in the
submerged mind and demanding its own meaning. It was simply the fact
that the grey landscape had never been entirely grey; there was one gold
spot amid its stripes of colourless colour, a lamp lighted in one of the
houses on the other side of the green. Something, perhaps irrational,
told him that it had been burning through all the hours of the darkness
and was only fading with the dawn. He counted the houses, and his
calculation brought out a result which seemed to fit in with something,
he knew not what. Anyhow, it was apparently the house of the Count Yvon
de Lara.
Inspector Pinner had arrived with several policemen, and done several
things of a rapid and resolute sort, being conscious that the very
absurdity of the costly trinkets might give the case considerable
prominence in the newspapers. He had examined everything, measured,
everything, taken down everybody's deposition, taken everybody's
finger-prints, put everybody's back up, and found himself at the end left
facing a fact which he could not believe. An Arab from the desert had
walked up the public road and stopped in front of the house of Mr.
Peregrine Smart, where a bowl of artificial goldfish was kept in an
inner room; he had then sung or recited a little poem, and the bowl had
exploded like a bomb and the fishes vanished into thin air. Nor did it
soothe the inspector to be told by a foreign Count, in a soft, purring
voice, that the bounds of experience were being enlarged.
Indeed, the attitude of each member of the little group was
characteristic enough. Peregrine Smart himself had come back from London
the next morning to hear the news of his loss. Naturally he admitted a
shock; but it was typical of something sporting and spirited in the
little old gentleman, something that always made his small strutting
figure look like a cock-sparrow's, that he showed more vivacity in the
search than depression at the loss. The man named Harmer, who had come
to the village on purpose to buy the goldfish, might be excused for
being a little testy on learning they were not there to be bought. But,
in truth, his rather aggressive moustache and eyebrows seemed to bristle
with something more definite than disappointment, and the eyes that
darted over the company were bright with a vigilance that might well be
suspicion. The sallow face of the bank manager, who had also returned
from London though by a later train, seemed again and again to attract
those shining and shifting eyes like a magnet. Of the two remaining
figures of the original circle. Father Brown was generally silent when
he was not spoken to, and the dazed Hartopp was often silent even when
he was.
But the Count was not a man to let anything pass that gave an apparent
advantage to his views. He smiled at his rationalistic rival, the
doctor, in the manner of one who knows how it is possible to be
irritating by being ingratiating.
"You will admit, doctor," he said, "that at least some of the stories
you thought so improbable look a little more realistic to-day than they
did yesterday. When a man as ragged as those I described is able, by
speaking a word, to dissolve a solid vessel inside the four walls of the
house he stands outside, it might perhaps be called an example of what I
said about spiritual powers and material barriers."
"And it might be called an example of what I said," said the doctor
sharply, "about a little scientific knowledge being enough to show how
the tricks are done."
"Do you really mean, doctor," asked Smart in some excitement, "that you
can throw any scientific light on this mystery?"
"I can throw light on what the Count calls a mystery," said the doctor,
"because it is not a mystery at all. That part of it is plain enough. A
sound is only a wave of vibration, and certain vibrations can break
glass, if the sound is of a certain kind and the glass of a certain
kind. The man did not stand in the road and think, which the Count tells
us is the ideal method when Orientals want a little chat. He sang out
what he wanted, quite loud, and struck a shrill note on an instrument.
It is similar to many experiments by which glass of special composition
has been cracked."
"Such as the experiment," said the Count lightly, "by which several
lumps of solid gold have suddenly ceased to exist."
"Here comes Inspector Pinner," said Boyle. "Between ourselves, I think
he would regard the doctor's natural explanation as quite as much of a
fairy tale as the Count's preternatural one. A very sceptical intellect,
Mr. Pinner's, especially about me. I rather think I am under suspicion."
"I think we are all under suspicion," said the Count.
It was the presence of this suspicion in his own case that led Boyle to
seek the personal advice of Father Brown. They were walking round the
village green together, some hours later in the day, when the priest,
who was frowning thoughtfully at the ground as he listened, suddenly
stopped.
"Do you see that?" he asked. "Somebody's been washing the pavement
here--just this little strip of pavement outside Colonel Varney's
house. I wonder whether that was done yesterday."
Father Brown looked rather earnestly at the house, which was high and
narrow, and carried rows of striped sun-blinds of gay but already faded
colours. The chinks or crannies that gave glimpses of the interior
looked all the darker; indeed, they looked almost black in contrast with
the facade thus golden in the morning light.
"That is Colonel Varney's house, isn't it?" he asked. "He comes from the
East, too, I fancy. What sort of man is he?"
"I've never even seen him," answered Boyle. "I don't think anybody's
seen him, except Dr. Burdock, and I rather fancy the doctor doesn't see
him more than he need."
"Well, I'm going to see him for a minute," said Father Brown.
The big front door opened and swallowed the small priest, and his friend
stood staring at it in a dazed and irrational manner, as if wondering
whether it would ever open again. It opened in a few minutes, and Father
Brown emerged, still smiling, and continued his slow and pottering
progress round the square of roads. Sometimes he seemed to have
forgotten the matter in hand altogether, for he would make passing
remarks on historical and social questions, or on the prospects of
development in the district. He remarked on the soil used for the
beginning of a new road by the bank; he looked across the old village
green with a vague expression.
"Common land. I suppose people ought to feed their pigs and geese on it,
if they had any pigs or geese; as it is, it seems to feed nothing but
nettles and thistles. What a pity that what was supposed to be a sort of
large meadow has been turned into a small and petty wilderness. That's
Dr. Burdock's house opposite, isn't it?"
"Yes," answered Boyle, almost jumping at this abrupt postscript.
"Very well," answered Father Brown, "then I think we'll go indoors
again."
As they opened the front door of Smart's house and mounted the stairs,
Boyle repeated to his companion many details of the drama enacted there
at daybreak.
"I suppose you didn't doze off again?" asked Father Brown, "giving time
for somebody to scale the balcony while Jameson ran down to secure the
door."
"No," answered Boyle; "I am sure of that. I woke up to hear Jameson
challenging the stranger from the balcony; then I heard him running
downstairs and putting up the bars, and then in two strides I was on the
balcony myself."
"Or could he have slipped in between you from another angle? Are there
any other entrances besides the front entrance?"
"Apparently there are not," said Boyle gravely.
"I had better make sure, don't you think?" asked Father Brown
apologetically, and scuttled softly downstairs again. Boyle remained in
the front bedroom gazing rather doubtfully after him. After a
comparatively brief interval the round and rather rustic visage appeared
again at the head of the stairs, looking rather like a turnip ghost with
a broad grin.
"No. I think that settles the matter of entrances," said the turnip
ghost, cheerfully. "And now, I think, having got everything in a tight
box, so to speak, we can take stock of what we've got. It's rather a
curious business."
"Do you think," asked Boyle, "that the Count or the colonel, or any of
these Eastern travellers have anything to do with it? Do you think it
is--preternatural?"
"I will grant you this," said the priest gravely, "if the Count, or the
colonel, or any of your neighbours did dress up in Arab masquerade and
creep up to this house in the dark--then it _was_ preternatural."
"What do you mean? Why?"
"Because the Arab left no footprints," answered Father Brown. "The
colonel on the one side and the banker on the other are the nearest of
your neighbours. That loose red soil is between you and the bank, it
would print off bare feet like a plaster cast and probably leave red
marks everywhere. I braved the colonel's curry-seasoned temper to verify
the fact that the front pavement was washed yesterday and not to-day;
it was wet enough to make wet footprints all along the road. Now, if the
visitor were the Count or the doctor in the houses opposite, he might
possibly, of course, have come across the common. But he must have found
it exceedingly uncomfortable with bare feet, for it is, as I remarked,
one mass of thorns and thistles and stinging nettles. He would surely
have pricked himself and probably left traces of it. Unless, as you say,
he was a preternatural being."
Boyle looked steadily at the grave and indecipherable face of his
clerical friend.
"Do you mean that he was?" he asked, at length.
"There is one general truth to remember," said Father Brown, after a
pause. "A thing can sometimes be too close to be seen, as, for instance,
a man cannot see himself. There was a man who had a fly in his eye when
he looked through the telescope, and he discovered that there was a most
incredible dragon in the moon. And I am told that if a man hears the
exact reproduction of his own voice it sounds like the voice of a
stranger. In the same way, if anything is right in the foreground of our
life we hardly see it, and if we did we might think it quite odd. If the
thing in the foreground got into the middle distance, we should probably
think it had come from the remote distance. Just come outside the house
again for a moment. I want to show you how it looks from another
standpoint."
He had already risen, and as they descended the stairs he continued his
remarks in a rather groping fashion as if he were thinking aloud.
"The Count and the Asiatic atmosphere all come in, because, in a case
like this, everything depends on the preparation of the mind. A man can
reach a condition in which a brick, falling on his head, will seem to be
a Babylonian brick carved with cuneiform, and dropped from the Hanging
Gardens of Babylon, so that he will never even look at the brick and see
it is of one pattern with the bricks or his own house. So in your
case----"
"What does this mean?" interrupted Boyle, staring and pointing at the
entrance. "What in the name of wonder does it mean? The door is barred
again."
He was staring at the front door by which they had entered but a little
while before, and across which stood, once more, the great dark bands of
rusty iron which had once, as he had said, locked the stable door too
late. There was something darkly and dumbly ironic in those old
fastenings closing behind them and imprisoning them as if of their own
motion.
"Of those," said Father Brown casually. "I put up those bars myself,
just now. Didn't you hear me?"
"No," answered Boyle, staring. "I heard nothing."
"Well, I rather thought you wouldn't," said the other equably. "There's
really no reason why anybody upstairs should hear those bars being put
up. A sort of hook fits easily into a sort of hole. When you're quite
close you hear a dull click; but that's all. The only thing that makes
any noise a man could hear upstairs, is this."
And he lifted the bar out of its socket and let it fall with a clang at
the side of the door.
"It does make a noise if you _unbar_ the door," said Father Brown gravely,
"even if you do it pretty carefully."
"You mean----"
"I mean," said Father Brown, "that what you heard upstairs was Jameson
opening the door and not shutting it. And now let's open the door
ourselves and go outside."
When they stood outside in the street, under the balcony, the little
priest resumed his previous explanation as coolly as if it had been a
chemical lecture.
"I was saying that a man may be in the mood to look for something very
distant, and not realize that it is something very close, something very
close to himself, perhaps something very like himself. It was a strange
and outlandish thing that you saw when you looked down at this road. I
suppose it never occurred to you to consider what he saw when he looked
up at that balcony?"
Boyle was staring at the balcony and did not answer, and the other
added:
"You thought it very wild and wonderful that an Arab should come through
civilized England with bare feet. You did not remember that at the same
moment you had bare feet yourself."
Boyle at last found words, and it was to repeat words already spoken.
"Jameson opened the door," he said mechanically.
"Yes," assented, his friend. "Jameson opened the door and came out into
the road in his night-clothes, just as you came out on the balcony. He
caught up two things that you had seen a hundred times: the length of
old blue curtain that he wrapped round his head, and the Oriental
musical instrument you must have often seen in that heap of Oriental
curiosities. The rest was atmosphere and acting, very fine acting, for
he is a very fine artist in crime."
"Jameson!" exclaimed Boyle incredulously. "He was such a dull old stick
that I never even noticed him."
"Precisely," said the priest, "he was an artist. If he could act a
wizard or a troubadour for six minutes, do you think he could not act a
clerk for six weeks?"
"I am still not quite sure of his object," said Boyle.
"His object has been achieved," replied Father Brown, "or very nearly
achieved. He had taken the goldfish already, of course, as he had twenty
chances of doing. But if he had simply taken, them, everybody would have
realized that he had twenty chances of doing it. By creating a
mysterious magician from the end of the earth, he set everybody's
thoughts wandering far afield to Arabia and India, so that you yourself
can hardly believe that the whole thing was so near home. It was too
close to you to be seen."
"If this is true," said Boyle, "it was an extraordinary risk to run, and
he had to cut it very fine. It's true I never heard the man in the
street say anything while Jameson was talking from the balcony, so I
suppose that was all a fake. And I suppose it's true that there was time
for him to get outside before I had fully woken up and got out on to the
balcony."
"Every crime depends on somebody not waking up too soon," replied Father
Brown; "and in every sense most of us wake up too late. I, for one, have
woken up much too late. For I imagine he's bolted long ago, just before
or just after they took his finger-prints."
"You woke up before anybody else, anyhow," said Boyle, "and I should
never have woken up in that sense. Jameson was so correct and colourless
that I forgot all about him."
"Beware of the man you forget," replied his friend; "he is the one man
who has you entirely at a disadvantage. But I did not suspect him,
either, until you told me how you had heard him barring the door."
"Anyhow, we owe it all to you," said Boyle warmly.
"You owe it all to Mrs. Robinson," said Father Brown with a smile.
"Mrs. Robinson?" questioned the wondering secretary. "You don't mean the
housekeeper?"
"Beware of the woman you forget, and even more," answered the other.
"This man was a very high-class criminal; he had been an excellent
actor, and therefore he was a good psychologist. A man like the Count
never hears any voice but his own; but this man could listen, when you
had all forgotten he was there, and gather exactly the right materials
for his romance and know exactly the right note to strike to lead you
all astray. But he made one bad mistake in the psychology of Mrs.
Robinson, the housekeeper."
"I don't understand," answered Boyle, "what she can have to do with it."
"Jameson did not expect the doors to be barred," said Father Brown. "He
knew that a lot of men, especially careless men like you and your
employer, could go on saying for days that something ought to be done,
or might as well be done. But if you convey to a woman that something
ought to be done, there is always a dreadful danger that she will
suddenly do it."
IV
THE ACTOR AND THE ALIBI
MR. MUNDON MANDEVILLE, the theatrical manager, walked briskly
through the passages behind the scenes, or rather below the scenes. His
attire was smart and festive, perhaps a little too festive; the flower
in his buttonhole was festive; the very varnish on his boots was
festive; but his face was not at all festive. He was a big, bull-necked,
black-browed man, and at the moment his brow was blacker than usual. He
had in any case, of course, the hundred botherations that besiege a man
in such a position; and they ranged from large to small and from new to
old. It annoyed him to pass through the passages where the old pantomime
scenery was stacked; because he had successfully begun, his career at
that theatre with very popular pantomimes, and had since been induced to
gamble in more serious and classical drama over which he had dropped a
good deal of money. Hence, to see the sapphire Gates of Bluebeard's Blue
Palace, or portions of the Enchanted Grove of Golden Orange Trees,
leaning up against the wall to be festooned with cobwebs or nibbled by
mice, did not give him that soothing sense of a return to simplicity
which we all ought to have when given a glimpse of that wonderland of
our childhood. Nor had he any time to drop a tear where he had dropped
the money, or to dream of this Paradise of Peter Pan; for he had been
summoned hurriedly to settle a practical problem, not of the past but of
the moment. It was the sort of thing that does sometimes happen in that
strange world behind the scenes; but it was big enough to be serious.
Miss Maroni, the talented young actress of Italian parentage, who had
undertaken to act an important part in the play that was to be rehearsed
that afternoon and performed that evening, had abruptly and even
violently refused at the last moment to do anything of the kind. He had
not even seen the exasperating lady yet; and as she had locked herself
up in her dressing-room and defied the world through the door, it seemed
unlikely, for the present, that he would. Mr. Mundon Mandeville was
sufficiently British to explain it by murmuring that all foreigners were
mad; but the thought of his good fortune in inhabiting the only sane
island of the planet did not suffice to soothe him any more than the
memory of the Enchanted Grove. All these things, and many more, were
annoying; and yet a very intimate observer might have suspected that
something was wrong with Mr. Mandeville that went beyond annoyance.
If it be possible for a heavy and healthy man to look haggard, he looked
haggard. His face was full, but his eye-sockets were hollow; his mouth
twitched as if it were always trying to bite the black strip of
moustache that was just too short to be bitten. He might have been a man
who had begun to take drugs; but even on that assumption there was
something that suggested that he had a reason for doing it; that the
drug was not the cause of the tragedy, but the tragedy the cause of the
drug. Whatever was his deeper secret, it seemed to inhabit that dark end
of the long passage where was the entrance to his own little study; and
as he went along the empty corridor, he threw back a nervous glance now
and then.
However, business is business; and he made his way to the opposite end
of the passage where the blank green door of Miss Maroni defied the
world. A group of actors and other people involved were already standing
in front of it, conferring and considering, one might almost fancy, the
advisability of a battering-ram. The group contained one figure, at
least, who was already well enough known; whose photograph was on many
mantelpieces and his autograph in many albums. For though Norman Knight
was playing the hero in a theatre that was still a little provincial and
old-fashioned and capable of calling him the first walking gentleman, he,
at least, was certainly on the way to wider triumphs. He was a
good-looking man with a long cleft chin and fair hair low on his forehead,
giving him a rather Neronian look that did not altogether correspond to
his impulsive and plunging movements. The group also contained Ralph
Randall, who generally acted elderly character parts, and had a humorous
hatchet face, blue with shaving, and discoloured with grease paint. It
contained Mandeville's second walking gentleman, carrying on the not yet
wholly vanished tradition of Charles's Friend, a dark, curly-haired
youth of somewhat Semitic profile bearing the name of Aubrey Vernon.
It included Mr. Mundon Mandeville's wife's maid or dresser, a very
powerful-looking person with tight red hair and a hard wooden face. It
also, incidentally, included Mandeville's wife, a quiet woman in the
background, with a pale, patient face, the lines of which had not lost a
classical symmetry and severity, but which looked all the paler because
her very eyes were pale, and her pale yellow hair lay in two plain bands
like some very archaic Madonna. Not everybody knew that she had once
been a serious and successful actress in Ibsen and the intellectual
drama. But her husband did not think much of problem plays; and
certainly at the moment was more interested in the problem of getting a
foreign actress out of a locked room; a new version of the conjuring
trick of the Vanishing Lady.
"Hasn't she come out yet?" he demanded, speaking to his wife's
business-like attendant rather than to his wife.
"No, sir," answered the woman--who was known as Mrs. Sands--in a
sombre manner.
"We are beginning to get a little alarmed," said old Randall. "She
seemed quite unbalanced, and we're afraid she might even do herself some
mischief."
"Hell!" said Mandeville in his simple and artless way. "Advertisement's
very good, but we don't want that sort of advertisement. Hasn't she any
friends here? Has nobody any influence with her?"
"Jarvis thinks the only man who might manage her is her own priest round
the corner," said Randall; "and in case she does start hanging herself
on a hat peg, I really thought perhaps he'd better be here. Jarvis has
gone to fetch him ... and, as a matter of fact, here he comes."
Two more figures appeared in that subterranean passage under the stage:
the first was Ashton Jarvis, a jolly fellow who generally acted
villains, but who had surrendered that high vocation for the moment to
the curly-headed youth with the nose. The other figure was short and
square and clad all in black; it was Father Brown from the church round
the corner.
Father Brown seemed to take it quite naturally and even casually, that
he should be called in to consider the queer conduct of one of his
flock, whether she was to be regarded as a black sheep or only as a lost
lamb. But he did not seem to think much of the suggestion of suicide.
"I suppose there was some reason for her flying off the handle like
that," he said. "Does anybody know what it was?"
"Dissatisfied with her part, I believe," said the older actor.