MR CALHOUN KIDD was a very young gentleman with a very old face, a face
dried up with its own eagerness, framed in blue-black hair and a black
butterfly tie. He was the emissary in England of the colossal American
daily called the Western Sun--also humorously described as the “Rising
Sunset”. This was in allusion to a great journalistic declaration
(attributed to Mr Kidd himself) that “he guessed the sun would rise
in the west yet, if American citizens did a bit more hustling.” Those,
however, who mock American journalism from the standpoint of somewhat
mellower traditions forget a certain paradox which partly redeems it.
For while the journalism of the States permits a pantomimic vulgarity
long past anything English, it also shows a real excitement about the
most earnest mental problems, of which English papers are innocent, or
rather incapable. The Sun was full of the most solemn matters treated
in the most farcical way. William James figured there as well as
“Weary Willie,” and pragmatists alternated with pugilists in the long
procession of its portraits.
Thus, when a very unobtrusive Oxford man named John Boulnois wrote in a
very unreadable review called the Natural Philosophy Quarterly a series
of articles on alleged weak points in Darwinian evolution, it fluttered
no corner of the English papers; though Boulnois’s theory (which was
that of a comparatively stationary universe visited occasionally by
convulsions of change) had some rather faddy fashionableness at Oxford,
and got so far as to be named “Catastrophism”. But many American papers
seized on the challenge as a great event; and the Sun threw the shadow
of Mr Boulnois quite gigantically across its pages. By the paradox
already noted, articles of valuable intelligence and enthusiasm were
presented with headlines apparently written by an illiterate maniac,
headlines such as “Darwin Chews Dirt; Critic Boulnois says He Jumps the
Shocks”--or “Keep Catastrophic, says Thinker Boulnois.” And Mr Calhoun
Kidd, of the Western Sun, was bidden to take his butterfly tie and
lugubrious visage down to the little house outside Oxford where Thinker
Boulnois lived in happy ignorance of such a title.
That fated philosopher had consented, in a somewhat dazed manner, to
receive the interviewer, and had named the hour of nine that evening.
The last of a summer sunset clung about Cumnor and the low wooded hills;
the romantic Yankee was both doubtful of his road and inquisitive about
his surroundings; and seeing the door of a genuine feudal old-country
inn, The Champion Arms, standing open, he went in to make inquiries.
In the bar parlour he rang the bell, and had to wait some little time
for a reply to it. The only other person present was a lean man with
close red hair and loose, horsey-looking clothes, who was drinking very
bad whisky, but smoking a very good cigar. The whisky, of course, was
the choice brand of The Champion Arms; the cigar he had probably brought
with him from London. Nothing could be more different than his cynical
negligence from the dapper dryness of the young American; but something
in his pencil and open notebook, and perhaps in the expression of his
alert blue eye, caused Kidd to guess, correctly, that he was a brother
journalist.
“Could you do me the favour,” asked Kidd, with the courtesy of his
nation, “of directing me to the Grey Cottage, where Mr Boulnois lives,
as I understand?”
“It’s a few yards down the road,” said the red-haired man, removing his
cigar; “I shall be passing it myself in a minute, but I’m going on to
Pendragon Park to try and see the fun.”
“What is Pendragon Park?” asked Calhoun Kidd.
“Sir Claude Champion’s place--haven’t you come down for that, too?”
asked the other pressman, looking up. “You’re a journalist, aren’t you?”
“I have come to see Mr Boulnois,” said Kidd.
“I’ve come to see Mrs Boulnois,” replied the other. “But I shan’t catch
her at home.” And he laughed rather unpleasantly.
“Are you interested in Catastrophism?” asked the wondering Yankee.
“I’m interested in catastrophes; and there are going to be some,”
replied his companion gloomily. “Mine’s a filthy trade, and I never
pretend it isn’t.”
With that he spat on the floor; yet somehow in the very act and instant
one could realize that the man had been brought up as a gentleman.
The American pressman considered him with more attention. His face was
pale and dissipated, with the promise of formidable passions yet to be
loosed; but it was a clever and sensitive face; his clothes were coarse
and careless, but he had a good seal ring on one of his long, thin
fingers. His name, which came out in the course of talk, was James
Dalroy; he was the son of a bankrupt Irish landlord, and attached to
a pink paper which he heartily despised, called Smart Society, in the
capacity of reporter and of something painfully like a spy.
Smart Society, I regret to say, felt none of that interest in Boulnois
on Darwin which was such a credit to the head and hearts of the Western
Sun. Dalroy had come down, it seemed, to snuff up the scent of a scandal
which might very well end in the Divorce Court, but which was at present
hovering between Grey Cottage and Pendragon Park.
Sir Claude Champion was known to the readers of the Western Sun as well
as Mr Boulnois. So were the Pope and the Derby Winner; but the idea
of their intimate acquaintanceship would have struck Kidd as equally
incongruous. He had heard of (and written about, nay, falsely pretended
to know) Sir Claude Champion, as “one of the brightest and wealthiest of
England’s Upper Ten”; as the great sportsman who raced yachts round the
world; as the great traveller who wrote books about the Himalayas, as
the politician who swept constituencies with a startling sort of Tory
Democracy, and as the great dabbler in art, music, literature, and,
above all, acting. Sir Claude was really rather magnificent in other
than American eyes. There was something of the Renascence Prince about
his omnivorous culture and restless publicity--, he was not only a great
amateur, but an ardent one. There was in him none of that antiquarian
frivolity that we convey by the word “dilettante”.
That faultless falcon profile with purple-black Italian eye, which had
been snap-shotted so often both for Smart Society and the Western Sun,
gave everyone the impression of a man eaten by ambition as by a fire,
or even a disease. But though Kidd knew a great deal about Sir Claude--a
great deal more, in fact, than there was to know--it would never have
crossed his wildest dreams to connect so showy an aristocrat with the
newly-unearthed founder of Catastrophism, or to guess that Sir Claude
Champion and John Boulnois could be intimate friends. Such, according
to Dalroy’s account, was nevertheless the fact. The two had hunted in
couples at school and college, and, though their social destinies had
been very different (for Champion was a great landlord and almost a
millionaire, while Boulnois was a poor scholar and, until just lately,
an unknown one), they still kept in very close touch with each other.
Indeed, Boulnois’s cottage stood just outside the gates of Pendragon
Park.
But whether the two men could be friends much longer was becoming a
dark and ugly question. A year or two before, Boulnois had married a
beautiful and not unsuccessful actress, to whom he was devoted in his
own shy and ponderous style; and the proximity of the household to
Champion’s had given that flighty celebrity opportunities for behaving
in a way that could not but cause painful and rather base excitement.
Sir Claude had carried the arts of publicity to perfection; and he
seemed to take a crazy pleasure in being equally ostentatious in an
intrigue that could do him no sort of honour. Footmen from Pendragon
were perpetually leaving bouquets for Mrs Boulnois; carriages and
motor-cars were perpetually calling at the cottage for Mrs Boulnois;
balls and masquerades perpetually filled the grounds in which the
baronet paraded Mrs Boulnois, like the Queen of Love and Beauty at a
tournament. That very evening, marked by Mr Kidd for the exposition of
Catastrophism, had been marked by Sir Claude Champion for an open-air
rendering of Romeo and Juliet, in which he was to play Romeo to a Juliet
it was needless to name.
“I don’t think it can go on without a smash,” said the young man
with red hair, getting up and shaking himself. “Old Boulnois may be
squared--or he may be square. But if he’s square he’s thick--what you
might call cubic. But I don’t believe it’s possible.”
“He is a man of grand intellectual powers,” said Calhoun Kidd in a deep
voice.
“Yes,” answered Dalroy; “but even a man of grand intellectual powers
can’t be such a blighted fool as all that. Must you be going on? I shall
be following myself in a minute or two.”
But Calhoun Kidd, having finished a milk and soda, betook himself
smartly up the road towards the Grey Cottage, leaving his cynical
informant to his whisky and tobacco. The last of the daylight had faded;
the skies were of a dark, green-grey, like slate, studded here and there
with a star, but lighter on the left side of the sky, with the promise
of a rising moon.
The Grey Cottage, which stood entrenched, as it were, in a square of
stiff, high thorn-hedges, was so close under the pines and palisades of
the Park that Kidd at first mistook it for the Park Lodge. Finding the
name on the narrow wooden gate, however, and seeing by his watch that
the hour of the “Thinker’s” appointment had just struck, he went in and
knocked at the front door. Inside the garden hedge, he could see that
the house, though unpretentious enough, was larger and more luxurious
than it looked at first, and was quite a different kind of place from a
porter’s lodge. A dog-kennel and a beehive stood outside, like symbols
of old English country-life; the moon was rising behind a plantation
of prosperous pear trees, the dog that came out of the kennel was
reverend-looking and reluctant to bark; and the plain, elderly
man-servant who opened the door was brief but dignified.
“Mr Boulnois asked me to offer his apologies, sir,” he said, “but he has
been obliged to go out suddenly.”
“But see here, I had an appointment,” said the interviewer, with a
rising voice. “Do you know where he went to?”
“To Pendragon Park, sir,” said the servant, rather sombrely, and began
to close the door.
Kidd started a little.
“Did he go with Mrs--with the rest of the party?” he asked rather
vaguely.
“No, sir,” said the man shortly; “he stayed behind, and then went out
alone.” And he shut the door, brutally, but with an air of duty not
done.
The American, that curious compound of impudence and sensitiveness,
was annoyed. He felt a strong desire to hustle them all along a bit
and teach them business habits; the hoary old dog and the grizzled,
heavy-faced old butler with his prehistoric shirt-front, and the drowsy
old moon, and above all the scatter-brained old philosopher who couldn’t
keep an appointment.
“If that’s the way he goes on he deserves to lose his wife’s purest
devotion,” said Mr Calhoun Kidd. “But perhaps he’s gone over to make
a row. In that case I reckon a man from the Western Sun will be on the
spot.”
And turning the corner by the open lodge-gates, he set off, stumping up
the long avenue of black pine-woods that pointed in abrupt perspective
towards the inner gardens of Pendragon Park. The trees were as black and
orderly as plumes upon a hearse; there were still a few stars. He was
a man with more literary than direct natural associations; the word
“Ravenswood” came into his head repeatedly. It was partly the raven
colour of the pine-woods; but partly also an indescribable atmosphere
almost described in Scott’s great tragedy; the smell of something that
died in the eighteenth century; the smell of dank gardens and broken
urns, of wrongs that will never now be righted; of something that is
none the less incurably sad because it is strangely unreal.
More than once, as he went up that strange, black road of tragic
artifice, he stopped, startled, thinking he heard steps in front of him.
He could see nothing in front but the twin sombre walls of pine and
the wedge of starlit sky above them. At first he thought he must have
fancied it or been mocked by a mere echo of his own tramp. But as he
went on he was more and more inclined to conclude, with the remains of
his reason, that there really were other feet upon the road. He thought
hazily of ghosts; and was surprised how swiftly he could see the
image of an appropriate and local ghost, one with a face as white as
Pierrot’s, but patched with black. The apex of the triangle of dark-blue
sky was growing brighter and bluer, but he did not realize as yet that
this was because he was coming nearer to the lights of the great house
and garden. He only felt that the atmosphere was growing more intense,
there was in the sadness more violence and secrecy--more--he hesitated
for the word, and then said it with a jerk of laughter--Catastrophism.
More pines, more pathway slid past him, and then he stood rooted as by
a blast of magic. It is vain to say that he felt as if he had got into a
dream; but this time he felt quite certain that he had got into a book.
For we human beings are used to inappropriate things; we are accustomed
to the clatter of the incongruous; it is a tune to which we can go to
sleep. If one appropriate thing happens, it wakes us up like the pang of
a perfect chord. Something happened such as would have happened in such
a place in a forgotten tale.
Over the black pine-wood came flying and flashing in the moon a naked
sword--such a slender and sparkling rapier as may have fought many an
unjust duel in that ancient park. It fell on the pathway far in front of
him and lay there glistening like a large needle. He ran like a hare and
bent to look at it. Seen at close quarters it had rather a showy look:
the big red jewels in the hilt and guard were a little dubious. But
there were other red drops upon the blade which were not dubious.
He looked round wildly in the direction from which the dazzling missile
had come, and saw that at this point the sable facade of fir and pine
was interrupted by a smaller road at right angles; which, when he turned
it, brought him in full view of the long, lighted house, with a lake and
fountains in front of it. Nevertheless, he did not look at this, having
something more interesting to look at.
Above him, at the angle of the steep green bank of the terraced garden,
was one of those small picturesque surprises common in the old landscape
gardening; a kind of small round hill or dome of grass, like a giant
mole-hill, ringed and crowned with three concentric fences of roses, and
having a sundial in the highest point in the centre. Kidd could see the
finger of the dial stand up dark against the sky like the dorsal fin of
a shark and the vain moonlight clinging to that idle clock. But he saw
something else clinging to it also, for one wild moment--the figure of a
man.
Though he saw it there only for a moment, though it was outlandish and
incredible in costume, being clad from neck to heel in tight crimson,
with glints of gold, yet he knew in one flash of moonlight who it was.
That white face flung up to heaven, clean-shaven and so unnaturally
young, like Byron with a Roman nose, those black curls already
grizzled--he had seen the thousand public portraits of Sir Claude
Champion. The wild red figure reeled an instant against the sundial; the
next it had rolled down the steep bank and lay at the American’s feet,
faintly moving one arm. A gaudy, unnatural gold ornament on the arm
suddenly reminded Kidd of Romeo and Juliet; of course the tight crimson
suit was part of the play. But there was a long red stain down the bank
from which the man had rolled--that was no part of the play. He had been
run through the body.
Mr Calhoun Kidd shouted and shouted again. Once more he seemed to hear
phantasmal footsteps, and started to find another figure already near
him. He knew the figure, and yet it terrified him. The dissipated youth
who had called himself Dalroy had a horribly quiet way with him; if
Boulnois failed to keep appointments that had been made, Dalroy had
a sinister air of keeping appointments that hadn’t. The moonlight
discoloured everything, against Dalroy’s red hair his wan face looked
not so much white as pale green.
All this morbid impressionism must be Kidd’s excuse for having cried
out, brutally and beyond all reason: “Did you do this, you devil?”
James Dalroy smiled his unpleasing smile; but before he could speak, the
fallen figure made another movement of the arm, waving vaguely towards
the place where the sword fell; then came a moan, and then it managed to
speak.
“Boulnois.... Boulnois, I say.... Boulnois did it... jealous of me...he
was jealous, he was, he was...”
Kidd bent his head down to hear more, and just managed to catch the
words:
“Boulnois...with my own sword...he threw it...”
Again the failing hand waved towards the sword, and then fell rigid with
a thud. In Kidd rose from its depth all that acrid humour that is the
strange salt of the seriousness of his race.
“See here,” he said sharply and with command, “you must fetch a doctor.
This man’s dead.”
“And a priest, too, I suppose,” said Dalroy in an undecipherable manner.
“All these Champions are papists.”
The American knelt down by the body, felt the heart, propped up the
head and used some last efforts at restoration; but before the other
journalist reappeared, followed by a doctor and a priest, he was already
prepared to assert they were too late.
“Were you too late also?” asked the doctor, a solid prosperous-looking
man, with conventional moustache and whiskers, but a lively eye, which
darted over Kidd dubiously.
“In one sense,” drawled the representative of the Sun. “I was too
late to save the man, but I guess I was in time to hear something of
importance. I heard the dead man denounce his assassin.”
“And who was the assassin?” asked the doctor, drawing his eyebrows
together.
“Boulnois,” said Calhoun Kidd, and whistled softly.
The doctor stared at him gloomily with a reddening brow--, but he did
not contradict. Then the priest, a shorter figure in the background,
said mildly: “I understood that Mr Boulnois was not coming to Pendragon
Park this evening.”
“There again,” said the Yankee grimly, “I may be in a position to give
the old country a fact or two. Yes, sir, John Boulnois was going to stay
in all this evening; he fixed up a real good appointment there with me.
But John Boulnois changed his mind; John Boulnois left his home abruptly
and all alone, and came over to this darned Park an hour or so ago.
His butler told me so. I think we hold what the all-wise police call a
clue--have you sent for them?”
“Yes,” said the doctor, “but we haven’t alarmed anyone else yet.”
“Does Mrs Boulnois know?” asked James Dalroy, and again Kidd was
conscious of an irrational desire to hit him on his curling mouth.
“I have not told her,” said the doctor gruffly--, “but here come the
police.”
The little priest had stepped out into the main avenue, and now returned
with the fallen sword, which looked ludicrously large and theatrical
when attached to his dumpy figure, at once clerical and commonplace.
“Just before the police come,” he said apologetically, “has anyone got a
light?”
The Yankee journalist took an electric torch from his pocket, and the
priest held it close to the middle part of the blade, which he examined
with blinking care. Then, without glancing at the point or pommel, he
handed the long weapon to the doctor.
“I fear I’m no use here,” he said, with a brief sigh. “I’ll say good
night to you, gentlemen.” And he walked away up the dark avenue towards
the house, his hands clasped behind him and his big head bent in
cogitation.
The rest of the group made increased haste towards the lodge-gates,
where an inspector and two constables could already be seen in
consultation with the lodge-keeper. But the little priest only walked
slower and slower in the dim cloister of pine, and at last stopped dead,
on the steps of the house. It was his silent way of acknowledging an
equally silent approach; for there came towards him a presence that
might have satisfied even Calhoun Kidd’s demands for a lovely and
aristocratic ghost. It was a young woman in silvery satins of a
Renascence design; she had golden hair in two long shining ropes, and
a face so startingly pale between them that she might have been
chryselephantine--made, that is, like some old Greek statues, out of
ivory and gold. But her eyes were very bright, and her voice, though
low, was confident.
“Father Brown?” she said.
“Mrs Boulnois?” he replied gravely. Then he looked at her and
immediately said: “I see you know about Sir Claude.”
“How do you know I know?” she asked steadily.
He did not answer the question, but asked another: “Have you seen your
husband?”
“My husband is at home,” she said. “He has nothing to do with this.”
Again he did not answer; and the woman drew nearer to him, with a
curiously intense expression on her face.
“Shall I tell you something more?” she said, with a rather fearful
smile. “I don’t think he did it, and you don’t either.” Father Brown
returned her gaze with a long, grave stare, and then nodded, yet more
gravely.
“Father Brown,” said the lady, “I am going to tell you all I know, but
I want you to do me a favour first. Will you tell me why you haven’t
jumped to the conclusion of poor John’s guilt, as all the rest have
done? Don’t mind what you say: I--I know about the gossip and the
appearances that are against me.”
Father Brown looked honestly embarrassed, and passed his hand across
his forehead. “Two very little things,” he said. “At least, one’s very
trivial and the other very vague. But such as they are, they don’t fit
in with Mr Boulnois being the murderer.”
He turned his blank, round face up to the stars and continued
absentmindedly: “To take the vague idea first. I attach a good deal of
importance to vague ideas. All those things that ‘aren’t evidence’
are what convince me. I think a moral impossibility the biggest of all
impossibilities. I know your husband only slightly, but I think this
crime of his, as generally conceived, something very like a moral
impossibility. Please do not think I mean that Boulnois could not be so
wicked. Anybody can be wicked--as wicked as he chooses. We can direct
our moral wills; but we can’t generally change our instinctive tastes
and ways of doing things. Boulnois might commit a murder, but not this
murder. He would not snatch Romeo’s sword from its romantic scabbard;
or slay his foe on the sundial as on a kind of altar; or leave his body
among the roses, or fling the sword away among the pines. If Boulnois
killed anyone he’d do it quietly and heavily, as he’d do any other
doubtful thing--take a tenth glass of port, or read a loose Greek poet.
No, the romantic setting is not like Boulnois. It’s more like Champion.”
“Ah!” she said, and looked at him with eyes like diamonds.
“And the trivial thing was this,” said Brown. “There were finger-prints
on that sword; finger-prints can be detected quite a time after they are
made if they’re on some polished surface like glass or steel. These were
on a polished surface. They were half-way down the blade of the sword.
Whose prints they were I have no earthly clue; but why should anybody
hold a sword half-way down? It was a long sword, but length is an
advantage in lunging at an enemy. At least, at most enemies. At all
enemies except one.”
“Except one,” she repeated.
“There is only one enemy,” said Father Brown, “whom it is easier to kill
with a dagger than a sword.”
“I know,” said the woman. “Oneself.”
There was a long silence, and then the priest said quietly but abruptly:
“Am I right, then? Did Sir Claude kill himself?”
“Yes” she said, with a face like marble. “I saw him do it.”
“He died,” said Father Brown, “for love of you?”
An extraordinary expression flashed across her face, very different
from pity, modesty, remorse, or anything her companion had expected: her
voice became suddenly strong and full. “I don’t believe,” she said, “he
ever cared about me a rap. He hated my husband.”
“Why?” asked the other, and turned his round face from the sky to the
lady.
“He hated my husband because...it is so strange I hardly know how to say
it...because...”
“Yes?” said Brown patiently.
“Because my husband wouldn’t hate him.”
Father Brown only nodded, and seemed still to be listening; he differed
from most detectives in fact and fiction in a small point--he never
pretended not to understand when he understood perfectly well.
Mrs Boulnois drew near once more with the same contained glow of
certainty. “My husband,” she said, “is a great man. Sir Claude Champion
was not a great man: he was a celebrated and successful man. My husband
has never been celebrated or successful; and it is the solemn truth that
he has never dreamed of being so. He no more expects to be famous for
thinking than for smoking cigars. On all that side he has a sort of
splendid stupidity. He has never grown up. He still liked Champion
exactly as he liked him at school; he admired him as he would admire
a conjuring trick done at the dinner-table. But he couldn’t be got
to conceive the notion of envying Champion. And Champion wanted to be
envied. He went mad and killed himself for that.”
“Yes,” said Father Brown; “I think I begin to understand.”
“Oh, don’t you see?” she cried; “the whole picture is made for that--the
place is planned for it. Champion put John in a little house at his very
door, like a dependant--to make him feel a failure. He never felt it.
He thinks no more about such things than--than an absent-minded lion.
Champion would burst in on John’s shabbiest hours or homeliest meals
with some dazzling present or announcement or expedition that made it
like the visit of Haroun Alraschid, and John would accept or refuse
amiably with one eye off, so to speak, like one lazy schoolboy agreeing
or disagreeing with another. After five years of it John had not turned
a hair; and Sir Claude Champion was a monomaniac.”
“And Haman began to tell them,” said Father Brown, “of all the things
wherein the king had honoured him; and he said: ‘All these things profit
me nothing while I see Mordecai the Jew sitting in the gate.’”
“The crisis came,” Mrs Boulnois continued, “when I persuaded John to let
me take down some of his speculations and send them to a magazine. They
began to attract attention, especially in America, and one paper wanted
to interview him. When Champion (who was interviewed nearly every day)
heard of this late little crumb of success falling to his unconscious
rival, the last link snapped that held back his devilish hatred. Then he
began to lay that insane siege to my own love and honour which has been
the talk of the shire. You will ask me why I allowed such atrocious
attentions. I answer that I could not have declined them except by
explaining to my husband, and there are some things the soul cannot
do, as the body cannot fly. Nobody could have explained to my husband.
Nobody could do it now. If you said to him in so many words, ‘Champion
is stealing your wife,’ he would think the joke a little vulgar: that
it could be anything but a joke--that notion could find no crack in his
great skull to get in by. Well, John was to come and see us act this
evening, but just as we were starting he said he wouldn’t; he had got an
interesting book and a cigar. I told this to Sir Claude, and it was his
death-blow. The monomaniac suddenly saw despair. He stabbed himself,
crying out like a devil that Boulnois was slaying him; he lies there
in the garden dead of his own jealousy to produce jealousy, and John is
sitting in the dining-room reading a book.”
There was another silence, and then the little priest said: “There is
only one weak point, Mrs Boulnois, in all your very vivid account. Your
husband is not sitting in the dining-room reading a book. That American
reporter told me he had been to your house, and your butler told him Mr
Boulnois had gone to Pendragon Park after all.”
Her bright eyes widened to an almost electric glare; and yet it seemed
rather bewilderment than confusion or fear. “Why, what can you
mean?” she cried. “All the servants were out of the house, seeing the
theatricals. And we don’t keep a butler, thank goodness!”
Father Brown started and spun half round like an absurd teetotum. “What,
what?” he cried seeming galvanized into sudden life. “Look here--I
say--can I make your husband hear if I go to the house?”
“Oh, the servants will be back by now,” she said, wondering.
“Right, right!” rejoined the cleric energetically, and set off scuttling
up the path towards the Park gates. He turned once to say: “Better get
hold of that Yankee, or ‘Crime of John Boulnois’ will be all over the
Republic in large letters.”
“You don’t understand,” said Mrs Boulnois. “He wouldn’t mind. I don’t
think he imagines that America really is a place.”
When Father Brown reached the house with the beehive and the drowsy dog,
a small and neat maid-servant showed him into the dining-room, where
Boulnois sat reading by a shaded lamp, exactly as his wife described
him. A decanter of port and a wineglass were at his elbow; and the
instant the priest entered he noted the long ash stand out unbroken on
his cigar.
“He has been here for half an hour at least,” thought Father Brown. In
fact, he had the air of sitting where he had sat when his dinner was
cleared away.
“Don’t get up, Mr Boulnois,” said the priest in his pleasant, prosaic
way. “I shan’t interrupt you a moment. I fear I break in on some of your
scientific studies.”
“No,” said Boulnois; “I was reading ‘The Bloody Thumb.’” He said it with
neither frown nor smile, and his visitor was conscious of a certain deep
and virile indifference in the man which his wife had called greatness.
He laid down a gory yellow “shocker” without even feeling its
incongruity enough to comment on it humorously. John Boulnois was a big,
slow-moving man with a massive head, partly grey and partly bald,
and blunt, burly features. He was in shabby and very old-fashioned
evening-dress, with a narrow triangular opening of shirt-front: he had
assumed it that evening in his original purpose of going to see his wife
act Juliet.
“I won’t keep you long from ‘The Bloody Thumb’ or any other catastrophic
affairs,” said Father Brown, smiling. “I only came to ask you about the
crime you committed this evening.”
Boulnois looked at him steadily, but a red bar began to show across his
broad brow; and he seemed like one discovering embarrassment for the
first time.
“I know it was a strange crime,” assented Brown in a low voice.
“Stranger than murder perhaps--to you. The little sins are sometimes
harder to confess than the big ones--but that’s why it’s so important to
confess them. Your crime is committed by every fashionable hostess six
times a week: and yet you find it sticks to your tongue like a nameless
atrocity.”
“It makes one feel,” said the philosopher slowly, “such a damned fool.”
“I know,” assented the other, “but one often has to choose between
feeling a damned fool and being one.”
“I can’t analyse myself well,” went on Boulnois; “but sitting in that
chair with that story I was as happy as a schoolboy on a half-holiday.
It was security, eternity--I can’t convey it... the cigars were within
reach...the matches were within reach... the Thumb had four more
appearances to...it was not only a peace, but a plenitude. Then that
bell rang, and I thought for one long, mortal minute that I couldn’t get
out of that chair--literally, physically, muscularly couldn’t. Then I
did it like a man lifting the world, because I knew all the servants
were out. I opened the front door, and there was a little man with his
mouth open to speak and his notebook open to write in. I remembered the
Yankee interviewer I had forgotten. His hair was parted in the middle,
and I tell you that murder--”
“I understand,” said Father Brown. “I’ve seen him.”
“I didn’t commit murder,” continued the Catastrophist mildly, “but only
perjury. I said I had gone across to Pendragon Park and shut the door in
his face. That is my crime, Father Brown, and I don’t know what penance
you would inflict for it.”
“I shan’t inflict any penance,” said the clerical gentleman, collecting
his heavy hat and umbrella with an air of some amusement; “quite the
contrary. I came here specially to let you off the little penance which
would otherwise have followed your little offence.”
“And what,” asked Boulnois, smiling, “is the little penance I have so
luckily been let off?”
“Being hanged,” said Father Brown.