The Innocence of Father Brown

by G. K. Chesterton

  The Three Tools of Death

  Both by calling and conviction Father Brown knew better than most of us,that every man is dignified when he is dead. But even he felt a pang ofincongruity when he was knocked up at daybreak and told that Sir AaronArmstrong had been murdered. There was something absurd and unseemlyabout secret violence in connection with so entirely entertaining andpopular a figure. For Sir Aaron Armstrong was entertaining to the pointof being comic; and popular in such a manner as to be almost legendary.It was like hearing that Sunny Jim had hanged himself; or that Mr.Pickwick had died in Hanwell. For though Sir Aaron was a philanthropist,and thus dealt with the darker side of our society, he prided himselfon dealing with it in the brightest possible style. His political andsocial speeches were cataracts of anecdotes and "loud laughter"; hisbodily health was of a bursting sort; his ethics were all optimism; andhe dealt with the Drink problem (his favourite topic) with that immortalor even monotonous gaiety which is so often a mark of the prosperoustotal abstainer.

  The established story of his conversion was familiar on the morepuritanic platforms and pulpits, how he had been, when only a boy, drawnaway from Scotch theology to Scotch whisky, and how he had risen out ofboth and become (as he modestly put it) what he was. Yet his widewhite beard, cherubic face, and sparkling spectacles, at the numberlessdinners and congresses where they appeared, made it hard to believe,somehow, that he had ever been anything so morbid as either adram-drinker or a Calvinist. He was, one felt, the most seriously merryof all the sons of men.

  He had lived on the rural skirt of Hampstead in a handsome house, highbut not broad, a modern and prosaic tower. The narrowest of its narrowsides overhung the steep green bank of a railway, and was shaken bypassing trains. Sir Aaron Armstrong, as he boisterously explained, hadno nerves. But if the train had often given a shock to the house, thatmorning the tables were turned, and it was the house that gave a shockto the train.

  The engine slowed down and stopped just beyond that point where an angleof the house impinged upon the sharp slope of turf. The arrest of mostmechanical things must be slow; but the living cause of this had beenvery rapid. A man clad completely in black, even (it was remembered)to the dreadful detail of black gloves, appeared on the ridge abovethe engine, and waved his black hands like some sable windmill. This initself would hardly have stopped even a lingering train. But there cameout of him a cry which was talked of afterwards as something utterlyunnatural and new. It was one of those shouts that are horridly distincteven when we cannot hear what is shouted. The word in this case was"Murder!"

  But the engine-driver swears he would have pulled up just the same if hehad heard only the dreadful and definite accent and not the word.

  The train once arrested, the most superficial stare could take in manyfeatures of the tragedy. The man in black on the green bank was SirAaron Armstrong's man-servant Magnus. The baronet in his optimism hadoften laughed at the black gloves of this dismal attendant; but no onewas likely to laugh at him just now.

  So soon as an inquirer or two had stepped off the line and across thesmoky hedge, they saw, rolled down almost to the bottom of the bank, thebody of an old man in a yellow dressing-gown with a very vividscarlet lining. A scrap of rope seemed caught about his leg, entangledpresumably in a struggle. There was a smear or so of blood, though verylittle; but the body was bent or broken into a posture impossible to anyliving thing. It was Sir Aaron Armstrong. A few more bewildered momentsbrought out a big fair-bearded man, whom some travellers could saluteas the dead man's secretary, Patrick Royce, once well known in Bohemiansociety and even famous in the Bohemian arts. In a manner more vague,but even more convincing, he echoed the agony of the servant. By thetime the third figure of that household, Alice Armstrong, daughter ofthe dead man, had come already tottering and waving into the garden, theengine-driver had put a stop to his stoppage. The whistle had blown andthe train had panted on to get help from the next station.

  Father Brown had been thus rapidly summoned at the request of PatrickRoyce, the big ex-Bohemian secretary. Royce was an Irishman by birth;and that casual kind of Catholic that never remembers his religionuntil he is really in a hole. But Royce's request might have been lesspromptly complied with if one of the official detectives had not been afriend and admirer of the unofficial Flambeau; and it was impossible tobe a friend of Flambeau without hearing numberless stories about FatherBrown. Hence, while the young detective (whose name was Merton) ledthe little priest across the fields to the railway, their talk was moreconfidential than could be expected between two total strangers.

  "As far as I can see," said Mr. Merton candidly, "there is no senseto be made of it at all. There is nobody one can suspect. Magnus is asolemn old fool; far too much of a fool to be an assassin. Royce hasbeen the baronet's best friend for years; and his daughter undoubtedlyadored him. Besides, it's all too absurd. Who would kill such a cheeryold chap as Armstrong? Who could dip his hands in the gore of anafter-dinner speaker? It would be like killing Father Christmas."

  "Yes, it was a cheery house," assented Father Brown. "It was a cheeryhouse while he was alive. Do you think it will be cheery now he isdead?"

  Merton started a little and regarded his companion with an enlivenedeye. "Now he is dead?" he repeated.

  "Yes," continued the priest stolidly, "he was cheerful. But did hecommunicate his cheerfulness? Frankly, was anyone else in the housecheerful but he?"

  A window in Merton's mind let in that strange light of surprise in whichwe see for the first time things we have known all along. He had oftenbeen to the Armstrongs', on little police jobs of the philanthropist;and, now he came to think of it, it was in itself a depressing house.The rooms were very high and very cold; the decoration mean andprovincial; the draughty corridors were lit by electricity that wasbleaker than moonlight. And though the old man's scarlet face and silverbeard had blazed like a bonfire in each room or passage in turn, it didnot leave any warmth behind it. Doubtless this spectral discomfort inthe place was partly due to the very vitality and exuberance of itsowner; he needed no stoves or lamps, he would say, but carried his ownwarmth with him. But when Merton recalled the other inmates, he wascompelled to confess that they also were as shadows of their lord.The moody man-servant, with his monstrous black gloves, was almost anightmare; Royce, the secretary, was solid enough, a big bull of aman, in tweeds, with a short beard; but the straw-coloured beard wasstartlingly salted with grey like the tweeds, and the broad forehead wasbarred with premature wrinkles. He was good-natured enough also, but itwas a sad sort of good-nature, almost a heart-broken sort--he had thegeneral air of being some sort of failure in life. As for Armstrong'sdaughter, it was almost incredible that she was his daughter; she was sopallid in colour and sensitive in outline. She was graceful, but therewas a quiver in the very shape of her that was like the lines of anaspen. Merton had sometimes wondered if she had learnt to quail at thecrash of the passing trains.

  "You see," said Father Brown, blinking modestly, "I'm not sure that theArmstrong cheerfulness is so very cheerful--for other people. You saythat nobody could kill such a happy old man, but I'm not sure; ne nosinducas in tentationem. If ever I murdered somebody," he added quitesimply, "I dare say it might be an Optimist."

  "Why?" cried Merton amused. "Do you think people dislike cheerfulness?"

  "People like frequent laughter," answered Father Brown, "but I don'tthink they like a permanent smile. Cheerfulness without humour is a verytrying thing."

  They walked some way in silence along the windy grassy bank by the rail,and just as they came under the far-flung shadow of the tall Armstronghouse, Father Brown said suddenly, like a man throwing away atroublesome thought rather than offering it seriously: "Of course, drinkis neither good nor bad in itself. But I can't help sometimes feelingthat men like Armstrong want an occasional glass of wine to saddenthem."

  Merton's official superior, a grizzled and capable detective namedGilder, was standing on the green bank waiting for the coroner, talkingto Patrick R
oyce, whose big shoulders and bristly beard and hair toweredabove him. This was the more noticeable because Royce walked alwayswith a sort of powerful stoop, and seemed to be going about his smallclerical and domestic duties in a heavy and humbled style, like abuffalo drawing a go-cart.

  He raised his head with unusual pleasure at the sight of the priest, andtook him a few paces apart. Meanwhile Merton was addressing theolder detective respectfully indeed, but not without a certain boyishimpatience.

  "Well, Mr. Gilder, have you got much farther with the mystery?"

  "There is no mystery," replied Gilder, as he looked under dreamy eyelidsat the rooks.

  "Well, there is for me, at any rate," said Merton, smiling.

  "It is simple enough, my boy," observed the senior investigator,stroking his grey, pointed beard. "Three minutes after you'd gone forMr. Royce's parson the whole thing came out. You know that pasty-facedservant in the black gloves who stopped the train?"

  "I should know him anywhere. Somehow he rather gave me the creeps."

  "Well," drawled Gilder, "when the train had gone on again, that man hadgone too. Rather a cool criminal, don't you think, to escape by the verytrain that went off for the police?"

  "You're pretty sure, I suppose," remarked the young man, "that he reallydid kill his master?"

  "Yes, my son, I'm pretty sure," replied Gilder drily, "for the triflingreason that he has gone off with twenty thousand pounds in papers thatwere in his master's desk. No, the only thing worth calling a difficultyis how he killed him. The skull seems broken as with some big weapon,but there's no weapon at all lying about, and the murderer would havefound it awkward to carry it away, unless the weapon was too small to benoticed."

  "Perhaps the weapon was too big to be noticed," said the priest, with anodd little giggle.

  Gilder looked round at this wild remark, and rather sternly asked Brownwhat he meant.

  "Silly way of putting it, I know," said Father Brown apologetically."Sounds like a fairy tale. But poor Armstrong was killed with a giant'sclub, a great green club, too big to be seen, and which we call theearth. He was broken against this green bank we are standing on."

  "How do you mean?" asked the detective quickly.

  Father Brown turned his moon face up to the narrow facade of the houseand blinked hopelessly up. Following his eyes, they saw that right atthe top of this otherwise blind back quarter of the building, an atticwindow stood open.

  "Don't you see," he explained, pointing a little awkwardly like a child,"he was thrown down from there?"

  Gilder frowningly scrutinised the window, and then said: "Well, it iscertainly possible. But I don't see why you are so sure about it."

  Brown opened his grey eyes wide. "Why," he said, "there's a bit of roperound the dead man's leg. Don't you see that other bit of rope up therecaught at the corner of the window?"

  At that height the thing looked like the faintest particle of dustor hair, but the shrewd old investigator was satisfied. "You're quiteright, sir," he said to Father Brown; "that is certainly one to you."

  Almost as he spoke a special train with one carriage took the curveof the line on their left, and, stopping, disgorged another groupof policemen, in whose midst was the hangdog visage of Magnus, theabsconded servant.

  "By Jove! they've got him," cried Gilder, and stepped forward with quitea new alertness.

  "Have you got the money!" he cried to the first policeman.

  The man looked him in the face with a rather curious expression andsaid: "No." Then he added: "At least, not here."

  "Which is the inspector, please?" asked the man called Magnus.

  When he spoke everyone instantly understood how this voice had stoppeda train. He was a dull-looking man with flat black hair, a colourlessface, and a faint suggestion of the East in the level slits in his eyesand mouth. His blood and name, indeed, had remained dubious, ever sinceSir Aaron had "rescued" him from a waitership in a London restaurant,and (as some said) from more infamous things. But his voice was as vividas his face was dead. Whether through exactitude in a foreign language,or in deference to his master (who had been somewhat deaf), Magnus'stones had a peculiarly ringing and piercing quality, and the whole groupquite jumped when he spoke.

  "I always knew this would happen," he said aloud with brazen blandness."My poor old master made game of me for wearing black; but I always saidI should be ready for his funeral."

  And he made a momentary movement with his two dark-gloved hands.

  "Sergeant," said Inspector Gilder, eyeing the black hands with wrath,"aren't you putting the bracelets on this fellow; he looks prettydangerous."

  "Well, sir," said the sergeant, with the same odd look of wonder, "Idon't know that we can."

  "What do you mean?" asked the other sharply. "Haven't you arrested him?"

  A faint scorn widened the slit-like mouth, and the whistle of anapproaching train seemed oddly to echo the mockery.

  "We arrested him," replied the sergeant gravely, "just as he was comingout of the police station at Highgate, where he had deposited all hismaster's money in the care of Inspector Robinson."

  Gilder looked at the man-servant in utter amazement. "Why on earth didyou do that?" he asked of Magnus.

  "To keep it safe from the criminal, of course," replied that personplacidly.

  "Surely," said Gilder, "Sir Aaron's money might have been safely leftwith Sir Aaron's family."

  The tail of his sentence was drowned in the roar of the train as it wentrocking and clanking; but through all the hell of noises to which thatunhappy house was periodically subject, they could hear the syllables ofMagnus's answer, in all their bell-like distinctness: "I have no reasonto feel confidence in Sir Aaron's family."

  All the motionless men had the ghostly sensation of the presence of somenew person; and Merton was scarcely surprised when he looked up and sawthe pale face of Armstrong's daughter over Father Brown's shoulder. Shewas still young and beautiful in a silvery style, but her hair was of sodusty and hueless a brown that in some shadows it seemed to have turnedtotally grey.

  "Be careful what you say," said Royce gruffly, "you'll frighten MissArmstrong."

  "I hope so," said the man with the clear voice.

  As the woman winced and everyone else wondered, he went on: "I amsomewhat used to Miss Armstrong's tremors. I have seen her trembling offand on for years. And some said she was shaking with cold and some shewas shaking with fear, but I know she was shaking with hate and wickedanger--fiends that have had their feast this morning. She would havebeen away by now with her lover and all the money but for me. Ever sincemy poor old master prevented her from marrying that tipsy blackguard--"

  "Stop," said Gilder very sternly. "We have nothing to do with yourfamily fancies or suspicions. Unless you have some practical evidence,your mere opinions--"

  "Oh! I'll give you practical evidence," cut in Magnus, in his hackingaccent. "You'll have to subpoena me, Mr. Inspector, and I shall have totell the truth. And the truth is this: An instant after the old man waspitched bleeding out of the window, I ran into the attic, and foundhis daughter swooning on the floor with a red dagger still in her hand.Allow me to hand that also to the proper authorities." He took from histail-pocket a long horn-hilted knife with a red smear on it, and handedit politely to the sergeant. Then he stood back again, and his slits ofeyes almost faded from his face in one fat Chinese sneer.

  Merton felt an almost bodily sickness at the sight of him; and hemuttered to Gilder: "Surely you would take Miss Armstrong's word againsthis?"

  Father Brown suddenly lifted a face so absurdly fresh that it lookedsomehow as if he had just washed it. "Yes," he said, radiatinginnocence, "but is Miss Armstrong's word against his?"

  The girl uttered a startled, singular little cry; everyone looked ather. Her figure was rigid as if paralysed; only her face within itsframe of faint brown hair was alive with an appalling surprise. Shestood like one of a sudden lassooed and throttled.

  "This man," said Mr. Gilder grav
ely, "actually says that you were foundgrasping a knife, insensible, after the murder."

  "He says the truth," answered Alice.

  The next fact of which they were conscious was that Patrick Royce strodewith his great stooping head into their ring and uttered the singularwords: "Well, if I've got to go, I'll have a bit of pleasure first."

  His huge shoulder heaved and he sent an iron fist smash into Magnus'sbland Mongolian visage, laying him on the lawn as flat as a starfish.Two or three of the police instantly put their hands on Royce; but tothe rest it seemed as if all reason had broken up and the universe wereturning into a brainless harlequinade.

  "None of that, Mr. Royce," Gilder had called out authoritatively. "Ishall arrest you for assault."

  "No, you won't," answered the secretary in a voice like an iron gong,"you will arrest me for murder."

  Gilder threw an alarmed glance at the man knocked down; but since thatoutraged person was already sitting up and wiping a little blood off asubstantially uninjured face, he only said shortly: "What do you mean?"

  "It is quite true, as this fellow says," explained Royce, "that MissArmstrong fainted with a knife in her hand. But she had not snatched theknife to attack her father, but to defend him."

  "To defend him," repeated Gilder gravely. "Against whom?"

  "Against me," answered the secretary.

  Alice looked at him with a complex and baffling face; then she said in alow voice: "After it all, I am still glad you are brave."

  "Come upstairs," said Patrick Royce heavily, "and I will show you thewhole cursed thing."

  The attic, which was the secretary's private place (and rather a smallcell for so large a hermit), had indeed all the vestiges of a violentdrama. Near the centre of the floor lay a large revolver as if flungaway; nearer to the left was rolled a whisky bottle, open but not quiteempty. The cloth of the little table lay dragged and trampled, and alength of cord, like that found on the corpse, was cast wildly acrossthe windowsill. Two vases were smashed on the mantelpiece and one on thecarpet.

  "I was drunk," said Royce; and this simplicity in the prematurelybattered man somehow had the pathos of the first sin of a baby.

  "You all know about me," he continued huskily; "everybody knows how mystory began, and it may as well end like that too. I was called a cleverman once, and might have been a happy one; Armstrong saved the remainsof a brain and body from the taverns, and was always kind to me in hisown way, poor fellow! Only he wouldn't let me marry Alice here; and itwill always be said that he was right enough. Well, you can form yourown conclusions, and you won't want me to go into details. That is mywhisky bottle half emptied in the corner; that is my revolver quiteemptied on the carpet. It was the rope from my box that was found on thecorpse, and it was from my window the corpse was thrown. You need notset detectives to grub up my tragedy; it is a common enough weed in thisworld. I give myself to the gallows; and, by God, that is enough!"

  At a sufficiently delicate sign, the police gathered round the large manto lead him away; but their unobtrusiveness was somewhat staggered bythe remarkable appearance of Father Brown, who was on his hands andknees on the carpet in the doorway, as if engaged in some kind ofundignified prayers. Being a person utterly insensible to the socialfigure he cut, he remained in this posture, but turned a bright roundface up at the company, presenting the appearance of a quadruped with avery comic human head.

  "I say," he said good-naturedly, "this really won't do at all, you know.At the beginning you said we'd found no weapon. But now we're findingtoo many; there's the knife to stab, and the rope to strangle, and thepistol to shoot; and after all he broke his neck by falling out of awindow! It won't do. It's not economical." And he shook his head at theground as a horse does grazing.

  Inspector Gilder had opened his mouth with serious intentions, butbefore he could speak the grotesque figure on the floor had gone onquite volubly.

  "And now three quite impossible things. First, these holes in thecarpet, where the six bullets have gone in. Why on earth should anybodyfire at the carpet? A drunken man lets fly at his enemy's head, thething that's grinning at him. He doesn't pick a quarrel with his feet,or lay siege to his slippers. And then there's the rope"--and havingdone with the carpet the speaker lifted his hands and put them in hispocket, but continued unaffectedly on his knees--"in what conceivableintoxication would anybody try to put a rope round a man's neck andfinally put it round his leg? Royce, anyhow, was not so drunk as that,or he would be sleeping like a log by now. And, plainest of all, thewhisky bottle. You suggest a dipsomaniac fought for the whisky bottle,and then having won, rolled it away in a corner, spilling one half andleaving the other. That is the very last thing a dipsomaniac would do."

  He scrambled awkwardly to his feet, and said to the self-accusedmurderer in tones of limpid penitence: "I'm awfully sorry, my dear sir,but your tale is really rubbish."

  "Sir," said Alice Armstrong in a low tone to the priest, "can I speak toyou alone for a moment?"

  This request forced the communicative cleric out of the gangway, andbefore he could speak in the next room, the girl was talking withstrange incisiveness.

  "You are a clever man," she said, "and you are trying to save Patrick,I know. But it's no use. The core of all this is black, and the morethings you find out the more there will be against the miserable man Ilove."

  "Why?" asked Brown, looking at her steadily.

  "Because," she answered equally steadily, "I saw him commit the crimemyself."

  "Ah!" said the unmoved Brown, "and what did he do?"

  "I was in this room next to them," she explained; "both doors wereclosed, but I suddenly heard a voice, such as I had never heard onearth, roaring 'Hell, hell, hell,' again and again, and then the twodoors shook with the first explosion of the revolver. Thrice again thething banged before I got the two doors open and found the room full ofsmoke; but the pistol was smoking in my poor, mad Patrick's hand; and Isaw him fire the last murderous volley with my own eyes. Then he leapton my father, who was clinging in terror to the window-sill, and,grappling, tried to strangle him with the rope, which he threw over hishead, but which slipped over his struggling shoulders to his feet. Thenit tightened round one leg and Patrick dragged him along like a maniac.I snatched a knife from the mat, and, rushing between them, managed tocut the rope before I fainted."

  "I see," said Father Brown, with the same wooden civility. "Thank you."

  As the girl collapsed under her memories, the priest passed stifflyinto the next room, where he found Gilder and Merton alone with PatrickRoyce, who sat in a chair, handcuffed. There he said to the Inspectorsubmissively:

  "Might I say a word to the prisoner in your presence; and might he takeoff those funny cuffs for a minute?"

  "He is a very powerful man," said Merton in an undertone. "Why do youwant them taken off?"

  "Why, I thought," replied the priest humbly, "that perhaps I might havethe very great honour of shaking hands with him."

  Both detectives stared, and Father Brown added: "Won't you tell themabout it, sir?"

  The man on the chair shook his tousled head, and the priest turnedimpatiently.

  "Then I will," he said. "Private lives are more important than publicreputations. I am going to save the living, and let the dead bury theirdead."

  He went to the fatal window, and blinked out of it as he went ontalking.

  "I told you that in this case there were too many weapons and only onedeath. I tell you now that they were not weapons, and were not used tocause death. All those grisly tools, the noose, the bloody knife, theexploding pistol, were instruments of a curious mercy. They were notused to kill Sir Aaron, but to save him."

  "To save him!" repeated Gilder. "And from what?"

  "From himself," said Father Brown. "He was a suicidal maniac."

  "What?" cried Merton in an incredulous tone. "And the Religion ofCheerfulness--"

  "It is a cruel religion," said the priest, looking out of the window."Why couldn't they let him wee
p a little, like his fathers before him?His plans stiffened, his views grew cold; behind that merry mask wasthe empty mind of the atheist. At last, to keep up his hilarious publiclevel, he fell back on that dram-drinking he had abandoned long ago. Butthere is this horror about alcoholism in a sincere teetotaler: that hepictures and expects that psychological inferno from which he has warnedothers. It leapt upon poor Armstrong prematurely, and by this morninghe was in such a case that he sat here and cried he was in hell, in socrazy a voice that his daughter did not know it. He was mad for death,and with the monkey tricks of the mad he had scattered round him deathin many shapes--a running noose and his friend's revolver and a knife.Royce entered accidentally and acted in a flash. He flung the knifeon the mat behind him, snatched up the revolver, and having no time tounload it, emptied it shot after shot all over the floor. The suicidesaw a fourth shape of death, and made a dash for the window. The rescuerdid the only thing he could--ran after him with the rope and tried totie him hand and foot. Then it was that the unlucky girl ran in, andmisunderstanding the struggle, strove to slash her father free. At firstshe only slashed poor Royce's knuckles, from which has come all thelittle blood in this affair. But, of course, you noticed that he leftblood, but no wound, on that servant's face? Only before the poor womanswooned, she did hack her father loose, so that he went crashing throughthat window into eternity."

  There was a long stillness slowly broken by the metallic noises ofGilder unlocking the handcuffs of Patrick Royce, to whom he said: "Ithink I should have told the truth, sir. You and the young lady areworth more than Armstrong's obituary notices."

  "Confound Armstrong's notices," cried Royce roughly. "Don't you see itwas because she mustn't know?"

  "Mustn't know what?" asked Merton.

  "Why, that she killed her father, you fool!" roared the other. "He'dhave been alive now but for her. It might craze her to know that."

  "No, I don't think it would," remarked Father Brown, as he picked up hishat. "I rather think I should tell her. Even the most murderous blundersdon't poison life like sins; anyhow, I think you may both be the happiernow. I've got to go back to the Deaf School."

  As he went out on to the gusty grass an acquaintance from Highgatestopped him and said:

  "The Coroner has arrived. The inquiry is just going to begin."

  "I've got to get back to the Deaf School," said Father Brown. "I'm sorryI can't stop for the inquiry."