The Secret of Father Brown

by Gilbert Keith Chesterton

  'Surely,' said Underhill, 'Sherlock Holmes would say that he went by a logical rule.'

  'He may be right,' answered the other; 'but I mean a collective rule. It’s like the staff work of an army. We pool our information.'

  'And you don’t think detective stories allow for that?' asked his friend.

  'Well, let’s take any imaginary case of Sherlock Holmes, and Lestrade, the official detective. Sherlock Holmes, let us say, can guess that a total stranger crossing the street is a foreigner, merely because he seems to look for the traffic to go to the right instead of the left. I’m quite ready to admit Holmes might guess that. I’m quite sure Lestrade wouldn’t guess anything of the kind. But what they leave out is the fact that the policeman, who couldn’t guess, might very probably know. Lestrade might know the man was a foreigner merely because his department has to keep an eye on all foreigners; some would say on all natives, too. As a policeman I’m glad the police know so much; for every man wants to do his own job well. But as a citizen, I sometimes wonder whether they don’t know too much.'

  'You don’t seriously mean to say,' cried Underhill incredulously, 'that you know anything about strange people in a strange street. That if a man walked out of that house over there, you would know anything about him?'

  'I should if he was the householder,' answered Bagshaw. 'That house is rented by a literary man of Anglo-Roumanian extraction, who generally lives in Paris, but is over here in connexion with some poetical play of his. His name’s Osric Orm, one of the new poets, and pretty steep to read, I believe.'

  'But I mean all the people down the road,' said his companion. 'I was thinking how strange and new and nameless everything looks, with these high blank walls and these houses lost in large gardens. You can’t know all of them.'

  'I know a few,' answered Bagshaw. 'This garden wall we’re walking under is at the end of the grounds of Sir Humphrey Gwynne, better known as Mr. Justice Gwynne, the old judge who made such a row about spying during the war. The house next door to it belongs to a wealthy cigar merchant. He comes from Spanish-America and looks very swarthy and Spanish himself; but he bears the very English name of Buller. The house beyond that – did you hear that noise?'

  'I heard something,' said Underhill, 'but I really don’t know what it was.'

  'I know what it was,' replied the detective, 'it was a rather heavy revolver, fired twice, followed by a cry for help. And it came straight out of the back garden of Mr. Justice Gwynne, that paradise of peace and legality.'

  He looked up and down the street sharply and then added:

  'And the only gate of the back garden is half a mile round on the other side. I wish this wall were a little lower, or I were a little lighter; but it’s got to be tried.'

  'It is lower a little farther on,' said Underhill, 'and there seems to be a tree that looks helpful.'

  They moved hastily along and found a place where the wall seemed to stoop abruptly, almost as if it had half-sunk into the earth; and a garden tree, flamboyant with the gayest garden blossom, straggled out of the dark enclosure and was gilded by the gleam of a solitary street-lamp. Bagshaw caught the crooked branch and threw one leg over the low wall; and the next moment they stood knee-deep amid the snapping plants of a garden border.

  The garden of Mr. Justice Gwynne by night was rather a singular spectacle. It was large and lay on the empty edge of the suburb, in the shadow of a tall, dark house that was the last in its line of houses. The house was literally dark, being shuttered and unlighted, at least on the side overlooking the garden. But the garden itself, which lay in its shadow, and should have been a tract of absolute darkness, showed a random glitter, like that of fading fireworks; as if a giant rocket had fallen in fire among the trees. As they advanced they were able to locate it as the light of several coloured lamps, entangled in the trees like the jewel fruits of Aladdin, and especially as the light from a small, round lake or pond, which gleamed, with pale colours as if a lamp were kindled under it.

  'Is he having a party?' asked Underhill. 'The garden seems to be illuminated.'

  'No,' answered Bagshaw. 'It’s a hobby of his, and I believe he prefers to do it when he’s alone. He likes playing with a little plant of electricity that he works from that bungalow or hut over there, where he does his work and keeps his papers. Buller, who knows him very well, says the coloured lamps are rather more often a sign he’s not to be disturbed.'

  'Sort of red danger signals,' suggested the other.

  'Good Lord! I’m afraid they are danger signals!' and he began suddenly to run.

  A moment after Underhill saw what he had seen. The opalescent ring of light, like the halo of the moon, round the sloping sides of the pond, was broken by two black stripes or streaks which soon proved themselves to be the long, black legs of a figure fallen head downwards into the hollow, with the head in the pond.

  'Come on,' cried the detective sharply, 'that looks to me like – '

  His voice was lost, as he ran on across the wide lawn, faintly luminous in the artificial light, making a bee-line across the big garden for the pool and the fallen figure. Underhill was trotting steadily in that straight track, when something happened that startled him for the moment. Bagshaw, who was travelling as steadily as a bullet towards the black figure by the luminous pool, suddenly turned at a sharp angle and began to run even more rapidly towards the shadow of the house. Underhill could not imagine what he meant by the altered direction. The next moment, when the detective had vanished into the shadow of the house, there came out of that obscurity the sound of a scuffle and a curse; and Bagshaw returned lugging with him a little struggling man with red hair. The captive had evidently been escaping under the shelter of the building, when the quicker ears of the detective had heard him rustling like a bird among the bushes.

  'Underhill,' said the detective, 'I wish you’d run on and see what’s up by the pool. And now, who are you?” he asked, coming to a halt. “What’s your name?'

  'Michael Flood,' said the stranger in a snappy fashion. He was an unnaturally lean little man, with a hooked nose too large for his face, which was colourless, like parchment, in contrast with the ginger colour of his hair. 'I’ve got nothing to do with this. I found him lying dead and I was scared; but I only came to interview him for a paper.'

  'When you interview celebrities for the Press,' said Bagshaw, 'do you generally climb over the garden wall?'

  And he pointed grimly to a trail of footprints coming and going along the path towards the flower bed.

  The man calling himself Flood wore an expression equally grim.

  'An interviewer might very well get over the wall,' he said, 'for I couldn’t make anybody hear at the front door. The servant had gone out.'

  'How do you know he’d gone out?' asked the detective suspiciously.

  'Because,' said Flood, with an almost unnatural calm, 'I’m not the only person who gets over garden walls. It seems just possible that you did it yourself. But, anyhow, the servant did; for I’ve just this moment seen him drop over the wall, away on the other side of the garden, just by the garden door.'

  'Then why didn’t he use the garden door?' demanded the cross-examiner.

  'How should I know?' retorted Flood. 'Because it was shut, I suppose. But you’d better ask him, not me; he’s coming towards the house at this minute.'

  There was, indeed, another shadowy figure beginning to be visible through the fire-shot gloaming, a squat, square-headed figure, wearing a red waistcoat as the most conspicuous part of a rather shabby livery. He appeared to be making with unobtrusive haste towards a side-door in the house, until Bagshaw halloed to him to halt. He drew nearer to them very reluctantly, revealing a heavy, yellow face, with a touch of something Asiatic which was consonant with his flat, blue-black hair.

  Bagshaw turned abruptly to the man called Flood. 'Is there anybody in this place,' he said, 'who can testify to your identity?'

  'Not many, even in this country,' growled Flood. 'I’ve only just
come from Ireland; the only man I know round here is the priest at St. Dominic’s Church – Father Brown.'

  'Neither of you must leave this place,' said Bagshaw, and then added to the servant: 'But you can go into the house and ring up St. Dominic’s Presbytery and ask Father Brown if he would mind coming round here at once. No tricks, mind.'

  While the energetic detective was securing the potential fugitives, his companion, at his direction, had hastened on to the actual scene of the tragedy. It was a strange enough scene; and, indeed, if the tragedy had not been tragic it would have been highly fantastic. The dead man (for the briefest examination proved him to be dead) lay with his head in the pond, where the glow of the artificial illumination encircled the head with something of the appearance of an unholy halo. The face was gaunt and rather sinister, the brow bald, and the scanty curls dark grey, like iron rings; and, despite the damage done by the bullet wound in the temple, Underhill had no difficulty in recognizing the features he had seen in the many portraits of Sir Humphrey Gwynne. The dead man was in evening-dress, and his long, black legs, so thin as to be almost spidery, were sprawling at different angles up the steep bank from which he had fallen. As by some weird whim of diabolical arabesque, blood was eddying out, very slowly, into the luminous water in snaky rings, like the transparent crimson of sunset clouds.

  Underhill did not know how long he stood staring down at this macabre figure, when he looked up and saw a group of four figures standing above him on the bank. He was prepared for Bagshaw and his Irish captive, and he had no difficulty in guessing the status of the servant in the red waistcoat. But the fourth figure had a sort of grotesque solemnity that seemed strangely congruous to that incongruity. It was a stumpy figure with a round face and a hat like a black halo. He realized that it was, in fact, a priest; but there was something about it that reminded him of some quaint old black woodcut at the end of a Dance of Death.

  Then he heard Bagshaw saying to the priest:

  'I’m glad you can identify this man; but you must realize that he’s to some extent under suspicion. Of course, he may be innocent; but he did enter the garden in an irregular fashion.'

  'Well, I think he’s innocent myself,' said the little priest in a colourless voice. 'But, of course, I may be wrong.'

  'Why do you think he is innocent?'

  'Because he entered the garden in an irregular fashion,' answered the cleric. 'You see, I entered it in a regular fashion myself. But I seem to be almost the only person who did. All the best people seem to get over garden walls nowadays.'

  'What do you mean by a regular fashion?' asked the detective.

  'Well,' said Father Brown, looking at him with limpid gravity, 'I came in by the front door. I often come into houses that way.'

  'Excuse me,' said Bagshaw, 'but does it matter very much how you came in, unless you propose to confess to the murder?'

  'Yes, I think it does,' said the priest mildly. 'The truth is, that when I came in at the front door I saw something I don’t think any of the rest of you have seen. It seems to me it might have something to do with it.'

  'What did you see?'

  'I saw a sort of general smash-up,' said Father Brown in his mild voice. 'A big looking-glass broken, and a small palm tree knocked over, and the pot smashed all over the floor. Somehow, it looked to me as if something had happened.'

  'You are right,' said Bagshaw after a pause. 'If you saw that, it certainly looks as if it had something to do with it.'

  'And if it had anything to do with it,' said the priest very gently, 'it looks as if there was one person who had nothing to do with it; and that is Mr. Michael Flood, who entered the garden over the wall in an irregular fashion, and then tried to leave it in the same irregular fashion. It is his irregularity that makes me believe in his innocence.'

  'Let us go into the house,' said Bagshaw abruptly.

  As they passed in at the side-door, the servant leading the way, Bagshaw fell back a pace or two and spoke to his friend.

  'Something odd about that servant,' he said. 'Says his name is Green, though he doesn’t look it; but there seems no doubt he’s really Gwynne’s servant, apparently the only regular servant he had. But the queer thing is, that he flatly denied that his master was in the garden at all, dead or alive. Said the old judge had gone out to a grand legal dinner and couldn’t be home for hours, and gave that as his excuse for slipping out.'

  'Did he,' asked Underhill, 'give any excuse for his curious way of slipping in?'

  'No, none that I can make sense of,' answered the detective. 'I can’t make him out. He seems to be scared of something.'

  Entering by the side-door, they found themselves at the inner end of the entrance hall, which ran along the side of the house and ended with the front door, surmounted by a dreary fanlight of the old-fashioned pattern. A faint, grey light was beginning to outline its radiation upon the darkness, like some dismal and discoloured sunrise; but what light there was in the hall came from a single, shaded lamp, also of an antiquated sort, that stood on a bracket in a corner. By the light of this Bagshaw could distinguish the debris of which Brown had spoken. A tall palm, with long sweeping leaves, had fallen full length, and its dark red pot was shattered into shards. They lay littered on the carpet, along with pale and gleaming fragments of a broken mirror, of which the almost empty frame hung behind them on the wall at the end of the vestibule. At right angles to this entrance, and directly opposite the side-door as they entered, was another and similar passage leading into the rest of the house. At the other end of it could be seen the telephone which the servant had used to summon the priest; and a half-open door, showing, even through the crack, the serried ranks of great leather-bound books, marked the entrance to the judge’s study.

  Bagshaw stood looking down at the fallen pot and the mingled fragments at his feet.

  'You’re quite right,' he said to the priest; 'there’s been a struggle here. And it must have been a struggle between Gwynne and his murderer.'

  'It seemed to me,' said Father Brown modestly, 'that something had happened here.'

  'Yes; it’s pretty clear what happened,' assented the detective. 'The murderer entered by the front door and found Gwynne; probably Gwynne let him in. There was a death grapple, possibly a chance shot, that hit the glass, though they might have broken it with a stray kick or anything. Gwynne managed to free himself and fled into the garden, where he was pursued and shot finally by the pond. I fancy that’s the whole story of the crime itself; but, of course, I must look round the other rooms.'

  The other rooms, however, revealed very little, though Bagshaw pointed significantly to the loaded automatic pistol that he found in a drawer of the library desk.

  'Looks as if he was expecting this,' he said; 'yet it seems queer he didn’t take it with him when he went out into the hall.'

  Eventually they returned to the hall, making their way towards the front door. Father Brown letting his eye rove around in a rather absent-minded fashion. The two corridors, monotonously papered in the same grey and faded pattern, seemed to emphasize the dust and dingy floridity of the few early Victorian ornaments, the green rust that devoured the bronze of the lamp, the dull gold that glimmered in the frame of the broken mirror.

  'They say it’s bad luck to break a looking-glass,' he said. 'This looks like the very house of ill-luck. There’s something about the very furniture -'

  'That’s rather odd,' said Bagshaw sharply. 'I thought the front door would be shut, but it’s left on the latch.'

  There was no reply; and they passed out of the front door into the front garden, a narrower and more formal plot of flowers, having at one end a curiously clipped hedge with a hole in it, like a green cave, under the shadow of which some broken steps peeped out.

  Father Brown strolled up to the hole and ducked his head under it. A few moments after he had disappeared they were astonished to hear his quiet voice in conversation above their heads, as if he were talking to somebody at the top of a tree. The
detective followed, and found that the curious covered stairway led to what looked like a broken bridge, over-hanging the darker and emptier spaces of the garden. It just curled round the corner of the house, bringing in sight the field of coloured lights beyond and beneath. Probably it was the relic of some abandoned architectural fancy of building a sort of terrace on arches across the lawn. Bagshaw thought it a curious cul-de-sac in which to find anybody in the small hours between night and morning; but he was not looking at the details of it just then. He was looking at the man who was found.

  As the man stood with his back turned – a small man in light grey clothes – the one outstanding feature about him was a wonderful head of hair, as yellow and radiant as the head of a huge dandelion. It was literally outstanding like a halo, and something in that association made the face, when it was slowly and sulkily turned on them, rather a shock of contrast. That halo should have enclosed an oval face of the mildly angelic sort; but the face was crabbed and elderly with a powerful jowl and a short nose that somehow suggested the broken nose of a pugilist.

  'This is Mr. Orm, the celebrated poet, I understand,' said Father Brown, as calmly as if he were introducing two people in a drawing-room.

  'Whoever he is,' said Bagshaw, 'I must trouble him to come with me and answer a few questions.'

  Mr. Osric Orm, the poet, was not a model of self-expression when it came to the answering of questions. There, in that corner of the old garden, as the grey twilight before dawn began to creep over the heavy hedges and the broken bridge, and afterwards in a succession of circumstances and stages of legal inquiry that grew more and more ominous, he refused to say anything except that he had intended to call on Sir Humphrey Gwynne, but had not done so because he could not get anyone to answer the bell. When it was pointed out that the door was practically open, he snorted. When it was hinted that the hour was somewhat late, he snarled. The little that he said was obscure, either because he really knew hardly any English, or because he knew better than to know any. His opinions seemed to be of a nihilistic and destructive sort, as was indeed the tendency of his poetry for those who could follow it; and it seemed possible that his business with the judge, and perhaps his quarrel with the judge, had been something in the anarchist line. Gwynne was known to have had something of a mania about Bolshevist spies, as he had about German spies. Anyhow, one coincidence, only a few moments after his capture, confirmed Bagshaw in the impression that the case must be taken seriously. As they went out of the front gate into the street, they so happened to encounter yet another neighbour, Buller, the cigar merchant from next door, conspicuous by his brown, shrewd face and the unique orchid in his buttonhole; for he had a name in that branch of horticulture. Rather to the surprise of the rest, he hailed his neighbour, the poet, in a matter-of-fact manner, almost as if he had expected to see him.