The Secret of Father Brown

by Gilbert Keith Chesterton

  “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 of 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.

  “Oh 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 nightclothes, 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.”
r />   “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.”

  Chapter V. 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.

  “They always are,” growled Mr. Mundon Mandeville. “And I thought my wife would look after those arrangements.”

  “I can only say,” said Mrs. Mundon Mandeville rather wearily, “that I gave her what ought to be the best part. It’s supposed to be what stage-struck young women want, isn’t it – to act the beautiful young heroine and marry the beautiful young hero in a shower of bouquets and cheers from the gallery? Women of my age naturally have to fall back on acting respectable matrons, and I was careful to confine myself to that.”

  “It would be devilish awkward to alter the parts now, anyhow,” said Randall.

  “It’s not to be thought of,” declared Norman Knight firmly. “Why, I could hardly act – but anyhow it’s much too late.”

  Father Brown had slipped forward and was standing outside the locked door listening.

  “Is there no sound?” asked the manager anxiously; and then added in a lower voice: “Do you think she can have done herself in?”

  “There is a certain sound,” replied Father Brown calmly. “I should be inclined to deduce from the sound that she is engaged in
breaking windows or looking-glasses, probably with her feet. No; I do not think there is much danger of her going on to destroy herself. Breaking looking-glasses with your feet is a very unusual prelude to suicide. If she had been a German, gone away to think quietly about metaphysics and weltschmerz, I should be all for breaking the door down. These Italians don’t really die so easily; and are not liable to kill themselves in a rage. Somebody else, perhaps – yes, possibly – it might be well to take ordinary precautions if she comes out with a leap.”

  “So you’re not in favour of forcing the door?” asked Mandeville.

  “Not if you want her to act in your play,” replied Father Brown. “If you do that, she’ll raise the roof and refuse to stay in the place; if you leave her alone – she’ll probably come out from mere curiosity. If I were you, I should just leave somebody to guard the door, more or less, and trust to time for an hour or two.”

  “In that case,” said Mandeville, “we can only get on with rehearsing the scenes where she doesn’t appear. My wife will arrange all that is necessary for scenery just now. After all, the fourth act is the main business. You had better get on with that.”

  “Not a dress rehearsal,” said Mandeville’s wife to the others.

  “Very well,” said Knight, “not a dress rehearsal, of course. I wish the dresses of the infernal period weren’t so elaborate.”

  “What is the play?” asked the priest with a touch of curiosity.

  “The School for Scandal,” said Mandeville. “It may be literature, but I want plays. My wife likes what she calls classical comedies. A long sight more classic than comic.”

  At this moment, the old doorkeeper known as Sam, and the solitary inhabitant of the theatre during off-hours, came waddling up to the manager with a card, to say that Lady Miriam Marden wished to see him. He turned away, but Father Brown continued to blink steadily for a few seconds in the direction of the manager’s wife, and saw that her wan face wore a faint smile; not altogether a cheerful smile.