‘Oh, well,’ said Professor Vair, rather curtly, ‘if you are resolved to believe in your priest and his miraculous Irishman I can say no more. I’m afraid you have not had an opportunity of studying psychology.’
‘No,’ said Fenner dryly; ‘but I’ve had an opportunity of studying psychologists.’
And, bowing politely, he led his deputation out of the room and did not speak till he got into the street; then he addressed them rather explosively.
‘Raving lunatics!’ cried Fenner in a fume. ‘What the devil do they think is to happen to the world if nobody knows whether he’s seen anything or not? I wish I’d blown his silly head off with a blank charge, and then explained that I did it in a blind flash. Father Brown’s miracle may be miraculous or no, but he said it would happen and it did happen. All these blasted cranks can do is to see a thing happen and then say it didn’t. Look here, I think we owe it to the padre to testify to his little demonstration. We’re all sane, solid men who never believed in anything. We weren’t drunk. We weren’t devout. It simply happened just as he said it would.’
‘I quite agree,’ said the millionaire. ‘It may be the beginning of mighty big things in the spiritual line; but anyhow, the man who’s in the spiritual line himself, Father Brown, has certainly scored over this business.’
A few days afterwards Father Brown received a very polite note signed Silas T. Vandam, and asking him if he would attend at a stated hour at the apartment which was the scene of the disappearance, in order to take steps for the establishment of that marvellous occurrence. The occurrence itself had already begun to break out in the newspapers, and was being taken up everywhere by the enthusiasts of occultism. Father Brown saw the flaring posters inscribed ‘Suicide of Vanishing Man’, and ‘Man’s Curse Hangs Philanthropist’, as he passed towards Moon Crescent and mounted the steps on the way to the elevator. He found the little group much as he left it, Vandam, Alboin, and the secretary; but there was an entirely new respectfulness and even reverence in their tone towards himself. They were standing by Wynd’s desk, on which lay a large paper and writing materials, as they turned to greet him.
‘Father Brown,’ said the spokesman, who was the white-haired Westerner, somewhat sobered with his responsibility, ‘we asked you here in the first place to offer our apologies and our thanks. We recognise that it was you that spotted the spiritual manifestation from the first. We were hard-shell sceptics, all of us; but we realise now that a man must break that shell to get at the great things behind the world. You stand for those things; you stand for the super-normal explanation of things; and we have to hand it to you. And in the second place, we feel that this document would not be complete without your signature. We are notifying the exact facts to the Psychical Research Society, because the newspaper accounts are not what you might call exact. We’ve stated how the curse was spoken out in the street; how the man was sealed up here in a room like a box; how the curse dissolved him straight into thin air, and in some unthinkable way materialised him as a suicide hoisted on a gallows. That’s all we can say about it; but all that we know, and have seen with our own eyes. And as you were the first to believe in the miracle, we all feel that you ought to be the first to sign.’
‘No, really,’ said Father Brown, in embarrassment. ‘I don’t think I should like to do that.’
‘You mean you’d rather not sign first?’
‘I mean I’d rather not sign at all,’ said Father Brown, modestly. ‘You see, it doesn’t quite do for a man in my position to joke about miracles.’
‘But it was you who said it was a miracle,’ said Alboin, staring.
‘I’m so sorry,’ said Father Brown; ‘I’m afraid there’s some mistake. I don’t think I ever said it was a miracle. All I said was that it might happen. What you said was that it couldn’t happen, because it would be a miracle if it did. And then it did. And so you said it was a miracle. But I never said a word about miracles or magic, or anything of the sort from beginning to end.’
‘But I thought you believed in miracles,’ broke out the secretary.
‘Yes,’ answered Father Brown, ‘I believe in miracles. I believe in man-eating tigers, but I don’t see them running about everywhere. If I want any miracles, I know where to get them.’
‘I can’t understand your taking this line, Father Brown,’ said Vandam, earnestly. ‘It seems so narrow; and you don’t look narrow to me, though you are a parson. Don’t you see, a miracle like this will knock all materialism endways? It will just tell the whole world in big print that spiritual powers can work and do work. You’ll be serving religion as no parson ever served it yet.’
The priest had stiffened a little and seemed in some strange way clothed with unconscious and impersonal dignity, for all his stumpy figure. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you wouldn’t suggest I should serve religion by what I know to be a lie? I don’t know precisely what you mean by the phrase; and, to be quite candid, I’m not sure you do. Lying may be serving religion; I’m sure it’s not serving God. And since you are harping so insistently on what I believe, wouldn’t it be as well if you had some sort of notion of what it is?’
‘I don’t think I quite understand,’ observed the millionaire, curiously.
‘I don’t think you do,’ said Father Brown, with simplicity. ‘You say this thing was done by spiritual powers. What spiritual powers? You don’t think the holy angels took him and hung him on a garden tree, do you? And as for the unholy angels—no, no, no. The men who did this did a wicked thing, but they went no further than their own wickedness; they weren’t wicked enough to be dealing with spiritual powers. I know something about Satanism, for my sins; I’ve been forced to know. I know what it is, what it practically always is. It’s proud and it’s sly. It likes to be superior; it loves to horrify the innocent with things half understood, to make children’s flesh creep. That’s why it’s so fond of mysteries and initiations and secret societies and all the rest of it. Its eyes are turned inwards, and however grand and grave it may look, it’s always hiding a small, mad smile.’ He shuddered suddenly, as if caught in an icy draught of air. ‘Never mind about them; they’ve got nothing to do with this, believe me. Do you think that poor, wild Irishman of mine, who ran raving down the street, who blurted out half of it when he first saw my face, and ran away for fear he should blurt out more, do you think Satan confides any secrets to him? I admit he joined in a plot, probably in a plot with two other men worse than himself; but for all that, he was just in an everlasting rage when he rushed down the lane and let off his pistol and his curse.’
‘But what on earth does all this mean?’ demanded Vandam. ‘Letting off a toy pistol and a twopenny curse wouldn’t do what was done, except by a miracle. It wouldn’t make Wynd disappear like a fairy. It wouldn’t make him reappear a quarter of a mile away with a rope round his neck.’
‘No,’ said Father Brown sharply; ‘but what would it do?’
‘And still I don’t follow you,’ said the millionaire gravely.
‘I say, what would it do?’ repeated the priest; showing, for the first time, a sort of animation verging on annoyance. ‘You keep on repeating that a blank pistol-shot wouldn’t do this and wouldn’t do that; that if that was all, the murder wouldn’t happen or the miracle wouldn’t happen. It doesn’t seem to occur to you to ask what would happen. What would happen to you if a lunatic let off a firearm without rhyme or reason right under your window? What’s the very first thing that would happen?’
Vandam looked thoughtful. ‘I guess I should look out of the window,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said Father Brown, ‘you’d look out of the window. That’s the whole story. It’s a sad story, but it’s finished now; and there were extenuating circumstances.’
‘Why should looking out of the window hurt him?’ asked Alboin. ‘He didn’t fall out, or he’d have been found in the lane.’
‘No,’ said Father Brown, in a l
ow voice. ‘He didn’t fall. He rose.’
There was something in his voice like the groan of a gong, a note of doom, but otherwise he went on steadily:
‘He rose, but not on wings; not on the wings of any holy or unholy angels. He rose at the end of a rope, exactly as you saw him in the garden; a noose dropped over his head the moment it was poked out of the window. Don’t you remember Wilson, that big servant of his, a man of huge strength, while Wynd was the lightest of little shrimps? Didn’t Wilson go to the floor above to get a pamphlet, to a room full of luggage corded in coils and coils of rope? Has Wilson been seen since that day? I fancy not.’
‘Do you mean,’ asked the secretary, ‘that Wilson whisked him clean out of his own window like a trout on a line?’
‘Yes,’ said the other, ‘and let him down again out of the other window into the park, where the third accomplice hooked him on to a tree. Remember the lane was always empty; remember the wall opposite was quite blank; remember it was all over in five minutes after the Irishman gave the signal with the pistol. There were three of them in it of course; and I wonder whether you can all guess who they were.’
They were all three staring at the plain, square window and the blank, white wall beyond; and nobody answered.
‘By the way,’ went on Father Brown, ‘don’t think I blame you for jumping to preternatural conclusions. The reason’s very simple, really. You all swore you were hard-shelled materialists; and as a matter of fact you were all balanced on the very edge of belief—of belief in almost anything. There are thousands balanced on it today; but it’s a sharp, uncomfortable edge to sit on. You won’t rest till you believe something; that’s why Mr. Vandam went through new religions with a tooth-comb, and Mr. Alboin quotes Scripture for his religion of breathing exercises, and Mr. Fenner grumbles at the very God he denies. That’s where you all split; it’s natural to believe in the supernatural. It never feels natural to accept only natural things. But though it wanted only a touch to tip you into preternaturalism about these things, these things really were only natural things. They were not only natural, they were almost unnaturally simple. I suppose there never was quite so simple a story as this.’
Fenner laughed and then looked puzzled. ‘I don’t understand one thing,’ he said. ‘If it was Wilson, how did Wynd come to have a man like that on such intimate terms? How did he come to be killed by a man he’d seen every day for years? He was famous as being a judge of men.’
Father Brown thumped his umbrella on the ground with an emphasis he rarely showed.
‘Yes,’ he said, almost fiercely; ‘that was how he came to be killed. He was killed for just that. He was killed for being a judge of men.’
They all stared at him, but he went on, almost as if they were not there.
‘What is any man that he should be a judge of men?’ he demanded. ‘These three were the tramps that once stood before him and were dismissed rapidly right and left to one place or another; as if for them there were no cloak of courtesy, no stages of intimacy, no free-will in friendship. And twenty years has not exhausted the indignation born of that unfathomable insult in that moment when he dared to know them at a glance.’
‘Yes,’ said the secretary; ‘I understand…and I understand how it is that you understand—all sorts of things.’
‘Well, I’m blamed if I understand,’ cried the breezy Western gentleman boisterously. ‘Your Wilson and your Irishman seem to be just a couple of cut-throat murderers who killed their benefactor. I’ve no use for a black and bloody assassin of that sort in my morality, whether it’s religion or not.’
‘He was a black and bloody assassin, no doubt,’ said Fenner, quietly. ‘I’m not defending him; but I suppose it’s Father Brown’s business to pray for all men, even for a man like—’
‘Yes,’ assented Father Brown, ‘it’s my business to pray for all men, even for a man like Warren Wynd.’
The Invisible Weapon
Nicholas Olde
The locked-room mystery expert Bob Adey highlighted the excellence of two impossible crime short stories that first appeared in 1928. One, ‘The Tea Leaf’ by Edgar Jepson and Robert Eustace, has long been highly regarded; it is included in the British Library anthology Capital Crimes. The other, once extremely obscure, is Nicholas Olde’s ‘The Invisible Weapon’, which appears in Olde’s only known book, The Incredible Adventures of Rowland Hern. Adey championed this collection for many years, and it is now available in an affordable reprint edition.
Mystery long surrounded the identity of Nicholas Olde. The pre-eminent bibliographer of crime fiction, Allen J. Hubin, discovered a few years ago that the pen-name concealed the identity of Amian Lister Champneys (1879–1951), but Champneys seems to have given up on the genre after publishing the Hern stories. It is a shame that he did not pursue his interest in detective fiction, because Hern is an appealing example of the ‘Great Detective’, and his cases are written up with a pleasingly light touch.
***
Before the snow had time to melt the great frost was upon us; and, in a few days, every pond and dyke was covered with half a foot of ice.
Hern and I were spending a week in a village in Lincolnshire, and, at the sight of the frozen fen, we sent to Peterborough for skates in keen anticipation of some happy days upon the ice.
‘And now,’ said Hern, ‘as our skates will not be here until to-morrow, we had better take this opportunity of going to see Grumby Castle. I had not intended to go until later in the week, but, as neither of us wants to lose a day’s skating, let us take advantage of Lord Grumby’s permission immediately. The castle, as I told you, is being thoroughly overhauled to be ready for his occupation in the spring.’
Thus it was that, that same morning, we turned our backs upon the fen and trudged through the powdery snow into the undulating country towards the west until at last we came within sight of that historic pile and passed through the lodge gates and up the stately avenue. When we reached the great entrance door Hern took out Lord Grumby’s letter to show to the caretaker—but it was not a caretaker that opened to our knock. It was a policeman.
The policeman looked at the letter and shook his head.
‘I’ll ask the inspector anyhow,’ he said, and disappeared with the letter in his hand.
The inspector arrived on the doorstep a minute later.
‘You are not Mr. Rowland Hern, the detective, are you?’ he asked.
‘The same, inspector,’ said Hern. ‘I didn’t know that I was known so far afield.’
‘Good gracious, yes!’ said the inspector. ‘We’ve all heard of you. There’s nothing strange in that. But that you should be here this morning is a very strange coincidence indeed.’
‘Why so?’ asked Hern.
‘Because,’ said the inspector, ‘there is a problem to be solved in this castle that is just after your own heart. A most mysterious thing has happened here. Please come inside.’
We followed him through a vestibule littered with builders’ paraphernalia and he led us up the wide stairway.
‘A murder has been committed in this castle—not two hours since,’ said the inspector. ‘There is only one man who could have done it—and he could not have done it.’
‘It certainly does seem to be a bit of a puzzle when put like that,’ said Hern. ‘Are you sure that it is not a riddle, like “When is a door not a door?”’
We had reached the top of the stairs.
‘I will tell you the whole story from start to—well, to the present moment,’ said the inspector. ‘You see this door on the left? It is the door of the ante-room to the great ballroom; and the ante-room is vital to this mystery for two reasons. In the first place, it is, for the time being, absolutely the only way by which the ballroom can be entered. The door at the other end has been bricked up in accordance with his lordship’s scheme of reconstruction, and the proposed new doorway has not ye
t been knocked through the wall: (that is one occasion when a door is not a door),’ he added with a smile; ‘and even the fireplaces have been removed and the chimneys blocked since a new heating system has rendered them superfluous. In the second place,’ he continued, ‘the work in the ballroom itself being practically finished, this ante-room has been, for the time being, appropriated as an office by the contractors. Consequently it is occupied all day by draughtsmen and clerks and others, and no one can enter or leave the ballroom during office hours unseen.
‘Among other alterations and improvements that have been carried out is, as I have said, the installation of a heating apparatus; and there appears to have been a good deal of trouble over this.
‘It has been installed by a local engineer named Henry Whelk, and the working of it under tests has been so unsatisfactory that his lordship insisted, some time since, on calling in a consulting engineer, a man named Blanco Persimmon.
‘Henry Whelk has, from the first, very much resented the “interference”, as he calls it, of this man; and the relations between the two have been, for some weeks, strained almost to the breaking-point.
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