by Michael Sims
“Yes, Mr. Hale, and the same seems to be the case in Imperial Flats. You have quite made up your mind that Mr. Summertrees is guilty, and will not be content until he proves his innocence. I venture to predict that, you will hear from him before long in a manner that may astonish you.”
Hale grunted and looked at his watch. The time passed very slowly as we sat there smoking and at last even I began to get uneasy. Macpherson, seeing our anxiety, said that when he came in the fog was almost as thick as it had been the week before, and that there might be some difficulty in getting a cab. Just as he was speaking the door was unlocked from the outside, and Podgers entered, bearing a thick volume in his hand. This he gave to his superior, who turned over its pages in amazement, and then looked at the back, crying:
“Encyclopedia of Sport, 1893! What sort of a joke is this, Mr. Macpherson?”
There was a pained look on Mr. Macpherson’s face as he reached forward and took the book. He said with a sigh: “If you had allowed me to telephone, Mr. Hale, I should have made it perfectly plain to Summertrees what was wanted. I might have known this mistake was liable to occur. There is an increasing demand for out-of-date books of sport, and no doubt Mr. Summertrees thought this was what I meant. There is nothing for it but to send your man back to Park Lane and tell Mr. Summertrees that what we want is the locked volume of accounts for 1893, which we call the encyclopedia. Allow me to write an order that will bring it. Oh, I’ll show you what I have written before your man takes it,” he said, as Hale stood ready to look over his shoulder.
On my note paper he dashed off a request such as he had outlined; and handed it to Hale, who read it and gave it to Podgers.
“Take that to Summertrees, and get back as quickly as possible. Have you a cab at the door?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Is it foggy outside?”
“Not so much, sir, as it was an hour ago. No difficulty about the traffic now, sir.”
“Very well, get back as soon as you can.”
Podgers saluted, and left with the book under his arm. Again the door was locked, and again we sat smoking in silence until the stillness was broken by the tinkle of the telephone. Hale put the receiver to his ear.
“Yes, this is the Imperial Flats. Yes. Valmont. Oh, yes; Macpherson is here. What? Out of what? Can’t hear you. Out of print. What, the encyclopedia’s out of print? Who is that speaking? Dr. Willoughby; thanks.”
Macpherson rose as if he would go to the telephone, but instead (and he acted so quietly that I did not notice what he was doing until the thing was done) he picked up the sheet which he called his visiting list, and walking quite without haste, held it in the glowing coals of the fireplace until it disappeared in a flash of flame up the chimney. I sprang to my feet indignant, but too late to make even a motion toward saving the sheet. Macpherson regarded us both with that self-depreciatory smile which had several times lighted up his face.
“How dared you burn that sheet?” I demanded.
“Because, Monsieur Valmont, it did not belong to you; because you do not belong to Scotland Yard; because you stole it; because you had no right to it; and because you have no official standing in this country. If it had been in Mr. Hale’s possession I should not have dared, as you put it, to destroy the sheet, but as this sheet was abstracted from my master’s premises by you, an entirely unauthorized person, whom he would have been justified in shooting dead if he had found you housebreaking; and you had resisted him on his discovery, I took the liberty of destroying the document. I have always held that these sheets should not have been kept, for, as has been the case, if they fell under the scrutiny of so intelligent a person as Eugène Valmont, improper inferences might have been drawn. Mr. Summertrees, however, persisted in keeping them, but made this concession, that if I ever telegraphed him or telephoned him the word ‘Encyclopedia,’ he would at once burn these records, and he, on his part, was to telegraph or telephone to me ‘The encyclopedia is out of print,’ whereupon I would know that he had succeeded.
“Now, gentlemen, open this door, which will save me the trouble of forcing it. Either put me formally under arrest, or cease to restrict my liberty. I am very much obliged to Mr. Hale for telephoning, and I have made no protest to so gallant a host as Monsieur Valmont is, because of the locked door. However, the farce is now terminated. The proceedings I have sat through were entirely illegal, and if you will pardon me, Mr. Hale, they have been a little too French to go down here in old England, or to make a report in the newspapers that would be quite satisfactory to your chiefs. I demand either my formal arrest or the unlocking of that door.”
In silence I pressed a button, and my man threw open the door. Macpherson walked to the threshold, paused, and looked back at Spenser Hale, who sat there silent as a sphinx.
“Good evening, Mr. Hale.”
There being no reply, he turned to me with the same ingratiating smile:
“Good evening, Monsieur Eugène Valmont,” he said. “I shall give myself the pleasure of calling next Wednesday at six for my five shillings.”
G. K. Chesterton
(1874–1936)
In March of 1904, when he was a few months shy of thirty years old, G. K. Chesterton visited the village of Keighley, at the confluence of the Worth and Aire Rivers in West Yorkshire—Brontë country, a bleakly romantic land of gritstone tors and remote villages. He was there to speak about literature. Although he had not yet grown the rotund silhouette that later inspired P. G. Wodehouse to describe a loud crash as sounding “like Chesterton falling onto a sheet of tin”—he was six feet four inches tall and eventually weighed close to three hundred pounds—with his anarchic hair and pince-nez on a cord he already looked every inch the absentminded intellectual.
After Chesterton’s lecture he met and immediately became friends with a man only a few years older than himself, John O’Connor, the Catholic priest of St. Cuthbert’s in nearby Bradford. The next morning they hiked together across the windy moor to Ilkley. Along the way they discussed penny dreadfuls, modern notions of society, the psychology of the rich, mathematics versus literature in education, and the priest’s horrific recitations of the depravity he encountered in his work. They found the air exhilarating and even tone-deaf Chesterton burst into song. Soon they were continuing their lively conversation over shepherd’s pie in Ilkley. O’Connor later recalled that Chesterton expressed “an ambition to increase and improve the breed of detective stories.”
O’Connor had a huge influence on the life and work of Chesterton and they remained friends until the author’s death. It was he who guided Chesterton’s conversion to Catholicism in 1922. Much earlier, however, the priest inspired the sole Chestertonian character that most of us are familiar with nowadays—Father Brown. From his insight into character and his sympathy for wrongdoers to his flat-brimmed hat, decrepit umbrella, and penchant for carrying brown paper parcels, the fictional priest owes many of his attributes to this real-life inspiration. Once when O’Connor arrived at the Chesterton household for lunch, he gradually realized that a young woman present, Maria Zimmern, was unobtrusively sketching him for what turned out to be a portrait of the crime-attracting curate that wound up adorning The Innocence of Father Brown, the first collection, which was published in 1911. O’Connor was proud of both his friendship with Chesterton and his unwitting influence on detective stories. In 1937, the year after Chesterton died, O’Connor recounted their friendship in a little book entitled Father Brown on Chesterton.
Chesterton became a well-known public intellectual, writing eighty books, some of them composed of his columns and occasional writings for newspapers such as the Illustrated London News and the Daily News. He served as editor of the New Witness and in 1925 launched his own paper, G. K.’s Weekly, which ran until his death. Novelist, poet, and essayist, he also wrote insightful critical prefaces to each of Dickens’s novels, as well as full-length studies of Dickens and other authors. By 1911, when he launched the Father Brown series—which
eventually ran to fifty-two stories—he was already well known as the author of, among other books, the philosophical and satirical thriller The Man Who Was Thursday.
“At a time when the crime story might have drifted into romantic theatricalism and pseudo-science,” wrote R. T. Bond in his 1935 introduction to The Father Brown Omnibus, “Chesterton gave it seriousness and validity … Thus to Poe, Dickens, Collins and Doyle as proponents of the detective story was added the name of Chesterton, and it took on thereby an added consequence and literary stature.” Chesterton is remembered in crime fiction not only for his creation of Father Brown but also for his idiosyncratic élan. His style is precisely phrased, rich in paradox, and concerned with more than whodunit.
The Hammer of God
The little village of Bohun Beacon was perched on a hill so steep that the tall spire of its church seemed only like the peak of a small mountain. At the foot of the church stood a smithy, generally red with fires and always littered with hammers and scraps of iron; opposite to this, over a rude cross of cobbled paths, was “The Blue Boar,” the only inn of the place. It was upon this crossway, in the lifting of a leaden and silver daybreak, that two brothers met in the street and spoke; though one was beginning the day and the other finishing it. The Rev. and Hon. Wilfred Bohun was very devout, and was making his way to some austere exercises of prayer or contemplation at dawn. Colonel the Hon. Norman Bohun, his elder brother, was by no means devout, and was sitting in evening dress on the bench outside “The Blue Boar,” drinking what the philosophic observer was free to regard either as his last glass on Tuesday or his first on Wednesday. The Colonel was not particular.
The Bohuns were one of the very few aristocratic families really dating from the Middle Ages, and their pennon had actually seen Palestine. But it is a great mistake to suppose that such houses stand high in chivalric tradition. Few except the poor preserve traditions. Aristocrats live not in traditions but in fashions. The Bohuns had been Mohocks under Queen Anne and Mashers under Queen Victoria. But like more than one of the really ancient houses, they had rotted in the last two centuries into mere drunkards and dandy degenerates, till there had even come a whisper of insanity. Certainly there was something hardly human about the Colonel’s wolfish pursuit of pleasure, and his chronic resolution not to go home till morning had a touch of the hideous clarity of insomnia. He was a tall, fine animal, elderly, but with hair still startlingly yellow. He would have looked merely blonde and leonine, but his blue eyes were sunk so deep in his face that they looked black. They were a little too close together. He had very long yellow moustaches; on each side of them a fold or furrow from nostril to jaw, so that a sneer seemed cut into his face. Over his evening clothes he wore a curious pale yellow coat that looked more like a very light dressing gown than an overcoat, and on the back of his head was stuck an extraordinary broad-brimmed hat of a bright green colour, evidently some oriental curiosity caught up at random. He was proud of appearing in such incongruous attires—proud of the fact that he always made them look congruous.
His brother the curate had also the yellow hair and the elegance, but he was buttoned up to the chin in black, and his face was cleanshaven, cultivated, and a little nervous. He seemed to live for nothing but his religion; but there were some who said (notably the blacksmith, who was a Presbyterian) that it was a love of Gothic architecture rather than of God, and that his haunting of the church like a ghost was only another and purer turn of the almost morbid thirst for beauty which sent his brother raging after women and wine. This charge was doubtful, while the man’s practical piety was indubitable. Indeed, the charge was mostly an ignorant misunderstanding of the love of solitude and secret prayer, and was founded on his being often found kneeling, not before the altar, but in peculiar places, in the crypts or gallery, or even in the belfry. He was at the moment about to enter the church through the yard of the smithy, but stopped and frowned a little as he saw his brother’s cavernous eyes staring in the same direction. On the hypothesis that the colonel was interested in the church he did not waste any speculations. There only remained the blacksmith’s shop, and though the blacksmith was a Puritan and none of his people, Wilfred Bohun had heard some scandals about a beautiful and rather celebrated wife. He flung a suspicious look across the shed, and the colonel stood up laughing to speak to him.
“Good morning, Wilfred,” he said. “Like a good landlord I am watching sleeplessly over my people. I am going to call on the blacksmith.”
Wilfred looked at the ground, and said: “The blacksmith is out. He is over at Greenford.”
“I know,” answered the other with silent laughter; “that is why I am calling on him.”
“Norman,” said the cleric, with his eye on a pebble in the road, “are you ever afraid of thunderbolts?”
“What do you mean?” asked the colonel. “Is your hobby meteorology?”
“I mean,” said Wilfred, without looking up, “do you ever think that God might strike you in the street?”
“I beg your pardon,” said the colonel; “I see your hobby is folklore.”
“I know your hobby is blasphemy,” retorted the religious man, stung in the one live place of his nature. “But if you do not fear God, you have good reason to fear man.”
The elder raised his eyebrows politely. “Fear man?” he said.
“Barnes the blacksmith is the biggest and strongest man for forty miles round,” said the clergyman sternly. “I know you are no coward or weakling, but he could throw you over the wall.”
This struck home, being true, and the lowering line by mouth and nostril darkened and deepened. For a moment he stood with the heavy sneer on his face. But in an instant Colonel Bohun had recovered his own cruel good humour and laughed, showing two dog-like front teeth under his yellow moustache. “In that case, my dear Wilfred,” he said quite carelessly, “it was wise for the last of the Bohuns to come out partially in armour.”
And he took off the queer round hat covered with green, showing that it was lined within with steel. Wilfred recognised it indeed as a light Japanese or Chinese helmet torn down from a trophy that hung in the old family hall.
“It was the first hat to hand,” explained his brother airily; “always the nearest hat—and the nearest woman.”
“The blacksmith is away at Greenford,” said Wilfred quietly; “the time of his return is unsettled.”
And with that he turned and went into the church with bowed head, crossing himself like one who wishes to be quit of an unclean spirit. He was anxious to forget such grossness in the cool twilight of his tall Gothic cloisters; but on that morning it was fated that his still round of religious exercises should be everywhere arrested by small shocks. As he entered the church, hitherto always empty at that hour, a kneeling figure rose hastily to its feet and came towards the full daylight of the doorway. When the curate saw it he stood still with surprise. For the early worshipper was none other than the village idiot, a nephew of the blacksmith, one who neither would nor could care for the church or for anything else. He was always called “Mad Joe,” and seemed to have no other name; he was a dark, strong, slouching lad, with a heavy white face, dark straight hair, and a mouth always open. As he passed the priest, his moon-calf countenance gave no hint of what he had been doing or thinking of. He had never been known to pray before.
What sort of prayers was he saying now? Extraordinary prayers surely.
Wilfred Bohun stood rooted to the spot long enough to see the idiot go out into the sunshine, and even to see his dissolute brother hail him with a sort of avuncular jocularity. The last thing he saw was the colonel throwing pennies at the open mouth of Joe, with the serious appearance of trying to hit it.
This ugly sunlit picture of the stupidity and cruelty of the earth sent the ascetic finally to his prayers for purification and new thoughts. He went up to a pew in the gallery, which brought him under a coloured window which he loved and always quieted his spirit; a blue window with an angel carrying lilies. The
re he began to think less about the half-wit, with his livid face and mouth like a fish. He began to think less of his evil brother, pacing like a lean lion in his horrible hunger. He sank deeper and deeper into those cold and sweet colours of silver blossoms and sapphire sky.
In this place half an hour afterwards he was found by Gibbs, the village cobbler, who had been sent for him in some haste. He got to his feet with promptitude, for he knew that no small matter would have brought Gibbs into such a place at all. The cobbler was, as in many villages, an atheist, and his appearance in church was a shade more extraordinary than Mad Joe’s. It was a morning of theological enigmas.
“What is it?” asked Wilfred Bohun rather stiffly, but putting out a trembling hand for his hat.
The atheist spoke in a tone that, coming from him, was quite startlingly respectful, and even, as it were, huskily sympathetic.
“You must excuse me, sir,” he said in a hoarse whisper, “but we didn’t think it right not to let you know at once. I’m afraid a rather dreadful thing has happened, sir. I’m afraid your brother—”
Wilfred clenched his frail hands. “What devilry has he done now?” he cried in voluntary passion.
“Why, sir,” said the cobbler, coughing, “I’m afraid he’s done nothing, and won’t do anything. I’m afraid he’s done for. You had really better come down, sir.”
The curate followed the cobbler down a short winding stair which brought them out at an entrance rather higher than the street. Bohun saw the tragedy in one glance, flat underneath him like a plan. In the yard of the smithy were standing five or six men mostly in black, one in an inspector’s uniform. They included the doctor, the Presbyterian minister, and the priest from the Roman Catholic chapel, to which the blacksmith’s wife belonged. The latter was speaking to her, indeed, very rapidly, in an undertone, as she, a magnificent woman with red-gold hair, was sobbing blindly on a bench. Between these two groups, and just clear of the main heap of hammers, lay a man in evening dress, spread-eagled and flat on his face. From the height above Wilfred could have sworn to every item of his costume and appearance, down to the Bohun rings upon his fingers; but the skull was only a hideous splash, like a star of blackness and blood. Wilfred Bohun gave but one glance, and ran down the steps into the yard. The doctor, who was the family physician, saluted him, but he scarcely took any notice. He could only stammer out:
