The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (88 page)

“
I
never knew Sir Arthur so excited,” said Bagshaw to his group of companions afterwards.
“Some people are saying he went beyond the usual limit and that the prosecutor
in a murder case oughtn’t to be so vindictive. But I must say there was
something downright creepy about that little goblin with the yellow hair, that
seemed to play up to the impression. I was vaguely recalling, all the time,
something that De Quincey says about Mr. Williams, that ghastly criminal who
slaughtered two whole families almost in silence. I think he says that Williams
had hair of a vivid unnatural yellow; and that he thought it had been dyed by a
trick learned in India, where they dye horses green or blue. Then there was his
queer, stony silence, like a troglodyte’s; I’ll never deny that it all worked
me up until I felt there was a sort of monster in the dock. If that was only
Sir Arthur’s eloquence, then he certainly took a heavy responsibility in
putting so much passion into it.”

“
He
was a friend of poor Gwynne’s, as a matter of fact,” said Underhill, more gently;
“a man I know saw them hobnobbing together after a great legal dinner lately. I
dare say that’s why he feels so strongly in this case. I suppose it’s doubtful
whether a man ought to act in such a case on mere personal feeling.”

“
He
wouldn’t,” said Bagshaw. “I bet Sir Arthur Travers wouldn’t act only on feeling,
however strongly he felt. He’s got a very stiff sense of his own professional
position. He’s one of those men who are ambitious even when they’ve satisfied
their ambition. I know nobody who’d take more trouble to keep his position in
the world. No; you’ve got hold of the wrong moral to his rather thundering
sermon. If he lets himself go like that, it’s because he thinks he can get a
conviction, anyhow, and wants to put himself at the head of some political
movement against the conspiracy he talks about. He must have some very good
reason for wanting to convict Orm and some very good reason for thinking he can
do it. That means that the facts will support him. His confidence doesn’t look
well for the prisoner.” He became conscious of an insignificant figure in the
group.

“
Well,
Father Brown,” he said with a smile; “what do you think of our judicial procedure?”

“
Well,”
replied the priest rather absently, “I think the thing that struck me most was how
different men look in their wigs. You talk about the prosecuting barrister being
so tremendous. But I happened to see him take his wig off for a minute, and he
really looks quite a different man. He’s quite bald, for one thing.”

“
I’m
afraid that won’t prevent his being tremendous,” answered Bagshaw. “You don’t propose
to found the defence on the fact that the prosecuting counsel is bald, do you?”

“
Not
exactly,” said Father Brown good-humouredly. “To tell the truth, I was thinking
how little some kinds of people know about other kinds of people. Suppose I went
among some remote people who had never even heard of England. Suppose I told
them that there is a man in my country who won’t ask a question of life and
death, until he has put an erection made of horse-hair on the top of his head,
with little tails behind, and grey corkscrew curls at the side, like an Early
Victorian old woman. They would think he must be rather eccentric; but he isn’t
at all eccentric, he’s only conventional. They would think so, because they
don’t know anything about English barristers; because they don’t know what a
barrister is. Well, that barrister doesn’t know what a poet is. He doesn’t understand
that a poet’s eccentricities wouldn’t seem eccentric to other poets. He thinks
it odd that Orm should walk about in a beautiful garden for two hours, with
nothing to do. God bless my soul! a poet would think nothing of walking about
in the same backyard for ten hours if he had a poem to do. Orm’s own counsel
was quite as stupid. It never occurred to him to ask Orm the obvious question.”

“
What
question do you mean?” asked the other.

“
Why,
what poem he was making up, of course,” said Father Brown rather impatiently. “What
line he was stuck at, what epithet he was looking for, what climax he was trying
to work up to. If there were any educated people in court, who know what literature
is, they would have known well enough whether he had had anything genuine to
do. You’d have asked a manufacturer about the conditions of his factory; but
nobody seems to consider the conditions under which poetry is manufactured.
It’s done by doing nothing.”

“
That’s
all very well,” replied the detective; “but why did he hide? Why did he climb up
that crooked little stairway and stop there; it led nowhere.”

“
Why,
because it led nowhere, of course,” cried Father Brown explosively. “Anybody who
clapped eyes on that blind alley ending in mid-air might have known an artist
would want to go there, just as a child would.”

He
stood blinking for a moment, and then said apologetically: “I beg your pardon; but
it seems odd that none of them understand these things. And then there was another
thing. Don’t you know that everything has, for an artist, one aspect or angle
that is exactly right? A tree, a cow, and a cloud, in a certain relation only,
mean something; as three letters, in one order only, mean a word. Well, the
view of that illuminated garden from that unfinished bridge was the right view
of it. It was as unique as the fourth dimension. It was a sort of fairy foreshortening;
it was like looking down at heaven and seeing all the stars growing on trees
and that luminous pond like a moon fallen flat on the fields in some happy
nursery tale. He could have looked at it for ever. If you told him the path led
nowhere, he would tell you it had led him to the country at the end of the
world. But do you expect him to tell you that in the witness-box? What would
you say to him if he did? You talk about a man having a jury of his peers. Why
don’t you have a jury of poets?”

“
You
talk as if you were a poet yourself,” said Bagshaw.

“
Thank
your stars I’m not,” said Father Brown. “Thank your lucky stars a priest has to
be more charitable than a poet. Lord have mercy on us, if you knew what a crushing,
what a cruel contempt he feels for the lot of you, you’d feel as if you were
under Niagara.”

“
You
may know more about the artistic temperament than I do,” said Bagshaw after a pause;
“but, after all, the answer is simple. You can only show that he might have
done what he did, without committing the crime. But it’s equally true that he
might have committed the crime. And who else could have committed it?”

“
Have
you thought about the servant, Green?” asked Father Brown, reflectively. “He told
a rather queer story.”

“
Ah,”
cried Bagshaw quickly, “you think Green did it, after all.”

“
I’m
quite sure he didn’t,” replied the other. “I only asked if you’d thought about his
queer story. He only went out for some trifle, a drink or an assignation or what
not. But he went out by the garden door and came back over the garden wall. In
other words, he left the door open, but he came back to find it shut. Why?
Because Somebody Else had already passed out that way.”

“
The
murderer,” muttered the detective doubtfully. “Do you know who he was?”

“
I
know what he looked like,” answered Father Brown quietly. “That’s the only thing
I do know. I can almost see him as he came in at the front door, in the gleam
of the hall lamp; his figure, his clothes, even his face!”

“
What’s
all this?”

“
He
looked like Sir Humphrey Gwynne,” said the priest.

“
What
the devil do you mean?” demanded Bagshaw. “Gwynne was lying dead with his head in
the pond.”

“
Oh,
yes,” said Father Brown.

After
a moment he went on: “Let’s go back to that theory of yours, which was a very good
one, though I don’t quite agree with it. You suppose the murderer came in at
the front door, met the Judge in the front hall, struggling with him and breaking
the mirror; that the judge then retreated into the garden, where he was finally
shot. Somehow, it doesn’t sound natural to me. Granted he retreated down the
hall, there are two exits at the end, one into the garden and one into the
house. Surely, he would be more likely to retreat into the house? His gun was
there; his telephone was there; his servant, so far as he knew, was there. Even
the nearest neighbours were in that direction. Why should he stop to open the
garden door and go out alone on the deserted side of the house?”

“
But
we know he did go out of the house,” replied his companion, puzzled. “We know he
went out of the house, because he was found in the garden.”

“
He
never went out of the house, because he never was in the house,” said Father Brown.
“Not that evening, I mean. He was sitting in that bungalow. I read that lesson
in the dark, at the beginning, in red and golden stars across the garden. They
were worked from the hut; they wouldn’t have been burning at all if he hadn’t
been in the hut. He was trying to run across to the house and the telephone,
when the murderer shot him beside the pond.”

“
But
what about the pot and the palm and the broken mirror?” cried Bagshaw. “Why, it
was you who found them! It was you yourself who said there must have been a struggle
in the hall.”

The
priest blinked rather painfully. “Did I?” he muttered. “Surely, I didn’t say that.
I never thought that. What I think I said, was that something had happened in
the hall. And something did happen; but it wasn’t a struggle.”

“
Then
what broke the mirror?” asked Bagshaw shortly.

“
A
bullet broke the mirror,” answered Father Brown gravely; “a bullet fired by the
criminal. The big fragments of falling glass were quite enough to knock over the
pot and the palm.”

“
Well,
what else could he have been firing at except Gwynne?” asked the detective.

“
It’s
rather a fine metaphysical point,” answered his clerical companion almost dreamily.
“In one sense, of course, he was firing at Gwynne. But Gwynne wasn’t there to
be fired at. The criminal was alone in the hall.”

He
was silent for a moment, and then went on quietly. “Imagine the looking-glass at
the end of the passage, before it was broken, and the tall palm arching over it.
In the half-light, reflecting these monochrome walls, it would look like the end
of the passage. A man reflected in it would look like a man coming from inside
the house. It would look like the master of the house — if only the reflection
were a little like him.”

“
Stop
a minute,” cried Bagshaw. “I believe I begin — —”

“
You
begin to see,” said Father Brown. “You begin to see why all the suspects in this
case must be innocent. Not one of them could possibly have mistaken his own reflection
for old Gwynne. Orm would have known at once that his bush of yellow hair was
not a bald head. Flood would have seen his own red head, and Green his own red
waistcoat. Besides, they’re all short and shabby; none of them could have
thought his own image was a tall, thin, old gentleman in evening-dress. We want
another, equally tall and thin, to match him. That’s what I meant by saying
that I knew what the murderer looked like.”

“
And
what do you argue from that?” asked Bagshaw, looking at him steadily.

The
priest uttered a sort of sharp, crisp laugh, oddly different from his ordinary mild
manner of speech.

“
I
am going to argue,” he said, “the very thing that you said was so ludicrous and
impossible.”

“
What
do you mean?”

“
I’m
going to base the defence,” said Father Brown, “on the fact that the prosecuting
counsel has a bald head.”

“
Oh,
my God!” said the detective quietly, and got to his feet, staring.

Father
Brown had resumed his monologue in an unruffled manner.

“
You’ve
been following the movements of a good many people in this business; you policemen
were prodigiously interested in the movements of the poet, and the servant, and
the Irishman. The man whose movements seem to have been rather forgotten is the
dead man himself. His servant was quite honestly astonished at finding his
master had returned. His master had gone to a great dinner of all the leaders
of the legal profession, but had left it abruptly and come home. He was not
ill, for he summoned no assistance; he had almost certainly quarrelled with
some leader of the legal profession. It’s among the leaders of that profession
that we should have looked first for his enemy. He returned, and shut himself
up in the bungalow, where he kept all his private documents about treasonable
practices. But the leader of the legal profession, who knew there was something
against him in those documents, was thoughtful enough to follow his accuser
home; he also being in evening-dress, but with a pistol in his pocket. That is
all; and nobody could ever have guessed it except for the mirror.”

He
seemed to be gazing into vacancy for a moment, and then added:

“
A
queer thing is a mirror; a picture frame that holds hundreds of different pictures,
all vivid and all vanished for ever. Yet, there was something specially strange
about the glass that hung at the end of that grey corridor under that green
palm. It is as if it was a magic glass and had a different fate from others, as
if its picture could somehow survive it, hanging in the air of that twilight
house like a spectre; or at least like an abstract diagram, the skeleton of an
argument. We could, at least, conjure out of the void the thing that Sir Arthur
Travers saw. And by the way, there was one very true thing that you said about
him.”