The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (106 page)

“
And
I tell you you didn’t see the duel,” said the priest.

“
Are
you mad?” demanded the other. “Or why should you think I am blind?”

“
Because
you were blinded — that you might not see,” said the priest. “Because you are a
good man and God had mercy on your innocence, and he turned your face away from
that unnatural strife. He set a wall of sand and silence between you and what really
happened on that horrible red shore, abandoned to the raging spirits of Judas
and of Cain.”

“
Tell
us what happened!” gasped the lady impatiently.

“
I
will tell it as I found it,” proceeded the priest. “The next thing I found was that
Romaine the actor had been training Maurice Mair in all the tricks of the trade
of acting. I once had a friend who went in for acting. He gave me a very amusing
account of how his first week’s training consisted entirely of falling down; of
learning how to fall flat without a stagger, as if he were stone dead.”

“
God
have mercy on us!” cried the general, and gripped the arms of his chair as if to
rise.

“
Amen,”
said Father Brown. “You told me how quickly it seemed to come; in fact, Maurice
fell before the bullet flew, and lay perfectly still, waiting. And his wicked friend
and teacher stood also in the background, waiting.”

“
We
are waiting,” said Cockspur, “and I feel as if I couldn’t wait.”

“
James
Mair, already broken with remorse, rushed across to the fallen man and bent over
to lift him up. He had thrown away his pistol like an unclean thing; but Maurice’s
pistol still lay under his hand and it was undischarged. Then as the elder man
bent over the younger, the younger lifted himself on his left arm and shot the
elder through the body. He knew he was not so good a shot, but there was no
question of missing the heart at that distance.”

The
rest of the company had risen and stood staring down at the narrator with pale faces.
“Are you sure of this?” asked Sir John at last, in a thick voice.

“
I
am sure of it,” said Father Brown, “and now I leave Maurice Mair, the present Marquis
of Marne, to your Christian charity. You have told me something to-day about
Christian charity. You seemed to me to give it almost too large a place; but
how fortunate it is for poor sinners like this man that you err so much on the
side of mercy, and are ready to be reconciled to all mankind.”

“
Hang
it all,” exploded the general; “if you think I’m going to be reconciled to a filthy
viper like that, I tell you I wouldn’t say a word to save him from hell. I said
I could pardon a regular decent duel, but of all the treacherous assassins — —”

“
He
ought to be lynched,” cried Cockspur excitedly. “He ought to burn alive like a nigger
in the States. And if there is such a thing as burning for ever, he jolly well
— —”

“
I
wouldn’t touch him with a barge-pole myself,” said Mallow.

“
There
is a limit to human charity,” said Lady Outram, trembling all over.

“
There
is,” said Father Brown dryly; “and that is the real difference between human charity
and Christian charity. You must forgive me if I was not altogether crushed by
your contempt for my uncharitableness to-day; or by the lectures you read me
about pardon for every sinner. For it seems to me that you only pardon the sins
that you don’t really think sinful. You only forgive criminals when they commit
what you don’t regard as crimes, but rather as conventions. So you tolerate a
conventional duel, just as you tolerate a conventional divorce. You forgive
because there isn’t anything to be forgiven.”

“
But,
hang it all,” cried Mallow, “you don’t expect us to be able to pardon a vile thing
like this?”

“
No,”
said the priest; “but we have to be able to pardon it.”

He
stood up abruptly and looked round at them.

“
We
have to touch such men, not with a bargepole, but with a benediction,” he said.
“We have to say the word that will save them from hell. We alone are left to deliver
them from despair when your human charity deserts them. Go on your own primrose
path pardoning all your favourite vices and being generous to your fashionable
crimes; and leave us in the darkness, vampires of the night, to console those
who really need consolation; who do things really indefensible, things that
neither the world nor they themselves can defend; and none but a priest will
pardon. Leave us with the men who commit the mean and revolting and real
crimes; mean as St. Peter when the cock crew, and yet the dawn came.”

“
The
dawn,” repeated Mallow doubtfully. “You mean hope — for him?”

“
Yes,”
replied the other. “Let me ask you one question. You are great ladies and men of
honour and secure of yourselves; you would never, you can tell yourselves, stoop
to such squalid reason as that. But tell me this. If any of you had so stooped,
which of you, years afterwards, when you were old and rich and safe, would have
been driven by conscience or confessor to tell such a story of yourself? You
say you could not commit so base a crime. Could you confess so base a crime?”
The others gathered their possessions together and drifted by twos and threes
out of the room in silence. And Father Brown, also in silence, went back to the
melancholy castle of Marne.

“ —
the
sort of murders in which I played the part of the murderer,” said Father Brown,
putting down the wineglass. The row of red pictures of crime had passed before him
in that moment.

“
It
is true,” he resumed, after a momentary pause, “that somebody else had played the
part of the murderer before me and done me out of the actual experience. I was
a sort of understudy; always in a state of being ready to act the assassin. I
always made it my business, at least, to know the part thoroughly. What I mean
is that, when I tried to imagine the state of mind in which such a thing would
be done, I always realized that I might have done it myself under certain mental
conditions, but not under others; and not generally under the obvious ones. And
then, of course, I knew who really had done it; and he was not generally the
obvious person.

“
For
instance, it seemed obvious to say that the revolutionary poet had killed the old
judge who saw red about red revolutionaries. But that isn’t really a reason for
the revolutionary poet killing him. It isn’t, if you think what it would really
be like to be a revolutionary poet. Now I set myself conscientiously down to be
a revolutionary poet. I mean that particular sort of pessimistic anarchial
lover of revolt, not as reform, but rather as destruction. I tried to clear my
mind of such elements of sanity and constructive common sense as I have had the
luck to learn or inherit. I shut down and darkened all the skylights through
which comes the good daylight out of heaven; I imagined a mind lit only by a
red light from below; a fire rending rocks and cleaving abysses upwards. And
even with the vision at its wildest and worst, I could not see why such a
visionary should cut short his own career by colliding with a common policeman,
for killing one out of a million conventional old fools, as he would have
called them. He wouldn’t do it; however much he wrote songs of violence. He
wouldn’t do it, because he wrote songs of violence. A man who can express
himself in song need not express himself in suicide. A poem was an event to
him; and he would want to have more of them. Then I thought of another sort of
heathen; the sort that is not destroying the world but entirely depending on
the world. I thought that, save for the grace of God, I might have been a man
for whom the world was a blaze of electric lights, with nothing but utter
darkness beyond and around it. The worldly man, who really lives only for this
world and believes in no other, whose worldly success and pleasure are all he
can ever snatch out of nothingness — that is the man who will really do anything,
when he is in danger of losing the whole world and saving nothing. It is not
the revolutionary man but the respectable man who would commit any crime — to
save his respectability. Think what exposure would mean to a man like that fashionable
barrister; and exposure of the one crime still really hated by his fashionable
world — treason against patriotism. If I had been in his position, and had
nothing better than his philosophy, heaven alone knows what I might have done.
That is just where this little religious exercise is so wholesome.”

“
Some
people would think it was rather morbid,” said Grandison Chace dubiously.

“
Some
people,” said Father Brown gravely, “undoubtedly do think that charity and humility
are morbid. Our friend the poet probably would. But I’m not arguing those
questions; I’m only trying to answer your question about how I generally go to
work. Some of your countrymen have apparently done me the honour to ask how I
managed to frustrate a few miscarriages of justice. Well, you can go back and
tell them that I do it by morbidity. But I most certainly don’t want them to
think I do it by magic.”

Chace
continued to look at him with a reflective frown; he was too intelligent not to
understand the idea; he would also have said that he was too healthy-minded to like
it. He felt as if he were talking to one man and yet to a hundred murderers.
There was something uncanny about that very small figure, perched like a goblin
beside the goblin stove; and the sense that its round head had held such a
universe of wild unreason and imaginative injustice. It was as if the vast void
of dark behind it were a throng of dark gigantic figures, the ghosts of great
criminals held at bay by the magic circle of the red stove, but ready to tear
their master in pieces.

“
Well,
I’m afraid I do think it’s morbid,” he said frankly. “And I’m not sure it isn’t
almost as morbid as magic. But morbidity or no, there’s one thing to be said; it
must be an interesting experience.” Then he added, after reflection: “I don’t
know whether you would make a really good criminal. But you ought to make a
rattling good novelist.”

“
I
only have to deal with real events,” said Father Brown. “But it’s sometimes harder
to imagine real things than unreal ones.”

“
Especially,”
said the other, “when they are the great crimes of the world.”

“
It’s
not the great crimes but the small crimes that are really hard to imagine,” replied
the priest.

“
I
don’t quite know what you mean by that,” said Chace.

“
I
mean commonplace crimes like stealing jewels,” said Father Brown; “like that affair
of the emerald necklace or the Ruby of Meru or the artificial goldfish. The
difficulty in those cases is that you’ve got to make your mind small. High and
mighty humbugs, who deal in big ideas, don’t do those obvious things. I was sure
the Prophet hadn’t taken the ruby; or the Count the goldfish; though a man like
Bankes might easily take the emeralds. For them, a jewel is a piece of glass:
and they can see through the glass. But the little, literal people take it at
its market value.

“
For
that you’ve got to have a small mind. It’s awfully hard to get; like focusing smaller
and sharper in a wobbling camera. But some things helped; and they threw a lot
of light on the mystery, too. For instance, the sort of man who brags about
having ‘shown up’ sham magicians or poor quacks of any sort — he’s always got a
small mind. He is the sort of man who ‘sees through’ tramps and trips them up
in telling lies. I dare say it might sometimes be a painful duty. It’s an
uncommonly base pleasure. The moment I realized what a small mind meant, I knew
where to look for it — in the man who wanted to expose the Prophet — and it was
he that sneaked the ruby; in the man who jeered at his sister’s psychic fancies
— and it was he who nabbed the emeralds. Men like that always have their eye on
jewels; they never could rise, with the higher humbugs, to despising jewels.
Those criminals with small minds are always quite conventional. They become
criminals out of sheer conventionality.

“
It
takes you quite a long time to feel so crudely as that, though. It’s quite a wild
effort of imagination to be so conventional. To want one potty little object as
seriously as all that. But you can do it. ... You can get nearer to it. Begin
by thinking of being a greedy child; of how you might have stolen a sweet in a
shop; of how there was one particular sweet you wanted … then you must subtract
the childish poetry; shut off the fairy light that shone on the sweet-stuff
shop; imagine you really think you know the world and the market value of
sweets … you contract your mind like the camera focus … the thing shapes and
then sharpens ... and then, suddenly, it comes!”

He
spoke like a man who had once captured a divine vision. Grandison Chace was still
looking at him with a frown of mingled mystification and interest. It must be
confessed that there did flash once beneath his heavy frown a look of something
almost like alarm. It was as if the shock of the first strange confession of
the priest still thrilled faintly through him like the last vibration of a
thunderclap in the room. Under the surface he was saying to himself that the
mistake had only been a temporary madness; that, of course. Father Brown could
not really be the monster and murderer he had beheld for that blinding and
bewildering instant. But was there not something wrong with the man who talked
in that calm way about being a murderer? Was it possible that the priest was a
little mad?

“
Don’t
you think,” he said, abruptly; “that this notion of yours, of a man trying to feel
like a criminal, might make him a little too tolerant of crime?”

Father
Brown sat up and spoke in a more staccato style.

“
I
know it does just the opposite. It solves the whole problem of time and sin. It
gives a man his remorse beforehand.”

There
was a silence; the American looked at the high and steep roof that stretched half
across the enclosure; his host gazed into the fire without moving; and then the
priest’s voice came on a different note, as if from lower down.

“
There
are two ways of renouncing the devil,” he said; “and the difference is perhaps the
deepest chasm in modern religion. One is to have a horror of him because he is
so far off; and the other to have it because he is so near. And no virtue and
vice are so much divided as those two virtues.”

They
did not answer and he went on in the same heavy tone, as if he were dropping words
like molten lead.

“
You
may think a crime horrible because you could never commit it. I think it horrible
because I could commit it. You think of it as something like an eruption of
Vesuvius; but that would not really be so terrible as this house catching fire.
If a criminal suddenly appeared in this room — —”

“
If
a criminal appeared in this room,” said Chace, smiling, “I think you would be a
good deal too favourable to him. Apparently you would start by telling him that
you were a criminal yourself and explaining how perfectly natural it was that he
should have picked his father’s pocket or cut his mother’s throat. Frankly, I
don’t think it’s practical. I think that the practical effect would be that no
criminal would ever reform. It’s easy enough to theorize and take hypothetical
cases; but we all know we’re only talking in the air. Sitting here in M.
Duroc’s nice, comfortable house, conscious of our respectability and all the
rest of it, it just gives us a theatrical thrill to talk about thieves and murderers
and the mysteries of their souls. But the people who really have to deal with
thieves and murderers have to deal with them differently. We are safe by the
fireside; and we know the house is not on fire. We know there is not a criminal
in the room.”

The
M. Duroc to whom allusion had been made rose slowly from what had been called his
fireside, and his huge shadow flung from the fire seemed to cover everything
and darken even the very night above him.

“
There
is a criminal in this room,” he said. “I am one. I am Flambeau, and the police of
two hemispheres are still hunting for me.”

The
American remained gazing at him with eyes of a stony brightness; he seemed unable
to speak or move.

“
There
is nothing mystical, or metaphorical, or vicarious about my confession,” said Flambeau.
“I stole for twenty years with these two hands; I fled from the police on these
two feet. I hope you will admit that my activities were practical. I hope you
will admit that my judges and pursuers really had to deal with crime. Do you
think I do not know all about their way of reprehending it? Have I not heard
the sermons of the righteous and seen the cold stare of the respectable; have I
not been lectured in the lofty and distant style, asked how it was possible for
anyone to fall so low, told that no decent person could ever have dreamed of such
depravity? Do you think all that ever did anything but make me laugh? Only my
friend told me that he knew exactly why I stole; and I have never stolen
since.”

Father
Brown made a gesture as of deprecation; and Grandison Chace at last let out a long
breath like a whistle.

“
I
have told you the exact truth,” said Flambeau; “and it is open to you to hand me
over to the police.”

There
was an instant of profound stillness, in which could be faintly heard the belated
laughter of Flambeau’s children in the high, dark house above them, and the
crunching and snorting of the great, grey pigs in the twilight. And then it was
cloven by a high voice, vibrant and with a touch of offence, almost surprising
for those who do not understand the sensitive American spirit, and how near, in
spite of commonplace contrasts, it can sometimes come to the chivalry of Spain.

“
Monsieur
Duroc,” he said rather stiffly. “We have been friends, I hope, for some considerable
period; and I should be pretty much pained to suppose you thought me capable of
playing you such a trick while I was enjoying your hospitality and the society
of your family, merely because you chose to tell me a little of your own
autobiography of your own free will. And when you spoke merely in defence of
your friend — no, sir, I can’t imagine any gentleman double-crossing another
under such circumstances; it would be a damned sight better to be a dirty
informer and sell men’s blood for money. But in a case like this — — ! Could
you conceive any man being such a Judas?”

“
I
could try.” said Father Brown.