Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 90
‘Now what we want from you, Mr Grant,’ said the Inspector gravely, dropping without further parley into tones of courtesy, ‘is simply your evidence on one very important fact. I am greatly grieved at the misunderstanding by which you have suffered, but I am sure you wish to serve the ends of justice. I believe you came into this bar just after it opened, at half-past five, and were served with a glass of whisky. We are not certain what servant of the hotel, whether the barman or the manager or some subordinate, was in the bar at the time. Will you look round the room, and tell me whether the bar-attendant who served you is present here.’
‘Aye, he’s present,’ said Mr Grant, grimly smiling, having swept the group with a shrewd glance. ‘I’d know him anywhere; and ye’ll agree he’s big enough to be seen. Do ye have all your inn-servants as grand as yon?’
The Inspector’s eye remained hard and steady, and his voice colourless and continuous; the face of Father Brown was a blank; but on many other faces there was a cloud; the barman was not particularly big and not at all grand; and the manager was decidedly small.
‘We only want the barman identified,’ said the Inspector calmly. ‘Of course we know him; but we should like you to verify it independently. You mean . . .?’ And he stopped suddenly.
‘Weel, there he is plain enough,’ said the Scotchman wearily; and made a gesture, and with that gesture the gigantic Jukes, the prince of commercial travellers, rose like a trumpeting elephant; and in a flash had three policemen fastened on him like hounds on a wild beast.
‘Well, all that was simple enough,’ said Father Brown to his friend afterwards. ‘As I told you, the instant I entered the empty bar-room, my first thought was that, if the barman left the bar unguarded like that, there was nothing in the world to stop you or me or anybody else lifting the flap and walking in, and putting poison in any of the bottles standing waiting for customers. Of course, a practical poisoner would probably do it as Jukes did, by substituting a poisoned bottle for the ordinary bottle; that could be done in a flash. It was easy enough for him, as he travelled in bottles, to carry a flask of cherry brandy prepared and of the same pattern. Of course, it requires one condition; but it’s a fairly common condition. It would hardly do to start poisoning the beer or whisky that scores of people drink; it would cause a massacre. But when a man is well known as drinking only one special thing, like cherry brandy, that isn’t very widely drunk, it’s just like poisoning him in his own home. Only it’s a jolly sight safer. For practically the whole suspicion instantly falls on the hotel, or somebody to do with the hotel; and there’s no earthly argument to show that it was done by anyone out of a hundred customers that might come into the bar: even if people realized that a customer could do it. It was about as absolutely anonymous and irresponsible a murder as a man could commit.’
‘And why exactly did the murderer commit it?’ asked his friend.
Father Brown rose and gravely gathered the papers which he had previously scattered in a moment of distraction.
‘May I recall your attention,’ he said smiling, ‘to the materials of the forthcoming Life and Letters of the Late John Raggley? Or, for that matter, his own spoken words? He said in this very bar that he was going to expose a scandal about the management of hotels; and the scandal was the pretty common one of a corrupt agreement between hotel proprietors and a salesman who took and gave secret commissions, so that his business had a monopoly of all the drink sold in the place. It wasn’t even an open slavery like an ordinary tied house; it was a swindle at the expense of everybody the manager was supposed to serve. It was a legal offence. So the ingenious Jukes, taking the first moment when the bar was empty, as it often was, stepped inside and made the exchange of bottles; unfortunately at that very moment a Scotchman in an Inverness cape came in harshly demanding whisky. Jukes saw his only chance was to pretend to be the barman and serve the customer. He was very much relieved that the customer was a Quick One.’
‘I think you’re rather a Quick One yourself,’ observed Greenwood; ‘if you say you smelt something at the start, in the mere air of an empty room. Did you suspect Jukes at all at the start?’
‘Well, he sounded rather rich somehow,’ answered Father Brown vaguely. ‘You know when a man has a rich voice. And I did sort of ask myself why he should have such a disgustingly rich voice, when all those honest fellows were fairly poor. But I think I knew he was a sham when I saw that big shining breast-pin.’
‘You mean because it was sham?’ asked Greenwood doubtfully.
‘Oh, no; because it was genuine,’ said Father Brown.
The Blast of the Book
Professor Openshaw always lost his temper, with a loud bang, if anybody called him a Spiritualist; or a believer in Spiritualism. This, however, did not exhaust his explosive elements; for he also lost his temper if anybody called him a disbeliever in Spiritualism. It was his pride to have given his whole life to investigating Psychic Phenomena; it was also his pride never to have given a hint of whether he thought they were really psychic or merely phenomenal. He enjoyed nothing so much as to sit in a circle of devout Spiritualists and give devastating descriptions of how he had exposed medium after medium and detected fraud after fraud; for indeed he was a man of much detective talent and insight, when once he had fixed his eye on an object, and he always fixed his eye on a medium, as a highly suspicious object. There was a story of his having spotted the same Spiritualist mountebank under three different disguises: dressed as a woman, a white-bearded old man, and a Brahmin of a rich chocolate brown. These recitals made the true believers rather restless, as indeed they were intended to do; but they could hardly complain, for no Spiritualist denies the existence of fraudulent mediums; only the Professor’s flowing narrative might well seem to indicate that all mediums were fraudulent.
But woe to the simple-minded and innocent Materialist (and Materialists as a race are rather innocent and simple-minded) who, presuming on this narrative tendency, should advance the thesis that ghosts were against the laws of nature, or that such things were only old superstitions; or that it was all tosh, or, alternatively, bunk. Him would the Professor, suddenly reversing all his scientific batteries, sweep from the field with a cannonade of unquestionable cases and unexplained phenomena, of which the wretched rationalist had never heard in his life, giving all the dates and details, stating all the attempted and abandoned natural explanations; stating everything, indeed, except whether he, John Oliver Openshaw, did or did not believe in Spirits, and that neither Spiritualist nor Materialist could ever boast of finding out.
Professor Openshaw, a lean figure with pale leonine hair and hypnotic blue eyes, stood exchanging a few words with Father Brown, who was a friend of his, on the steps outside the hotel where both had been breakfasting that morning and sleeping the night before. The Professor had come back rather late from one of this grand experiments, in general exasperation, and was still tingling with the fight that he always waged alone and against both sides.
‘Oh, I don’t mind you,’ he said laughing. ‘You don’t believe in it even if it’s true. But all these people are perpetually asking me what I’m trying to prove. They don’t seem to understand that I’m a man of science. A man of science isn’t trying to prove anything. He’s trying to find out what will prove itself.’
‘But he hasn’t found out yet,’ said Father Brown.
‘Well, I have some little notions of my own, that are not quite so negative as most people think,’ answered the Professor, after an instant of frowning silence; ‘anyhow, I’ve begun to fancy that if there is something to be found, they’re looking for it along the wrong line. It’s all too theatrical; it’s showing off, all their shiny ectoplasm and trumpets and voices and the rest; all on the model of old melodramas and mouldy historical novels about the Family Ghost. If they’d go to history instead of historical novels, I’m beginning to think they’d really find something. But not Apparitions.’
‘After all,’ said Father Brown, ‘Apparitions are only Appearances. I suppose you’d say the Family Ghost is only keeping up appearances.’
The Professor’s gaze, which had commonly a fine abstracted character, suddenly fixed and focused itself as it did on a dubious medium. It had rather the air of a man screwing a strong magnifying-glass into his eye. Not that he thought the priest was in the least like a dubious medium; but he was startled into attention by his friend’s thought following so closely on his own.
‘Appearances!’ he muttered, ‘crikey, but it’s odd you should say that just now. The more I learn, the more I fancy they lose by merely looking for appearances. Now if they’d look a little into Disappearances—’
‘Yes,’ said Father Brown, ‘after all, the real fairy legends weren’t so very much about the appearance of famous fairies; calling up Titania or exhibiting Oberon by moonlight. But there were no end of legends about people disappearing, because they were stolen by the fairies. Are you on the track of Kilmeny or Thomas the Rhymer?’
‘I’m on the track of ordinary modern people you’ve read of in the newspapers,’ answered Openshaw. ‘You may well stare; but that’s my game just now; and I’ve been on it for a long time. Frankly, I think a lot of psychic appearances could be explained away. It’s the disappearances I can’t explain, unless they’re psychic. These people in the newspaper who vanish and are never found — if you knew the details as I do ... and now only this morning I got confirmation; an extraordinary letter from an old missionary, quite a respectable old boy. He’s coming to see me at my office this morning. Perhaps you’d lunch with me or something; and I’d tell the results — in confidence.’
‘Thanks; I will — unless,’ said Father Brown modestly, ‘the fairies have stolen me by then.’
With that they parted and Openshaw walked round the corner to a small office he rented in the neighbourhood; chiefly for the publication of a small periodical, of psychical and psychological notes of the driest and most agnostic sort. He had only one clerk, who sat at a desk in the outer office, totting up figures and facts for the purposes of the printed report; and the Professor paused to ask if Mr Pringle had called. The clerk answered mechanically in the negative and went on mechanically adding up figures; and the Professor turned towards the inner room that was his study. ‘Oh, by the way, Berridge,’ he added, without turning round, ‘if Mr Pringle comes, send him straight in to me. You needn’t interrupt your work; I rather want those notes finished tonight if possible. You might leave them on my desk tomorrow, if I am late.’
And he went into his private office, still brooding on the problem which the name of Pringle had raised; or rather, perhaps, had ratified and confirmed in his mind. Even the most perfectly balanced of agnostics is partially human; and it is possible that the missionary’s letter seemed to have greater weight as promising to support his private and still tentative hypothesis. He sat down in his large and comfortable chair, opposite the engraving of Montaigne; and read once more the short letter from the Rev. Luke Pringle, making the appointment for that morning. No man knew better than Professor Openshaw the marks of the letter of the crank; the crowded details; the spidery handwriting; the unnecessary length and repetition. There were none of these things in this case; but a brief and businesslike typewritten statement that the writer had encountered some curious cases of Disappearance, which seemed to fall within the province of the Professor as a student of psychic problems. The Professor was favourably impressed; nor had he any unfavourable impression, in spite of a slight movement of surprise, when he looked up and saw that the Rev. Luke Pringle was already in the room.
‘Your clerk told me to come straight in,’ said Mr Pringle apologetically, but with a broad and rather agreeable grin. The grin was partly masked by masses of reddish-grey beard and whiskers; a perfect jungle of a beard, such as is sometimes grown by white men living in the jungles; but the eyes above the snub nose had nothing about them in the least wild or outlandish. Openshaw had instantly turned on them that concentrated spotlight or burning-glass of sceptical scrutiny which he turned on many men to see if they were mountebanks or maniacs; and, in this case, he had a rather unusual sense of reassurance. The wild beard might have belonged to a crank, but the eyes completely contradicted the beard; they were full of that quite frank and friendly laughter which is never found in the faces of those who are serious frauds or serious lunatics. He would have expected a man with those eyes to be a Philistine, a jolly sceptic, a man who shouted out shallow but hearty contempt of ghosts and spirits; but anyhow, no professional humbug could afford to look as frivolous as that. The man was buttoned up to the throat in a shabby old cape, and only his broad limp hat suggested the cleric; but missionaries from wild places do not always bother to dress like clerics.
‘You probably think all this another hoax. Professor,’ said Mr Pringle, with a sort of abstract enjoyment, ‘and I hope you will forgive my laughing at your very natural air of disapproval. All the same, I’ve got to tell my story to somebody who knows, because it’s true. And, all joking apart, it’s tragic as well as true. Well, to cut it short, I was missionary in Nya-Nya, a station in West Africa, in the thick of the forests, where almost the only other white man was the officer in command of the district, Captain Wales; and he and I grew rather thick. Not that he liked missions; he was, if I may say so, thick in many ways; one of those square-headed, square-shouldered men of action who hardly need to think, let alone believe.
That’s what makes it all the queerer. One day he came back to his tent in the forest, after a short leave, and said he had gone through a jolly rum experience, and didn’t know what to do about it. He was holding a rusty old book in a leather binding, and he put it down on a table beside his revolver and an old Arab sword he kept, probably as a curiosity. He said this book had belonged to a man on the boat he had just come off; and the man swore that nobody must open the book, or look inside it; or else they would be carried off by the devil, or disappear, or something. Wales said this was all nonsense, of course; and they had a quarrel; and the upshot seems to have been that this man, taunted with cowardice or superstition, actually did look into the book; and instantly dropped it; walked to the side of the boat—’
‘One moment,’ said the Professor, who had made one or two notes. ‘Before you tell me anything else. Did this man tell Wales where he had got the book, or who it originally belonged to?’
‘Yes,’ replied Pringle, now entirely grave. ‘It seems he said he was bringing it back to Dr Hankey, the Oriental traveller now in England, to whom it originally belonged, and who had warned him of its strange properties. Well, Hankey is an able man and a rather crabbed and sneering sort of man; which makes it queerer still. But the point of Wales’s story is much simpler. It is that the man who had looked into the book walked straight over the side of the ship, and was never seen again.’
‘Do you believe it yourself?’ asked Openshaw after a pause.
‘Well, I do,’ replied Pringle. ‘I believe it for two reasons. First, that Wales was an entirely unimaginative man; and he added one touch that only an imaginative man could have added. He said that the man walked straight over the side on a still and calm day; but there was no splash.’
The Professor looked at his notes for some seconds in silence; and then said: ‘And your other reason for believing it?’
‘My other reason,’ answered the Rev. Luke Pringle, ‘is what I saw myself.’
There was another silence; until he continued in the same matter-of-fact way. Whatever he had, he had nothing of the eagerness with which the crank, or even the believer, tried to convince others.
‘I told you that Wales put down the book on the table beside the sword. There was only one entrance to the tent; and it happened that I was standing in it, looking out into the forest, with my back to my companion. He was standing by the table grumbling and growling about the whole business; saying it was tomfoolery in the twentieth century to be frightened of opening a book; asking why the devil he shouldn’t open it himself. Then some instinct stirred in me and I said he had better not do that, it had better be returned to Dr Hankey. “What harm could it do?” he said restlessly. “What harm did it do?” I answered obstinately. “What happened to your friend on the boat?” He didn’t answer, indeed I didn’t know what he could answer; but I pressed my logical advantage in mere vanity. “If it comes to that,” I said, “what is your version of what really happened on the boat?” Still he didn’t answer; and I looked round and saw that he wasn’t there.
‘The tent was empty. The book was lying on the table; open, but on its face, as if he had turned it downwards. But the sword was lying on the ground near the other side of the tent; and the canvas of the tent showed a great slash, as if somebody had hacked his way out with the sword. The gash in the tent gaped at me; but showed only the dark glimmer of the forest outside. And when I went across and looked through the rent I could not be certain whether the tangle of the tall plants and the undergrowth had been bent or broken; at least not farther than a few feet. I have never seen or heard of Captain Wales from that day.
‘I wrapped the book up in brown paper, taking good care not to look at it; and I brought it back to England, intending at first to return it to Dr Hankey. Then I saw some notes in your paper suggesting a hypothesis about such things; and I decided to stop on the way and put the matter before you; as you have a name for being balanced and having an open mind.’
