Chương Chương 7 · The Wrong Shape

. The Wrong Shape

Certain of the great roads going north out of London continue far into

the country a sort of attenuated and interrupted spectre of a street,

with great gaps in the building, but preserving the line. Here will be a

group of shops, followed by a fenced field or paddock, and then a famous

public-house, and then perhaps a market garden or a nursery garden, and

then one large private house, and then another field and another inn,

and so on. If anyone walks along one of these roads he will pass a house

which will probably catch his eye, though he may not be able to explain

its attraction. It is a long, low house, running parallel with the road,

painted mostly white and pale green, with a veranda and sun-blinds, and

porches capped with those quaint sort of cupolas like wooden umbrellas

that one sees in some old-fashioned houses. In fact, it is an

old-fashioned house, very English and very suburban in the good old

wealthy Clapham sense. And yet the house has a look of having been built

chiefly for the hot weather. Looking at its white paint and sun-blinds

one thinks vaguely of pugarees and even of palm trees. I cannot trace

the feeling to its root; perhaps the place was built by an Anglo-Indian.

Anyone passing this house, I say, would be namelessly fascinated by it;

would feel that it was a place about which some story was to be told.

And he would have been right, as you shall shortly hear. For this is the

story--the story of the strange things that did really happen in it in

the Whitsuntide of the year 18--:

Anyone passing the house on the Thursday before Whit-Sunday at about

half-past four p.m. would have seen the front door open, and Father

Brown, of the small church of St. Mungo, come out smoking a large pipe

in company with a very tall French friend of his called Flambeau, who

was smoking a very small cigarette. These persons may or may not be of

interest to the reader, but the truth is that they were not the only

interesting things that were displayed when the front door of the

white-and-green house was opened. There are further peculiarities about

this house, which must be described to start with, not only that the

reader may understand this tragic tale, but also that he may realise

what it was that the opening of the door revealed.

The whole house was built upon the plan of a T, but a T with a very long

cross piece and a very short tail piece. The long cross piece was the

frontage that ran along in face of the street, with the front door

in the middle; it was two stories high, and contained nearly all

the important rooms. The short tail piece, which ran out at the back

immediately opposite the front door, was one story high, and consisted

only of two long rooms, the one leading into the other. The first of

these two rooms was the study in which the celebrated Mr. Quinton wrote

his wild Oriental poems and romances. The farther room was a glass

conservatory full of tropical blossoms of quite unique and almost

monstrous beauty, and on such afternoons as these glowing with gorgeous

sunlight. Thus when the hall door was open, many a passer-by literally

stopped to stare and gasp; for he looked down a perspective of rich

apartments to something really like a transformation scene in a fairy

play: purple clouds and golden suns and crimson stars that were at once

scorchingly vivid and yet transparent and far away.

Leonard Quinton, the poet, had himself most carefully arranged this

effect; and it is doubtful whether he so perfectly expressed his

personality in any of his poems. For he was a man who drank and bathed

in colours, who indulged his lust for colour somewhat to the neglect

of form--even of good form. This it was that had turned his genius

so wholly to eastern art and imagery; to those bewildering carpets

or blinding embroideries in which all the colours seem fallen into a

fortunate chaos, having nothing to typify or to teach. He had attempted,

not perhaps with complete artistic success, but with acknowledged

imagination and invention, to compose epics and love stories reflecting

the riot of violent and even cruel colour; tales of tropical heavens

of burning gold or blood-red copper; of eastern heroes who rode with

twelve-turbaned mitres upon elephants painted purple or peacock green;

of gigantic jewels that a hundred negroes could not carry, but which

burned with ancient and strange-hued fires.

In short (to put the matter from the more common point of view), he

dealt much in eastern heavens, rather worse than most western hells; in

eastern monarchs, whom we might possibly call maniacs; and in eastern

jewels which a Bond Street jeweller (if the hundred staggering negroes

brought them into his shop) might possibly not regard as genuine.

Quinton was a genius, if a morbid one; and even his morbidity appeared

more in his life than in his work. In temperament he was weak and

waspish, and his health had suffered heavily from oriental experiments

with opium. His wife--a handsome, hard-working, and, indeed, over-worked

woman objected to the opium, but objected much more to a live Indian

hermit in white and yellow robes, whom her husband insisted on

entertaining for months together, a Virgil to guide his spirit through

the heavens and the hells of the east.

It was out of this artistic household that Father Brown and his friend

stepped on to the door-step; and to judge from their faces, they stepped

out of it with much relief. Flambeau had known Quinton in wild student

days in Paris, and they had renewed the acquaintance for a week-end; but

apart from Flambeau’s more responsible developments of late, he did not

get on well with the poet now. Choking oneself with opium and writing

little erotic verses on vellum was not his notion of how a gentleman

should go to the devil. As the two paused on the door-step, before

taking a turn in the garden, the front garden gate was thrown open with

violence, and a young man with a billycock hat on the back of his head

tumbled up the steps in his eagerness. He was a dissipated-looking youth

with a gorgeous red necktie all awry, as if he had slept in it, and he

kept fidgeting and lashing about with one of those little jointed canes.

“I say,” he said breathlessly, “I want to see old Quinton. I must see

him. Has he gone?”

“Mr. Quinton is in, I believe,” said Father Brown, cleaning his pipe,

“but I do not know if you can see him. The doctor is with him at

present.”

The young man, who seemed not to be perfectly sober, stumbled into the

hall; and at the same moment the doctor came out of Quinton’s study,

shutting the door and beginning to put on his gloves.

“See Mr. Quinton?” said the doctor coolly. “No, I’m afraid you can’t. In

fact, you mustn’t on any account. Nobody must see him; I’ve just given

him his sleeping draught.”

“No, but look here, old chap,” said the youth in the red tie, trying

affectionately to capture the doctor by the lapels of his coat. “Look

here. I’m simply sewn up, I tell you. I--”

“It’s no good, Mr. Atkinson,” said the doctor, forcing him to fall back;

“when you can alter the effects of a drug I’ll alter my decision,” and,

settling on his hat, he stepped out into the sunlight with the other

two. He was a bull-necked, good-tempered little man with a small

moustache, inexpressibly ordinary, yet giving an impression of capacity.

The young man in the billycock, who did not seem to be gifted with any

tact in dealing with people beyond the general idea of clutching hold of

their coats, stood outside the door, as dazed as if he had been thrown

out bodily, and silently watched the other three walk away together

through the garden.

“That was a sound, spanking lie I told just now,” remarked the medical

man, laughing. “In point of fact, poor Quinton doesn’t have his sleeping

draught for nearly half an hour. But I’m not going to have him bothered

with that little beast, who only wants to borrow money that he wouldn’t

pay back if he could. He’s a dirty little scamp, though he is Mrs.

Quinton’s brother, and she’s as fine a woman as ever walked.”

“Yes,” said Father Brown. “She’s a good woman.”

“So I propose to hang about the garden till the creature has cleared

off,” went on the doctor, “and then I’ll go in to Quinton with the

medicine. Atkinson can’t get in, because I locked the door.”

“In that case, Dr. Harris,” said Flambeau, “we might as well walk round

at the back by the end of the conservatory. There’s no entrance to it

that way, but it’s worth seeing, even from the outside.”

“Yes, and I might get a squint at my patient,” laughed the doctor, “for

he prefers to lie on an ottoman right at the end of the conservatory

amid all those blood-red poinsettias; it would give me the creeps. But

what are you doing?”

Father Brown had stopped for a moment, and picked up out of the long

grass, where it had almost been wholly hidden, a queer, crooked Oriental

knife, inlaid exquisitely in coloured stones and metals.

“What is this?” asked Father Brown, regarding it with some disfavour.

“Oh, Quinton’s, I suppose,” said Dr. Harris carelessly; “he has all

sorts of Chinese knickknacks about the place. Or perhaps it belongs to

that mild Hindoo of his whom he keeps on a string.”

“What Hindoo?” asked Father Brown, still staring at the dagger in his

hand.

“Oh, some Indian conjuror,” said the doctor lightly; “a fraud, of

course.”

“You don’t believe in magic?” asked Father Brown, without looking up.

“O crickey! magic!” said the doctor.

“It’s very beautiful,” said the priest in a low, dreaming voice; “the

colours are very beautiful. But it’s the wrong shape.”

“What for?” asked Flambeau, staring.

“For anything. It’s the wrong shape in the abstract. Don’t you ever feel

that about Eastern art? The colours are intoxicatingly lovely; but the

shapes are mean and bad--deliberately mean and bad. I have seen wicked

things in a Turkey carpet.”

“Mon Dieu!” cried Flambeau, laughing.

“They are letters and symbols in a language I don’t know; but I know

they stand for evil words,” went on the priest, his voice growing lower

and lower. “The lines go wrong on purpose--like serpents doubling to

escape.”

“What the devil are you talking about?” said the doctor with a loud

laugh.

Flambeau spoke quietly to him in answer. “The Father sometimes gets this

mystic’s cloud on him,” he said; “but I give you fair warning that I

have never known him to have it except when there was some evil quite

near.”

“Oh, rats!” said the scientist.

“Why, look at it,” cried Father Brown, holding out the crooked knife at

arm’s length, as if it were some glittering snake. “Don’t you see it is

the wrong shape? Don’t you see that it has no hearty and plain purpose?

It does not point like a spear. It does not sweep like a scythe. It does

not look like a weapon. It looks like an instrument of torture.”

“Well, as you don’t seem to like it,” said the jolly Harris, “it had

better be taken back to its owner. Haven’t we come to the end of this

confounded conservatory yet? This house is the wrong shape, if you

like.”

“You don’t understand,” said Father Brown, shaking his head. “The shape

of this house is quaint--it is even laughable. But there is nothing

wrong about it.”

As they spoke they came round the curve of glass that ended the

conservatory, an uninterrupted curve, for there was neither door nor

window by which to enter at that end. The glass, however, was clear, and

the sun still bright, though beginning to set; and they could see not

only the flamboyant blossoms inside, but the frail figure of the poet

in a brown velvet coat lying languidly on the sofa, having, apparently,

fallen half asleep over a book. He was a pale, slight man, with loose,

chestnut hair and a fringe of beard that was the paradox of his face,

for the beard made him look less manly. These traits were well known

to all three of them; but even had it not been so, it may be doubted

whether they would have looked at Quinton just then. Their eyes were

riveted on another object.

Exactly in their path, immediately outside the round end of the glass

building, was standing a tall man, whose drapery fell to his feet in

faultless white, and whose bare, brown skull, face, and neck gleamed in

the setting sun like splendid bronze. He was looking through the glass

at the sleeper, and he was more motionless than a mountain.

“Who is that?” cried Father Brown, stepping back with a hissing intake

of his breath.

“Oh, it is only that Hindoo humbug,” growled Harris; “but I don’t know

what the deuce he’s doing here.”

“It looks like hypnotism,” said Flambeau, biting his black moustache.

“Why are you unmedical fellows always talking bosh about hypnotism?”

cried the doctor. “It looks a deal more like burglary.”

“Well, we will speak to it, at any rate,” said Flambeau, who was always

for action. One long stride took him to the place where the Indian

stood. Bowing from his great height, which overtopped even the

Oriental’s, he said with placid impudence:

“Good evening, sir. Do you want anything?”

Quite slowly, like a great ship turning into a harbour, the great yellow

face turned, and looked at last over its white shoulder. They were

startled to see that its yellow eyelids were quite sealed, as in sleep.

“Thank you,” said the face in excellent English. “I want nothing.” Then,

half opening the lids, so as to show a slit of opalescent eyeball,

he repeated, “I want nothing.” Then he opened his eyes wide with a

startling stare, said, “I want nothing,” and went rustling away into the

rapidly darkening garden.

“The Christian is more modest,” muttered Father Brown; “he wants

something.”

“What on earth was he doing?” asked Flambeau, knitting his black brows

and lowering his voice.

“I should like to talk to you later,” said Father Brown.

The sunlight was still a reality, but it was the red light of evening,

and the bulk of the garden trees and bushes grew blacker and blacker

against it. They turned round the end of the conservatory, and walked in

silence down the other side to get round to the front door. As they went

they seemed to wake something, as one startles a bird, in the deeper

corner between the study and the main building; and again they saw the

white-robed fakir slide out of the shadow, and slip round towards the

front door. To their surprise, however, he had not been alone.

They found themselves abruptly pulled up and forced to banish their

bewilderment by the appearance of Mrs. Quinton, with her heavy golden

hair and square pale face, advancing on them out of the twilight. She

looked a little stern, but was entirely courteous.

“Good evening, Dr. Harris,” was all she said.

“Good evening, Mrs. Quinton,” said the little doctor heartily. “I am

just going to give your husband his sleeping draught.”

“Yes,” she said in a clear voice. “I think it is quite time.” And she

smiled at them, and went sweeping into the house.

“That woman’s over-driven,” said Father Brown; “that’s the kind of woman

that does her duty for twenty years, and then does something dreadful.”

The little doctor looked at him for the first time with an eye of

interest. “Did you ever study medicine?” he asked.

“You have to know something of the mind as well as the body,” answered

the priest; “we have to know something of the body as well as the mind.”

“Well,” said the doctor, “I think I’ll go and give Quinton his stuff.”

They had turned the corner of the front façade, and were approaching the

front doorway. As they turned into it they saw the man in the white robe

for the third time. He came so straight towards the front door that

it seemed quite incredible that he had not just come out of the study

opposite to it. Yet they knew that the study door was locked.

Father Brown and Flambeau, however, kept this weird contradiction to

themselves, and Dr. Harris was not a man to waste his thoughts on the

impossible. He permitted the omnipresent Asiatic to make his exit, and

then stepped briskly into the hall. There he found a figure which he had

already forgotten. The inane Atkinson was still hanging about, humming

and poking things with his knobby cane. The doctor’s face had a spasm of

disgust and decision, and he whispered rapidly to his companion: “I must

lock the door again, or this rat will get in. But I shall be out again

in two minutes.”

He rapidly unlocked the door and locked it again behind him, just

balking a blundering charge from the young man in the billycock. The

young man threw himself impatiently on a hall chair. Flambeau looked at

a Persian illumination on the wall; Father Brown, who seemed in a sort

of daze, dully eyed the door. In about four minutes the door was opened

again. Atkinson was quicker this time. He sprang forward, held the door

open for an instant, and called out: “Oh, I say, Quinton, I want--”

From the other end of the study came the clear voice of Quinton, in

something between a yawn and a yell of weary laughter.

“Oh, I know what you want. Take it, and leave me in peace. I’m writing a

song about peacocks.”

Before the door closed half a sovereign came flying through the

aperture; and Atkinson, stumbling forward, caught it with singular

dexterity.

“So that’s settled,” said the doctor, and, locking the door savagely, he

led the way out into the garden.

“Poor Leonard can get a little peace now,” he added to Father Brown;

“he’s locked in all by himself for an hour or two.”

“Yes,” answered the priest; “and his voice sounded jolly enough when we

left him.” Then he looked gravely round the garden, and saw the loose

figure of Atkinson standing and jingling the half-sovereign in his

pocket, and beyond, in the purple twilight, the figure of the Indian

sitting bolt upright upon a bank of grass with his face turned towards

the setting sun. Then he said abruptly: “Where is Mrs. Quinton!”

“She has gone up to her room,” said the doctor. “That is her shadow on

the blind.”

Father Brown looked up, and frowningly scrutinised a dark outline at the

gas-lit window.

“Yes,” he said, “that is her shadow,” and he walked a yard or two and

threw himself upon a garden seat.

Flambeau sat down beside him; but the doctor was one of those energetic

people who live naturally on their legs. He walked away, smoking, into

the twilight, and the two friends were left together.

“My father,” said Flambeau in French, “what is the matter with you?”

Father Brown was silent and motionless for half a minute, then he said:

“Superstition is irreligious, but there is something in the air of this

place. I think it’s that Indian--at least, partly.”

He sank into silence, and watched the distant outline of the Indian, who

still sat rigid as if in prayer. At first sight he seemed motionless,

but as Father Brown watched him he saw that the man swayed ever so

slightly with a rhythmic movement, just as the dark tree-tops swayed

ever so slightly in the wind that was creeping up the dim garden paths

and shuffling the fallen leaves a little.

The landscape was growing rapidly dark, as if for a storm, but they

could still see all the figures in their various places. Atkinson was

leaning against a tree with a listless face; Quinton’s wife was still

at her window; the doctor had gone strolling round the end of the

conservatory; they could see his cigar like a will-o’-the-wisp; and the

fakir still sat rigid and yet rocking, while the trees above him began

to rock and almost to roar. Storm was certainly coming.

“When that Indian spoke to us,” went on Brown in a conversational

undertone, “I had a sort of vision, a vision of him and all his

universe. Yet he only said the same thing three times. When first he

said ‘I want nothing,’ it meant only that he was impenetrable, that Asia

does not give itself away. Then he said again, ‘I want nothing,’ and

I knew that he meant that he was sufficient to himself, like a cosmos,

that he needed no God, neither admitted any sins. And when he said the

third time, ‘I want nothing,’ he said it with blazing eyes. And I knew

that he meant literally what he said; that nothing was his desire and

his home; that he was weary for nothing as for wine; that annihilation,

the mere destruction of everything or anything--”

Two drops of rain fell; and for some reason Flambeau started and looked

up, as if they had stung him. And the same instant the doctor down by

the end of the conservatory began running towards them, calling out

something as he ran.

As he came among them like a bombshell the restless Atkinson happened to

be taking a turn nearer to the house front; and the doctor clutched him

by the collar in a convulsive grip. “Foul play!” he cried; “what have

you been doing to him, you dog?”

The priest had sprung erect, and had the voice of steel of a soldier in

command.

“No fighting,” he cried coolly; “we are enough to hold anyone we want

to. What is the matter, doctor?”

“Things are not right with Quinton,” said the doctor, quite white. “I

could just see him through the glass, and I don’t like the way he’s

lying. It’s not as I left him, anyhow.”

“Let us go in to him,” said Father Brown shortly. “You can leave Mr.

Atkinson alone. I have had him in sight since we heard Quinton’s voice.”

“I will stop here and watch him,” said Flambeau hurriedly. “You go in

and see.”

The doctor and the priest flew to the study door, unlocked it, and fell

into the room. In doing so they nearly fell over the large mahogany

table in the centre at which the poet usually wrote; for the place was

lit only by a small fire kept for the invalid. In the middle of this

table lay a single sheet of paper, evidently left there on purpose. The

doctor snatched it up, glanced at it, handed it to Father Brown, and

crying, “Good God, look at that!” plunged toward the glass room beyond,

where the terrible tropic flowers still seemed to keep a crimson memory

of the sunset.

Father Brown read the words three times before he put down the paper.

The words were: “I die by my own hand; yet I die murdered!” They were

in the quite inimitable, not to say illegible, handwriting of Leonard

Quinton.

Then Father Brown, still keeping the paper in his hand, strode towards

the conservatory, only to meet his medical friend coming back with a

face of assurance and collapse. “He’s done it,” said Harris.

They went together through the gorgeous unnatural beauty of cactus

and azalea and found Leonard Quinton, poet and romancer, with his head

hanging downward off his ottoman and his red curls sweeping the ground.

Into his left side was thrust the queer dagger that they had picked up

in the garden, and his limp hand still rested on the hilt.

Outside the storm had come at one stride, like the night in Coleridge,

and garden and glass roof were darkened with driving rain. Father Brown

seemed to be studying the paper more than the corpse; he held it close

to his eyes; and seemed trying to read it in the twilight. Then he held

it up against the faint light, and, as he did so, lightning stared at

them for an instant so white that the paper looked black against it.

Darkness full of thunder followed, and after the thunder Father Brown’s

voice said out of the dark: “Doctor, this paper is the wrong shape.”

“What do you mean?” asked Doctor Harris, with a frowning stare.

“It isn’t square,” answered Brown. “It has a sort of edge snipped off at

the corner. What does it mean?”

“How the deuce should I know?” growled the doctor. “Shall we move this

poor chap, do you think? He’s quite dead.”

“No,” answered the priest; “we must leave him as he lies and send for

the police.” But he was still scrutinising the paper.

As they went back through the study he stopped by the table and picked

up a small pair of nail scissors. “Ah,” he said, with a sort of relief,

“this is what he did it with. But yet--” And he knitted his brows.

“Oh, stop fooling with that scrap of paper,” said the doctor

emphatically. “It was a fad of his. He had hundreds of them. He cut all

his paper like that,” as he pointed to a stack of sermon paper still

unused on another and smaller table. Father Brown went up to it and held

up a sheet. It was the same irregular shape.

“Quite so,” he said. “And here I see the corners that were snipped off.”

And to the indignation of his colleague he began to count them.

“That’s all right,” he said, with an apologetic smile. “Twenty-three

sheets cut and twenty-two corners cut off them. And as I see you are

impatient we will rejoin the others.”

“Who is to tell his wife?” asked Dr. Harris. “Will you go and tell her

now, while I send a servant for the police?”

“As you will,” said Father Brown indifferently. And he went out to the

hall door.

Here also he found a drama, though of a more grotesque sort. It showed

nothing less than his big friend Flambeau in an attitude to which he

had long been unaccustomed, while upon the pathway at the bottom of the

steps was sprawling with his boots in the air the amiable Atkinson, his

billycock hat and walking cane sent flying in opposite directions along

the path. Atkinson had at length wearied of Flambeau’s almost paternal

custody, and had endeavoured to knock him down, which was by no means a

smooth game to play with the Roi des Apaches, even after that monarch’s

abdication.

Flambeau was about to leap upon his enemy and secure him once more, when

the priest patted him easily on the shoulder.

“Make it up with Mr. Atkinson, my friend,” he said. “Beg a mutual pardon

and say ‘Good night.’ We need not detain him any longer.” Then, as

Atkinson rose somewhat doubtfully and gathered his hat and stick and

went towards the garden gate, Father Brown said in a more serious voice:

“Where is that Indian?”

They all three (for the doctor had joined them) turned involuntarily

towards the dim grassy bank amid the tossing trees purple with twilight,

where they had last seen the brown man swaying in his strange prayers.

The Indian was gone.

“Confound him,” cried the doctor, stamping furiously. “Now I know that

it was that nigger that did it.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in magic,” said Father Brown quietly.

“No more I did,” said the doctor, rolling his eyes. “I only know that

I loathed that yellow devil when I thought he was a sham wizard. And I

shall loathe him more if I come to think he was a real one.”

“Well, his having escaped is nothing,” said Flambeau. “For we could

have proved nothing and done nothing against him. One hardly goes to

the parish constable with a story of suicide imposed by witchcraft or

auto-suggestion.”

Meanwhile Father Brown had made his way into the house, and now went to

break the news to the wife of the dead man.

When he came out again he looked a little pale and tragic, but what

passed between them in that interview was never known, even when all was

known.

Flambeau, who was talking quietly with the doctor, was surprised to see

his friend reappear so soon at his elbow; but Brown took no notice, and

merely drew the doctor apart. “You have sent for the police, haven’t

you?” he asked.

“Yes,” answered Harris. “They ought to be here in ten minutes.”

“Will you do me a favour?” said the priest quietly. “The truth is, I

make a collection of these curious stories, which often contain, as in

the case of our Hindoo friend, elements which can hardly be put into a

police report. Now, I want you to write out a report of this case for

my private use. Yours is a clever trade,” he said, looking the doctor

gravely and steadily in the face. “I sometimes think that you know some

details of this matter which you have not thought fit to mention. Mine

is a confidential trade like yours, and I will treat anything you write

for me in strict confidence. But write the whole.”

The doctor, who had been listening thoughtfully with his head a little

on one side, looked the priest in the face for an instant, and said:

“All right,” and went into the study, closing the door behind him.

“Flambeau,” said Father Brown, “there is a long seat there under the

veranda, where we can smoke out of the rain. You are my only friend in

the world, and I want to talk to you. Or, perhaps, be silent with you.”

They established themselves comfortably in the veranda seat; Father

Brown, against his common habit, accepted a good cigar and smoked it

steadily in silence, while the rain shrieked and rattled on the roof of

the veranda.

“My friend,” he said at length, “this is a very queer case. A very queer

case.”

“I should think it was,” said Flambeau, with something like a shudder.

“You call it queer, and I call it queer,” said the other, “and yet

we mean quite opposite things. The modern mind always mixes up two

different ideas: mystery in the sense of what is marvellous, and mystery

in the sense of what is complicated. That is half its difficulty about

miracles. A miracle is startling; but it is simple. It is simple because

it is a miracle. It is power coming directly from God (or the devil)

instead of indirectly through nature or human wills. Now, you mean that

this business is marvellous because it is miraculous, because it is

witchcraft worked by a wicked Indian. Understand, I do not say that

it was not spiritual or diabolic. Heaven and hell only know by what

surrounding influences strange sins come into the lives of men. But for

the present my point is this: If it was pure magic, as you think,

then it is marvellous; but it is not mysterious--that is, it is not

complicated. The quality of a miracle is mysterious, but its manner

is simple. Now, the manner of this business has been the reverse of

simple.”

The storm that had slackened for a little seemed to be swelling again,

and there came heavy movements as of faint thunder. Father Brown let

fall the ash of his cigar and went on:

“There has been in this incident,” he said, “a twisted, ugly, complex

quality that does not belong to the straight bolts either of heaven

or hell. As one knows the crooked track of a snail, I know the crooked

track of a man.”

The white lightning opened its enormous eye in one wink, the sky shut up

again, and the priest went on:

“Of all these crooked things, the crookedest was the shape of that piece

of paper. It was crookeder than the dagger that killed him.”

“You mean the paper on which Quinton confessed his suicide,” said

Flambeau.

“I mean the paper on which Quinton wrote, ‘I die by my own hand,’”

answered Father Brown. “The shape of that paper, my friend, was the

wrong shape; the wrong shape, if ever I have seen it in this wicked

world.”

“It only had a corner snipped off,” said Flambeau, “and I understand

that all Quinton’s paper was cut that way.”

“It was a very odd way,” said the other, “and a very bad way, to my

taste and fancy. Look here, Flambeau, this Quinton--God receive his

soul!--was perhaps a bit of a cur in some ways, but he really was an

artist, with the pencil as well as the pen. His handwriting, though hard

to read, was bold and beautiful. I can’t prove what I say; I can’t prove

anything. But I tell you with the full force of conviction that he could

never have cut that mean little piece off a sheet of paper. If he had

wanted to cut down paper for some purpose of fitting in, or binding

up, or what not, he would have made quite a different slash with the

scissors. Do you remember the shape? It was a mean shape. It was a wrong

shape. Like this. Don’t you remember?”

And he waved his burning cigar before him in the darkness, making

irregular squares so rapidly that Flambeau really seemed to see them as

fiery hieroglyphics upon the darkness--hieroglyphics such as his friend

had spoken of, which are undecipherable, yet can have no good meaning.

“But,” said Flambeau, as the priest put his cigar in his mouth again

and leaned back, staring at the roof, “suppose somebody else did use the

scissors. Why should somebody else, cutting pieces off his sermon paper,

make Quinton commit suicide?”

Father Brown was still leaning back and staring at the roof, but he took

his cigar out of his mouth and said: “Quinton never did commit suicide.”

Flambeau stared at him. “Why, confound it all,” he cried, “then why did

he confess to suicide?”

The priest leant forward again, settled his elbows on his knees, looked

at the ground, and said, in a low, distinct voice: “He never did confess

to suicide.”

Flambeau laid his cigar down. “You mean,” he said, “that the writing was

forged?”

“No,” said Father Brown. “Quinton wrote it all right.”

“Well, there you are,” said the aggravated Flambeau; “Quinton wrote, ‘I

die by my own hand,’ with his own hand on a plain piece of paper.”

“Of the wrong shape,” said the priest calmly.

“Oh, the shape be damned!” cried Flambeau. “What has the shape to do

with it?”

“There were twenty-three snipped papers,” resumed Brown unmoved, “and

only twenty-two pieces snipped off. Therefore one of the pieces had

been destroyed, probably that from the written paper. Does that suggest

anything to you?”

A light dawned on Flambeau’s face, and he said: “There was something

else written by Quinton, some other words. ‘They will tell you I die by

my own hand,’ or ‘Do not believe that--’”

“Hotter, as the children say,” said his friend. “But the piece was

hardly half an inch across; there was no room for one word, let alone

five. Can you think of anything hardly bigger than a comma which the man

with hell in his heart had to tear away as a testimony against him?”

“I can think of nothing,” said Flambeau at last.

“What about quotation marks?” said the priest, and flung his cigar far

into the darkness like a shooting star.

All words had left the other man’s mouth, and Father Brown said, like

one going back to fundamentals:

“Leonard Quinton was a romancer, and was writing an Oriental romance

about wizardry and hypnotism. He--”

At this moment the door opened briskly behind them, and the doctor came

out with his hat on. He put a long envelope into the priest’s hands.

“That’s the document you wanted,” he said, “and I must be getting home.

Good night.”

“Good night,” said Father Brown, as the doctor walked briskly to the

gate. He had left the front door open, so that a shaft of gaslight fell

upon them. In the light of this Brown opened the envelope and read the

following words:

DEAR FATHER BROWN,--Vicisti Galilee. Otherwise, damn your

eyes, which are very penetrating ones. Can it be possible that

there is something in all that stuff of yours after all?

I am a man who has ever since boyhood believed in Nature and

in all natural functions and instincts, whether men called them

moral or immoral. Long before I became a doctor, when I was a

schoolboy keeping mice and spiders, I believed that to be a good

animal is the best thing in the world. But just now I am shaken;

I have believed in Nature; but it seems as if Nature could betray

a man. Can there be anything in your bosh? I am really getting

morbid.

I loved Quinton’s wife. What was there wrong in that? Nature

told me to, and it’s love that makes the world go round. I also

thought quite sincerely that she would be happier with a clean

animal like me than with that tormenting little lunatic. What was

there wrong in that? I was only facing facts, like a man of

science. She would have been happier.

According to my own creed I was quite free to kill Quinton,

which was the best thing for everybody, even himself. But as a

healthy animal I had no notion of killing myself. I resolved,

therefore, that I would never do it until I saw a chance that

would leave me scot free. I saw that chance this morning.

I have been three times, all told, into Quinton’s study today.

The first time I went in he would talk about nothing but the weird

tale, called “The Cure of a Saint,” which he was writing, which

was all about how some Indian hermit made an English colonel kill

himself by thinking about him. He showed me the last sheets, and

even read me the last paragraph, which was something like this:

“The conqueror of the Punjab, a mere yellow skeleton, but still

gigantic, managed to lift himself on his elbow and gasp in his

nephew’s ear: ‘I die by my own hand, yet I die murdered!’” It so

happened by one chance out of a hundred, that those last words

were written at the top of a new sheet of paper. I left the room,

and went out into the garden intoxicated with a frightful

opportunity.

We walked round the house; and two more things happened in my

favour. You suspected an Indian, and you found a dagger which the

Indian might most probably use. Taking the opportunity to stuff

it in my pocket I went back to Quinton’s study, locked the door,

and gave him his sleeping draught. He was against answering

Atkinson at all, but I urged him to call out and quiet the fellow,

because I wanted a clear proof that Quinton was alive when I left

the room for the second time. Quinton lay down in the conservatory,

and I came through the study. I am a quick man with my hands, and

in a minute and a half I had done what I wanted to do. I had

emptied all the first part of Quinton’s romance into the fireplace,

where it burnt to ashes. Then I saw that the quotation marks

wouldn’t do, so I snipped them off, and to make it seem likelier,

snipped the whole quire to match. Then I came out with the

knowledge that Quinton’s confession of suicide lay on the front

table, while Quinton lay alive but asleep in the conservatory

beyond.

The last act was a desperate one; you can guess it: I pretended

to have seen Quinton dead and rushed to his room. I delayed you

with the paper, and, being a quick man with my hands, killed

Quinton while you were looking at his confession of suicide. He

was half-asleep, being drugged, and I put his own hand on the

knife and drove it into his body. The knife was of so queer a

shape that no one but an operator could have calculated the angle

that would reach his heart. I wonder if you noticed this.

When I had done it, the extraordinary thing happened. Nature

deserted me. I felt ill. I felt just as if I had done something

wrong. I think my brain is breaking up; I feel some sort of

desperate pleasure in thinking I have told the thing to somebody;

that I shall not have to be alone with it if I marry and have

children. What is the matter with me?... Madness... or can one

have remorse, just as if one were in Byron’s poems! I cannot

write any more.

James Erskine Harris.

Father Brown carefully folded up the letter, and put it in his breast

pocket just as there came a loud peal at the gate bell, and the wet

waterproofs of several policemen gleamed in the road outside.