Chapter 3

THE soul of Mr. Peregrine Smart hovered like a fly
round one possession and one joke. It might be considered a mild joke,
for it consisted merely of asking people if they had seen his goldfish.
It might also be considered an expensive joke; but it is doubtful
whether he was not secretly more attached to the joke than to the
evidence of expenditure. In talking to his neighbours in the little
group of new houses that had grown up round the old village green, he
lost no time in turning the conversation in the direction of his hobby.
To Dr. Burdock, a rising biologist with a resolute chin and hair brushed
back like a German's, Mr. Smart made the easy transition. "You are
interested in natural history; have you seen my goldfish?" To so
orthodox an evolutionist as Dr. Burdock doubtless all nature was one;
but at first sight the link was not close, as he was a specialist who
had concentrated entirely upon the primitive ancestry of the giraffe. To
Father Brown, from a church in the neighbouring provincial town, he
traced a rapid train of thought which touched on the topics of
"Rome--St. Peter--fisherman--fish--goldfish." In talking to Mr.
Imlack Smith, the bank manager, a slim and sallow gentleman of dressy
appearance but quiet demeanour, he violently wrenched the conversation
to the subject of the gold standard, from which it was merely a step to
goldfish. In talking to that brilliant Oriental traveller and scholar.
Count Yvon de Lara (whose title was French and his face rather Russian,
not to say Tartar), the versatile conversationalist showed an intense
and intelligent interest in the Ganges and the Indian Ocean, leading
naturally to the possible presence of goldfish in those waters.
From Mr. Harry Hartopp, the very rich but very shy and silent young
gentleman who had recently come down from London, he had at last
extorted the information that the embarrassed youth in question was _not_
interested in fishing, and had then added: "Talking about fishing, have
you seen my goldfish?"

The peculiar thing about the goldfish was that they were made of gold.
They were part of an eccentric but expensive toy, said to have been made
by the freak of some rich Eastern prince, and Mr. Smart had picked it up
at some sale or in some curiosity shop, such as he frequented for the
purpose of lumbering up his house with unique and useless things. From
the other end of the room it looked like a rather unusually large bowl
containing rather unusually large living fish; a closer inspection
showed it to be a huge bubble of beautifully blown Venetian glass, very
thin and delicately clouded with faintly iridescent colour, in the
tinted twilight of which hung grotesque golden fishes with great rubies
for eyes. The whole thing was undoubtedly worth a great deal in solid
material; how much more would depend upon the waves of lunacy passing
over the world of collectors. Mr. Smart's new secretary, a young man
named Francis Boyle, though an Irishman and not credited with caution,
was mildly surprised at his talking so freely of the gems of his
collection to the group of comparative strangers who happened to have
alighted in a rather nomadic fashion in the neighbourhood; for
collectors are commonly vigilant and sometimes secretive. In the course
of settling down to his new duties, Mr. Boyle found he was not alone in
this sentiment, and that in others, it passed from a mild wonder to a
grave disapproval.

"It's a wonder his throat isn't cut," said Mr. Smart's valet, Harris,
not without a hypothetical relish, almost as if he had said, in a purely
artistic sense: "It's a pity."

"It's extraordinary how he leaves things about," said Mr. Smart's head
clerk, Jameson, who had come up from the office to assist the new
secretary, "and he won't even put up those ramshackle old bars across
his ramshackle old door."

"It's all very well with Father Brown and the doctor," said Mr. Smart's
housekeeper, with a certain vigorous vagueness that marked her opinions,
"but when it comes to foreigners, I call it tempting providence. It
isn't only the Count, either; that man at the bank looks to me much too
yellow to be English."

"Well, that young Hartopp is English enough," said Boyle good-humouredly,
"to the extent of not having a word to say for himself."

"He thinks the more," said the housekeeper. "He may not be exactly a
foreigner, but he is not such a fool as he looks. Foreign is as foreign
does, I say," she added darkly.

Her disapproval would probably have deepened if she had heard the
conversation, in her master's drawing-room that afternoon, a
conversation of which the goldfish were the text, though the offensive
foreigner tended more and more to be the central figure. It was not that
he spoke so very much; but even his silences had something positive
about them. He looked the more massive for sitting in a sort of heap on
a heap of cushions, and in the deepening twilight his wide Mongolian
face seemed faintly luminous, like a moon. Perhaps his background
brought out something atmospherically Asiatic about his face and figure,
for the room was a chaos of more or less costly curiosities, amid which
could be seen the crooked curves and burning colours of countless
Eastern weapons, Eastern pipes and vessels, Eastern musical instruments
and illuminated manuscripts. Anyhow, as the conversation proceeded,
Boyle felt more and more that the figure seated on the cushions and dark
against the twilight had the exact outline of a huge image of Buddha.

The conversation was general enough, for all the little local group were
present. They were, indeed, often in the habit of dropping in at each
other's houses, and by this time constituted a sort of club, of people
coming from the four or five houses standing round the green. Of these
houses Peregrine Smart's was the oldest, largest, and most picturesque;
it straggled down almost the whole of one side of the square, leaving
only room for a small villa, inhabited by a retired colonel named
Varney, who was reported to be an invalid, and certainly was never seen
to go abroad. At right angles to these stood two or three shops that
served the simpler needs of the hamlet, and at the corner the inn of the
Blue Dragon, at which Mr. Hartopp, the stranger from London, was
staying. On the opposite side were three houses, one rented by the Count
de Lara, one by Dr. Burdock, and the third still standing empty. On the
fourth side was the bank, with an adjoining house for the bank manager,
and a line offence enclosing some land that was let for building. It was
thus a very self-contained group, and the comparative emptiness of the
open ground for miles round it threw the members more and more on each
other's society. That afternoon, one stranger had indeed broken into the
magic circle: a hatchet-faced fellow with fierce tufts of eyebrows and
moustache, and so shabbily dressed that he must have been a millionaire
or a duke if he had really (as was alleged) come down to do business
with the old collector. But he was known, at the Blue Dragon at least,
as Mr. Harmer.

To him had been recounted anew the glories of the gilded fish and the
criticisms regarding their custody.

"People are always telling me I ought to lock them up more carefully,"
observed Mr. Smart, cocking an eyebrow over his shoulder at the
dependant who stood there holding some papers from the office. Smart was
a round-faced, round-bodied little old man rather like a bald parrot.
"Jameson and Harris and the rest are always at me to bar the doors as if
it were a mediæval fortress, though really these rotten old rusty bars
are too mediæval to keep anybody out, I should think. I prefer to trust
to luck and the local police."

"It is not always the best bars that keep people out," said the Count.
"It all depends on who's trying to get in. There was an ancient Hindu
hermit who lived naked in a cave and passed through the three armies
that encircled the Mogul and took the great ruby out of the tyrant's
turban, and went back unscathed like a shadow. For he wished to teach
the great how small are the laws of space and time."

"When we really study the small laws of space and time," said Dr.
Burdock dryly, "we generally find out how those tricks are done. Western
science has let in daylight on a good deal of Eastern magic. Doubtless a
great deal can be done with hypnotism and suggestion, to say nothing of
sleight-of-hand."

"The ruby was not in the royal tent," observed the Count in his dream
fashion; "but he found it among a hundred tents."

"Can't all that be explained by telepathy?" asked the doctor sharply.
The question sounded the sharper because it was followed by a heavy
silence, almost as if the distinguished Oriental traveller had, with
imperfect politeness, gone to sleep.

"I beg your pardon," he said rousing himself with a sudden smile. "I had
forgotten we were talking with words. In the east we talk with thoughts,
and so we never misunderstand each other. It is strange how you people
worship words and are satisfied with words. What difference does it make
to a thing that you now call it telepathy, as you once called it
tomfoolery? If a man climbs into the sky on a mango-tree, how is it
altered by saying it is only levitation, instead of saying it is only
lies. If a mediæval witch waved a wand and turned me into a blue baboon,
you would say it was only atavism."

The doctor looked for a moment as if he might say that it would not be
so great a change after all. But before his irritation could find that
or any other vent, the man called Harmer interrupted gruffly:

"It's true enough those Indian conjurers can do queer things, but I
notice they generally do them in India. Confederates, perhaps, or merely
mass psychology. I don't think those tricks have ever been played in an
English village, and I should say our friend's goldfish were quite
safe."

"I will tell you a story," said de Lara, in his motionless way, "which
happened not in India, but outside an English barrack in the most
modernized part of Cairo. A sentinel was standing inside the grating of
an iron gateway looking out between the bars on to the street. There
appeared outside the gate a beggar, barefoot and in native rags, who
asked him, in English that was startlingly distinct and refined, for a
certain official document kept in the building for safety. The soldier
told the man, of that he could not come inside; and the man answered,
smiling: course, 'What is inside and what is outside?' The soldier was
still staring scornfully through the iron grating when he gradually
realized that, though neither he nor the gate had moved, he was actually
standing in the street and looking in at the barrack yard, where the
beggar stood still and smiling and equally motionless. Then, when the
beggar turned towards the building, the sentry awoke to such sense as he
had left, and shouted a warning to all the soldiers within the gated
enclosure to hold the prisoner fast. 'You won't get out of there
anyhow,' he said vindictively. Then the beggar said in his silvery
voice: 'What is outside and what is inside?' And the soldier, still
glaring through the same bars, saw that they were once more between him
and the street, where the beggar stood free and smiling with a paper in
his hand."

Mr. Imlack Smith, the bank manager, was looking at the carpet with his
dark sleek head bowed, and he spoke for the first time.

"Did anything happen about the paper?" he asked.

"Your professional instincts are correct, sir," said the Count with grim
affability. "It was a paper of considerable financial importance. Its
consequences were international."

"I hope they don't occur often," said young Hartopp gloomily.

"I do not touch the political side," said the Count serenely, "but only
the philosophical. It illustrates how the wise man can get behind time
and space and turn the levers of them, so to speak, so that the whole
world turns round before our eyes. But is it so hard for you people to
believe that spiritual powers are really more powerful than material
ones."

"Well," said old Smart cheerfully, "I don't profess to be an authority
on spiritual powers. What do you say, Father Brown?"

"The only thing that strikes me," answered the little priest, "is that
all the supernatural acts we have yet heard of seem to be thefts. And
stealing by spiritual methods seem to me much the same as stealing by
material ones."

"Father Brown is a Philistine," said the smiling Smith.

"I have a sympathy with the tribe," said Father Brown. "A Philistine is
only a man who is right without knowing why."

"All this is too clever for me," said Hartopp heartily.

"Perhaps," said Father Brown with a smile, "you would like to speak
without words, as the Count suggests. He would begin by saying nothing
in a pointed fashion, and you would retort with a burst of taciturnity."

"Something might be done with music," murmured the Count dreamily. "It
would be better than all these words."

"Yes, I might understand that better," said the young man in a low
voice.

Boyle had followed the conversation with curious attention, for there
was something in the demeanour of more than one of the talkers that
seemed to him significant or even odd. As the talk drifted to music,
with an appeal to the dapper bank manager (who was an amateur musician
of some merit), the young secretary awoke with a start to his
secretarial duties, and reminded his employer that the head clerk was
still standing patiently with the papers in his hand.

"Oh, never mind about those just now, Jameson," said Smart rather
hurriedly. "Only something about my account; I'll see Mr. Smith about it
later. You were saying that the 'cello, Mr. Smith----"

But the cold breath of business had sufficed to disperse the fumes of
transcendental talk, and the guests began one after another to say
farewell. Only Mr. Imlack Smith, bank manager and musician, remained to
the last; and when the rest were gone he and his host went into the
inner room, where the goldfish were kept, and closed the door.

The house was long and narrow, with a covered balcony running along the
first floor, which consisted mostly of a sort of suite of rooms used by
the householder himself, his bedroom and dressing-room, and an inner
room in which his very valuable treasures were sometimes stored for the
night instead of being left in the rooms below. This balcony, like the
insufficiently barred door below it, was a matter of concern to the
housekeeper and the head clerk and the others who lamented the
carelessness of the collector; but, in truth, that cunning old gentleman
was more careful than he seemed. He professed no great belief in the
antiquated fastenings of the old house, which the housekeeper lamented
to see rusting in idleness, but he had an eye to the more important
point of strategy. He always put his favourite goldfish in the room at
the back of his bedroom for the night, and slept in front of it, as it
were, with a pistol under his pillow. And when Boyle and Jameson,
awaiting his return from the _tête-à-tête_, at length saw the door open
and their employer reappear, he was carrying the great glass bowl as
reverently as it if had been the relic of a saint.

Outside, the last edges of the sunset still clung to the corners of the
green square; but inside, a lamp had already been kindled; and in the
mingling of the two lights the coloured globe glowed like some monstrous
jewel, and the fantastic outlines of the fiery fishes seemed to give it,
indeed, something of the mystery of a talisman, like strange shapes seen
by a seer in the crystal of doom. Over the old man's shoulder the olive
face of Imlack Smith stared like a sphinx.

"I am going up to London to-night, Mr. Boyle," said old Smart, with more
gravity than he commonly showed. "Mr. Smith and I are catching the
six-forty-five. I should prefer you, Jameson, to sleep upstairs in my
room to-night; if you put the bowl in the back room as usual, it will be
quite safe then. Not that I suppose anything could possibly happen."

"Anything may happen anywhere," said the smiling Mr. Smith. "I think you
generally take a gun to bed with you. Perhaps you had better leave it
behind in this case."

Peregrine Smart did not reply, and they passed out of the house on to
the road round the village green.

The secretary and the head clerk slept that night as directed in their
employer's bedroom. To speak more strictly, Jameson, the head clerk,
slept in a bed in the dressing-room, but the door stood open between,
and the two rooms running along the front were practically one. Only the
bedroom had a long French window giving on the balcony, and an entrance
at the back into the inner apartment where the goldfish bowl had been
placed for safety. Boyle dragged his bed right across so as to bar this
entrance, put the revolver under his pillow, and then undressed and went
to bed, feeling that he had taken all possible precautions against an
impossible or improbable event. He did not see why there should be any
particular danger of normal burglary; and as for the spiritual burglary
that figured in the traveller's tales of the Count de Lara, if his
thoughts ran on them so near to sleep it was because they were such
stuff as dreams are made of. They soon turned into dreams with intervals
of dreamless slumber. The old clerk was a little more restless as usual;
but after fussing about a little longer and repeating some of his
favourite regrets and warnings, he also retired to his bed in the same
manner and slept. The moon brightened and grew dim again above the green
square and the grey blocks of houses in a solitude and silence that
seemed to have no human witness; and it was when the white cracks of
daybreak had already appeared in the corners of the grey sky that the
thing happened.

Boyle, being young, was naturally both the healthier and the heavier
sleeper of the two. Though active enough when he was once awake, he
always had a load to lift in waking. Moreover, he had dreams of the sort
that cling to the emerging minds like the dim tentacles of an octopus.
They were a medley of many things, including his last look from the
balcony across the four grey roads and the green square. But the pattern
of them changed and shifted and turned dizzily, to the accompaniment of
a low grinding noise, which sounded somehow like a subterranean river, and
may have been no more than old Mr. Jameson snoring in the dressing-room.
But in the dreamer's mind all that murmur and motion was vaguely
connected with the words of the Count de Lara, about a wisdom that could
hold the levers of time and space and turn the world. In the dream it
seemed as if a vast murmuring machinery under the world were really
moving whole landscapes hither and thither, so that the ends of the
earth might appear in a man's front-garden, or his own front-garden be
exiled beyond the sea.

The first complete impressions he had were the words of a song, with a
rather thin metallic accompaniment; they were sung in a foreign accent
and a voice that was still strange and yet faintly familiar. And yet he
could hardly feel sure that he was not making up poetry in his sleep.

_Over the land and over the sea
My flying fishes will come to me,
For the note is not of the world that wakes them,
But in----_

He struggled to his feet and saw that his fellow-guardian was already
out of bed; Jameson was peering out of the long window on to the balcony
and calling out sharply to someone in the street below.

"Who's that?" he called out sharply. "What do you want?"

He turned to Boyle in agitation, saying: "There's somebody prowling
about just outside. I knew it wasn't safe. I'm going down to bar that
front door, whatever they say."

He ran downstairs in a flutter and Boyle could hear the clattering of
the bars upon the front door; but Boyle himself stepped out upon the
balcony and looked out on the long grey road that led up to the house,
and he thought he was still dreaming.

Upon that grey road leading across that empty moor and through that
little English hamlet, there had appeared a figure that might have
stepped straight out of the jungle or the bazaar--a figure out of one
of the Count's fantastic stories; a figure out of the "Arabian Nights."
The rather ghostly grey twilight which begins to define and yet to
discolour everything when the light in the east has ceased to be
localized, lifted slowly like a veil of grey gauze and showed him a
figure wrapped in outlandish raiment. A scarf of a strange sea-blue,
vast and voluminous, went round the head like a turban, and then again
round the chin, giving rather the general character of a hood; so far as
the face was concerned it had a the effects of a mask. For the raiment
round the head was drawn close as a veil; and the head itself was bowed
over a queer-looking musical instrument made of silver or steel, and
shaped like a deformed or crooked violin. It was played with something
like a silver comb, and the notes were curiously thin and keen. Before
Boyle could open his mouth, the same haunting alien accent came from
under the shadow of the burnous, singing-words of the same sort:

_As the golden birds go back to the tree
My golden fishes return to me.
Return_----

"You've no right here," called out Boyle in exasperation, hardly knowing
what he said.

"I have a right to the goldfish," said the stranger, speaking more like
King Solomon than an unsandalled Bedouin in a ragged blue cloak. "And
they will come to me. Come!"

He struck his strange fiddle as his voice rose sharply on the word.
There was a pang of sound that seemed to pierce the mind, and then there
came a fainter sound, like an answer: a vibrant whisper. It came from
the dark room behind where the bowl of goldfish was standing.

Boyle turned towards it; and even as he turned the echo in the inner
room changed to a long tingling sound like an electric bell, and then to
a faint crash. It was still a matter of seconds since he had challenged
the man from the balcony; but the old clerk had already regained the top
of the stairs, panting a little, for he was an elderly gentleman.

"I've locked up the door, anyhow," he said.

"The stable door," said Boyle out of the darkness of the inner room.

Jameson followed him into that apartment and found him staring down at
the floor, which was covered with a litter of coloured glass like the
curved bits of a broken rainbow.

"What do you mean by the stable door?" began Jameson.

"I mean that the steed is stolen," answered Boyle. "The flying steeds.
The flying fishes our Arab friend outside has just whistled to like so
many performing puppies."

"But how could he?" exploded the old clerk, as if such events were
hardly respectable.

"Well, they're gone," said Boyle shortly. "The broken bowl is here,
which would have taken a long time to open properly, but only a second
to smash. But the fish are gone, God knows how, though I think our
friend ought to be asked."

"We are wasting time," said the distracted Jameson. "We ought to be
after him at once."

"Much better be telephoning the police at once," answered Boyle. "They
ought to outstrip him in a flash with motors and telephones that go a
good deal farther than we should ever get, running through the village
in our nightgowns. But it may be there are things even the police cars
and wires won't outstrip."

While Jameson was talking to the police-station through the telephone in
an agitated voice, Boyle went out again on to the balcony and hastily
scanned that grey landscape of daybreak. There was no trace of the man
in the turban, and no other sign of life, except some faint stirrings an
expert might have recognized in the hotel of the Blue Dragon. Only
Boyle, for the first time, noted consciously something that he had all
along been noting unconsciously. It was like a fact struggling in the
submerged mind and demanding its own meaning. It was simply the fact
that the grey landscape had never been entirely grey; there was one gold
spot amid its stripes of colourless colour, a lamp lighted in one of the
houses on the other side of the green. Something, perhaps irrational,
told him that it had been burning through all the hours of the darkness
and was only fading with the dawn. He counted the houses, and his
calculation brought out a result which seemed to fit in with something,
he knew not what. Anyhow, it was apparently the house of the Count Yvon
de Lara.

Inspector Pinner had arrived with several policemen, and done several
things of a rapid and resolute sort, being conscious that the very
absurdity of the costly trinkets might give the case considerable
prominence in the newspapers. He had examined everything, measured,
everything, taken down everybody's deposition, taken everybody's
finger-prints, put everybody's back up, and found himself at the end left
facing a fact which he could not believe. An Arab from the desert had
walked up the public road and stopped in front of the house of Mr.
Peregrine Smart, where a bowl of artificial goldfish was kept in an
inner room; he had then sung or recited a little poem, and the bowl had
exploded like a bomb and the fishes vanished into thin air. Nor did it
soothe the inspector to be told by a foreign Count, in a soft, purring
voice, that the bounds of experience were being enlarged.

Indeed, the attitude of each member of the little group was
characteristic enough. Peregrine Smart himself had come back from London
the next morning to hear the news of his loss. Naturally he admitted a
shock; but it was typical of something sporting and spirited in the
little old gentleman, something that always made his small strutting
figure look like a cock-sparrow's, that he showed more vivacity in the
search than depression at the loss. The man named Harmer, who had come
to the village on purpose to buy the goldfish, might be excused for
being a little testy on learning they were not there to be bought. But,
in truth, his rather aggressive moustache and eyebrows seemed to bristle
with something more definite than disappointment, and the eyes that
darted over the company were bright with a vigilance that might well be
suspicion. The sallow face of the bank manager, who had also returned
from London though by a later train, seemed again and again to attract
those shining and shifting eyes like a magnet. Of the two remaining
figures of the original circle. Father Brown was generally silent when
he was not spoken to, and the dazed Hartopp was often silent even when
he was.

But the Count was not a man to let anything pass that gave an apparent
advantage to his views. He smiled at his rationalistic rival, the
doctor, in the manner of one who knows how it is possible to be
irritating by being ingratiating.

"You will admit, doctor," he said, "that at least some of the stories
you thought so improbable look a little more realistic to-day than they
did yesterday. When a man as ragged as those I described is able, by
speaking a word, to dissolve a solid vessel inside the four walls of the
house he stands outside, it might perhaps be called an example of what I
said about spiritual powers and material barriers."

"And it might be called an example of what I said," said the doctor
sharply, "about a little scientific knowledge being enough to show how
the tricks are done."

"Do you really mean, doctor," asked Smart in some excitement, "that you
can throw any scientific light on this mystery?"

"I can throw light on what the Count calls a mystery," said the doctor,
"because it is not a mystery at all. That part of it is plain enough. A
sound is only a wave of vibration, and certain vibrations can break
glass, if the sound is of a certain kind and the glass of a certain
kind. The man did not stand in the road and think, which the Count tells
us is the ideal method when Orientals want a little chat. He sang out
what he wanted, quite loud, and struck a shrill note on an instrument.
It is similar to many experiments by which glass of special composition
has been cracked."

"Such as the experiment," said the Count lightly, "by which several
lumps of solid gold have suddenly ceased to exist."

"Here comes Inspector Pinner," said Boyle. "Between ourselves, I think
he would regard the doctor's natural explanation as quite as much of a
fairy tale as the Count's preternatural one. A very sceptical intellect,
Mr. Pinner's, especially about me. I rather think I am under suspicion."

"I think we are all under suspicion," said the Count.

It was the presence of this suspicion in his own case that led Boyle to
seek the personal advice of Father Brown. They were walking round the
village green together, some hours later in the day, when the priest,
who was frowning thoughtfully at the ground as he listened, suddenly
stopped.

"Do you see that?" he asked. "Somebody's been washing the pavement
here--just this little strip of pavement outside Colonel Varney's
house. I wonder whether that was done yesterday."

Father Brown looked rather earnestly at the house, which was high and
narrow, and carried rows of striped sun-blinds of gay but already faded
colours. The chinks or crannies that gave glimpses of the interior
looked all the darker; indeed, they looked almost black in contrast with
the facade thus golden in the morning light.

"That is Colonel Varney's house, isn't it?" he asked. "He comes from the
East, too, I fancy. What sort of man is he?"

"I've never even seen him," answered Boyle. "I don't think anybody's
seen him, except Dr. Burdock, and I rather fancy the doctor doesn't see
him more than he need."

"Well, I'm going to see him for a minute," said Father Brown.

The big front door opened and swallowed the small priest, and his friend
stood staring at it in a dazed and irrational manner, as if wondering
whether it would ever open again. It opened in a few minutes, and Father
Brown emerged, still smiling, and continued his slow and pottering
progress round the square of roads. Sometimes he seemed to have
forgotten the matter in hand altogether, for he would make passing
remarks on historical and social questions, or on the prospects of
development in the district. He remarked on the soil used for the
beginning of a new road by the bank; he looked across the old village
green with a vague expression.

"Common land. I suppose people ought to feed their pigs and geese on it,
if they had any pigs or geese; as it is, it seems to feed nothing but
nettles and thistles. What a pity that what was supposed to be a sort of
large meadow has been turned into a small and petty wilderness. That's
Dr. Burdock's house opposite, isn't it?"

"Yes," answered Boyle, almost jumping at this abrupt postscript.

"Very well," answered Father Brown, "then I think we'll go indoors
again."

As they opened the front door of Smart's house and mounted the stairs,
Boyle repeated to his companion many details of the drama enacted there
at daybreak.

"I suppose you didn't doze off again?" asked Father Brown, "giving time
for somebody to scale the balcony while Jameson ran down to secure the
door."

"No," answered Boyle; "I am sure of that. I woke up to hear Jameson
challenging the stranger from the balcony; then I heard him running
downstairs and putting up the bars, and then in two strides I was on the
balcony myself."

"Or could he have slipped in between you from another angle? Are there
any other entrances besides the front entrance?"

"Apparently there are not," said Boyle gravely.

"I had better make sure, don't you think?" asked Father Brown
apologetically, and scuttled softly downstairs again. Boyle remained in
the front bedroom gazing rather doubtfully after him. After a
comparatively brief interval the round and rather rustic visage appeared
again at the head of the stairs, looking rather like a turnip ghost with
a broad grin.

"No. I think that settles the matter of entrances," said the turnip
ghost, cheerfully. "And now, I think, having got everything in a tight
box, so to speak, we can take stock of what we've got. It's rather a
curious business."

"Do you think," asked Boyle, "that the Count or the colonel, or any of
these Eastern travellers have anything to do with it? Do you think it
is--preternatural?"

"I will grant you this," said the priest gravely, "if the Count, or the
colonel, or any of your neighbours did dress up in Arab masquerade and
creep up to this house in the dark--then it _was_ preternatural."

"What do you mean? Why?"

"Because the Arab left no footprints," answered Father Brown. "The
colonel on the one side and the banker on the other are the nearest of
your neighbours. That loose red soil is between you and the bank, it
would print off bare feet like a plaster cast and probably leave red
marks everywhere. I braved the colonel's curry-seasoned temper to verify
the fact that the front pavement was washed yesterday and not to-day;
it was wet enough to make wet footprints all along the road. Now, if the
visitor were the Count or the doctor in the houses opposite, he might
possibly, of course, have come across the common. But he must have found
it exceedingly uncomfortable with bare feet, for it is, as I remarked,
one mass of thorns and thistles and stinging nettles. He would surely
have pricked himself and probably left traces of it. Unless, as you say,
he was a preternatural being."

Boyle looked steadily at the grave and indecipherable face of his
clerical friend.

"Do you mean that he was?" he asked, at length.

"There is one general truth to remember," said Father Brown, after a
pause. "A thing can sometimes be too close to be seen, as, for instance,
a man cannot see himself. There was a man who had a fly in his eye when
he looked through the telescope, and he discovered that there was a most
incredible dragon in the moon. And I am told that if a man hears the
exact reproduction of his own voice it sounds like the voice of a
stranger. In the same way, if anything is right in the foreground of our
life we hardly see it, and if we did we might think it quite odd. If the
thing in the foreground got into the middle distance, we should probably
think it had come from the remote distance. Just come outside the house
again for a moment. I want to show you how it looks from another
standpoint."

He had already risen, and as they descended the stairs he continued his
remarks in a rather groping fashion as if he were thinking aloud.

"The Count and the Asiatic atmosphere all come in, because, in a case
like this, everything depends on the preparation of the mind. A man can
reach a condition in which a brick, falling on his head, will seem to be
a Babylonian brick carved with cuneiform, and dropped from the Hanging
Gardens of Babylon, so that he will never even look at the brick and see
it is of one pattern with the bricks or his own house. So in your
case----"

"What does this mean?" interrupted Boyle, staring and pointing at the
entrance. "What in the name of wonder does it mean? The door is barred
again."

He was staring at the front door by which they had entered but a little
while before, and across which stood, once more, the great dark bands of
rusty iron which had once, as he had said, locked the stable door too
late. There was something darkly and dumbly ironic in those old
fastenings closing behind them and imprisoning them as if of their own
motion.

"Of those," said Father Brown casually. "I put up those bars myself,
just now. Didn't you hear me?"

"No," answered Boyle, staring. "I heard nothing."

"Well, I rather thought you wouldn't," said the other equably. "There's
really no reason why anybody upstairs should hear those bars being put
up. A sort of hook fits easily into a sort of hole. When you're quite
close you hear a dull click; but that's all. The only thing that makes
any noise a man could hear upstairs, is this."

And he lifted the bar out of its socket and let it fall with a clang at
the side of the door.

"It does make a noise if you _unbar_ the door," said Father Brown gravely,
"even if you do it pretty carefully."

"You mean----"

"I mean," said Father Brown, "that what you heard upstairs was Jameson
opening the door and not shutting it. And now let's open the door
ourselves and go outside."

When they stood outside in the street, under the balcony, the little
priest resumed his previous explanation as coolly as if it had been a
chemical lecture.

"I was saying that a man may be in the mood to look for something very
distant, and not realize that it is something very close, something very
close to himself, perhaps something very like himself. It was a strange
and outlandish thing that you saw when you looked down at this road. I
suppose it never occurred to you to consider what he saw when he looked
up at that balcony?"

Boyle was staring at the balcony and did not answer, and the other
added:

"You thought it very wild and wonderful that an Arab should come through
civilized England with bare feet. You did not remember that at the same
moment you had bare feet yourself."

Boyle at last found words, and it was to repeat words already spoken.

"Jameson opened the door," he said mechanically.

"Yes," assented, his friend. "Jameson opened the door and came out into
the road in his night-clothes, just as you came out on the balcony. He
caught up two things that you had seen a hundred times: the length of
old blue curtain that he wrapped round his head, and the Oriental
musical instrument you must have often seen in that heap of Oriental
curiosities. The rest was atmosphere and acting, very fine acting, for
he is a very fine artist in crime."

"Jameson!" exclaimed Boyle incredulously. "He was such a dull old stick
that I never even noticed him."

"Precisely," said the priest, "he was an artist. If he could act a
wizard or a troubadour for six minutes, do you think he could not act a
clerk for six weeks?"

"I am still not quite sure of his object," said Boyle.

"His object has been achieved," replied Father Brown, "or very nearly
achieved. He had taken the goldfish already, of course, as he had twenty
chances of doing. But if he had simply taken, them, everybody would have
realized that he had twenty chances of doing it. By creating a
mysterious magician from the end of the earth, he set everybody's
thoughts wandering far afield to Arabia and India, so that you yourself
can hardly believe that the whole thing was so near home. It was too
close to you to be seen."

"If this is true," said Boyle, "it was an extraordinary risk to run, and
he had to cut it very fine. It's true I never heard the man in the
street say anything while Jameson was talking from the balcony, so I
suppose that was all a fake. And I suppose it's true that there was time
for him to get outside before I had fully woken up and got out on to the
balcony."

"Every crime depends on somebody not waking up too soon," replied Father
Brown; "and in every sense most of us wake up too late. I, for one, have
woken up much too late. For I imagine he's bolted long ago, just before
or just after they took his finger-prints."

"You woke up before anybody else, anyhow," said Boyle, "and I should
never have woken up in that sense. Jameson was so correct and colourless
that I forgot all about him."

"Beware of the man you forget," replied his friend; "he is the one man
who has you entirely at a disadvantage. But I did not suspect him,
either, until you told me how you had heard him barring the door."

"Anyhow, we owe it all to you," said Boyle warmly.

"You owe it all to Mrs. Robinson," said Father Brown with a smile.

"Mrs. Robinson?" questioned the wondering secretary. "You don't mean the
housekeeper?"

"Beware of the woman you forget, and even more," answered the other.
"This man was a very high-class criminal; he had been an excellent
actor, and therefore he was a good psychologist. A man like the Count
never hears any voice but his own; but this man could listen, when you
had all forgotten he was there, and gather exactly the right materials
for his romance and know exactly the right note to strike to lead you
all astray. But he made one bad mistake in the psychology of Mrs.
Robinson, the housekeeper."

"I don't understand," answered Boyle, "what she can have to do with it."

"Jameson did not expect the doors to be barred," said Father Brown. "He
knew that a lot of men, especially careless men like you and your
employer, could go on saying for days that something ought to be done,
or might as well be done. But if you convey to a woman that something
ought to be done, there is always a dreadful danger that she will
suddenly do it."