Chapter 3

I will not conceal from you
that the document ends with certain legal phrases about the unpleasant
things that may happen if the money is not paid; but meanwhile, ladies
and gentlemen, let me assure you that I am comfortably off here
for accommodation, wine and cigars, and bid you for the present a
sportsman-like welcome to the luxuries of the Paradise of Thieves.”

All the time that he had been speaking, the dubious-looking men with
carbines and dirty slouch hats had been gathering silently in such
preponderating numbers that even Muscari was compelled to recognize his
sally with the sword as hopeless. He glanced around him; but the girl
had already gone over to soothe and comfort her father, for her natural
affection for his person was as strong or stronger than her somewhat
snobbish pride in his success. Muscari, with the illogicality of a
lover, admired this filial devotion, and yet was irritated by it.
He slapped his sword back in the scabbard and went and flung himself
somewhat sulkily on one of the green banks. The priest sat down within
a yard or two, and Muscari turned his aquiline nose on him in an
instantaneous irritation.

“Well,” said the poet tartly, “do people still think me too romantic?
Are there, I wonder, any brigands left in the mountains?”

“There may be,” said Father Brown agnostically.

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

“I mean I am puzzled,” replied the priest. “I am puzzled about Ezza or
Montano, or whatever his name is. He seems to me much more inexplicable
as a brigand even than he was as a courier.”

“But in what way?” persisted his companion. “Santa Maria! I should have
thought the brigand was plain enough.”

“I find three curious difficulties,” said the priest in a quiet voice.
“I should like to have your opinion on them. First of all I must tell
you I was lunching in that restaurant at the seaside. As four of you
left the room, you and Miss Harrogate went ahead, talking and laughing;
the banker and the courier came behind, speaking sparely and rather low.
But I could not help hearing Ezza say these words--‘Well, let her have
a little fun; you know the blow may smash her any minute.’ Mr Harrogate
answered nothing; so the words must have had some meaning. On the
impulse of the moment I warned her brother that she might be in peril;
I said nothing of its nature, for I did not know. But if it meant
this capture in the hills, the thing is nonsense. Why should the
brigand-courier warn his patron, even by a hint, when it was his whole
purpose to lure him into the mountain-mousetrap? It could not have
meant that. But if not, what is this disaster, known both to courier and
banker, which hangs over Miss Harrogate’s head?”

“Disaster to Miss Harrogate!” ejaculated the poet, sitting up with some
ferocity. “Explain yourself; go on.”

“All my riddles, however, revolve round our bandit chief,” resumed the
priest reflectively. “And here is the second of them. Why did he put
so prominently in his demand for ransom the fact that he had taken two
thousand pounds from his victim on the spot? It had no faintest tendency
to evoke the ransom. Quite the other way, in fact. Harrogate’s friends
would be far likelier to fear for his fate if they thought the thieves
were poor and desperate. Yet the spoliation on the spot was emphasized
and even put first in the demand. Why should Ezza Montano want so
specially to tell all Europe that he had picked the pocket before he
levied the blackmail?”

“I cannot imagine,” said Muscari, rubbing up his black hair for once
with an unaffected gesture. “You may think you enlighten me, but you are
leading me deeper in the dark. What may be the third objection to the
King of the Thieves?” “The third objection,” said Father Brown, still
in meditation, “is this bank we are sitting on. Why does our
brigand-courier call this his chief fortress and the Paradise of
Thieves? It is certainly a soft spot to fall on and a sweet spot to look
at. It is also quite true, as he says, that it is invisible from valley
and peak, and is therefore a hiding-place. But it is not a fortress. It
never could be a fortress. I think it would be the worst fortress in the
world. For it is actually commanded from above by the common high-road
across the mountains--the very place where the police would most
probably pass. Why, five shabby short guns held us helpless here about
half an hour ago. The quarter of a company of any kind of soldiers could
have blown us over the precipice. Whatever is the meaning of this odd
little nook of grass and flowers, it is not an entrenched position. It
is something else; it has some other strange sort of importance; some
value that I do not understand. It is more like an accidental theatre or
a natural green-room; it is like the scene for some romantic comedy; it
is like....”

As the little priest’s words lengthened and lost themselves in a dull
and dreamy sincerity, Muscari, whose animal senses were alert and
impatient, heard a new noise in the mountains. Even for him the sound
was as yet very small and faint; but he could have sworn the evening
breeze bore with it something like the pulsation of horses’ hoofs and a
distant hallooing.

At the same moment, and long before the vibration had touched the
less-experienced English ears, Montano the brigand ran up the bank above
them and stood in the broken hedge, steadying himself against a tree and
peering down the road. He was a strange figure as he stood there, for he
had assumed a flapped fantastic hat and swinging baldric and cutlass in
his capacity of bandit king, but the bright prosaic tweed of the courier
showed through in patches all over him.

The next moment he turned his olive, sneering face and made a movement
with his hand. The brigands scattered at the signal, not in confusion,
but in what was evidently a kind of guerrilla discipline. Instead of
occupying the road along the ridge, they sprinkled themselves along the
side of it behind the trees and the hedge, as if watching unseen for an
enemy. The noise beyond grew stronger, beginning to shake the mountain
road, and a voice could be clearly heard calling out orders. The
brigands swayed and huddled, cursing and whispering, and the evening
air was full of little metallic noises as they cocked their pistols, or
loosened their knives, or trailed their scabbards over the stones. Then
the noises from both quarters seemed to meet on the road above; branches
broke, horses neighed, men cried out.

“A rescue!” cried Muscari, springing to his feet and waving his hat;
“the gendarmes are on them! Now for freedom and a blow for it! Now to
be rebels against robbers! Come, don’t let us leave everything to
the police; that is so dreadfully modern. Fall on the rear of these
ruffians. The gendarmes are rescuing us; come, friends, let us rescue
the gendarmes!”

And throwing his hat over the trees, he drew his cutlass once more and
began to escalade the slope up to the road. Frank Harrogate jumped up
and ran across to help him, revolver in hand, but was astounded to hear
himself imperatively recalled by the raucous voice of his father, who
seemed to be in great agitation.

“I won’t have it,” said the banker in a choking voice; “I command you
not to interfere.”

“But, father,” said Frank very warmly, “an Italian gentleman has led the
way. You wouldn’t have it said that the English hung back.”

“It is useless,” said the older man, who was trembling violently, “it is
useless. We must submit to our lot.”

Father Brown looked at the banker; then he put his hand instinctively as
if on his heart, but really on the little bottle of poison; and a great
light came into his face like the light of the revelation of death.

Muscari meanwhile, without waiting for support, had crested the bank
up to the road, and struck the brigand king heavily on the shoulder,
causing him to stagger and swing round. Montano also had his cutlass
unsheathed, and Muscari, without further speech, sent a slash at his
head which he was compelled to catch and parry. But even as the two
short blades crossed and clashed the King of Thieves deliberately
dropped his point and laughed.

“What’s the good, old man?” he said in spirited Italian slang; “this
damned farce will soon be over.”

“What do you mean, you shuffler?” panted the fire-eating poet. “Is your
courage a sham as well as your honesty?”

“Everything about me is a sham,” responded the ex-courier in complete
good humour. “I am an actor; and if I ever had a private character, I
have forgotten it. I am no more a genuine brigand than I am a genuine
courier. I am only a bundle of masks, and you can’t fight a duel
with that.” And he laughed with boyish pleasure and fell into his old
straddling attitude, with his back to the skirmish up the road.

Darkness was deepening under the mountain walls, and it was not easy to
discern much of the progress of the struggle, save that tall men were
pushing their horses’ muzzles through a clinging crowd of brigands,
who seemed more inclined to harass and hustle the invaders than to kill
them. It was more like a town crowd preventing the passage of the police
than anything the poet had ever pictured as the last stand of doomed and
outlawed men of blood. Just as he was rolling his eyes in bewilderment
he felt a touch on his elbow, and found the odd little priest standing
there like a small Noah with a large hat, and requesting the favour of a
word or two.

“Signor Muscari,” said the cleric, “in this queer crisis personalities
may be pardoned. I may tell you without offence of a way in which you
will do more good than by helping the gendarmes, who are bound to break
through in any case. You will permit me the impertinent intimacy, but do
you care about that girl? Care enough to marry her and make her a good
husband, I mean?”

“Yes,” said the poet quite simply.

“Does she care about you?”

“I think so,” was the equally grave reply.

“Then go over there and offer yourself,” said the priest: “offer her
everything you can; offer her heaven and earth if you’ve got them. The
time is short.”

“Why?” asked the astonished man of letters.

“Because,” said Father Brown, “her Doom is coming up the road.”

“Nothing is coming up the road,” argued Muscari, “except the rescue.”

“Well, you go over there,” said his adviser, “and be ready to rescue her
from the rescue.”

Almost as he spoke the hedges were broken all along the ridge by a rush
of the escaping brigands. They dived into bushes and thick grass
like defeated men pursued; and the great cocked hats of the mounted
gendarmerie were seen passing along above the broken hedge. Another
order was given; there was a noise of dismounting, and a tall officer
with cocked hat, a grey imperial, and a paper in his hand appeared
in the gap that was the gate of the Paradise of Thieves. There was a
momentary silence, broken in an extraordinary way by the banker, who
cried out in a hoarse and strangled voice: “Robbed! I’ve been robbed!”

“Why, that was hours ago,” cried his son in astonishment: “when you were
robbed of two thousand pounds.”

“Not of two thousand pounds,” said the financier, with an abrupt and
terrible composure, “only of a small bottle.”

The policeman with the grey imperial was striding across the green
hollow. Encountering the King of the Thieves in his path, he clapped him
on the shoulder with something between a caress and a buffet and gave
him a push that sent him staggering away. “You’ll get into trouble,
too,” he said, “if you play these tricks.”

Again to Muscari’s artistic eye it seemed scarcely like the capture of
a great outlaw at bay. Passing on, the policeman halted before the
Harrogate group and said: “Samuel Harrogate, I arrest you in the name
of the law for embezzlement of the funds of the Hull and Huddersfield
Bank.”

The great banker nodded with an odd air of business assent, seemed to
reflect a moment, and before they could interpose took a half turn and
a step that brought him to the edge of the outer mountain wall. Then,
flinging up his hands, he leapt exactly as he leapt out of the coach.
But this time he did not fall into a little meadow just beneath; he fell
a thousand feet below, to become a wreck of bones in the valley.

The anger of the Italian policeman, which he expressed volubly to Father
Brown, was largely mixed with admiration. “It was like him to escape us
at last,” he said. “He was a great brigand if you like. This last
trick of his I believe to be absolutely unprecedented. He fled with
the company’s money to Italy, and actually got himself captured by sham
brigands in his own pay, so as to explain both the disappearance of
the money and the disappearance of himself. That demand for ransom was
really taken seriously by most of the police. But for years he’s been
doing things as good as that, quite as good as that. He will be a
serious loss to his family.”

Muscari was leading away the unhappy daughter, who held hard to him, as
she did for many a year after. But even in that tragic wreck he could
not help having a smile and a hand of half-mocking friendship for the
indefensible Ezza Montano. “And where are you going next?” he asked him
over his shoulder.

“Birmingham,” answered the actor, puffing a cigarette. “Didn’t I tell
you I was a Futurist? I really do believe in those things if I believe
in anything. Change, bustle and new things every morning. I am going to
Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Hull, Huddersfield, Glasgow, Chicago--in
short, to enlightened, energetic, civilized society!”

“In short,” said Muscari, “to the real Paradise of Thieves.”

THREE -- The Duel of Dr Hirsch

M. MAURICE BRUN and M. Armand Armagnac were crossing the sunlit Champs
Elysee with a kind of vivacious respectability. They were both short,
brisk and bold. They both had black beards that did not seem to belong
to their faces, after the strange French fashion which makes real hair
look like artificial. M. Brun had a dark wedge of beard apparently
affixed under his lower lip. M. Armagnac, by way of a change, had two
beards; one sticking out from each corner of his emphatic chin. They
were both young. They were both atheists, with a depressing fixity of
outlook but great mobility of exposition. They were both pupils of the
great Dr Hirsch, scientist, publicist and moralist.

M. Brun had become prominent by his proposal that the common expression
“Adieu” should be obliterated from all the French classics, and a slight
fine imposed for its use in private life. “Then,” he said, “the very
name of your imagined God will have echoed for the last time in the ear
of man.” M. Armagnac specialized rather in a resistance to militarism,
and wished the chorus of the Marseillaise altered from “Aux armes,
citoyens” to “Aux greves, citoyens”. But his antimilitarism was of a
peculiar and Gallic sort. An eminent and very wealthy English Quaker,
who had come to see him to arrange for the disarmament of the whole
planet, was rather distressed by Armagnac’s proposal that (by way of
beginning) the soldiers should shoot their officers.

And indeed it was in this regard that the two men differed most from
their leader and father in philosophy. Dr Hirsch, though born in France
and covered with the most triumphant favours of French education, was
temperamentally of another type--mild, dreamy, humane; and, despite his
sceptical system, not devoid of transcendentalism. He was, in short,
more like a German than a Frenchman; and much as they admired him,
something in the subconsciousness of these Gauls was irritated at his
pleading for peace in so peaceful a manner. To their party throughout
Europe, however, Paul Hirsch was a saint of science. His large and
daring cosmic theories advertised his austere life and innocent, if
somewhat frigid, morality; he held something of the position of Darwin
doubled with the position of Tolstoy. But he was neither an anarchist
nor an antipatriot; his views on disarmament were moderate and
evolutionary--the Republican Government put considerable confidence in
him as to various chemical improvements. He had lately even discovered
a noiseless explosive, the secret of which the Government was carefully
guarding.

His house stood in a handsome street near the Elysee--a street which in
that strong summer seemed almost as full of foliage as the park itself;
a row of chestnuts shattered the sunshine, interrupted only in one place
where a large cafe ran out into the street. Almost opposite to this
were the white and green blinds of the great scientist’s house, an iron
balcony, also painted green, running along in front of the first-floor
windows. Beneath this was the entrance into a kind of court, gay with
shrubs and tiles, into which the two Frenchmen passed in animated talk.

The door was opened to them by the doctor’s old servant, Simon, who
might very well have passed for a doctor himself, having a strict suit
of black, spectacles, grey hair, and a confidential manner. In fact, he
was a far more presentable man of science than his master, Dr Hirsch,
who was a forked radish of a fellow, with just enough bulb of a head to
make his body insignificant. With all the gravity of a great physician
handling a prescription, Simon handed a letter to M. Armagnac. That
gentleman ripped it up with a racial impatience, and rapidly read the
following:

I cannot come down to speak to you. There is a man in this house whom I
refuse to meet. He is a Chauvinist officer, Dubosc. He is sitting on the
stairs. He has been kicking the furniture about in all the other rooms;
I have locked myself in my study, opposite that cafe. If you love me,
go over to the cafe and wait at one of the tables outside. I will try
to send him over to you. I want you to answer him and deal with him. I
cannot meet him myself. I cannot: I will not.

There is going to be another Dreyfus case.

P. HIRSCH

M. Armagnac looked at M. Brun. M. Brun borrowed the letter, read it, and
looked at M. Armagnac. Then both betook themselves briskly to one of the
little tables under the chestnuts opposite, where they procured two tall
glasses of horrible green absinthe, which they could drink apparently in
any weather and at any time. Otherwise the cafe seemed empty, except
for one soldier drinking coffee at one table, and at another a large man
drinking a small syrup and a priest drinking nothing.

Maurice Brun cleared his throat and said: “Of course we must help the
master in every way, but--”

There was an abrupt silence, and Armagnac said: “He may have excellent
reasons for not meeting the man himself, but--”

Before either could complete a sentence, it was evident that the invader
had been expelled from the house opposite. The shrubs under the archway
swayed and burst apart, as that unwelcome guest was shot out of them
like a cannon-ball.

He was a sturdy figure in a small and tilted Tyrolean felt hat, a
figure that had indeed something generally Tyrolean about it. The man’s
shoulders were big and broad, but his legs were neat and active in
knee-breeches and knitted stockings. His face was brown like a nut; he
had very bright and restless brown eyes; his dark hair was brushed
back stiffly in front and cropped close behind, outlining a square and
powerful skull; and he had a huge black moustache like the horns of a
bison. Such a substantial head is generally based on a bull neck; but
this was hidden by a big coloured scarf, swathed round up the man’s ears
and falling in front inside his jacket like a sort of fancy waistcoat.
It was a scarf of strong dead colours, dark red and old gold and purple,
probably of Oriental fabrication. Altogether the man had something a
shade barbaric about him; more like a Hungarian squire than an ordinary
French officer. His French, however, was obviously that of a native;
and his French patriotism was so impulsive as to be slightly absurd.
His first act when he burst out of the archway was to call in a clarion
voice down the street: “Are there any Frenchmen here?” as if he were
calling for Christians in Mecca.

Armagnac and Brun instantly stood up; but they were too late. Men
were already running from the street corners; there was a small but
ever-clustering crowd. With the prompt French instinct for the politics
of the street, the man with the black moustache had already run across
to a corner of the cafe, sprung on one of the tables, and seizing a
branch of chestnut to steady himself, shouted as Camille Desmoulins once
shouted when he scattered the oak-leaves among the populace.

“Frenchmen!” he volleyed; “I cannot speak! God help me, that is why I
am speaking! The fellows in their filthy parliaments who learn to
speak also learn to be silent--silent as that spy cowering in the house
opposite! Silent as he is when I beat on his bedroom door! Silent as he
is now, though he hears my voice across this street and shakes where he
sits! Oh, they can be silent eloquently--the politicians! But the time
has come when we that cannot speak must speak. You are betrayed to the
Prussians. Betrayed at this moment. Betrayed by that man. I am Jules
Dubosc, Colonel of Artillery, Belfort. We caught a German spy in the
Vosges yesterday, and a paper was found on him--a paper I hold in my
hand. Oh, they tried to hush it up; but I took it direct to the man who
wrote it--the man in that house! It is in his hand. It is signed with
his initials. It is a direction for finding the secret of this new
Noiseless Powder. Hirsch invented it; Hirsch wrote this note about it.
This note is in German, and was found in a German’s pocket. ‘Tell the
man the formula for powder is in grey envelope in first drawer to the
left of Secretary’s desk, War Office, in red ink. He must be careful.
P.H.’”

He rattled short sentences like a quick-firing gun, but he was plainly
the sort of man who is either mad or right. The mass of the crowd
was Nationalist, and already in threatening uproar; and a minority of
equally angry Intellectuals, led by Armagnac and Brun, only made the
majority more militant.

“If this is a military secret,” shouted Brun, “why do you yell about it
in the street?”

“I will tell you why I do!” roared Dubosc above the roaring crowd. “I
went to this man in straight and civil style. If he had any explanation
it could have been given in complete confidence. He refuses to explain.
He refers me to two strangers in a cafe as to two flunkeys. He has
thrown me out of the house, but I am going back into it, with the people
of Paris behind me!”

A shout seemed to shake the very facade of mansions and two stones flew,
one breaking a window above the balcony. The indignant Colonel plunged
once more under the archway and was heard crying and thundering inside.
Every instant the human sea grew wider and wider; it surged up against
the rails and steps of the traitor’s house; it was already certain that
the place would be burst into like the Bastille, when the broken french
window opened and Dr Hirsch came out on the balcony. For an instant
the fury half turned to laughter; for he was an absurd figure in such
a scene. His long bare neck and sloping shoulders were the shape of a
champagne bottle, but that was the only festive thing about him. His
coat hung on him as on a peg; he wore his carrot-coloured hair long
and weedy; his cheeks and chin were fully fringed with one of those
irritating beards that begin far from the mouth. He was very pale, and
he wore blue spectacles.

Livid as he was, he spoke with a sort of prim decision, so that the mob
fell silent in the middle of his third sentence.

“...only two things to say to you now. The first is to my foes, the
second to my friends. To my foes I say: It is true I will not meet M.
Dubosc, though he is storming outside this very room. It is true I have
asked two other men to confront him for me. And I will tell you why!
Because I will not and must not see him--because it would be against all
rules of dignity and honour to see him. Before I am triumphantly cleared
before a court, there is another arbitration this gentleman owes me as a
gentleman, and in referring him to my seconds I am strictly--”

Armagnac and Brun were waving their hats wildly, and even the Doctor’s
enemies roared applause at this unexpected defiance. Once more a few
sentences were inaudible, but they could hear him say: “To my friends--I
myself should always prefer weapons purely intellectual, and to these
an evolved humanity will certainly confine itself. But our own most
precious truth is the fundamental force of matter and heredity. My books
are successful; my theories are unrefuted; but I suffer in politics
from a prejudice almost physical in the French. I cannot speak like
Clemenceau and Deroulede, for their words are like echoes of their
pistols. The French ask for a duellist as the English ask for a
sportsman. Well, I give my proofs: I will pay this barbaric bribe, and
then go back to reason for the rest of my life.”

Two men were instantly found in the crowd itself to offer their services
to Colonel Dubosc, who came out presently, satisfied. One was the common
soldier with the coffee, who said simply: “I will act for you, sir. I
am the Duc de Valognes.” The other was the big man, whom his friend the
priest sought at first to dissuade; and then walked away alone.

In the early evening a light dinner was spread at the back of the Cafe
Charlemagne. Though unroofed by any glass or gilt plaster, the guests
were nearly all under a delicate and irregular roof of leaves; for the
ornamental trees stood so thick around and among the tables as to give
something of the dimness and the dazzle of a small orchard. At one of
the central tables a very stumpy little priest sat in complete solitude,
and applied himself to a pile of whitebait with the gravest sort of
enjoyment. His daily living being very plain, he had a peculiar taste
for sudden and isolated luxuries; he was an abstemious epicure. He did
not lift his eyes from his plate, round which red pepper, lemons, brown
bread and butter, etc., were rigidly ranked, until a tall shadow fell
across the table, and his friend Flambeau sat down opposite. Flambeau
was gloomy.

“I’m afraid I must chuck this business,” said he heavily. “I’m all on
the side of the French soldiers like Dubosc, and I’m all against the
French atheists like Hirsch; but it seems to me in this case we’ve made
a mistake. The Duke and I thought it as well to investigate the charge,
and I must say I’m glad we did.”

“Is the paper a forgery, then?” asked the priest

“That’s just the odd thing,” replied Flambeau. “It’s exactly like
Hirsch’s writing, and nobody can point out any mistake in it. But it
wasn’t written by Hirsch. If he’s a French patriot he didn’t write it,
because it gives information to Germany. And if he’s a German spy he
didn’t write it, well--because it doesn’t give information to Germany.”

“You mean the information is wrong?” asked Father Brown.

“Wrong,” replied the other, “and wrong exactly where Dr Hirsch would
have been right--about the hiding-place of his own secret formula in his
own official department. By favour of Hirsch and the authorities, the
Duke and I have actually been allowed to inspect the secret drawer at
the War Office where the Hirsch formula is kept. We are the only people
who have ever known it, except the inventor himself and the Minister for
War; but the Minister permitted it to save Hirsch from fighting. After
that we really can’t support Dubosc if his revelation is a mare’s nest.”

“And it is?” asked Father Brown.

“It is,” said his friend gloomily. “It is a clumsy forgery by somebody
who knew nothing of the real hiding-place. It says the paper is in the
cupboard on the right of the Secretary’s desk. As a fact the cupboard
with the secret drawer is some way to the left of the desk.