red waistcoat. Besides, they’re all short and shabby; none of them could have thought his own image was a tall, thin, old gentleman in evening-dress. We want another, equally tall and thin, to match him. That’s what I meant by saying that I knew what the murderer looked like.”
“And what do you argue from that?” asked Bagshaw, looking at him steadily.
The priest uttered a sort of sharp, crisp laugh, oddly different from his ordinary mild manner of speech.
“I am going to argue,” he said, “the very thing that you said was so ludicrous and impossible.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m going to base the defence,” said Father Brown, “on the fact that the prosecuting counsel has a bald head.”
“Oh, my God!” said the detective quietly, and got to his feet, staring.
Father Brown had resumed his monologue in an unruffled manner.
“You’ve been following the movements of a good many people in this business; you policemen were prodigiously interested in the movements of the poet, and the servant, and the Irishman. The name whose movements seem to have been rather forgotten is the dead man himself. His servant was quite honestly astonished at finding his master had returned. His master had gone to a great dinner of all the leaders of the legal profession, but had left it abruptly and come home. He was not ill, for he summoned no assistance; he had almost certainly quarrelled with some leader of the legal profession. It’s among the leaders of that profession that we should have looked first for his enemy. He returned, and shut himself up in the bungalow, where he kept all his private documents about treasonable practices. But the leader of the legal profession, who knew there was something against him in those documents, was thoughtful enough to follow his accuser home; he also being in evening-dress, but with a pistol in his pocket. That is all; and nobody could ever have guessed it except for the mirror.”
He seemed to be gazing into vacancy for a moment, and then added:
“A queer thing is a mirror; a picture frame that holds hundreds of different pictures, all vivid and all vanished forever. Yet, there was something specially strange about the glass that hung at the end of that grey corridor under that green palm. It is as if it was a magic glass and had a different fate from others, as if its picture could somehow survive it, hanging in the air of that twilight house like a spectre; or at least like an abstract diagram, the skeleton of an argument. We could, at least, conjure out of the void the thing that Sir Arthur Travers saw. By the way, there was one very true thing that you said about him.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” said Bagshaw with grim good-nature. “And what was it?”
“You said,” observed the priest, “that Sir Arthur must have some good reason for wanting to get Orm hanged.”
A week later the priest met the police detective once more, and learned that the authorities had already been moving on the new lines of inquiry when they were interrupted by a sensational event.
“Sir Arthur Travers,” began Father Brown.
“Sir Arthur Travers is dead,” said Bagshaw, briefly.
“Ah!” said the other, with a little catch in his voice; “you mean that he—”
“Yes,” said Bagshaw, “he shot at the same man again, but not in a mirror.”
The Man with Two Beards
This tale was told by Father Brown to Professor Crake, the celebrated criminologist, after dinner at a club, where the two were introduced to each other as sharing a harmless hobby of murder and robbery. But, as Father Brown’s version rather minimized his own part in the matter, it is here retold in a more impartial style. It arose out of a playful passage of arms, in which the professor was very scientific and the priest rather sceptical.
“My good sir,” said the professor in remonstrance, “don’t you believe that criminology is a science?”
“I’m not sure,” replied Father Brown. “Do you believe that hagiology is a science?”
“What’s that?” asked the specialist sharply.
“No, it’s not the study of hags, and has nothing to do with burning witches,” said the priest, smiling. “It’s the study of holy things, saints and so on. You see, the Dark Ages tried to make a science about good people. But our own humane and enlightened age is only interested in a science about bad ones. Yet, I think our general experience is that every conceivable sort of man has been a saint. And I suspect you will find, too, that every conceivable sort of man has been a murderer.”
“Well, we believe murderers can be pretty well classified,” observed Crake. “The list sounds rather long and dull; but I think it’s exhaustive. First, all killing can be divided into rational and irrational, and we’ll take the last first, because they are much fewer. There is such a thing as homicidal mania, or love of butchery in the abstract. There is such a thing as irrational antipathy, though it’s very seldom homicidal. Then we come to the true motives; of these, some are less rational in the sense of being merely romantic and retrospective. Acts of pure revenge are acts of hopeless revenge. Thus, a lover will sometimes kill a rival he could never supplant, or a rebel assassinate a tyrant after the conquest is complete. But, more often, even these acts have a rational expectation. They are hopeful murders. They fall into the larger section of the second division, of what we may call prudential crimes. These, again, fall chiefly under two descriptions. A man kills either in order to obtain what the other man possesses, either by theft or inheritance, or to stop the other man from acting in some way; as in the case of killing a blackmailer or a political opponent, or, in the case of a rather more passive obstacle, a husband or wife whose continued functioning, as such, interferes with other things. We believe that
