The Innocence of Father Brown quotes

If Valentin’s quick eye had caught a tall apple-woman, a tall grenadier, or even a tolerably tall duchess, he might have arrested them on the spot.

But all along his train there was nobody that could be a disguised Flambeau, any more than a cat could be a disguised giraffe.

About the people on the boat he had already satisfied himself; and the people picked up at Harwich or on the journey limited themselves with certainty to six.

Valentin stood and smoked in front of the yellow-white blinds and considered them long.

The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen.

A few clouds in heaven do come together into the staring shape of one human eye. A tree does stand up in the landscape of a doubtful journey in the exact and elaborate shape of a note of interrogation.

A machine only is a machine because it cannot think. But he was a thinking man, and a plain man at the same time. All his wonderful successes, that looked like conjuring, had been gained by plodding logic, by clear and commonplace French thought.

The French electrify the world not by starting any paradox, they electrify it by carrying out a truism.

They carry a truism so far—as in the French Revolution. But exactly because Valentin understood reason, he understood the limits of reason. Only a man who knows nothing of motors talks of motoring without petrol;

The French electrify the world not by starting any paradox, they electrify it by carrying out a truism. They carry a truism so far—as in the French Revolution. But exactly because Valentin understood reason, he understood the limits of reason.

Only a man who knows nothing of motors talks of motoring without petrol; only a man who knows nothing of reason talks of reasoning without strong, undisputed first principles.

Here he had no strong first principles. Flambeau had been missed at Harwich; and if he was in London at all, he might be anything from a tall tramp on Wimbledon Common to a tall toastmaster at the Hôtel Métropole.

He thought his detective brain as good as the criminal’s, which was true. But he fully realised the disadvantage. “

The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic

,” he said with a sour smile, and lifted his coffee cup to his lips slowly, and put it down very quickly. He had put salt in it.

Valentin smoked frowningly for a few seconds; then, removing his cigarette, he said: “

If you know what a man’s doing, get in front of him; but if you want to guess what he’s doing, keep behind him.

Stray when he strays; stop when he stops; travel as slowly as he. Then you may see what he saw and may act as he acted. All we can do is to keep our eyes skinned for a queer thing.”

Perhaps, also, they felt a silent and growing desire for lunch, for the hours crept long past the normal luncheon hour, and the long roads of the North London suburbs seemed to shoot out into length after length like an infernal telescope.

It was one of those journeys on which a man perpetually feels that now at last he must have come to the end of the universe, and then finds he has only come to the beginning of Tufnell Park.

London died away in draggled taverns and dreary scrubs, and then was unaccountably born again in blazing high streets and blatant hotels. It was like passing through thirteen separate vulgar cities all just touching each other.

The holiday makers who roam this region had not wholly dispersed; a few couples sat shapelessly on benches; and here and there a distant girl still shrieked in one of the swings.

The glory of heaven deepened and darkened around the sublime vulgarity of man

; and standing on the slope and looking across the valley, Valentin beheld the thing which he sought.

“

Reason and justice grip the remotest and the loneliest star.

Look at those stars. Don’t they look as if they were single diamonds and sapphires? Well, you can imagine any mad botany or geology you please. Think of forests of adamant with leaves of brilliants.

Think of forests of adamant with leaves of brilliants. Think the moon is a blue moon, a single elephantine sapphire. But don’t fancy that all that frantic astronomy would make the smallest difference to the reason and justice of conduct.

On plains of opal, under cliffs cut out of pearl, you would still find a notice-board, ‘Thou shalt not steal.’

”

He used to do it with handbags he stole at railway stations, but he’s in a monastery now. Oh, one gets to know, you know,” he added, rubbing his head again with the same sort of desperate apology. “

We can’t help being priests. People come and tell us these things.

”

“Oh, by being a celibate simpleton, I suppose,” he said. “

Has it never struck you that a man who does next to nothing but hear men’s real sins is not likely to be wholly unaware of human evil?

But, as a matter of fact, another part of my trade, too, made me sure you weren’t a priest.”

“What?” asked the thief, almost gaping.

“You attacked reason,” said Father Brown. “It’s bad theology.”

And even as he turned away to collect his property, the three policemen came out from under the twilight trees. Flambeau was an artist and a sportsman. He stepped back and swept Valentin a great bow.

Ruthless in the pursuit of criminals, he was very mild about their punishment. Since he had been supreme over French—and largely over European—policial methods, his great influence had been honourably used for the mitigation of sentences and the purification of prisons.

He was one of the great humanitarian French freethinkers; and the only thing wrong with them is that they make mercy even colder than justice.

When Valentin arrived he was already dressed in black clothes and the red rosette—an elegant figure, his dark beard already streaked with grey. He went straight through his house to his study, which opened on the grounds behind.

but he was ready to pour money into any intellectual vessel, so long as it was an untried vessel. One of his hobbies was to wait for the American Shakespeare—a hobby more patient than angling.

He admired Walt Whitman, but thought that Luke P. Tanner, of Paris, PA, was more “progressive” than Whitman any day.

He liked anything that he thought “progressive.” He thought Valentin “progressive,” thereby doing him a grave injustice.

The solid appearance of Julius K. Brayne in the room was as decisive as a dinner bell.

He had this great quality, which very few of us can claim, that his presence was as big as his absence.

He was a huge fellow, as fat as he was tall, clad in complete evening black, without so much relief as a watch-chain or a ring. His hair was white and well brushed back like a German’s;

There are ladies, gentlemen, and there is a foreign ambassador. If we must mark it down as a crime, then it must be followed up as a crime. But till then I can use my own discretion.

I am the head of the police; I am so public that I can afford to be private.

Please Heaven, I will clear every one of my own guests before I call in my men to look for anybody else. Gentlemen, upon your honour, you will none of you leave the house till tomorrow at noon; there are bedrooms for all.

Dr. Simon went through to the armoury and routed out Ivan, the public detective’s private detective. Galloway went to the drawing-room and told the terrible news tactfully enough, so that by the time the company assembled there the ladies were already startled and already soothed.

Meanwhile the good priest and the good atheist stood at the head and foot of the dead man motionless in the moonlight, like symbolic statues of their two philosophies of death.

Ivan, the confidential man with the scar and the moustaches, came out of the house like a cannon ball, and came racing across the lawn to Valentin like a dog to his master.

The proprietor knew all his waiters like the fingers on his hand; there were only fifteen of them all told.

It was much easier to become a Member of Parliament than to become a waiter in that hotel.

Each waiter was trained in terrible silence and smoothness, as if he were a gentleman’s servant. And, indeed, there was generally at least one waiter to every gentleman who dined.

It was that topsy-turvy product—an “exclusive” commercial enterprise. That is, it was a thing which paid not by attracting people, but actually by turning people away.

In the heart of a plutocracy tradesmen become cunning enough to be more fastidious than their customers.

They positively create difficulties so that their wealthy and weary clients may spend money and diplomacy in overcoming them.

Father Brown had the kind of head that cannot help asking questions; and on this apparently trivial question his head almost split. He had seen men run in order to jump. He had seen men run in order to slide.

But why on earth should a man run in order to walk?

Or, again, why should he walk in order to run? Yet no other description would cover the antics of this invisible pair of legs.

Father Brown’s figure remained quite dark and still; but in that instant he had lost his head. His head was always most valuable when he had lost it.

In such moments he put two and two together and made four million.

Often the Catholic Church (which is wedded to common sense) did not approve of it. Often he did not approve of it himself. But it was real inspiration—important at rare crises—when whosoever shall lose his head the same shall save it.

Father Brown’s figure remained quite dark and still; but in that instant he had lost his head.

His head was always most valuable when he had lost it.

In such moments he put two and two together and made four million. Often the Catholic Church (which is wedded to common sense) did not approve of it. Often he did not approve of it himself.

That is to say, he was a pleasant youth, with flat, fair hair and a freckled face, with moderate intelligence and enormous estates. In public his appearances were always successful and his principle was simple enough.

When he thought of a joke he made it, and was called brilliant. When he could not think of a joke he said that this was no time for trifling, and was called able.

In private, in a club of his own class, he was simply quite pleasantly frank and silly, like a schoolboy. Mr. Audley, never having been in politics, treated them a little more seriously.

There was a shocking stillness for an instant in that room.

It may be (so supernatural is the word death) that each of those idle men looked for a second at his soul, and saw it as a small dried pea.

One of them—the duke, I think—even said with the idiotic kindness of wealth: “Is there anything we can do?”

“

Well, my last crime was a Christmas crime, a cheery, cosy, English middle-class crime; a crime of Charles Dickens.

I did it in a good old middle-class house near Putney, a house with a crescent of carriage drive, a house with a stable by the side of it, a house with the name on the two outer gates, a house with a monkey tree.

“A radical does not mean a man who lives on radishes,” remarked Crook, with some impatience; “and a Conservative does not mean a man who preserves jam. Neither, I assure you, does a Socialist mean a man who desires a social evening with the chimney-sweep.

A Socialist means a man who wants all the chimneys swept and all the chimney-sweeps paid for it.

”

he died in a madhouse, screaming with fear of the ‘narks’ and receivers that had betrayed him and hunted him down. I know the woods look very free behind you, Flambeau; I know that in a flash you could melt into them like a monkey.

But some day you will be an old grey monkey, Flambeau. You will sit up in your free forest cold at heart and close to death, and the treetops will be very bare.

”

“I want you to give them back, Flambeau, and I want you to give up this life. There is still youth and honour and humour in you; don’t fancy they will last in that trade.

Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil. That road goes down and down.

The kind man drinks and turns cruel; the frank man kills and lies about it. Many a man I’ve known started like you to be an honest outlaw, a merry robber of the rich, and ended stamped into slime.

“Really and truly,” he said, “it’s as serious—as serious as the halfpenny bun.

It is expensive, like the bun; one pays for it. It is indigestible, like the bun.

It hurts.”

“Well, my dear,” said the young man, cheerfully, “if he were Satan himself, he is done for now you have told somebody.

One goes mad all alone, old girl.

But when was it you fancied you felt and heard our squinting friend?”

She says ‘There is nobody staying with us,’ meaning nobody of the sort you mean. But suppose a doctor inquiring into an epidemic asks, ‘Who is staying in the house?’ then the lady will remember the butler, the parlourmaid, and the rest.

All language is used like that; you never get a question answered literally, even when you get it answered truly.

When those four quite honest men said that no man had gone into the Mansions, they did not really mean that no man had gone into them. They meant no man whom they could suspect of being your man.

“

Nobody ever notices postmen somehow

,” he said thoughtfully; “yet they have passions like other men, and even carry large bags where a small corpse can be stowed quite easily.”

For there did rest on the place one of those clouds of pride and madness and mysterious sorrow which lie more heavily on the noble houses of Scotland than on any other of the children of men.

For Scotland has a double dose of the poison called heredity; the sense of blood in the aristocrat, and the sense of doom in the Calvinist.

The priest had snatched a day from his business at Glasgow to meet his friend Flambeau, the amateur detective, who was at Glengyle Castle with another more formal officer investigating the life and death of the late Earl of Glengyle.

As green sap to the simmer trees Is red gold to the Ogilvies.

For many centuries there had never been a decent lord in Glengyle Castle; and with the Victorian era one would have thought that all eccentricities were exhausted.

The last Glengyle, however, satisfied his tribal tradition by doing the only thing that was left for him to do; he disappeared. I do not mean that he went abroad; by all accounts he was still in the castle, if he was anywhere.

“Don’t you know what psychology means?” asked Flambeau with friendly surprise. “

Psychology means being off your chump.

”

“I only suggested that because you said one could not plausibly connect snuff with clockwork or candles with bright stones.

Ten false philosophies will fit the universe; ten false theories will fit Glengyle Castle.

But we want the real explanation of the castle and the universe. But are there no other exhibits?”

“Sleep!” cried Father Brown. “Sleep. We have come to the end of the ways. Do you know what sleep is?

Do you know that every man who sleeps believes in God? It is a sacrament; for it is an act of faith and it is a food.

And we need a sacrament, if only a natural one. Something has fallen on us that falls very seldom on men; perhaps the worst thing that can fall on them.”

The priest had turned his face to the castle as he answered: “

We have found the truth; and the truth makes no sense.

”

“The dentist!” he repeated. “Six hours in the spiritual abyss, and all because I never thought of the dentist! Such a simple, such a beautiful and peaceful thought!

Friends, we have passed a night in hell; but now the sun is risen, the birds are singing, and the radiant form of the dentist consoles the world.

”

“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.

”

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.”

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.

“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.

“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 people who wrote the medieval ballads,” answered the priest, “knew more about fairies than you do.

It isn’t only nice things that happen in fairyland.

”

“All right,” said Father Brown. “

I never said it was always wrong to enter fairyland. I only said it was always dangerous.

”

It was already an easy twilight, in which all things were visible, when they came under the hanging roofs and bridges of this riverside hamlet.

The houses, with their long, low, stooping roofs, seemed to come down to drink at the river, like huge grey and red cattle.

The broadening and whitening dawn had already turned to working daylight before they saw any living creature on the wharves and bridges of that silent town.

“Not at all,” answered Flambeau, laughing. “I am not sensitive.

Very few reputations are gained by unsullied virtue.

”

“I mean that we here are on the wrong side of the tapestry,” answered Father Brown. “

The things that happen here do not seem to mean anything; they mean something somewhere else.

Somewhere else retribution will come on the real offender. Here it often seems to fall on the wrong person.”

The two swords sparkled from point to pommel like two diamond pins. There was something frightful in the two figures appearing so little and so gay.

They looked like two butterflies trying to pin each other to a cork.

Father Brown ran as hard as he could, his little legs going like a wheel.

“I suppose you can guess the whole story now? After all, it’s a primitive story.

A man had two enemies. He was a wise man. And so he discovered that two enemies are better than one.

”

The Bohuns were one of the very few aristocratic families really dating from the Middle Ages, and their pennon had actually seen Palestine. But it is a great mistake to suppose that such houses stand high in chivalric tradition.

Few except the poor preserve traditions. Aristocrats live not in traditions but in fashions.

The Bohuns had been Mohocks under Queen Anne and Mashers under Queen Victoria.

“Don’t say anything! Oh, don’t say anything,” cried the atheist cobbler, dancing about in an ecstasy of admiration of the English legal system.

For no man is such a legalist as the good Secularist.

The blacksmith turned on him over his shoulder the august face of a fanatic.

“Why do these idiots always assume that the only person who hates the wife’s lover is the wife’s husband?

Nine times out of ten the person who most hates the wife’s lover is the wife.

Who knows what insolence or treachery he had shown her—look there!”

“First,” said Father Brown quietly, “the thing is quite in your own province. It is a matter of physical science. The blacksmith is mistaken, not perhaps in saying that the blow was divine, but certainly in saying that it came by a miracle.

It was no miracle, doctor, except in so far as man is himself a miracle, with his strange and wicked and yet half-heroic heart.

The force that smashed that skull was a force well known to scientists—one of the most frequently debated of the laws of nature.”

Immediately beneath and about them the lines of the Gothic building plunged outwards into the void with a sickening swiftness akin to suicide.

There is that element of Titan energy in the architecture of the Middle Ages that, from whatever aspect it be seen, it always seems to be rushing away, like the strong back of some maddened horse.

This church was hewn out of ancient and silent stone, bearded with old fungoids and stained with the nests of birds. And yet, when they saw it from below, it sprang like a fountain at the stars;

“I think there is something rather dangerous about standing on these high places even to pray,” said Father Brown. “

Heights were made to be looked at, not to be looked from.

”

“

I mean that one’s soul may fall if one’s body doesn’t,

” said the other priest.

“a good man, but not a Christian—hard, imperious, unforgiving. Well, his Scotch religion was made up by men who prayed on hills and high crags, and learnt to look down on the world more than to look up at heaven.

Humility is the mother of giants. One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.

”

“Let him look out,” said Father Brown. “

The sun was the cruellest of all the gods.

But what does that monstrous eye mean?”

“

Oh, thinking one is quite well,

” said his friend.

it is substantially certain that he did not see a stunted, round-faced priest who, in the crowd below, looked up at him with blinking eyes. That was perhaps the most startling difference between even these two far divided men.

Father Brown could not look at anything without blinking; but the priest of Apollo could look on the blaze at noon without a quiver of the eyelid.

“O sun,” cried the prophet, “O star that art too great to be allowed among the stars! O fountain that flowest quietly in that secret spot that is called space. White Father of all white unwearied things, white flames and white flowers and white peaks.

Your present work of suspicion and slander is worthy of your coat and creed. All your church is but a black police; you are only spies and detectives seeking to tear from men confessions of guilt, whether by treachery or torture.

You would convict men of crime, I would convict them of innocence. You would convince them of sin, I would convince them of virtue.

“Reader of the books of evil, one more word before I blow away your baseless nightmares forever. Not even faintly could you understand how little I care whether you can convict me or no.

Of a sudden the man broke out into blasphemies and cataracts of incredulous words.

There was something shocking about the dropping of his mask; it was like a man’s real face falling off.

“See here!” he cried in broad American, when he was breathless with cursing, “I may be an adventurer, but I guess you’re a murderess. Yes, gentlemen, here’s your death explained, and without any levitation. The poor girl is writing a will in my favour;

“No; let him pass,” said Father Brown, with a strange deep sigh that seemed to come from the depths of the universe. “

Let Cain pass by, for he belongs to God.

”

It came with this precious prophet, or whatever he calls himself, who taught her to stare at the hot sun with the naked eye. It was called accepting Apollo. Oh, if these new pagans would only be old pagans, they would be a little wiser!

The old pagans knew that mere naked Nature-worship must have a cruel side. They knew that the eye of Apollo can blast and blind.

”

“

Where does a wise man hide a pebble?

”

“

And if a man had to hide a dead body, he would make a field of dead bodies to hide it in.

”

“Sir Arthur St. Clare, as I have already said, was a man who read his Bible. That was what was the matter with him.

When will people understand that it is useless for a man to read his Bible unless he also reads everybody else’s Bible?

A printer reads a Bible for misprints. A Mormon reads his Bible, and finds polygamy; a Christian Scientist reads his, and finds we have no arms and legs. St. Clare was an old Anglo-Indian Protestant soldier. Now, just think what that might mean;

Clare, as I have already said, was a man who read his Bible. That was what was the matter with him. When will people understand that it is useless for a man to read his Bible unless he also reads everybody else’s Bible?

A printer reads a Bible for misprints. A Mormon reads his Bible, and finds polygamy; a Christian Scientist reads his, and finds we have no arms and legs.

St. Clare was an old Anglo-Indian Protestant soldier. Now, just think what that might mean; and, for Heaven’s sake, don’t cant about it.

Of course, he read the Old Testament rather than the New. Of course, he found in the Old Testament anything that he wanted—lust, tyranny, treason. Oh, I dare say he was honest, as you call it.

But what is the good of a man being honest in his worship of dishonesty?

“In each of the hot and secret countries to which the man went he kept a harem, he tortured witnesses, he amassed shameful gold; but certainly he would have said with steady eyes that he did it to the glory of the Lord.

but certainly he would have said with steady eyes that he did it to the glory of the Lord. My own theology is sufficiently expressed by asking which Lord?

Anyhow, there is this about such evil, that it opens door after door in hell, and always into smaller and smaller chambers.

This is the real case against crime, that a man does not become wilder and wilder, but only meaner and meaner. St. Clare was soon suffocated by difficulties of bribery and blackmail; and needed more and more cash.

My own theology is sufficiently expressed by asking which Lord? Anyhow, there is this about such evil, that it opens door after door in hell, and always into smaller and smaller chambers.

This is the real case against crime, that a man does not become wilder and wilder, but only meaner and meaner.

St. Clare was soon suffocated by difficulties of bribery and blackmail; and needed more and more cash.

“People like frequent laughter,” answered Father Brown, “but I don’t think they like a permanent smile.

Cheerfulness without humour is a very trying thing.

”

“Of course, drink is neither good nor bad in itself.

But I can’t help sometimes feeling that men like Armstrong want an occasional glass of wine to sadden them.

”