The Innocence of Father Brown | Page 5

reckon on the unforeseen.
Aristide Valentin was unfathomably French; and the French intelligence is intelligence
specially and solely. He was not "a thinking machine"; for that is a brainless phrase of
modern fatalism and materialism. 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; 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 toast-master at the Hotel Metropole. In such a naked state of nescience, Valentin
had a view and a method of his own.
In such cases he reckoned on the unforeseen. In such cases, when he could not follow the
train of the reasonable, he coldly and carefully followed the train of the unreasonable.
Instead of going to the right places--banks, police stations, rendezvous-- he
systematically went to the wrong places; knocked at every empty house, turned down
every cul de sac, went up every lane blocked with rubbish, went round every crescent that
led him uselessly out of the way. He defended this crazy course quite logically. He said
that if one had a clue this was the worst way; but if one had no clue at all it was the best,
because there was just the chance that any oddity that caught the eye of the pursuer might
be the same that had caught the eye of the pursued. Somewhere a man must begin, and it
had better be just where another man might stop. Something about that flight of steps up
to the shop, something about the quietude and quaintness of the restaurant, roused all the
detective's rare romantic fancy and made him resolve to strike at random. He went up the
steps, and sitting down at a table by the window, asked for a cup of black coffee.
It was half-way through the morning, and he had not breakfasted; the slight litter of other
breakfasts stood about on the table to remind him of his hunger; and adding a poached
egg to his order, he proceeded musingly to shake some white sugar into his coffee,
thinking all the time about Flambeau. He remembered how Flambeau had escaped, once
by a pair of nail scissors, and once by a house on fire; once by having to pay for an
unstamped letter, and once by getting people to look through a telescope at a comet that
might destroy the world. 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.
He looked at the vessel from which the silvery powder had come; it was certainly a
sugar-basin; as unmistakably meant for sugar as a champagne-bottle for champagne. He
wondered why they should keep salt in it. He looked to see if there were any more
orthodox vessels. Yes; there were two salt-cellars quite full. Perhaps there was some

speciality in the condiment in the salt-cellars. He tasted it; it was sugar. Then he looked
round at the restaurant with a refreshed air of interest, to see if there were any other traces
of that singular artistic taste which puts the sugar in the salt-cellars and the salt in the
sugar-basin. Except for an odd splash of some dark fluid on one of the white-papered
walls, the whole place appeared neat, cheerful and ordinary. He rang the bell for the
waiter.
When that official hurried up, fuzzy-haired and somewhat blear-eyed at that early hour,
the detective (who was not without an appreciation of the simpler forms of humour)
asked him to taste the sugar and see if it was up to the high reputation of the hotel. The
result was that the waiter yawned suddenly and woke up.
"Do you play this delicate joke on your customers every morning?" inquired Valentin.
"Does changing the salt and sugar never pall on you as a jest?"
The waiter, when this irony grew clearer,