The Wisdom of Father Brown | Page 3

of the house," asked Dr Hood, with huge and silent amusement,
"what does she want?"
"Why, she wants to marry him," cried Father Brown, sitting up eagerly. "That is just the
awful complication."
"It is indeed a hideous enigma," said Dr Hood.
"This young James Todhunter," continued the cleric, "is a very decent man so far as I
know; but then nobody knows very much. He is a bright, brownish little fellow, agile like
a monkey, clean-shaven like an actor, and obliging like a born courtier. He seems to have
quite a pocketful of money, but nobody knows what his trade is. Mrs MacNab, therefore

(being of a pessimistic turn), is quite sure it is something dreadful, and probably
connected with dynamite. The dynamite must be of a shy and noiseless sort, for the poor
fellow only shuts himself up for several hours of the day and studies something behind a
locked door. He declares his privacy is temporary and justified, and promises to explain
before the wedding. That is all that anyone knows for certain, but Mrs MacNab will tell
you a great deal more than even she is certain of. You know how the tales grow like grass
on such a patch of ignorance as that. There are tales of two voices heard talking in the
room; though, when the door is opened, Todhunter is always found alone. There are tales
of a mysterious tall man in a silk hat, who once came out of the sea-mists and apparently
out of the sea, stepping softly across the sandy fields and through the small back garden
at twilight, till he was heard talking to the lodger at his open window. The colloquy
seemed to end in a quarrel. Todhunter dashed down his window with violence, and the
man in the high hat melted into the sea-fog again. This story is told by the family with the
fiercest mystification; but I really think Mrs MacNab prefers her own original tale: that
the Other Man (or whatever it is) crawls out every night from the big box in the corner,
which is kept locked all day. You see, therefore, how this sealed door of Todhunter's is
treated as the gate of all the fancies and monstrosities of the `Thousand and One Nights'.
And yet there is the little fellow in his respectable black jacket, as punctual and innocent
as a parlour clock. He pays his rent to the tick; he is practically a teetotaller; he is
tirelessly kind with the younger children, and can keep them amused for a day on end;
and, last and most urgent of all, he has made himself equally popular with the eldest
daughter, who is ready to go to church with him tomorrow."
A man warmly concerned with any large theories has always a relish for applying them to
any triviality. The great specialist having condescended to the priest's simplicity,
condescended expansively. He settled himself with comfort in his arm-chair and began to
talk in the tone of a somewhat absent-minded lecturer:
"Even in a minute instance, it is best to look first to the main tendencies of Nature. A
particular flower may not be dead in early winter, but the flowers are dying; a particular
pebble may never be wetted with the tide, but the tide is coming in. To the scientific eye
all human history is a series of collective movements, destructions or migrations, like the
massacre of flies in winter or the return of birds in spring. Now the root fact in all history
is Race. Race produces religion; Race produces legal and ethical wars. There is no
stronger case than that of the wild, unworldly and perishing stock which we commonly
call the Celts, of whom your friends the MacNabs are specimens. Small, swarthy, and of
this dreamy and drifting blood, they accept easily the superstitious explanation of any
incidents, just as they still accept (you will excuse me for saying) that superstitious
explanation of all incidents which you and your Church represent. It is not remarkable
that such people, with the sea moaning behind them and the Church (excuse me again)
droning in front of them, should put fantastic features into what are probably plain events.
You, with your small parochial responsibilities, see only this particular Mrs MacNab,
terrified with this particular tale of two voices and a tall man out of the sea. But the man
with the scientific imagination sees, as it were, the whole clans of MacNab scattered over
the whole world, in its ultimate average as uniform as a tribe of birds. He sees thousands
of Mrs MacNabs, in thousands of houses, dropping their little drop of morbidity in the
tea-cups of their friends; he sees--"

Before the scientist could conclude his sentence, another and more impatient summons