Gilbert Chesterton - The Scandal of Father Brown

Agar Rock turned on his companion a face of final and awful justice; like the Day of Judgement.

"Well, all America is going to hear of this," he said. "In plain words, you helped her to bolt with that curly-haired lover."

"Yes," said Father Brown, "I helped her to bolt with that curly-haired lover."

"You call yourself a minister of Jesus Christ," cried Rock, "and you boast of a crime."

"I have been mixed up with several crimes," said the priest gently. "Happily for once this is a story without a crime. This is a simple fire-side idyll; that ends with a glow of domesticity."

"And ends with a rope-ladder instead of a rope," said Rock. "Isn't she a married woman?"

"Oh, yes," said Father Brown.

"Well, oughtn't she to be with her husband?" demanded Rock.

"She is with her husband," said Father Brown.

The other was startled into anger. "You lie," he said. "The poor little man is still snoring in bed."

"You seem to know a lot about his private affairs," said Father Brown plaintively. "You could almost write a life of the Man with a Beard. The only thing you don't seem ever to have found out about him is his name."

"Nonsense," said Rock. "His name is in the hotel book."

"I know it is," answered the priest, nodding gravely, "in very large letters; the name of Rudel Romanes. Hypatia Potter, who met him here, put her name boldly under his, when she meant to elope with him; and her husband put his name under that, when he pursued them to this place. He put it very close under hers, by way of protest. The Romanes (who has pots of money, as a popular misanthrope despising men) bribed the brutes in this hotel to bar and bolt it and keep the lawful husband out. And I, as you truly say, helped him to get in."

When a man is told something that turns things upside-down; that the tail wags the dog; that the fish has caught the fisherman; that the earth goes round the moon; he takes some little time before he even asks seriously if it is true. He is still content with the consciousness that it is the opposite of the obvious truth. Rock said at last: "You don't mean that little fellow is the romantic Rudel we're always reading about; and that curly haired fellow is Mr Potter of Pittsburgh ."

"Yes," said Father Brown. "I knew it the moment I clapped eyes on both of them. But I verified it afterwards."

Rock ruminated for a time and said at last: "I suppose it's barely possible you're right. But how did you come to have such a notion, in the face of the facts?"

Father Brown looked rather abashed; subsided into a chair, and stared into vacancy, until a faint smile began to dawn on his round and rather foolish face.

"Well," he said, "you see — the truth is, I'm not romantic."

"I don't know what the devil you are," said Rock roughly.

"Now you are romantic," said Father Brown helpfully. "For instance, you see somebody looking poetical, and you assume he is a poet. Do you know what the majority of poets look like? What a wild confusion was created by that coincidence of three good-looking aristocrats at the beginning of the nineteenth century: Byron and Goethe and Shelley! Believe me, in the common way, a man may write: 'Beauty has laid her flaming lips on mine,' or whatever that chap wrote, without being himself particularly beautiful. Besides, do you realize how old a man generally is by the time his fame has filled the world? Watts painted Swinburne with a halo of hair; but Swinburne was bald before most of his last American or Australian admirers had heard of his hyacinthine locks. So was D'Annunzio. As a fact, Romanes still has rather a fine head, as you will see if you look at it closely; he looks like an intellectual man; and he is. Unfortunately, like a good many other intellectual men, he's a fool. He's let himself go to seed with selfishness and fussing about his digestion. So that the ambitious American lady, who thought it would be like soaring to Olympus with the Nine Muses to elope with a poet, found that a day or so of it was about enough for her. So that when her husband came after her, and stormed the place, she was delighted to go back to him."

"But her husband?" queried Rock. "I am still rather puzzled about her husband."

"Ah, you've been reading too many of your erotic modern novels," said Father Brown; and partly closed his eyes in answer to the protesting glare of the other. "I know a lot of stories start with a wildly beautiful woman wedded to some elderly swine in the stock market. But why? In that, as in most things, modern novels are the very reverse of modern. I don't say it never happens; but it hardly ever happens now except by her own fault. Girls nowadays marry whom they like; especially spoilt girls like Hypatia. And whom do they marry? A beautiful wealthy girl like that would have a ring of admirers; and whom would she choose? The chances are a hundred to one that she'd marry very young and choose the handsomest man she met at a dance or a tennis-party. Well, ordinary business men are sometimes handsome. A young god appeared (called Potter) and she wouldn't care if he was a broker or a burglar. But, given the environment, you will admit it's more likely he would be a broker; also, it's quite likely that he'd be called Potter. You see, you are so incurably romantic that your whole case was founded on the idea that a man looking like a young god couldn't be called Potter. Believe me, names are not so appropriately distributed."

"Well," said the other, after a short pause, "and what do you suppose happened after that?"

Father Brown got up rather abruptly from the seat in which he had collapsed; the candlelight threw the shadow of his short figure across the wall and ceiling, giving an odd impression that the balance of the room had been altered.

"Ah," he muttered, "that's the devil of it. That's the real devil. Much worse than the old Indian demons in this jungle. You thought I was only making out a case for the loose ways of these Latin Americans — well, the queer thing about you" — and he blinked owlishly at the other through his spectacles — "the queerest thing about you is that in a way you're right.

"You say down with romance. I say I'd take my chance in fighting the genuine romances — all the more because they are precious few, outside the first fiery days of youth. I say — take away the Intellectual Friendships; take away the Platonic Unions; take away the Higher Laws of Self-Fulfilment and the rest, and I'll risk the normal dangers of the job. Take away the love that isn't love, but only pride and vainglory and publicity and making a splash; and we'll take our chance of fighting the love that is love, when it has to be fought, as well as the love that is lust and lechery. Priests know young people will have passions, as doctors know they will have measles. But Hypatia Potter is forty if she is a day, and she cares no more for that little poet than if he were her publisher or her publicity man. That's just the point — he was her publicity man. It's your newspapers that have ruined her; it's living in the limelight; it's wanting to see herself in the headlines, even in a scandal if it were only sufficiently psychic and superior. It's wanting to be George Sand, her name immortally linked with Alfred de Musset. When her real romance of youth was over, it was the sin of middle age that got hold of her; the sin of intellectual ambition. She hasn't got any intellect to speak of; but you don't need any intellect to be an intellectual."

"I should say she was pretty brainy in one sense," observed Rock reflectively.

"Yes, in one sense," said Father Brown. "In only one sense. In a business sense. Not in any sense that has anything to do with these poor lounging Dagos down here. You curse the Film Stars and tell me you hate romance. Do you suppose the Film Star, who is married for the fifth time, is misled by any romance? Such people are very practical; more practical than you are. You say you admire the simple solid Business Man. Do you suppose that Rudel Romanes isn't a Business Man? Can't you see he knew, quite as well as she did, the advertising advantages of this grand affair with a famous beauty. He also knew very well that his hold on it was pretty insecure; hence his fussing about and bribing servants to lock doors. But what I mean to say, first and last, is that there'd be a lot less scandal if people didn't idealize sin and pose as sinners. These poor Mexicans may seem sometimes to live like beasts, or rather sin like men; but they don't go in for Ideals. You must at least give them credit for that."