Complete Works of G K Chesterton Read online

  The Complete Works of

  G. K. CHESTERTON

  (1874–1936)

  Contents

  Father Brown Stories

  THE INNOCENCE OF FATHER BROWN

  THE WISDOM OF FATHER BROWN

  THE INCREDULITY OF FATHER BROWN

  THE SECRET OF FATHER BROWN

  THE SCANDAL OF FATHER BROWN

  UNCOLLECTED FATHER BROWN STORIES

  Index of Father Brown Stories

  The Novels

  THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL

  THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY

  THE BALL AND THE CROSS

  MANALIVE

  THE FLYING INN

  THE RETURN OF DON QUIXOTE

  Short Story Collections

  THE CLUB OF QUEER TRADES

  THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH AND OTHER STORIES

  TALES OF THE LONG BOW

  THE POET AND THE LUNATICS

  FOUR FAULTLESS FELONS

  THE PARADOXES OF MR. POND

  DAYLIGHT AND NIGHTMARE

  UNCOLLECTED SHORT STORIES

  The Short Stories

  LIST OF SHORT STORIES IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

  LIST OF SHORT STORIES IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER

  The Plays

  MAGIC

  THE JUDGMENT OF DR. JOHNSON

  THE TURKEY AND THE TURK

  THE SURPRISE

  The Poetry Collections

  GREYBEARDS AT PLAY

  THE WILD KNIGHT AND OTHER POEMS

  THE BALLAD OF THE WHITE HORSE

  POEMS

  WINE, WATER AND SONG

  THE BALLAD OF ST. BARBARA AND OTHER POEMS

  GLORIA IN PROFUNDIS

  UBI ECCLESIA

  THE GRAVE OF ARTHUR

  NEW POEMS

  The Poems

  LIST OF POEMS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

  LIST OF POEMS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER

  The Non-Fiction

  THE DEFENDANT

  ROBERT BROWNING

  TWELVE TYPES

  HERETICS

  VARIED TYPES

  CHARLES DICKENS

  ALL THINGS CONSIDERED

  TREMENDOUS TRIFLES

  ORTHODOXY

  WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE WORLD

  GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

  APPRECIATIONS AND CRITICISMS OF THE WORKS OF CHARLES DICKENS

  ALARMS AND DISCURSIONS

  A MISCELLANY OF MEN

  THE VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE

  THE APPETITE OF TYRANNY

  THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND

  LORD KITCHENER

  UTOPIA OF USURERS AND OTHER ESSAYS

  A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLAND

  IRISH IMPRESSIONS

  THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

  THE NEW JERUSALEM

  WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA

  EUGENICS AND OTHER EVILS

  ST. FRANCIS

  FANCIES VERSUS FADS

  THE EVERLASTING MAN

  WILLIAM COBBETT

  THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND CONVERSION

  THE OUTLINE OF SANITY

  ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

  DO WE AGREE?

  THE THING

  COME TO THINK OF IT

  ALL IS GRIST

  ST. THOMAS AQUINAS

  ALL I SURVEY: A BOOK OF ESSAYS

  THE WELL AND THE SHALLOWS

  THE GLASS WALKING STICK

  AS I WAS SAYING

  THE COMMON MAN

  THE SPICE OF LIFE

  THE APOSTLE AND THE WILD DUCKS AND OTHER ESSAYS

  UNCOLLECTED ESSAYS

  The Criticism

  MR. G. K. CHESTERTON AND MR. HILAIRE BELLOC by Robert Lynd

  G. K. CHESTERTON, A CRITICAL STUDY by Julius West

  MR. G. K. CHESTERTON’S POINT OF VIEW by John Kelman

  GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON by Patrick Braybrooke

  The Biography

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  The Delphi Classics Catalogue

  © Delphi Classics 2014

  Version 2

  The Complete Works of

  G. K. CHESTERTON

  By Delphi Classics, 2014

  COPYRIGHT

  Complete Works of G. K. Chesterton

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2014 by Delphi Classics.

  © Delphi Classics, 2014.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form other than that in which it is published.

  Delphi Classics

  is an imprint of

  Delphi Publishing Ltd

  Hastings, East Sussex

  United Kingdom

  Contact: [email protected]

  www.delphiclassics.com

  Parts Edition Now Available!

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  Did you know you can now purchase the Delphi Classics Parts Edition of this author and enjoy all the novels, plays, non-fiction books and other works as individual eBooks? Now, you can select and read individual novels etc. and know precisely where you are in an eBook. You will also be able to manage space better on your eReading devices.

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  Father Brown Stories

  Chesterton’s birthplace — Campden Hill, Kensington, London

  Kensington, 1870

  THE INNOCENCE OF FATHER BROWN

  Illustrated by Sydney Seymour Lucas

  Father Brown is Chesterton’s most famous creation, appearing in 52 short stories, which were later compiled in five books. The stories originally appeared in journals such as The Saturday Evening Post and The Story-Teller, with the first story appearing in the former magazine on July 23, 1910. The stories were an instant success.

  Chesterton based the character on Father John O’Connor (1870–1952), a parish priest in Bradford who was involved in the author’s conversion to Catholicism in 1922. Father Brown is depicted as a short, stumpy Catholic priest, from Cobhole in Essex, and now working in London, with shapeless clothes and a large umbrella, and uncanny insight into human evil. Unlike the more famous fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown’s methods tend to be intuitive rather than deductive. He makes his first appearance in the story The Blue Cross and continues through the five volumes of short stories, often assisted by the reformed criminal Flambeau. Father Brown is characteristically humble and tends to handle crimes with a steady, realistic approach, he believes in the supernatural as the greatest reason of all.

  The Innocence of Father Brown, the first book of Father Brown stories, was published in 1911, followed by The Wisdom of Father Brown (1914), The Incredulity of Father Brown (1926), The Secret of Father Brown (1927) and The Scandal of Father Brown (1935).

  The 1911 first edition of this story collection

  CONTENTS

  The Blue Cross

  The Secret Garden

  The Queer Feet

  The Flying Stars

  The Invisible Man

  The Honour of Israel Gow

  The Wrong Shape

  The Sins of Prince Saradine

  The Hammer of God

  The Eye of Apollo

  The Sign of the Broken Sword

  The Three Tools
of Death

  The Parish of the Holy Spirit, Heckmondwike, where Father John O’Connor, the inspiration for Father Brown, preached

  The Blue Cross

  Between the silver ribbon of morning and the green glittering ribbon of sea, the boat touched Harwich and let loose a swarm of folk like flies, among whom the man we must follow was by no means conspicuous — nor wished to be. There was nothing notable about him, except a slight contrast between the holiday gaiety of his clothes and the official gravity of his face. His clothes included a slight, pale grey jacket, a white waistcoat, and a silver straw hat with a grey-blue ribbon. His lean face was dark by contrast, and ended in a curt black beard that looked Spanish and suggested an Elizabethan ruff. He was smoking a cigarette with the seriousness of an idler. There was nothing about him to indicate the fact that the grey jacket covered a loaded revolver, that the white waistcoat covered a police card, or that the straw hat covered one of the most powerful intellects in Europe. For this was Valentin himself, the head of the Paris police and the most famous investigator of the world; and he was coming from Brussels to London to make the greatest arrest of the century.

  Flambeau was in England. The police of three countries had tracked the great criminal at last from Ghent to Brussels, from Brussels to the Hook of Holland; and it was conjectured that he would take some advantage of the unfamiliarity and confusion of the Eucharistic Congress, then taking place in London. Probably he would travel as some minor clerk or secretary connected with it; but, of course, Valentin could not be certain; nobody could be certain about Flambeau.

  It is many years now since this colossus of crime suddenly ceased keeping the world in a turmoil; and when he ceased, as they said after the death of Roland, there was a great quiet upon the earth. But in his best days (I mean, of course, his worst) Flambeau was a figure as statuesque and international as the Kaiser. Almost every morning the daily paper announced that he had escaped the consequences of one extraordinary crime by committing another. He was a Gascon of gigantic stature and bodily daring; and the wildest tales were told of his outbursts of athletic humour; how he turned the juge d’instruction upside down and stood him on his head, “to clear his mind”; how he ran down the Rue de Rivoli with a policeman under each arm. It is due to him to say that his fantastic physical strength was generally employed in such bloodless though undignified scenes; his real crimes were chiefly those of ingenious and wholesale robbery. But each of his thefts was almost a new sin, and would make a story by itself. It was he who ran the great Tyrolean Dairy Company in London, with no dairies, no cows, no carts, no milk, but with some thousand subscribers. These he served by the simple operation of moving the little milk cans outside people’s doors to the doors of his own customers. It was he who had kept up an unaccountable and close correspondence with a young lady whose whole letter-bag was intercepted, by the extraordinary trick of photographing his messages infinitesimally small upon the slides of a microscope. A sweeping simplicity, however, marked many of his experiments. It is said that he once repainted all the numbers in a street in the dead of night merely to divert one traveller into a trap. It is quite certain that he invented a portable pillar-box, which he put up at corners in quiet suburbs on the chance of strangers dropping postal orders into it. Lastly, he was known to be a startling acrobat; despite his huge figure, he could leap like a grasshopper and melt into the tree-tops like a monkey. Hence the great Valentin, when he set out to find Flambeau, was perfectly aware that his adventures would not end when he had found him.

  But how was he to find him? On this the great Valentin’s ideas were still in process of settlement.

  There was one thing which Flambeau, with all his dexterity of disguise, could not cover, and that was his singular height. 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. There was a short railway official travelling up to the terminus, three fairly short market gardeners picked up two stations afterwards, one very short widow lady going up from a small Essex town, and a very short Roman Catholic priest going up from a small Essex village. When it came to the last case, Valentin gave it up and almost laughed. The little priest was so much the essence of those Eastern flats; he had a face as round and dull as a Norfolk dumpling; he had eyes as empty as the North Sea; he had several brown paper parcels, which he was quite incapable of collecting. The Eucharistic Congress had doubtless sucked out of their local stagnation many such creatures, blind and helpless, like moles disinterred. Valentin was a sceptic in the severe style of France, and could have no love for priests. But he could have pity for them, and this one might have provoked pity in anybody. He had a large, shabby umbrella, which constantly fell on the floor. He did not seem to know which was the right end of his return ticket. He explained with a moon-calf simplicity to everybody in the carriage that he had to be careful, because he had something made of real silver “with blue stones” in one of his brown-paper parcels. His quaint blending of Essex flatness with saintly simplicity continuously amused the Frenchman till the priest arrived (somehow) at Tottenham with all his parcels, and came back for his umbrella. When he did the last, Valentin even had the good nature to warn him not to take care of the silver by telling everybody about it. But to whomever he talked, Valentin kept his eye open for someone else; he looked out steadily for anyone, rich or poor, male or female, who was well up to six feet; for Flambeau was four inches above it.

  He alighted at Liverpool Street, however, quite conscientiously secure that he had not missed the criminal so far. He then went to Scotland Yard to regularise his position and arrange for help in case of need; he then lit another cigarette and went for a long stroll in the streets of London. As he was walking in the streets and squares beyond Victoria, he paused suddenly and stood. It was a quaint, quiet square, very typical of London, full of an accidental stillness. The tall, flat houses round looked at once prosperous and uninhabited; the square of shrubbery in the centre looked as deserted as a green Pacific islet. One of the four sides was much higher than the rest, like a dais; and the line of this side was broken by one of London’s admirable accidents — a restaurant that looked as if it had strayed from Soho. It was an unreasonably attractive object, with dwarf plants in pots and long, striped blinds of lemon yellow and white. It stood specially high above the street, and in the usual patchwork way of London, a flight of steps from the street ran up to meet the front door almost as a fire-escape might run up to a first-floor window. 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. I have seen both these things myself within the last few days. Nelson does die in the instant of victory; and a man named Williams does quite accidentally murder a man named Williamson; it sounds like a sort of infanticide. In short, there is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people reckoning on the prosaic may perpetually miss. As it has been well expressed in the paradox of Poe, wisdom should 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.