Рассказы об отце Брауне

Gilbert Keith CHESTERTON
STORIES OF 
FATHER BROWN
DETECTIVE STORY

УДК	372.8:821.111
ББК	81.2 Англ-93
	
Ч51
ISBN 978-5-9925-1705-7
Честертон, Гилберт Кейт.
Ч51	
  Рассказы об отце Брауне : книга для чтения на 
английском языке / Г. К. Честертон. — Санкт-Петербург : КАРО, 2024. — 320 с. — (Detective story).
ISBN 978-5-9925-1705-7.
Мир рассказов Гилберта Кита Честертона об отце Брауне — это воплощение Англии начала XX века. Места преступлений поджидают главного героя в загородных домах, 
сельских приходских церквях и садах, а также на туманных 
лондонских улицах и мрачных вокзалах. Отец Браун — добродушный священник, но он обладает удивительной проницательностью в отношении человеческой натуры, а за 
его спокойным сочувствием скрывается детективный ум, не 
уступающий Шерлоку Холмсу.
Отец Браун использует свой опыт, чтобы вжиться в образ злоумышленника, разгадать каждую загадку и поймать 
преступника.
Рассказы об отце Брауне, написанные в начале 1900-х 
годов британским критиком, новеллистом и философом Гилбертом Китом Честертоном, до сих пор остаются одними из 
лучших в жанре детектива.
УДК 372.8:821.111
ББК 81.2 Англ-93
© КАРО, 2024
Все права защищены

B
ETWEEN 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 con
trast 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 serious
ness of an idler. There was nothing about him to in
dicate 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 cer
tain 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 Ro
land, there was a great quiet upon the earth. But in
his best days (I mean, of course, his worst) Flam
beau 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 ingen
ious and wholesale robbery. But each of his thefts
was almost a new sin, and would make a story by it
self. 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 inter
cepted, 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 sub
urbs on the chance of strangers dropping postal or
ders 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 mon
key. Hence the great Valentin, when he set out to
find Flambeau, was perfectly aware that his adven
tures 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 him
self; 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 Con
gress had doubtless sucked out of their local stagna
tion 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 Tot
tenham 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 whom
ever he talked, Valentin kept his eye open for some
one 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 walk
ing 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 shrub
bery in the centre looked as deserted as a green Pa
cific 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 to
gether 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 in
stant 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, wis
dom 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 material
ism. 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 Revo
lution1. But exactly because Valentin understood
reason, he understood the limits of reason. Only a
man who knows nothing of motors talks of motor
ing without petrol; only a man who knows nothing
of reason talks of reasoning without strong, undis
puted 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
1 French Revolution — Великая Французская револю
ция (буржуазно
демократическая), 1799–1794, покончи
ла с феодально
абсолютистским строем, расчистила поч
ву для развития капитализма

from a tall tramp on Wimbledon Common to a tall
toast
master at the Hotel Metropole. In such a na
ked 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 logical
ly. 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, be
cause 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 random1. He went up the steps,
1 to strike at random — (разг.) нанести неожиданный
удар