Description
The Wisdom of Father Brown
ONE — The Absence of Mr Glass
THE consulting-rooms of Dr Orion Hood, the eminent criminologist and
specialist in certain moral disorders, lay along the sea-front at
Scarborough, in a series of very large and well-lighted french windows,
which showed the North Sea like one endless outer wall of blue-green
marble. In such a place the sea had something of the monotony of a
blue-green dado: for the chambers themselves were ruled throughout by a
terrible tidiness not unlike the terrible tidiness of the sea. It must
not be supposed that Dr Hood’s apartments excluded luxury, or even
poetry. These things were there, in their place; but one felt that they
were never allowed out of their place. Luxury was there: there stood
upon a special table eight or ten boxes of the best cigars; but they
were built upon a plan so that the strongest were always nearest the
wall and the mildest nearest the window. A tantalus containing three
kinds of spirit, all of a liqueur excellence, stood always on this table
of luxury; but the fanciful have asserted that the whisky, brandy, and
rum seemed always to stand at the same level. Poetry was there: the
left-hand corner of the room was lined with as complete a set of
English classics as the right hand could show of English and foreign
physiologists. But if one took a volume of Chaucer or Shelley from that
rank, its absence irritated the mind like a gap in a man’s front teeth.
One could not say the books were never read; probably they were, but
there was a sense of their being chained to their places, like the
Bibles in the old churches. Dr Hood treated his private book-shelf as
if it were a public library. And if this strict scientific intangibility
steeped even the shelves laden with lyrics and ballads and the tables
