THE TRAIN WITHOUT DEFENCE
A Father Brown story by F.
Two men walked together, one very tall and one rather short, talking in the comfortable way of old friends. They both wore mainly black; but the tall man's dress clothes, carved by sudden swishes of dazzling white silk, managed a sort of dashing, cavalier style and swagger, emphasized by a bold moustache and a handsomely grizzled, hatless head of hair; while the other's contrived to look shabby without even necessarily being well-worn, and his fewer dashes of white - mainly about the neck, in the stiff form of a Roman collar - had a suggestion not of dirt (for he was clean enough), but of dust. If you did not know them, you would never have guessed which was the dominant spirit.
"There is one thing", the tall man said, "that puzzled me for years. I often thought I'd ask you, Father, but I always forgot to."
There was a pause; on the priest's side, an expectant pause. "You remember, of course, our first meeting?"
"An uncomfortable experience", said the priest, "yes".
"Well, Father, I would never have assaulted you, even then. Frankly..."
"...I was too small for you?"
"You could say that. I never did like hurting weaker people... You read that pretty neatly later on, in the matter of the Flying Stars.
"But tell me, Father... have you ever wondered how I came to be in your way again so soon after you had seen Valentin charge me with enough crimes to bridge the Manche?"
"Is that your question?"
"I think so, yes. Of course, I was meant to be good at the business of getting away from cops (or fellow villains), but you have to remember that, whatever else Valentin was, he was one of the finest policemen the world has ever seen."
"You got away from him?"
"I don't mean that. Of course I got away from him. It was a long journey from London to the courts in central France where I was to stand the first of many trials; sooner or later, a man like me would find his chance. I knew that, and so did he.
"What baffles me to this day is that, once I got away from him, and once he had got on my trail, and once he had got me absolutely where he wanted me... he did not get me. He did nothing. I got away from him as if he was a child. Father, this is Valentin we are talking about!"
The priest was silent for a second. "Can you give me a bit more detail?"
"Of course. It was in a very French part of north France - though actually it's not French at all, since the locals speak Dutch. There was a spinney; a long flat road with rows of poplars on either side; a lot of green fields with hedges; and here and there a little whitewashed farmhouse rather like a child's toy blown up several sizes.
"I was going by in a closed police carriage with an armed escort. One of the flics guarding me had made the mistake of falling asleep in the heat (for which I have no doubt Valentin roasted him later!), but I did not want to take advantage of the situation till it was very favourable: there were too many of his colleagues around the carriage with loaded rifles. However, I managed to undo the shackles on my legs - more important than the manacles on my wrists - without showing it, and bided my time.
"When we reached the spinney, I kept my eyes open. Suddenly I felt the carriage rise, and concluded that we were crossing a humpback bridge over a river of some size. It was now or never.
"I can't say what I did was very skilled. It was just brute force and speed. I hurled all my weight at the carriage door without any warning. It was no stronger than a normal carriage door (my poor fellow-French taxpayers, paying for such shoddy police material!) and splintered. Another man would have fallen over; I am luckily rather well-balanced, and managed to stay more or less in control till I stood on the ledge. I dived into the river and swam for it. The whole had taken little more than five seconds, and the flics had hardly had time to react before I was under the water. I made for where the spinney was thickest, and it was only after I had reached the shore that the first bullets started flying.
"In situations like that, it is best not to try and think too much. Take things as they are and try to get out by any means that turn up. If you start thinking too far ahead, you find yourself making plans, and next thing you know you are wedded to your own plan and react too late to the unexpected."
"You know", said Father Brown, "I might put that in a sermon. It is good theology." Flambeau laughed uproariously; the words "good theology" were part of an old, shared joke.
"Well, Father" said Flambeau when he had subsided, "my good theology did not get me away from Valentin. He had been prepared. Army and police forces both sides of my route had been put on alert just in case, and within a quarter of an hour I had the finest selection of dogs on my trail you could wish. They had excellent maps and knew the country; I could hardly turn a hedge without stepping over somebody's big, flat feet.
"That night I slept under a hedge, within sight of two soldiers who walked up and down the whole night ten metres away. Good thing they weren't policemen, or I'd have been caught as sure as there's a God in heaven.
"Morning came, and my bones ached so much that I began to think nice thoughts about the straw pallet in a French jail. I managed to have a look without being seen, and my heart sank. The place bristled with flics and soldiers; and whoever had arranged them had done so with forethought. Every way out was barred.
"My only hope, a few hundred metres away, was a raised railway line. As I watched, some soldiers crossed it and took position on the far side; otherwise, it seemed unguarded.
"Came the train's whistle, and one of the soldiers turned as if surprised. There was nothing between me and the line, and a nice hedge to cover my movements from everyone except the soldiers across it; so I ran. I would not have another chance. The train went by; I caught the last wagon, my arms almost pulled out of their sockets; I crawled inside - it was, by the height of good fortune, a goods train, with no inconvenient passengers. And all the time I was doing that, nobody moved. Nobody did anything. Nobody so much as pointed a rifle at me. The train went right through two frontiers, and next thing I knew I was in Germany and safe.
"But I never understood why Valentin - Valentin, of all people - with all the power and organization of the French state behind him, with bureaucracy, police and soldiers, maps and railway timetables, with everything staked on my capture, did not think of that train! Why, when he had made such a nice trap of the whole area, he did not cover the railway line! Why, why, why! It was a crazy mistake to make. Can you understand it, Father?"
Father Brown fell into one of his silences. Then he did something like a puppy shaking himself, and looked at his friend through his thick glasses.
"I can make a guess, I think. But remember, it is just a guess."
"Your guesses, father, are worth more than most people's."
"Well, then... You must remember that I did not have much to do with Valentin after our first meeting. Shortly afterwards, the Dreyfus Affair fell between us like a curtain, and the only time I ever met him again was when he committed murder, violated his duties as a policeman, and, on top of it, was guilty of the sin of suicide to avoid scandal." Father Brown, this time, definitely shuddered; and Flambeau, who had not been present at those events but had heard the story from a Foreign Legion officer, felt a shiver run through his own stalwart frame.
"My God, yes... It's true. Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps he was crazy, and his failure with me was part of a pattern."
"I think it was", said Father Brown; "I think it was, but not in the way you think.
"You see, Flambeau, Valentin had a very clear and definite philosophy; one that had served him well in his police work. He was a determinist. He believed that free will was a delusion, and so was chance; that if we knew enough of all the factors that determine an event, we would see that that event was simply inevitable - that it could have gone no other way, with no breath of chance, luck or free choice about it.
"I think that, when he set his great mind to the problem of holding you, he made a very thorough study of all the factors involved. He probably directed other men to make supplementary studies of the areas in which you would move, covering such things as tides, rivers, traffic on nearby roads, towns, and the presence of known felons in various places. By such means Napoleon kept up with everything his subjects and enemies were doing; and Valentin was a man very like Napoleon.
"He knew, or his subordinates knew, of that line and that train. As soon as you made your break, he had all the data about the region taken to him and arranged things accordingly. And on the dawn of the next day, you realized how well he had arranged them."
"What happened, then? Why did he forget the train?"
"My guess is that he forgot nothing. He knew everything about that train; but it came at a time he did not expect."
"What? - it was late?"
"No, my friend; it was on time."
Father Brown started again. "There is only one way your story can make sense. Valentin believed that if you had all the factors at your fingertips, then you could not fail; and one of the factors he had considered was that, while the railway timetable claimed a particular time for that train, everyone on the railway (and the railway is a State service in France) knew that it could be relied on to be from ten to thirty minutes late! It happened, you see, absolutely all the time!
"But it did not happen that morning. For God knows what reason (and I am not taking God's name in vain), whether because the driver felt good with the world, or whether the engine was having an unusually good day - engines do, you know, vary in their performances, sometimes for no reason you can fathom - or whether the crew were just feeling perverse and decided they would surprise everyone, the fact remains that that constant delay which Valentin had factored into his plans did not happen. On this day, and probably only on this day, of all the days of the year, the train went by at its proper appointed hour. And the great determinist policeman, who had not expected that things would behave otherwise than as they should, stood by and watched his prey slip towards a border across which he had no jurisdiction.
"You see, my friend, you were wrong to say that your good theology did not get you away from Valentin. It did. Valentin's religion of necessity and inevitability led him to act as if everything in the world was predictable; but you knew that it was not. You were free to act; free as a fly is to go up or down, right or left, as it pleases; free from the grip of determinism, as all God's creatures are."
Father Brown was standing still. It was a lovely June afternoon, with a thin wind, and tiny insects buzzed and zipped over a patch of grass on which the sun cast flecks of green and gold; and Flambeau felt a great peace steal over him, though he was not sure where it was coming from.