Both he and Gilbert have told the story of how the idea of the detective priest first dawned. On their second meeting Father O'Connor had startled, indeed almost shattered Gilbert, with certain rather lurid knowledge of human depravity which he had acquired in the course of his priestly experience. At the house to which they were going, two Cambridge undergraduates spoke disparagingly of the "cloistered" habits of the Catholic clergy, saying that to them it seemed that to know and meet evil was a far better thing than the innocence of such ignorance. To Gilbert, still under the shock of a knowledge compared with which "these two Cambridge gentlemen knew about as much of real evil as two babies in the same perambulator," the exquisite irony of this remark suggested a thought. Why not a whole comedy of cross purposes based on the notion of a priest with a knowledge of evil deeper than that of the criminal he is converting? He carried out this idea in the story of "The Blue Cross," the first Father Brown detective story. Father O'Connor's account adds the details that he had himself once boasted of buying five sapphires for five shillings, and that he always carried a large umbrella and many brown paper parcels. At the Steinthal dining table, an artist friend of the family made a sketch of Father O'Connor which later appeared on the wrapper of The Innocence of Father Brown.
Beyond one or two touches of this sort the idea had been a suggestion for a character, not a portrait, and in the Autobiography and in the Dickens Gilbert has a good deal to say of interest to the novelist about how such suggestions come and are used. He never believed that Dickens drew a portrait, as it were, in the round. Nature just gives hints to the creative artist. And it used to amuse "Father Brown" to find that such touches of observation as noting where an ash-tray had got hidden behind a book seemed to Gilbert quasi miraculous. Left to himself he merely dropped ashes on the floor from his cigar. "He did not smoke a pipe and cigarettes were prone to set him on fire in one place or another."
A frequent visitor, Father O'Connor noted his fashion of work and reading, and the abstracted way he often moved and spoke. "Call it mooning, but he never mooned. He was always working out something in his mind, and when he drifted from his study to the garden and was seen making deadly passes with his sword-stick at the dahlias, we knew that he had got to a dead end in his composition and was getting his thoughts into order."
He played often, too, with a huge knife which he had for twenty-four years. He took it abroad with him, took it to bed: Frances had to retrieve it often from under his pillow in some hotel. Once at a lecture in Dublin he drew it absent-mindedly to sharpen a pencil: as it was seven and a half inches long shut, and fourteen open, the amusement of the audience may be imagined. In origin it was, Father O'Connor relates, a Texan or Mexican general utility implement. It was with this knife that he won my daughter's heart many years later when she, aged three, had not seen him for some time and had grown shy of him. A little scared of his enormousness she stood far off. He did not look in her direction but began to open and shut the vast blade. Next she was on his knee. A little later we heard her remark, "Uncle Gilbert, you make jokes just like my Daddy." And from him came, "I do my best."
The prototype of Father Brown tells of the easy job in detection when
Gilbert had been reading a book:
He had just been reading a shilling pamphlet by Dr. Horton on the Roman Menace or some such fearful wild fowl. I knew he had read it, because no one else could when he had done. Most of his books, as and when read, had gone through every indignity a book may suffer and live. He turned it inside out, dog-eared it, pencilled it, sat on it, took it to bed and rolled on it, and got up again and spilled tea on it—if he were sufficiently interested. So Dr. Horton's pamphlet had a refuted look when I saw it.
Father O'Connor was not the only friend who was added to the Beaconsfield group with some frequency. It was easy enough to run down from London or over from Welwyn (home of G.B.S.) or from Oxford or Cambridge. It was most conveniently central. Gilbert's brethren of the pen were especially apt to appear at all seasons and always found friendly welcome. For he continued to call himself neither poet nor philosopher but journalist. Father O'Connor had tried to persuade him, as he neatly puts it, to "begin to print on handmade paper with gilt edges." But Frances begged him to drop the idea: "You will not change Gilbert, you will only fidget him. He is bent on being a jolly journalist, to paint the town red, and he does not need style to do that. All he wants is buckets and buckets of red paint."
Journalists coming down from London describe the "jolly" welcome, beer poured, the sword-stick flourished, conversation flowing as freely as the beer. It meant a pleasant afternoon and it meant good copy. They visited him in the country, they observed him in town. One interviewer returned with a photo which showed Chesterton "in a somewhat négligé condition," the result as he admitted of reading W. W. Jacobs "rolling about on the floor waving his legs in the air."
He was seen working a swan boat at the White City: "he collapsed it and the placid lake became a raging sea." He was seen thinking and even reading under the strangest weather conditions: one man saw him under a gas lamp in the street in pouring rain with an open book in his hand. Reading in Fleet Street one day Gilbert discovered suddenly that the Lord Mayor's Show was passing. He began to reflect on the Show so deeply that he forgot to look at it.
Overroads I remember as a little triangular house, much too small for the sort of fun the Chestertons enjoyed. Frances bought a field opposite to it and there built a studio. The night the studio was opened Father O'Connor remembers a large party at which charades were acted. He himself as Canon Cross-Keys gave away the word so that "Belfry" was loudly shouted by the opposition group. The rival company acting Torture got away with it successfully, especially, complains our Yorkshire priest "as 'ure' was pronounced 'yaw' in the best southern manner."