The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (6 page)

“
Great
Heaven!” cried O’Brien. “Is Brayne a monomaniac?”

“
There
are American vendettas,” said the priest impassively. Then he added: “They want
you to come to the library and see it.”

Commandant
O’Brien followed the others towards the inquest, feeling decidedly sick. As a soldier,
he loathed all this secretive carnage; where were these extravagant amputations
going to stop? First one head was hacked off, and then another; in this case
(he told himself bitterly) it was not true that two heads were better than one.
As he crossed the study he almost staggered at a shocking coincidence. Upon
Valentin’s table lay the coloured picture of yet a third bleeding head; and it
was the head of Valentin himself. A second glance showed him it was only a
Nationalist paper, called The Guillotine, which every week showed one of its political
opponents with rolling eyes and writhing features just after execution; for
Valentin was an anti-clerical of some note. But O’Brien was an Irishman, with a
kind of chastity even in his sins; and his gorge rose against that great brutality
of the intellect which belongs only to France. He felt Paris as a whole, from
the grotesques on the Gothic churches to the gross caricatures in the
newspapers. He remembered the gigantic jests of the Revolution. He saw the
whole city as one ugly energy, from the sanguinary sketch lying on Valentin’s
table up to where, above a mountain and forest of gargoyles, the great devil
grins on Notre Dame.

The
library was long, low, and dark; what light entered it shot from under low blinds
and had still some of the ruddy tinge of morning. Valentin and his servant Ivan
were waiting for them at the upper end of a long, slightly-sloping desk, on
which lay the mortal remains, looking enormous in the twilight. The big black
figure and yellow face of the man found in the garden confronted them essentially
unchanged. The second head, which had been fished from among the river reeds
that morning, lay streaming and dripping beside it; Valentin’s men were still
seeking to recover the rest of this second corpse, which was supposed to be
afloat. Father Brown, who did not seem to share O’Brien’s sensibilities in the
least, went up to the second head and examined it with his blinking care. It
was little more than a mop of wet white hair, fringed with silver fire in the
red and level morning light; the face, which seemed of an ugly, empurpled and
perhaps criminal type, had been much battered against trees or stones as it
tossed in the water.

“
Good
morning, Commandant O’Brien,” said Valentin, with quiet cordiality. “You have heard
of Brayne’s last experiment in butchery, I suppose?”

Father
Brown was still bending over the head with white hair, and he said, without looking
up:

“
I
suppose it is quite certain that Brayne cut off this head, too.”

“
Well,
it seems common sense,” said Valentin, with his hands in his pockets. “Killed in
the same way as the other. Found within a few yards of the other. And sliced by
the same weapon which we know he carried away.”

“
Yes,
yes; I know,” replied Father Brown submissively. “Yet, you know, I doubt whether
Brayne could have cut off this head.”

“
Why
not?” inquired Dr. Simon, with a rational stare.

“
Well,
doctor,” said the priest, looking up blinking, “can a man cut off his own head?
I don’t know.”

O’Brien
felt an insane universe crashing about his ears; but the doctor sprang forward with
impetuous practicality and pushed back the wet white hair.

“
Oh,
there’s no doubt it’s Brayne,” said the priest quietly. “He had exactly that chip
in the left ear.”

The
detective, who had been regarding the priest with steady and glittering eyes, opened
his clenched mouth and said sharply: “You seem to know a lot about him, Father
Brown.”

“
I
do,” said the little man simply. “I’ve been about with him for some weeks. He was
thinking of joining our church.”

The
star of the fanatic sprang into Valentin’s eyes; he strode towards the priest with
clenched hands. “And, perhaps,” he cried, with a blasting sneer, “perhaps he
was also thinking of leaving all his money to your church.”

“
Perhaps
he was,” said Brown stolidly; “it is possible.”

“
In
that case,” cried Valentin, with a dreadful smile, “you may indeed know a great
deal about him. About his life and about his —”

Commandant
O’Brien laid a hand on Valentin’s arm. “Drop that slanderous rubbish, Valentin,”
he said, “or there may be more swords yet.”

But
Valentin (under the steady, humble gaze of the priest) had already recovered himself.
“Well,” he said shortly, “people’s private opinions can wait. You gentlemen are
still bound by your promise to stay; you must enforce it on yourselves — and on
each other. Ivan here will tell you anything more you want to know; I must get
to business and write to the authorities. We can’t keep this quiet any longer.
I shall be writing in my study if there is any more news.”

“
Is
there any more news, Ivan?” asked Dr. Simon, as the chief of police strode out of
the room.

“
Only
one more thing, I think, sir,” said Ivan, wrinkling up his grey old face, “but that’s
important, too, in its way. There’s that old buffer you found on the lawn,” and
he pointed without pretence of reverence at the big black body with the yellow
head. “We’ve found out who he is, anyhow.”

“
Indeed!”
cried the astonished doctor, “and who is he?”

“
His
name was Arnold Becker,” said the under-detective, “though he went by many aliases.
He was a wandering sort of scamp, and is known to have been in America; so that
was where Brayne got his knife into him. We didn’t have much to do with him
ourselves, for he worked mostly in Germany. We’ve communicated, of course, with
the German police. But, oddly enough, there was a twin brother of his, named
Louis Becker, whom we had a great deal to do with. In fact, we found it
necessary to guillotine him only yesterday. Well, it’s a rum thing, gentlemen,
but when I saw that fellow flat on the lawn I had the greatest jump of my life.
If I hadn’t seen Louis Becker guillotined with my own eyes, I’d have sworn it
was Louis Becker lying there in the grass. Then, of course, I remembered his
twin brother in Germany, and following up the clue —”

The
explanatory Ivan stopped, for the excellent reason that nobody was listening to
him. The Commandant and the doctor were both staring at Father Brown, who had sprung
stiffly to his feet, and was holding his temples tight like a man in sudden and
violent pain.

“
Stop,
stop, stop!” he cried; “stop talking a minute, for I see half. Will God give me
strength? Will my brain make the one jump and see all? Heaven help me! I used to
be fairly good at thinking. I could paraphrase any page in Aquinas once. Will
my head split — or will it see? I see half — I only see half.”

He
buried his head in his hands, and stood in a sort of rigid torture of thought or
prayer, while the other three could only go on staring at this last prodigy of
their wild twelve hours.

When
Father Brown’s hands fell they showed a face quite fresh and serious, like a child’s.
He heaved a huge sigh, and said: “Let us get this said and done with as quickly
as possible. Look here, this will be the quickest way to convince you all of
the truth.” He turned to the doctor. “Dr. Simon,” he said, “you have a strong
head-piece, and I heard you this morning asking the five hardest questions
about this business. Well, if you will ask them again, I will answer them.”

Simon’s
pince-nez dropped from his nose in his doubt and wonder, but he answered at once.
“Well, the first question, you know, is why a man should kill another with a
clumsy sabre at all when a man can kill with a bodkin?”

“
A
man cannot behead with a bodkin,” said Brown calmly, “and for this murder beheading
was absolutely necessary.”

“
Why?”
asked O’Brien, with interest.

“
And
the next question?” asked Father Brown.

“
Well,
why didn’t the man cry out or anything?” asked the doctor; “sabres in gardens are
certainly unusual.”

“
Twigs,”
said the priest gloomily, and turned to the window which looked on the scene of
death. “No one saw the point of the twigs. Why should they lie on that lawn (look
at it) so far from any tree? They were not snapped off; they were chopped off.
The murderer occupied his enemy with some tricks with the sabre, showing how he
could cut a branch in mid-air, or what-not. Then, while his enemy bent down to
see the result, a silent slash, and the head fell.”

“
Well,”
said the doctor slowly, “that seems plausible enough. But my next two questions
will stump anyone.”

The
priest still stood looking critically out of the window and waited.

“
You
know how all the garden was sealed up like an air-tight chamber,” went on the doctor.
“Well, how did the strange man get into the garden?”

Without
turning round, the little priest answered: “There never was any strange man in the
garden.”

There
was a silence, and then a sudden cackle of almost childish laughter relieved the
strain. The absurdity of Brown’s remark moved Ivan to open taunts.

“
Oh!”
he cried; “then we didn’t lug a great fat corpse on to a sofa last night? He hadn’t
got into the garden, I suppose?”

“
Got
into the garden?” repeated Brown reflectively. “No, not entirely.”

“
Hang
it all,” cried Simon, “a man gets into a garden, or he doesn’t.”

“
Not
necessarily,” said the priest, with a faint smile. “What is the nest question, doctor?”

“
I
fancy you’re ill,” exclaimed Dr. Simon sharply; “but I’ll ask the next question
if you like. How did Brayne get out of the garden?”

“
He
didn’t get out of the garden,” said the priest, still looking out of the window.

“
Didn’t
get out of the garden?” exploded Simon.

“
Not
completely,” said Father Brown.

Simon
shook his fists in a frenzy of French logic. “A man gets out of a garden, or he
doesn’t,” he cried.

“
Not
always,” said Father Brown.

Dr.
Simon sprang to his feet impatiently. “I have no time to spare on such senseless
talk,” he cried angrily. “If you can’t understand a man being on one side of a wall
or the other, I won’t trouble you further.”

“
Doctor,”
said the cleric very gently, “we have always got on very pleasantly together. If
only for the sake of old friendship, stop and tell me your fifth question.”

The
impatient Simon sank into a chair by the door and said briefly: “The head and shoulders
were cut about in a queer way. It seemed to be done after death.”

“
Yes,”
said the motionless priest, “it was done so as to make you assume exactly the one
simple falsehood that you did assume. It was done to make you take for granted
that the head belonged to the body.”

The
borderland of the brain, where all the monsters are made, moved horribly in the
Gaelic O’Brien. He felt the chaotic presence of all the horse-men and fish-women
that man’s unnatural fancy has begotten. A voice older than his first fathers
seemed saying in his ear: “Keep out of the monstrous garden where grows the
tree with double fruit. Avoid the evil garden where died the man with two
heads.” Yet, while these shameful symbolic shapes passed across the ancient mirror
of his Irish soul, his Frenchified intellect was quite alert, and was watching the
odd priest as closely and incredulously as all the rest.

Father
Brown had turned round at last, and stood against the window, with his face in dense
shadow; but even in that shadow they could see it was pale as ashes. Nevertheless,
he spoke quite sensibly, as if there were no Gaelic souls on earth.

“
Gentlemen,”
he said, “you did not find the strange body of Becker in the garden. You did not
find any strange body in the garden. In face of Dr. Simon’s rationalism, I still
affirm that Becker was only partly present. Look here!” (pointing to the black
bulk of the mysterious corpse) “You never saw that man in your lives. Did you
ever see this man?”

He
rapidly rolled away the bald, yellow head of the unknown, and put in its place the
white-maned head beside it. And there, complete, unified, unmistakable, lay Julius
K. Brayne.

“
The
murderer,” went on Brown quietly, “hacked off his enemy’s head and flung the sword
far over the wall. But he was too clever to fling the sword only. He flung the
head over the wall also. Then he had only to clap on another head to the
corpse, and (as he insisted on a private inquest) you all imagined a totally
new man.”

“
Clap
on another head!” said O’Brien staring. “What other head? Heads don’t grow on garden
bushes, do they?”

“
No,”
said Father Brown huskily, and looking at his boots; “there is only one place where
they grow. They grow in the basket of the guillotine, beside which the chief of
police, Aristide Valentin, was standing not an hour before the murder. Oh, my
friends, hear me a minute more before you tear me in pieces. Valentin is an
honest man, if being mad for an arguable cause is honesty. But did you never see
in that cold, grey eye of his that he is mad! He would do anything, anything,
to break what he calls the superstition of the Cross. He has fought for it and
starved for it, and now he has murdered for it. Brayne’s crazy millions had
hitherto been scattered among so many sects that they did little to alter the
balance of things. But Valentin heard a whisper that Brayne, like so many
scatter-brained sceptics, was drifting to us; and that was quite a different
thing. Brayne would pour supplies into the impoverished and pugnacious Church
of France; he would support six Nationalist newspapers like The Guillotine. The
battle was already balanced on a point, and the fanatic took flame at the risk.
He resolved to destroy the millionaire, and he did it as one would expect the
greatest of detectives to commit his only crime. He abstracted the severed head
of Becker on some criminological excuse, and took it home in his official box.
He had that last argument with Brayne, that Lord Galloway did not hear the end
of; that failing, he led him out into the sealed garden, talked about
swordsmanship, used twigs and a sabre for illustration, and —”