The innocence of Father Brown
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