The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (15 page)

The
heady tempest without drove a dreadful wrack of clouds across Glengyle and threw
the long room into darkness as Father Brown picked up the little illuminated
pages to examine them. He spoke before the drift of darkness had passed; but it
was the voice of an utterly new man.

“
Mr.
Craven,” said he, talking like a man ten years younger, “you have got a legal warrant,
haven’t you, to go up and examine that grave? The sooner we do it the better,
and get to the bottom of this horrible affair. If I were you I should start
now.”

“
Now,”
repeated the astonished detective, “and why now?”

“
Because
this is serious,” answered Brown; “this is not spilt snuff or loose pebbles, that
might be there for a hundred reasons. There is only one reason I know of for
this being done; and the reason goes down to the roots of the world. These religious
pictures are not just dirtied or torn or scrawled over, which might be done in
idleness or bigotry, by children or by Protestants. These have been treated
very carefully — and very queerly. In every place where the great ornamented
name of God comes in the old illuminations it has been elaborately taken out.
The only other thing that has been removed is the halo round the head of the
Child Jesus. Therefore, I say, let us get our warrant and our spade and our
hatchet, and go up and break open that coffin.”

“
What
do you mean?” demanded the London officer.

“
I
mean,” answered the little priest, and his voice seemed to rise slightly in the
roar of the gale. “I mean that the great devil of the universe may be sitting on
the top tower of this castle at this moment, as big as a hundred elephants, and
roaring like the Apocalypse. There is black magic somewhere at the bottom of
this.”

“
Black
magic,” repeated Flambeau in a low voice, for he was too enlightened a man not to
know of such things; “but what can these other things mean?”

“
Oh,
something damnable, I suppose,” replied Brown impatiently. “How should I know? How
can I guess all their mazes down below? Perhaps you can make a torture out of
snuff and bamboo. Perhaps lunatics lust after wax and steel filings. Perhaps there
is a maddening drug made of lead pencils! Our shortest cut to the mystery is up
the hill to the grave.”

His
comrades hardly knew that they had obeyed and followed him till a blast of the night
wind nearly flung them on their faces in the garden. Nevertheless they had
obeyed him like automata; for Craven found a hatchet in his hand, and the warrant
in his pocket; Flambeau was carrying the heavy spade of the strange gardener;
Father Brown was carrying the little gilt book from which had been torn the
name of God.

The
path up the hill to the churchyard was crooked but short; only under that stress
of wind it seemed laborious and long. Far as the eye could see, farther and
farther as they mounted the slope, were seas beyond seas of pines, now all aslope
one way under the wind. And that universal gesture seemed as vain as it was
vast, as vain as if that wind were whistling about some unpeopled and purposeless
planet. Through all that infinite growth of grey-blue forests sang, shrill and
high, that ancient sorrow that is in the heart of all heathen things. One could
fancy that the voices from the underworld of unfathomable foliage were cries of
the lost and wandering pagan gods: gods who had gone roaming in that irrational
forest, and who will never find their way back to heaven.

“
You
see,” said Father Brown in low but easy tone, “Scotch people before Scotland existed
were a curious lot. In fact, they’re a curious lot still. But in the prehistoric
times I fancy they really worshipped demons. That,” he added genially, “is why
they jumped at the Puritan theology.”

“
My
friend,” said Flambeau, turning in a kind of fury, “what does all that snuff mean?”

“
My
friend,” replied Brown, with equal seriousness, “there is one mark of all genuine
religions: materialism. Now, devil-worship is a perfectly genuine religion.”

They
had come up on the grassy scalp of the hill, one of the few bald spots that stood
clear of the crashing and roaring pine forest. A mean enclosure, partly timber
and partly wire, rattled in the tempest to tell them the border of the graveyard.
But by the time Inspector Craven had come to the corner of the grave, and
Flambeau had planted his spade point downwards and leaned on it, they were both
almost as shaken as the shaky wood and wire. At the foot of the grave grew
great tall thistles, grey and silver in their decay. Once or twice, when a ball
of thistledown broke under the breeze and flew past him, Craven jumped slightly
as if it had been an arrow.

Flambeau
drove the blade of his spade through the whistling grass into the wet clay below.
Then he seemed to stop and lean on it as on a staff.

“
Go
on,” said the priest very gently. “We are only trying to find the truth. What are
you afraid of?”

“
I
am afraid of finding it,” said Flambeau.

The
London detective spoke suddenly in a high crowing voice that was meant to be conversational
and cheery. “I wonder why he really did hide himself like that. Something
nasty, I suppose; was he a leper?”

“
Something
worse than that,” said Flambeau.

“
And
what do you imagine,” asked the other, “would be worse than a leper?”

“
I
don’t imagine it,” said Flambeau.

He
dug for some dreadful minutes in silence, and then said in a choked voice, “I’m
afraid of his not being the right shape.”

“
Nor
was that piece of paper, you know,” said Father Brown quietly, “and we survived
even that piece of paper.”

Flambeau
dug on with a blind energy. But the tempest had shouldered away the choking grey
clouds that clung to the hills like smoke and revealed grey fields of faint
starlight before he cleared the shape of a rude timber coffin, and somehow
tipped it up upon the turf. Craven stepped forward with his axe; a thistle-top
touched him, and he flinched. Then he took a firmer stride, and hacked and
wrenched with an energy like Flambeau’s till the lid was torn off, and all that
was there lay glimmering in the grey starlight.

“
Bones,”
said Craven; and then he added, “but it is a man,” as if that were something unexpected.

“
Is
he,” asked Flambeau in a voice that went oddly up and down, “is he all right?”

“
Seems
so,” said the officer huskily, bending over the obscure and decaying skeleton in
the box. “Wait a minute.”

A
vast heave went over Flambeau’s huge figure. “And now I come to think of it,” he
cried, “why in the name of madness shouldn’t he be all right? What is it gets hold
of a man on these cursed cold mountains? I think it’s the black, brainless repetition;
all these forests, and over all an ancient horror of unconsciousness. It’s like
the dream of an atheist. Pine-trees and more pine-trees and millions more
pine-trees —”

“
God!”
cried the man by the coffin, “but he hasn’t got a head.”

While
the others stood rigid the priest, for the first time, showed a leap of startled
concern.

“
No
head!” he repeated. “No head?” as if he had almost expected some other deficiency.

Half-witted
visions of a headless baby born to Glengyle, of a headless youth hiding himself
in the castle, of a headless man pacing those ancient halls or that gorgeous garden,
passed in panorama through their minds. But even in that stiffened instant the
tale took no root in them and seemed to have no reason in it. They stood
listening to the loud woods and the shrieking sky quite foolishly, like exhausted
animals. Thought seemed to be something enormous that had suddenly slipped out
of their grasp.

“
There
are three headless men,” said Father Brown, “standing round this open grave.”

The
pale detective from London opened his mouth to speak, and left it open like a yokel,
while a long scream of wind tore the sky; then he looked at the axe in his
hands as if it did not belong to him, and dropped it.

“
Father,”
said Flambeau in that infantile and heavy voice he used very seldom, “what are we
to do?”

His
friend’s reply came with the pent promptitude of a gun going off.

“
Sleep!”
cried Father Brown. “Sleep. We have come to the end of the ways. Do you know what
sleep is? Do you know that every man who sleeps believes in God? It is a sacrament;
for it is an act of faith and it is a food. And we need a sacrament, if only a
natural one. Something has fallen on us that falls very seldom on men; perhaps
the worst thing that can fall on them.”

Craven’s
parted lips came together to say, “What do you mean?”

The
priest had turned his face to the castle as he answered: “We have found the truth;
and the truth makes no sense.”

He
went down the path in front of them with a plunging and reckless step very rare
with him, and when they reached the castle again he threw himself upon sleep with
the simplicity of a dog.

Despite
his mystic praise of slumber, Father Brown was up earlier than anyone else except
the silent gardener; and was found smoking a big pipe and watching that expert
at his speechless labours in the kitchen garden. Towards daybreak the rocking
storm had ended in roaring rains, and the day came with a curious freshness.
The gardener seemed even to have been conversing, but at sight of the
detectives he planted his spade sullenly in a bed and, saying something about
his breakfast, shifted along the lines of cabbages and shut himself in the
kitchen. “He’s a valuable man, that,” said Father Brown. “He does the potatoes
amazingly. Still,” he added, with a dispassionate charity, “he has his faults;
which of us hasn’t? He doesn’t dig this bank quite regularly. There, for
instance,” and he stamped suddenly on one spot. “I’m really very doubtful about
that potato.”

“
And
why?” asked Craven, amused with the little man’s hobby.

“
I’m
doubtful about it,” said the other, “because old Gow was doubtful about it himself.
He put his spade in methodically in every place but just this. There must be a
mighty fine potato just here.”

Flambeau
pulled up the spade and impetuously drove it into the place. He turned up, under
a load of soil, something that did not look like a potato, but rather like a
monstrous, over-domed mushroom. But it struck the spade with a cold click; it
rolled over like a ball, and grinned up at them.

“
The
Earl of Glengyle,” said Brown sadly, and looked down heavily at the skull.

Then,
after a momentary meditation, he plucked the spade from Flambeau, and, saying “We
must hide it again,” clamped the skull down in the earth. Then he leaned his
little body and huge head on the great handle of the spade, that stood up stiffly
in the earth, and his eyes were empty and his forehead full of wrinkles. “If
one could only conceive,” he muttered, “the meaning of this last monstrosity.”
And leaning on the large spade handle, he buried his brows in his hands, as men
do in church.

All
the corners of the sky were brightening into blue and silver; the birds were chattering
in the tiny garden trees; so loud it seemed as if the trees themselves were
talking. But the three men were silent enough.

“
Well,
I give it all up,” said Flambeau at last boisterously. “My brain and this world
don’t fit each other; and there’s an end of it. Snuff, spoilt Prayer Books, and
the insides of musical boxes — what —”

Brown
threw up his bothered brow and rapped on the spade handle with an intolerance quite
unusual with him. “Oh, tut, tut, tut, tut!” he cried. “All that is as plain as
a pikestaff. I understood the snuff and clockwork, and so on, when I first
opened my eyes this morning. And since then I’ve had it out with old Gow, the
gardener, who is neither so deaf nor so stupid as he pretends. There’s nothing
amiss about the loose items. I was wrong about the torn mass-book, too; there’s
no harm in that. But it’s this last business. Desecrating graves and stealing
dead men’s heads — surely there’s harm in that? Surely there’s black magic
still in that? That doesn’t fit in to the quite simple story of the snuff and
the candles.” And, striding about again, he smoked moodily.

“
My
friend,” said Flambeau, with a grim humour, “you must be careful with me and remember
I was once a criminal. The great advantage of that estate was that I always
made up the story myself, and acted it as quick as I chose. This detective
business of waiting about is too much for my French impatience. All my life,
for good or evil, I have done things at the instant; I always fought duels the
next morning; I always paid bills on the nail; I never even put off a visit to
the dentist —”

Father
Brown’s pipe fell out of his mouth and broke into three pieces on the gravel path.
He stood rolling his eyes, the exact picture of an idiot. “Lord, what a turnip
I am!” he kept saying. “Lord, what a turnip!” Then, in a somewhat groggy kind
of way, he began to laugh.

“
The
dentist!” he repeated. “Six hours in the spiritual abyss, and all because I never
thought of the dentist! Such a simple, such a beautiful and peaceful thought!
Friends, we have passed a night in hell; but now the sun is risen, the birds
are singing, and the radiant form of the dentist consoles the world.”