The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] by G.K. Chesterton Page B

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,