The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (77 page)

On
the field of snow, which had been so blank a little while before, lay one black
object. At the first glance it looked a little like an enormous bat. A second glance
showed that it was, after all, a human figure; fallen on its face, the whole
head covered by a broad black hat having something of a Latin-American look;
while the appearance of black wings came from the two flaps or loose sleeves of
a very vast black cloak spread out, perhaps by accident, to their utmost length
on either side. Both the hands were hidden, though Father Brown thought he
could detect the position of one of them, and saw close to it, under the edge
of the cloak, the glimmer of some metallic weapon. The main effect, however,
was curiously like that of the simple extravagances of heraldry; like a black
eagle displayed on a white ground. But by walking round it and peering under
the hat the priest got a glimpse of the face, which was indeed what his host
had called refined and intellectual; even sceptical and austere: the face of
John Strake.

‘
Well,
I’m jiggered,’ muttered Father Brown. ‘It really does look like some vast vampire
that has swooped down like a bird.’

‘
How
else could he have come?’ came a voice from the doorway, and Father Brown looked
up to see Aylmer once more standing there.

‘
Couldn’t
he have walked?’ replied Father Brown evasively.

Aylmer
stretched out his arm and swept the white landscape with a gesture.

‘
Look
at the snow,’ he said in a deep voice that had a sort of roll and thrill in it.
‘Is not the snow unspotted — pure as the white magic you yourself called it? Is
there a speck on it for miles, save that one foul black blot that has fallen there?
There are no footprints, but a few of yours and mine; there are none approaching
the house from anywhere.’

Then
he looked at the little priest for a moment with a concentrated and curious expression,
and said: ‘I will tell you something else. That cloak he flies with is too long
to walk with. He was not a very tall man, and it would trail behind him like a
royal train. Stretch it out over his body, if you like, and see.’

‘
What
happened to you both?’ asked Father Brown abruptly.

‘
It
was too swift to describe,’ answered Aylmer. ‘I had looked out of the door and was
turning back when there came a kind of rushing of wind all around me, as if I
were being buffeted by a wheel revolving in mid-air. I spun round somehow and fired
blindly; and then I saw nothing but what you see now. But I am morally certain
that you wouldn’t see it if I had not had a silver shot in my gun. It would
have been a different body lying there in the snow.’

‘
By
the way,’ remarked Father Brown, ‘shall we leave it lying there in the snow? Or
would you like it taken into your room — I suppose that’s your bedroom in the passage?’

‘
No,
no,’ replied Aylmer hastily, ‘we must leave it here till the police have seen it.
Besides, I’ve had as much of such things as I can stand for the moment. Whatever
else happens, I’m going to have a drink. After that, they can hang me if they
like.’

Inside
the central apartment, between the palm plant and the bowl of fishes, Aylmer tumbled
into a chair. He had nearly knocked the bowl over as he lurched into the room,
but he had managed to find the decanter of brandy after plunging his hand
rather blindly into several cupboards and corners. He did not at any time look
like a methodical person, but at this moment his distraction must have been
extreme. He drank with a long gulp and began to talk rather feverishly, as if
to fill up a silence.

‘
I
see you are still doubtful,’ he said, ‘though you have seen the thing with your
own eyes. Believe me, there was something more behind the quarrel between the spirit
of Strake and the spirit of the house of Aylmer. Besides, you have no business
to be an unbeliever. You ought to stand for all the things these stupid people
call superstitions. Come now, don’t you think there’s a lot in those old wives’
tales about luck and charms and so on, silver bullets included? What do you say
about them as a Catholic?’

‘
I
say I’m an agnostic,’ replied Father Brown, smiling.

‘
Nonsense,’
said Aylmer impatiently. ‘It’s your business to believe things.’

‘
Well,
I do believe some things, of course,’ conceded Father Brown; ‘and therefore, of
course, I don’t believe other things.’

Aylmer
was leaning forward, and looking at him with a strange intensity that was almost
like that of a mesmerist.

‘
You
do believe it,’ he said. ‘You do believe everything. We all believe everything,
even when we deny everything. The denyers believe. The unbelievers believe. Don’t
you feel in your heart that these contradictions do not really contradict: that
there is a cosmos that contains them all? The soul goes round upon a wheel of
stars and all things return; perhaps Strake and I have striven in many shapes,
beast against beast and bird against bird, and perhaps we shall strive for
ever. But since we seek and need each other, even that eternal hatred is an
eternal love. Good and evil go round in a wheel that is one thing and not many.
Do you not realize in your heart, do you not believe behind all your beliefs,
that there is but one reality and we are its shadows; and that all things are
but aspects of one thing: a centre where men melt into Man and Man into God?’

‘
No,’
said Father Brown.

Outside,
twilight had begun to fall, in that phase of such a snow-laden evening when the
land looks brighter than the sky. In the porch of the main entrance, visible through
a half-curtained window, Father Brown could dimly see a bulky figure standing.
He glanced casually at the french windows through which he had originally
entered, and saw they were darkened with two equally motionless figures. The
inner door with the coloured glass stood slightly ajar; and he could see in the
short corridor beyond, the ends of two long shadows, exaggerated and distorted
by the level light of evening, but still like grey caricatures of the figures
of men. Dr Boyne had already obeyed the telephone message. The house was
surrounded.

‘
What
is the good of saying no?’ insisted his host, still with the same hypnotic stare.
‘You have seen part of that eternal drama with your own eyes. You have seen the
threat of John Strake to slay Arnold Aylmer by black magic. You have seen
Arnold Aylmer slay John Strake by white magic. You see Arnold Aylmer alive and
talking to you now. And yet you don’t believe it.’

‘
No,
I do not believe it,’ said Father Brown, and rose from his chair like one terminating
a visit.

‘
Why
not?’ asked the other.

The
priest only lifted his voice a little, but it sounded in every corner of the room
like a bell. ‘Because you are not Arnold Aylmer,’ he said. ‘I know who you are.
Your name is John Strake; and you have murdered the last of the brothers, who
is lying outside in the snow.’

A
ring of white showed round the iris of the other man’s eyes; he seemed to be making,
with bursting eyeballs, a last effort to mesmerize and master his companion.
Then he made a sudden movement sideways; and even as he did so the door behind
him opened and a big detective in plain clothes put one hand quietly on his
shoulder. The other hand hung down, but it held a revolver. The man looked
wildly round, and saw plain-clothes men in all corners of the quiet room.

That
evening Father Brown had another and longer conversation with Dr Boyne about the
tragedy of the Aylmer family. By that time there was no longer any doubt of the
central fact of the case, for John Strake had confessed his identity and even
confessed his crimes; only it would be truer to say that he boasted of his victories.
Compared to the fact that he had rounded off his life’s work with the last
Aylmer lying dead, everything else, including existence itself, seemed to be
indifferent to him.

‘
The
man is a sort of monomaniac,’ said Father Brown. ‘He is not interested in any other
matter; not even in any other murder. I owe him something for that; for I had
to comfort myself with the reflection a good many times this afternoon. As has
doubtless occurred to you, instead of weaving all that wild but ingenious romance
about winged vampires and silver bullets, he might have put an ordinary leaden
bullet into me, and walked out of the house. I assure you it occurred quite
frequently to me.’

‘
I
wonder why he didn’t,’ observed Boyne. ‘I don’t understand it; but I don’t understand
anything yet. How on earth did you discover it, and what in the world did you
discover?’

‘
Oh,
you provided me with very valuable information,’ replied Father Brown modestly,
‘especially the one piece of information that really counted. I mean the statement
that Strake was a very inventive and imaginative liar, with great presence of
mind in producing his lies. This afternoon he needed it; but he rose to the
occasion. Perhaps his only mistake was in choosing a preternatural story; he
had the notion that because I am a clergyman I should believe anything. Many
people have little notions of that kind.’

‘
But
I can’t make head or tail of it,’ said the doctor. ‘You must really begin at the
beginning.’

‘
The
beginning of it was a dressing-gown,’ said Father Brown simply. ‘It was the one
really good disguise I’ve ever known. When you meet a man in a house with a dressing-gown
on, you assume quite automatically that he’s in his own house. I assumed it
myself; but afterwards queer little things began to happen. When he took the
pistol down he clicked it at arm’s length, as a man does to make sure a strange
weapon isn’t loaded; of course he would know whether the pistols in his own
hall were loaded or not. I didn’t like the way he looked for the brandy, or the
way he nearly barged into the bowl of fishes. For a man who has a fragile thing
of that sort as a fixture in his rooms gets a quite mechanical habit of
avoiding it. But these things might possibly have been fancies; the first real
point was this. He came out from the little passage between the two doors; and
in that passage there’s only one other door leading to a room; so I assumed it
was the bedroom he had just come from. I tried the handle; but it was locked. I
thought this odd; and looked through the keyhole. It was an utterly bare room,
obviously deserted; no bed, no anything. Therefore he had not come from inside
any room, but from outside the house. And when I saw that, I think I saw the
whole picture.

‘
Poor
Arnold Aylmer doubtless slept and perhaps lived upstairs, and came down in his dressing-gown
and passed through the red glass door. At the end of the passage, black against
the winter daylight, he saw the enemy of his house. He saw a tall bearded man
in a broad-brimmed black hat and a large flapping black cloak. He did not see
much more in this world. Strake sprang at him, throttling or stabbing him; we
cannot be sure till the inquest. Then Strake, standing in the narrow passage
between the hat-stand and the old sideboard, and looking down in triumph on the
last of his foes heard something he had not expected. He heard footsteps in the
parlour beyond. It was myself entering by the french windows.

‘
His
masquerade was a miracle of promptitude. It involved not only a disguise but a romance
— an impromptu romance. He took off his big black hat and cloak and put on the
dead man’s dressing-gown. Then he did a rather grisly thing; at least a thing
that affects my fancy as more grisly than the rest. He hung the corpse like a
coat on one of the hat pegs. He draped it in his own long cloak, and found it
hung well below the heels; he covered the head entirely with his own wide hat.
It was the only possible way of hiding it in that little passage with the
locked door; but it was really a very clever one. I myself walked past the hat-stand
once without knowing it was anything but a hat-stand. I think that unconsciousness
of mine will always give me a shiver.

‘
He
might perhaps have left it at that; but I might have discovered the corpse at any
minute; and, hung where it was, it was a corpse calling for what you might call
an explanation. He adopted the bolder stroke of discovering it himself and explaining
it himself.

‘
Then
there dawned on this strange and frightfully fertile mind the conception of a story
of substitution; the reversal of the parts. He had already assumed the part of
Arnold Aylmer. Why should not his dead enemy assume the part of John Strake?
There must have been something in that topsy-turvydom to take the fancy of that
darkly fanciful man. It was like some frightful fancy-dress ball to which the
two mortal enemies were to go dressed up as each other. Only, the fancy-dress
ball was to be a dance of death: and one of the dancers would be dead. That is
why I can imagine that man putting it in his own mind, and I can imagine him
smiling.’

Father
Brown was gazing into vacancy with his large grey eyes, which, when not blurred
by his trick of blinking, were the one notable thing in his face. He went on speaking
simply and seriously: ‘All things are from God; and above all, reason and
imagination and the great gifts of the mind. They are good in themselves; and we
must not altogether forget their origin even in their perversion. Now this man
had in him a very noble power to be perverted; the power of telling stories. He
was a great novelist; only he had twisted his fictive power to practical and to
evil ends; to deceiving men with false fact instead of with true fiction. It
began with his deceiving old Aylmer with elaborate excuses and ingeniously
detailed lies; but even that may have been, at the beginning, little more than
the tall stories and tarradiddles of the child who may say equally he has seen
the King of England or the King of the Fairies. It grew strong in him through
the vice that perpetuates all vices, pride; he grew more and more vain of his
promptitude in producing stories of his originality, and subtlety in developing
them. That is what the young Aylmers meant by saying that he could always cast
a spell over their father; and it was true. It was the sort of spell that the
storyteller cast over the tyrant in the Arabian Nights. And to the last he
walked the world with the pride of a poet, and with the false yet unfathomable
courage of a great liar. He could always produce more Arabian Nights if ever
his neck was in danger. And today his neck was in danger.