The Incredulity of Father Brown · The Miracle of Moon Crescent (1/4)

The Miracle of Moon Crescent

Moon Crescent was meant in a sense to be as romantic as its name; and the things that happened there were romantic enough in their way. At least it had been an expression of that genuine element of sentiment⁠—historic and almost heroic⁠—which manages to remain side by side with commercialism in the elder cities on the eastern coast of America. It was originally a curve of classical architecture really recalling that eighteenth-century atmosphere in which men like Washington and Jefferson had seemed to be all the more republicans for being aristocrats. Travellers faced with the recurrent query of what they thought of our city were understood to be specially answerable for what they thought of our Moon Crescent. The very contrasts that confuse its original harmony were characteristic of its survival. At one extremity or horn of the crescent its last windows looked over an enclosure like a strip of a gentleman’s park, with trees and hedges as formal as a Queen Anne garden. But immediately round the corner, the other windows, even of the same rooms, or rather “apartments,” looked out on the blank, unsightly wall of a huge warehouse attached to some ugly industry. The apartments of Moon Crescent itself were at that end remodelled on the monotonous pattern of an American hotel, and rose to a height, which, though lower than the colossal warehouse, would have been called a skyscraper in London. But the colonnade that ran round the whole frontage upon the street had a grey and weather-stained stateliness suggesting that the ghosts of the Fathers of the Republic might still be walking to and fro in it. The insides of the rooms, however, were as neat and new as the last New York fittings could make them, especially at the northern end between the neat garden and the blank warehouse wall. They were a system of very small flats, as we should say in England, each consisting of a sitting-room, bedroom, and bathroom, as identical as the hundred cells of a hive. In one of these the celebrated Warren Wynd sat at his desk sorting letters and scattering orders with wonderful rapidity and exactitude. He could only be compared to a tidy whirlwind.

Warren Wynd was a very little man with loose grey hair and a pointed beard, seemingly frail but fierily active. He had very wonderful eyes, brighter than stars and stronger than magnets, which nobody who had ever seen them could easily forget. And indeed in his work as a reformer and regulator of many good works he had shown at least that he had a pair of eyes in his head. All sorts of stories and even legends were told of the miraculous rapidity with which he could form a sound judgment, especially of human character. It was said that he selected the wife who worked with him so long in so charitable a fashion, by picking her out of a whole regiment of women in uniform marching past at some official celebration, some said of the Girl Guides and some of the Women Police. Another story was told of how three tramps, indistinguishable from each other in their community of filth and rags, had presented themselves before him asking for charity. Without a moment’s hesitation he had sent one of them to a particular hospital devoted to a certain nervous disorder, had recommended the second to an inebriate’s home, and had engaged the third at a handsome salary as his own private servant, a position which he filled successfully for years afterwards. There were, of course, the inevitable anecdotes of his prompt criticisms and curt repartees when brought in contact with Roosevelt, with Henry Ford, and with Mrs. Asquith and all other persons with whom an American public man ought to have a historic interview, if only in the newspapers. Certainly he was not likely to be overawed by such personages; and at the moment here in question he continued very calmly his centrifugal whirl of papers, though the man confronting him was a personage of almost equal importance.

Silas T. Vandam, the millionaire and oil magnate, was a lean man with a long, yellow face and blue-black hair, colours which were the less conspicuous yet somehow the more sinister because his face and figure showed dark against the window and the white warehouse wall outside it; he was buttoned up tight in an elegant overcoat with strips of astrachan. The eager face and brilliant eyes of Wynd, on the other hand were in the full light from the other window overlooking the little garden, for his chair and desk stood facing it; and though the face was preoccupied, it did not seem unduly preoccupied about the millionaire. Wynd’s valet or personal servant, a big, powerful man with flat fair hair, was standing behind his master’s desk holding a sheaf of letters; and Wynd’s private secretary, a neat, red-haired youth with a sharp face, had his hand already on the door handle, as if guessing some purpose or obeying some gesture of his employer. The room was not only neat, but austere to the point of emptiness; for Wynd, with characteristic thoroughness, had rented the whole floor above, and turned it into a loft or storeroom, where all his other papers and possessions were stacked in boxes and corded bales.

“Give these to the floor-clerk, Wilson,” said Wynd to the servant holding the letters, “and then get me the pamphlet on the Minneapolis Night Clubs; you’ll find it in the bundle marked G. I shall want it in half an hour, but don’t disturb me till then. Well, Mr. Vandam, I think your proposition sounds very promising; but I can’t give a final answer till I’ve seen the report. It ought to reach me tomorrow afternoon, and I’ll phone you at once. I’m sorry I can’t say anything more definite just now.”

Mr. Vandam seemed to feel that this was something like a polite dismissal; and his sallow, saturnine face suggested that he found a certain irony in the fact.

“Well, I suppose I must be going,” he said.

“Very good of you to call, Mr. Vandam,” said Wynd, politely; “you will excuse my not coming out, as I’ve something here I must fix at once. Fenner,” he added to the secretary, “show Mr. Vandam to his car, and don’t come back again for half an hour. I’ve something here I want to work out by myself; after that I shall want you.”

The three men went out into the hallway together, closing the door behind them. The big servant, Wilson, was turning down the hallway in the direction of the floor-clerk and the other two moving in the opposite direction towards the lift; for Wynd’s apartment was high up on the fourteenth floor. They had hardly gone a yard from the closed door when they became conscious that the corridor was filled with a marching and even magnificent figure. The man was very tall and broad-shouldered, his bulk being the more conspicuous for being clad in white or a light grey that looked like it, with a very wide white panama hat and an almost equally wide fringe or halo of almost equally white hair. Set in this aureole his face was strong and handsome, like that of a Roman emperor, save that there was something more than boyish, something a little childish, about the brightness of his eyes and the beatitude of his smile.

“Mr. Warren Wynd in?” he asked, in hearty tones.

“Mr. Warren Wynd is engaged,” said Fenner; “he must not be disturbed on any account. I may say I am his secretary and can take any message.”

“Mr. Warren Wynd is not at home to the Pope or the Crowned Heads,” said Vandam, the oil magnate, with sour satire. “Mr. Warren Wynd is mighty particular. I went in there to hand him over a trifle of twenty thousand dollars on certain conditions; and he told me to call again like as if I was a call-boy.”

“It’s a fine thing to be a boy,” said the stranger, “and a finer to have a call; and I’ve got a call he’s just got to listen to. It’s a call out of the great good country out West where the real American is being made while you’re all snoring. Just tell him that Art Alboin of Oklahoma City has come to convert him.”

“I tell you nobody can see him,” said the red-haired secretary sharply. “He has given orders that he is not to be disturbed for half an hour.”

“You folks down East are all against being disturbed,” said the breezy Mr. Alboin, “but I calculate there’s a big breeze getting up in the West that will have to disturb you. He’s been figuring out how much money must go to this and that stuffy old religion; but I tell you any scheme that leaves out the new Great Spirit movement in Texas and Oklahoma, is leaving out the religion of the future.”

“Oh, I’ve sized up those religions of the future,” said the millionaire, contemptuously. “I’ve been through them with a tooth-comb; and they’re as mangy as yellow dog. There was that woman called herself Sophia; ought to have called herself Sapphira, I reckon. Just a plum fraud. Strings tied to all the tables and tambourines. Then there were the Invisible Life bunch; said they could vanish when they liked, and they did vanish, too, and a hundred thousand of my dollars vanished with them. I knew Jupiter Jesus out in Denver; saw him for weeks on end; and he was just a common crook. So was the Patagonian Prophet; you bet he’s made a bolt for Patagonia. No, I’m through with all that; from now on I only believe what I see. I believe they call it being an atheist.”

“I guess you got me wrong,” said the man from Oklahoma, almost eagerly. “I guess I’m as much of an atheist as you are. No supernatural or superstitious stuff in our movement; just plain science. The only real right science is just health, and the only real right health is just breathing. Fill your lungs with the wide air of the prairie and you could blow all your old eastern cities into the sea. You could just puff away their biggest men like thistledown. That’s what we do in the new movement out home: we breathe. We don’t pray; we breathe.”

“Well, I suppose you do,” said the secretary, wearily; he had a keen, intelligent face which could hardly conceal the weariness; but he had listened to the two monologues with the admirable patience and politeness (so much in contrast with the legends of impatience and insolence) with which such monologues are listened to in America.

“Nothing supernatural,” continued Alboin, “just the great natural fact behind all the supernatural fancies. What did the Jews want with a God except to breathe into man’s nostrils the breath of life? We do the breathing into our own nostrils out in Oklahoma. What’s the meaning of the very word Spirit? It’s just the Greek for breathing exercises. Life, progress, prophecy; it’s all breath.”

“Some would allow it’s all wind,” said Vandam; “but I’m glad you’ve got rid of the divinity stunt, anyhow.”

The keen face of the secretary, rather pale against his red hair, showed a flicker of some odd feeling suggestive of a secret bitterness.

“I’m not glad,” he said, “I’m just sure. You seem to like being atheists; so you may be just believing what you like to believe. But I wish to God there were a God; and there ain’t. It’s just my luck.”

Without a sound or stir they all became almost creepily conscious at this moment that the group, halted outside Wynd’s door, had silently grown from three figures to four. How long the fourth figure had stood there none of the earnest disputants could tell, but he had every appearance of waiting respectfully and even timidly for the opportunity to say something urgent. But to their nervous sensibility he seemed to have sprung up suddenly and silently like a mushroom. And indeed, he looked rather like a big, black mushroom, for he was quite short and his small, stumpy figure was eclipsed by his big, black clerical hat; the resemblance might have been more complete if mushrooms were in the habit of carrying umbrellas, even of a shabby and shapeless sort.

Fenner, the secretary, was conscious of a curious additional surprise at recognizing the figure of a priest; but when the priest turned up a round face under the round hat and innocently asked for Mr. Warren Wynd, he gave the regular negative answer rather more curtly than before. But the priest stood his ground.

“I do really want to see Mr. Wynd,” he said. “It seems odd, but that’s exactly what I do want to do. I don’t want to speak to him. I just want to see him. I just want to see if he’s there to be seen.”

“Well, I tell you he’s there and can’t be seen,” said Fenner, with increasing annoyance. “What do you mean by saying you want to see if he’s there to be seen? Of course he’s there. We all left him there five minutes ago, and we’ve stood outside this door ever since.”

“Well, I want to see if he’s all right,” said the priest.

“Why?” demanded the secretary, in exasperation.

“Because I have a serious, I might say solemn, reason,” said the cleric, gravely, “for doubting whether he is all right.”

“Oh, Lord!” cried Vandam, in a sort of fury, “not more superstitions.”

“I see I shall have to give my reasons,” observed the little cleric, gravely. “I suppose I can’t expect you even to let me look through the crack of a door till I tell you the whole story.”

He was silent a moment as in reflection, and then went on without noticing the wondering faces around him. “I was walking outside along the front of the colonnade when I saw a very ragged man running hard round the corner at the end of the crescent. He came pounding along the pavement towards me, revealing a great, rawboned figure and a face I knew. It was the face of a wild Irish fellow I once helped a little; I will not tell you his name. When he saw me he staggered, calling me by mine and saying, ‘Saints alive, it’s Father Brown; you’re the only man whose face could frighten me today.’ I knew he meant he’d been doing some wild thing or other, and I don’t think my face frightened him much, for he was soon telling me about it. And a very strange thing it was. He asked me if I knew Warren Wynd, and I said no, though I knew he lived near the top of these flats. He said, ‘That’s a man who thinks he’s a saint of God; but if he knew what I was saying of him he should be ready to hang himself.’ And he repeated hysterically more than once, ‘Yes, ready to hang himself.’ I asked him if he’d done any harm to Wynd and his answer was rather a queer one. He said: ‘I took a pistol and I loaded it with neither shot nor slug, but only with a curse.’ As far as I could make out, all he had done was to go down that little alley between this building and the big warehouse, with an old pistol loaded with a blank charge, and merely fire it against the wall, as if that would bring down the building. ‘But as I did it,’ he said, ‘I cursed him with the great curse, that the justice of God should take him by the hair and the vengeance of hell by the heels, and he should be torn asunder like Judas and the world know him no more.’ Well, it doesn’t matter now what else I said to the poor, crazy fellow; he went away quieted down a little, and I went round to the back of the building to inspect. And sure enough, in the little alley at the foot of this wall there lay a rusty antiquated pistol; I know enough about pistols to know it had been loaded only with a little powder; there were the black marks of powder and smoke on the wall, and even the mark of the muzzle, but not even a dent of any bullet. He had left no trace of destruction; he had left no trace of anything, except those black marks and that black curse he had hurled into heaven. So I came back here to ask for this Warren Wynd and find out if he’s all right.”

Fenner the secretary laughed. “I can soon settle that difficulty for you. I assure you he’s quite all right; we left him writing at his desk only a few minutes ago. He was alone in his flat; it’s a hundred feet up from the street, and so placed that no shot could have reached him, even if your friend hadn’t fired blank. There’s no other entrance to this place but this door, and we’ve been standing outside it ever since.