TWO days passed, three; and Father Malachy’s miracle had become the leading topic of conversation in every drawing room, office, bar, and railway carriage in the world.
The British had for so long allowed themselves to believe outwardly in a religion which they believed inwardly to be untrue that this public proof of the validity of its doctrines struck them as being in very bad taste and liable to damage trade. Faith, English faith, had always been a nice, neo-Gothic mist in which unattractive women and men who were bad at games could hide themselves and where their more human brothers and sisters could join them for religious Ascots, Derbys, and twelfths of August. And now here was a Roman Catholic monk proving that Christian doctrine was as much about fact as India or the Panama Canal. Well, well, if Christianity was as true as all that, they weren’t going to believe in it any longer, not they.
Of course, they did not really reason like that—not explicitly, at any rate; but the sum total of their false deductions derived from falser premises amounted to the general conclusion that Christianity was all very well and healthy and English if it restricted itself to being a probable improbability but that it was an absolute washout if it started becoming unashamedly and obviously true. The scholarly utterances of popular deans and the private lives of abnormal actresses had done their work. Men and women who never read anything more profound than the report of a boxing match or a society wedding had now come to have intellectual difficulties in believing what Saint Ignatius Loyola, Saint Dominic, and Saint Benedict had swallowed without effort; and sin—fornication and adultery being now regarded as feats as intellectual as reading Tolstoy in the original—had proved such a pleasant alternative to golf in wet weather that it was not likely that clean-limbed English men and women were going to take more kindly to myth and mystery because they had become, for a week at least, fact and reality.
The thinkers and those who were able to choose their own library books and to ask for a cup of coffee in comprehensible French were, of course, dead against the miracle which they opposed as bitterly and as incompetently as Gladstone had, in the nineteenth century, opposed the biology of Darwin and Huxley. “Agnosticism,” they declaimed from their pulpits and editorial chairs, “agnosticism has been for fifty years or more the only religious philosophy possible to the educated man and woman; and any attempt to justify, by a juggling that is as anachronous as it is clumsy, a supernaturalism repugnant to the intelligent mind is doomed to failure.”
There were also, however, the naturally pious, those ultra-spiritual souls who were as ready to ascribe the receipt of an unexpected postal order to God as their opponents were to interpret High Mass in terms of Freud. Every day Leith Walk publicans, who recited daily twice as many rosaries as they sold bottles of champagne, knelt on the pavement of the vanished Garden of Eden and asked Our Lady to obtain them pardon for their spiritual apathy; and ladies of title and servant girls (in Scotland Catholicism is more or less confined to the social extremes) could be seen bowed in prayer and meditation before those once worldly railings. The High Church Anglicans, too, always ready to believe when a papist might, with good conscience, doubt, had shown great devotion to the miracle; and the Reverend Denis Meaty had called personally on the priests of the Church of Saint Margaret of Scotland and, after asking Canon Geoghegan how he disposed of his spectacles at the consecration, had confided that his own bishop was most interested in the miracle but, for fear of giving offense to the more timid and conservative souls committed to his charge, had to content himself with being interested at a distance.
Seductions, rapes, murders, and transatlantic flights were, as has already been indicated, scarce; and, as it was at least a fortnight before Scotland met France at Murrayfield, the miracle had as much honour in its own country as it had in Mexico, and it became quite the convention for sweet young things to talk, as they promenaded Princes Street, of how amusing it would be if religion and all that were really and truly true.
2
On the Friday morning within the first octave of the miracle, Father Malachy, tired by constant interviews, was again informed by James that someone wished to see him in the parlour. He did not sigh but wished that he could have done so without forfeiting a particle of God’s grace. (He had returned to his room only ten minutes ago from interviewing a female member of the British Fascisti who had prefaced her volubility by the request: “Please, Father, tell me all about religion”; and before that he had been instructing a chartered accountant, an international authority on columnar cash books, who stated that he had audited theology and found it correct.)
His new visitor turned out to be a prosperous-looking man of about fifty years of age, who was wearing a heavy black overcoat with a fur collar and who seemed to smell of cigar smoke, reminiscently, like a church of incense.
“Good morning,” he boomed out straight away. “You’re Father Malachy Murdoch, are you? Well, I’ve come to buy the rights of your miracle.”
“I beg your pardon.” Father Malachy, all hud-dled in his black cloak, seemed to be hugging himself for astonishment.
“I forgot. Of course, you don’t know who I am. How very stupid of me.” The stranger smiled and produced his card and handed it to Father Malachy. “As you will read, my name is Thomas Ink. Thomas B. Ink. Not entirely unknown, as I think you will agree.”
Father Malachy studied the card attentively.
“You must pardon me, Mr. Ink,” he said politely, “but, living as I do in a monastery, I am naturally somewhat out of touch with the outer world. Your name is certainly familiar to me; but whether you are known for exporting Protestant Bibles to South America or for plain unsectarian horticulture, I can’t for the life of me say.”
Mr. Ink laughed, loudly and deeply.
“Unsectarian horticulture! Damned good. I can see that you and I are going to understand each other perfectly. No, I am afraid that I am known for neither of the rather dull accomplishments which you have just mentioned. Indeed, my profession is anything but a dull one. For I am, you see, a showman; and I think that I may, with all modesty, claim to be Britain’s leading showman. At any rate, I have discovered more Spanish beauties and been bankrupt oftener than any of my rivals. In 1919 I staged Put Me to Bye-Byes, which ran six months longer than any other revue of its type, and was responsible for the successful filming of Miss Primrose Field’s emotional little masterpiece Mothers of Tomorrow. In 1920 I organized three unsuccessful transatlantic flights, a crash on Wall Street, the début of Miss Trixie Tantana and the publicity work of the Lambeth Conference. In 1921, yes, in 1921, I failed for exactly double the amount of hundreds of thousands that any other showman has failed for. But in 1922 I was on my feet again and produced Get Me, Girlie? in the West End and Handel’s Messiah in Birmingham and Glasgow and dined, if I remember rightly, with the ex-Kaiser at Doorn. In 1923 I financed two of the prize fights which made Chicago the metropolis of the ring and in 1924 I was again down and out. In 1925—but I need weary you no further, need I? I am sure that I have told you enough about myself for you to understand that I am a man of considerable action. And, my dear Father, the fact that you, essentially a man of inaction, have within the space of a single week attracted to yourself more publicity than I have in a lifetime—well, Father, all that I can say is that I am intrigued. For whereas my name is familiar enough wherever English is spoken, yours is just as much a household word in Moscow as it is in Haiti.”
Father Malachy bowed.
“Won’t you sit down?” he asked. “I don’t know about you, Mr. Ink, but I am very tired. As perhaps you can understand, I have been having a rather large number of callers these last few days.”
Mr. Ink sat down and so did Father Malachy.
“Well,” said Mr. Ink, “as man to man, what’s the trick?”
“The trick? I am afraid, Mr. Ink, that I don’t quite understand you.”
“Oh, yes you do.” Mr. Ink was jolly and con-fidential and twinkling. “Oh, yes you do. I asked you to tell me as man to man, didn’t I? Perhaps I ought to have put it more delicately and more aptly. As showman to showman, as celestial showman to terrestrial showman, what’s the trick? In other words, how did you do it?”
Father Malachy appeared to become more grey and monkish and impersonal as he listened to his visitor.
“I presume that you are referring to my trans-lation of the Garden of Eden to the Bass Rock?” he asked.
“Exactly. You see, I am interested profes-sionally: firstly, in your technique; secondly in the commercial possibilities of your miracle. And then I am unfortunate enough to be the largest shareholder in a music hall in Leeds which would pay much better if it could be removed to Bradford. So that, professionally, personally, and in every kind of way, I have been most impressed by your performance of last Saturday night.” The merriment went from Mr. Ink’s face and was replaced by an intense expression which was intended to convey such sentiments and policies as honesty, friendliness, and no Home Rule for India. “And I need hardly say, Father, that you would not be the loser by any services which you chose to render me.”
“I think, Mr. Ink, that you and I are not at all likely to understand each other. My miracle was not a trick; it was a direct supervention of the supernatural, of which the purpose was and is to bring an apathetic and godless generation back to religion and right living. And”—Father Malachy smiled ever so slightly—“as Almighty God is more like to disapprove than to approve your purpose, I am afraid that, even were I to choose to come to your aid, your music hall would continue to sit in Leeds.”
Mr. Ink was puzzled and looked it. A frown rippled across his brow and spread, in dribbles, to the corners of his eyes.
“But,” he protested uncertainly, “I thought that—that even religious people had given up believing in that sort of thing. And only last night the Protestant bishop of Wallington stated that it was not by upsetting the laws of physics that Christianity would commend itself to thoughtful people.”
Father Malachy’s smile broadened.
“My dear Mr. Ink,” he said, “I am sorry to be forced to tell you that you are a sentimentalist. Belief makes no difference to fact. If all the people in the world were suddenly to go insane and to refuse to believe that the Channel Islands existed, the Channel Islands would still continue to lie where they do. And the same holds good with regard to abstract principles: two and two will continue to make four even if all the mathematicians in the world decide that, in accordance with modern thought, they ought to make five. Similarly the Trinity and the supernatural continue to crown physics and the natural in spite of what prominent heretical bishops and cinema actresses may believe to the contrary. Theology, Mr. Ink, is an exact science often misinterpreted as a sentimental opinion just as geology is often a sentimental opinion misinterpreted as an exact science.”
Mr. Ink’s expression of bewilderment changed to one of uneasiness. He had never pretended to understand the fuss that parsons and priests made about matters which, in his opinion, were best left alone. Religion was all very well when it confined itself to preserving ancient cathedrals and marrying and burying people; but when it began to try to stop you from making love when and with whom you liked and to pretend to be true…He was almost on the point of taking his leave when he remembered that, miracle or fraud, there was money in this business and that, according to his trainer’s last report, it was not likely that Cami-Knickers would win next year’s Derby.
“I perceive, Father Malachy, that you are both a philosopher and a man of principle. Please, then, accept my sincerest apologies if I have said anything to offend you and believe that I entertain only sentiments of good will and admiration towards the cause of which you are so able an exponent.” He made a heavy little bow, pulled half of it back again, and replaced it by a real Rotarian smile. “Let us, then, leave aside the—the more solemn aspects of this miracle of yours and talk, as even the most unworldly men must on occasion, business. Are you willing to sell the rights of your miracle? Perhaps the fact has not struck you, but your miracle has a certain cash value. And I have no doubt that you, like many other worthy clergymen, would be only too willing to earn a little extra money to enable you to carry on your great and noble work of aiding our less fortunate brothers and sisters.”
Father Malachy thought of Mr. George Bleater and of Mr. J. Shyman Bell and of their claims and of the way that the bishop had seemed inclined to let the justice of God be tempered by the justice of men.
“It is not a little extra money that I require,” he said. “It is a great deal of money. Yes, a great deal of money. Much more than you would be willing to give me, in all probability. But perhaps you would be good enough to tell me exactly in what, commercially speaking, the rights of my miracle consist.”
“Cinema and serial,” said Mr. Ink, without hes-itation. “Dramatic, perhaps, although I am inclined to think that your miracle would make neither a good play nor a popular musical comedy. Of course, with a little human interest added…”
“And what exactly am I to understand by hu-man interest?” Father Malachy asked.
Mr. Ink began to roll between his teeth the cigar which he wasn’t smoking.
“Well, I’ll tell you. In the first place, you’d have to drop all this stuff about performing your miracle to prove that your religion was truer than anybody else’s. The great heart of the people wouldn’t stand for it; and it’s the great heart of the people, Father Malachy, and not their soul or their intellect which we showmen have to consider. Now, this miracle of yours would make a first-class talkie and it would be a great draw if you could play in it yourself. But real, human interest, remember, and no probing into this, that, and the other thing. The average mental age of any cinema audience is seventeen, Father, and the mind of seventeen is more concerned with love than religion. That’s it; we’d have to give your miracle a love interest.”
“But it has one already,” Father Malachy pro-tested. “Haven’t I told you that I performed the miracle for the love of God?”
Mr. Ink brushed away the higher motives with an imperious wave of his imaginary cigar.
“I said seventeen, Father, not seventy. At sev-enteen people are concerned with loving—and in a slightly technical manner at that—each other and not with loving God. You’d have to be a monk who was always keen on praying in chapels and tending roses until one day you looked from out an old world turret window and saw a lover and his lass kissing each other with passionate abandon against an ivy-covered wall. It would come over you all of a sudden that human love is a very beautiful thing and that men and women were doing the work of the devil in shutting themselves up in monasteries and convents and flying from an emotion that was stronger than the iron bridge which spans the river and at the same time more tender than broken moonbeams falling on a forest lake. One might even show you, forty years younger, fleeing from a love that you were too cowardly to embrace. ‘Your golden hair, Gretchen,’ you would say, ‘will always be a rope to bind my heart to the great something which men must always seek and never find; but, alas! my father is adamant that a monk I must be. Fare thee well, golden Gretchen; each year when the roses bloom I will think of thee.’ Anyway, next day as you are walking along a lane, you meet the girl you saw kissing and being kissed and you are surprised to see that she is weeping bitterly. ‘What ails thee, my daughter?’ you ask in a voice that is both saintly and kind. ‘My mother wants me to become a nun,’ the fair young thing will answer, raising a tear-stained face to yours. ‘And I, wretched creature that I am, love Fritz Ausenheim, who lives by yonder watermill.’ ‘Blaspheme not, daughter,’ you will say, raising your hand in sweet reproof. ‘Your love for Fritz Ausenheim is a very beautiful gift from God. Go, tell your mother that a poor monk desires speech with her.’ You will then see the mother who will be a harsh, unattractive woman who is always worshipping the Virgin and bullying the servants. ‘Get thee behind me, Satan,’ she will answer to your request that her daughter be allowed to love and marry. ‘Griselda is promised to the abbess of Saint-Mary-of-the-Mountain and to the abbess of Saint-Mary-of-the-Mountain she will go.’ ‘It is a shame and a sin to flout true love,’ you will cry, nothing daunted by her flashing eyes, and you will transfer her baronial castle to the top of Mount Blanc until she sanctions the marriage of her daughter with Fritz Ausenheim—who will then turn out to be the cobbler’s or the blacksmith’s son—and admits that true love is God’s sunshine for human souls. The whole action to take place in the Austrian Tyrol.”
Father Malachy was gently rocking with laugh-ter by the time that Mr. Ink had finished.
“Do you really think that we’re like that, Mr. Ink? Monks and priests, I mean. Dear, dear, but I think I know more about showmen than you do about monks. Seventeen, you said, Mr. Ink, didn’t you? Well, in my opinion, the appeal of your film would be limited to badly instructed children of five.”
Mr. Ink was hurt but did his best not to appear so.
“I admire,” he said, “that there is nothing very profound in the plot which I have just outlined to you. But I think that my experience as a showman justifies me in preferring my own opinion to yours; and it is most decidedly my opinion that the public would lap up a first-class talkie planned on the lines that I have just described.”
“Well, in any case, I am afraid that I shall have to decline that particular proposal. My abbot would never give me permission to act in any film, let alone a film to propagate cheap and vulgar heterodoxy. No, I’m afraid that you’ll have to think of something else, Mr. Ink. And please think of it quickly because I am very anxious to earn a nice fat sum of money.”
Mr. Ink scratched his head, symbolically al-most.
“There’s the Sunday papers,” he said at length. “A series of articles from your pen would be worth a mint of money; and I think that I know just the quarter in which they’d be most appreciated. Only, once again, Father Malachy, you’d have to provide the human interest. And, after all, why shouldn’t you? Hang it all, that dean fellow who’s so down on your miracle was writing only a month ago in the Sunday Rapid on ‘Should Girls Wear Garters?’”
Father Malachy shook his head.
“I decline to write about garters when I can write about souls,” he said.
Mr. Ink thought. After all, there was a good deal of talk about religion in the papers these days. Charwomen, novelists, public schoolboys were always adding their trickle to the public diarrhœa of diluted theology. Yes, but this Malachy wouldn’t dilute his theology. That was just the trouble. He would treat religion as though it were as important as cricket or aëronautics. Yet the whole point of his miracle, according to him, was that religion was more important than cricket or aëronautics and the public would certainly be interested to hear the miracle-monger’s views on his own miracle. It was just possible that the time was ripe for religion to rake in as much money as legs. This priest was certainly—for the moment, at least—famous enough to command any price he chose for his public utterances, written or spoken; and it was likely to be a very long time before another opportunity for exploiting religion would occur. Yes, perhaps it would be best to give him carte blanche as regards his subject and his treatment of it.
“What do you say to four consecutive and ex-clusive articles in the Sunday Messenger and lectures in London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, and this rather noble architectural hiccup which has the temerity to proclaim itself a capital?” Mr. Ink was as suave and as ultimately thirteen-second-Corinthians in charity as he had been when he persuaded Miss Dillie Delaney to appear in Singapore without a cache-sexe. “Eh, what do you say to that?”
Father Malachy answered readily enough:
“Three things: firstly, that you give me time to obtain the permission of my abbot; secondly, that I may speak of my miracle as I believe that Almighty God would have me speak of it; and thirdly, that you pay to me the sum of one hundred thousand, one hundred and thirteen pounds, nineteen shillings.”
“One hundred thousand, one hundred and thir-teen pounds, nineteen shillings is both a large sum and a curious sum,” Mr. Ink murmured reflectively. “May I be so indiscreet as to ask you if you have any special reason for naming it?”
“I have a very special reason,” said Father Mal-achy, “but, if you don’t mind, I rather think that I shall keep it to myself. One hundred thousand, one hundred and thirteen pounds, nineteen shillings is my price, Mr. Ink, for telling the British public what it ought to know already.”
“Of course,” said Mr. Ink, “you’ll have to give me time to approach newspaper proprietors and the owners of large public halls. And, as I cannot afford to be a loser over this transaction, I shall have to satisfy myself that our gross receipts will be sufficient to pay you the sum you have demanded after allowing for general expenses and my little commission.”
“That is entirely your affair, Mr. Ink. And, as long as the result of your labours will be to guarantee me one hundred thousand, one hundred and thirteen pounds, nineteen shillings, I shall ask to know nothing more. And, on your part, you must give me sufficient time to communicate with my abbot.”
“Of course,” said Mr. Ink, rising. “Of course, Father Malachy. Then perhaps in a couple of days or so from now we might meet again? We must strike while the iron’s hot, you know.” And, finding conversation difficult now that business had been exhausted, he remarked, in spite of the gay sunshine outside: “Rotten weather, is it not?”
3
Yes, thought Father Malachy, as he mounted to his room, Almighty God wasn’t going to let him down after all. The abbot mightn’t altogether like the idea of the newspaper articles and the popular lectures, but he couldn’t very well object in view of the publicity that would be obtained for Catholic orthodoxy. And Mr. George Bleater and Mr. J. Shyman Bell would be paid in full and the Garden of Eden would become a basilica where converted Britons would do penance for three and a half centuries of pig-headedness. Yes, yes, you could always trust Almighty God; He wasn’t the sort of Person to perform a miracle and then let it get messed up for want of one hundred thousand, one hundred and thirteen pounds, nineteen shillings, not He. He just reversed the principle of one of His own parables and made unto Himself friends of the mammon of unrighteousness that He might receive them into His dwellings. Dear old Almighty God; He was a one, He was.
Father Malachy's Miracle: Chapter Nine
Father Malachy's Miracle: Chapter Seven
Notes
cache-sexe: a small garment (as a loincloth) worn to cover the genitals
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