Saint in New York Read Free Page A

their
distinguished clientele. Bellboys in caravanserai after caravanserai had
gazed knowingly at the large, useful feet on which the tour was conducted,
and had whispered wisely to one another behind their hands. There had been
an atmosphere of commiserating sapience about the au diences of all their
interviews which to a couple of seasoned sleuths professedly
disguised as ordinary citizens was pecu liarly distressing.
    And it was scarcely to be expected that the
chauffeur of a certain William K. Valcross, resident of the Waldorf
Astoria, would have swum into their questioning ken. They were look ing for a
tall, dark man of about thirty, described as an addict of the most
luxurious hotels; and they had looked for him with commendable
doggedness, refusing to be lured into any byways of fantasy. Mr. Valcross being
indubitably sixty years old and by no stretch of imagination resembling the photograph
with which they had been provided, they passed him over without loss
of time—and, with him, his maidservant, his manservant, his
ox, his ass, and the stranger within his gates.
    “If they do find me,” remarked the
Saint reflectively, “there will probably be harsh words.”
    He squinted approvingly down the shining
barrel of his gun, secured the safety catch, and patted it
affectionately into his pocket. Then he rose and stretched himself and went
over to the window
where Valcross was standing.
    Before them was spread out the ragged panorama
of south Manhattan, the wonder island of the West. A narrow hump of rock
sheltered from the Atlantic by the broad shoulder of Brooklyn, a mere
ripple of stone in the ocean’s inroads, on which the indomitable
cussedness of Man had elected to build a city—and, not contented with the
prodigious feat of over coming such a dimensional difficulty at all,
had made monu ments of its defiance. Because the city could not expand laterally,
it had expanded upwards; but the upward move ment was a leap
sculptured in stone, a flight born of necessity that had soared far beyond the
standards of necessity, in a magnificent impulse of levitation that
obliterated its own source. Molehills had become mountains in an art begotten of pure artifice. In the shadow of those grey and white pin nacles had
grown up a modern Baghdad where the ends of the earth came
together. A greater Italian city than Rome, a greater Irish city
than Dublin, a greater German city than Cologne; a city of dazzling wealth
whose towers had once looked like peaks of solid gold to hungry eyes reaching
beyond the horizons of the Old World; a place that had sprung up from a
lonely frontier to a metropolis, a central city, bow ing to no other. A
place where civilization and savagery had climbed alternately
on each other’s shoulders and reached their crest together… .
    “This has always been my home,” said Valcross, with a
queer softness.
    He turned his eyes from east to west in a
glance that swept in the whole skyline.
    “I know there are other cities; and they
say that New York doesn’t represent anything but itself. But this is
where my life has been lived.”
    Simon said nothing. He was three thousand
miles from his own home; but as he stood there at the window he saw what the older
man was seeing, and he could feel what the other felt. He had been there long
enough to sense the spell that New York could lay on a man who looked at it
with a mind not too tired for wonder—the pride and amazement at which cynical sophisticates laughed, which could still move the heart of a
man who was not ashamed to sink below the surface and touch the common
humanity that is the builder of cities. And because Simon could understand, he
knew what was in
the other’s mind before it was spoken.
    “I have to send for you,” Valcross
said, “because there are other people, more powerful than I am, who
don’t feel like that. The people to whom it isn’t a home, but a
battle-field to be looted. That is why you have to come here, from the