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The Ball and the Cross

by G. K. Chesterton · English · Gutenberg #5265 · 461,302 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Ball and the Cross

Author: G. K. Chesterton


        
Release date: March 1, 2004 [eBook #5265]
                Most recently updated: June 11, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5265

Credits: Ben Crowder and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BALL AND THE CROSS ***




THE BALL AND THE CROSS

G.K. Chesterton



CONTENTS

    I. A Discussion Somewhat in the Air
   II. The Religion of the Stipendiary Magistrate
  III. Some Old Curiosities
   IV. A Discussion at Dawn
    V. The Peacemaker
   VI. The Other Philosopher
  VII. The Village of Grassley-in-the-Hole
 VIII. An Interlude of Argument
   IX. The Strange Lady
    X. The Swords Rejoined
   XI. A Scandal in the Village
  XII. The Desert Island
 XIII. The Garden of Peace
  XIV. A Museum of Souls
   XV. The Dream of MacIan
  XVI. The Dream of Turnbull
 XVII. The Idiot
XVIII. A Riddle of Faces
  XIX. The Last Parley
   XX. Dies Irae




I. A DISCUSSION SOMEWHAT IN THE AIR

The flying ship of Professor Lucifer sang through the skies like a
silver arrow; the bleak white steel of it, gleaming in the bleak
blue emptiness of the evening. That it was far above the earth was no
expression for it; to the two men in it, it seemed to be far above the
stars. The professor had himself invented the flying machine, and had
also invented nearly everything in it. Every sort of tool or apparatus
had, in consequence, to the full, that fantastic and distorted look
which belongs to the miracles of science. For the world of science and
evolution is far more nameless and elusive and like a dream than the
world of poetry and religion; since in the latter images and ideas
remain themselves eternally, while it is the whole idea of evolution
that identities melt into each other as they do in a nightmare.

All the tools of Professor Lucifer were the ancient human tools gone
mad, grown into unrecognizable shapes, forgetful of their origin,
forgetful of their names. That thing which looked like an enormous key
with three wheels was really a patent and very deadly revolver. That
object which seemed to be created by the entanglement of two corkscrews
was really the key. The thing which might have been mistaken for a
tricycle turned upside-down was the inexpressibly important instrument
to which the corkscrew was the key. All these things, as I say, the
professor had invented; he had invented everything in the flying ship,
with the exception, perhaps, of himself. This he had been born too
late actually to inaugurate, but he believed at least, that he had
considerably improved it.

There was, however, another man on board, so to speak, at the time. Him,
also, by a curious coincidence, the professor had not invented, and him
he had not even very greatly improved, though he had fished him up with
a lasso out of his own back garden, in Western Bulgaria, with the pure
object of improving him. He was an exceedingly holy man, almost entirely
covered with white hair. You could see nothing but his eyes, and he
seemed to talk with them. A monk of immense learning and acute intellect
he had made himself happy in a little stone hut and a little stony
garden in the Balkans, chiefly by writing the most crushing refutations
of exposures of certain heresies, the last professors of which had been
burnt (generally by each other) precisely 1,119 years previously. They
were really very plausible and thoughtful heresies, and it was really
a creditable or even glorious circumstance, that the old monk had been
intellectual enough to detect their fallacy; the only misfortune
was that nobody in the modern world was intellectual enough even to
understand their argument. The old monk, one of whose names was Michael,
and the other a name quite impossible to remember or repeat in our
Western civilization, had, however, as I have said, made himself quite
happy while he was in a mountain hermitage in the society of wild
animals. And now that his luck had lifted him above all the mountains in
the society of a wild physicist, he made himself happy still.

“I have no intention, my good Michael,” said Professor Lucifer,
“of endeavouring to convert you by argument. The imbecility of your
traditions can be quite finally exhibited to anybody with mere ordinary
knowledge of the world, the same kind of knowledge which teaches us
not to sit in draughts or not to encourage friendliness in impecunious
people. It is folly to talk of this or that demonstrating the
rationalist philosophy. Everything demonstrates it. Rubbing shoulders
with men of all kinds----”

“You will forgive me,” said the monk, meekly from under loads of white
beard, “but I fear I do not understand; was it in order that I might rub
my shoulder against men of all kinds that you put me inside this thing?”

“An entertaining retort, in the narrow and deductive manner of the
Middle Ages,” replied the Professor, calmly, “but even upon your own
basis I will illustrate my point. We are up in the sky. In your religion
and all the religions, as far as I know (and I know everything), the sky
is made the symbol of everything that is sacred and merciful. Well, now
you are in the sky, you know better. Phrase it how you like, twist it
how you like, you know that you know better. You know what are a man's
real feelings about the heavens, when he finds himself alone in the
heavens, surrounded by the heavens. You know the truth, and the truth
is this. The heavens are evil, the sky is evil, the stars are evil. This
mere space, this mere quantity, terrifies a man more than tigers or the
terrible plague. You know that since our science has spoken, the bottom
has fallen out of the Universe. Now, heaven is the hopeless thing,
more hopeless than any hell. Now, if there be any comfort for all your
miserable progeny of morbid apes, it must be in the earth, underneath
you, under the roots of the grass, in the place where hell was of old.
The fiery crypts, the lurid cellars of the underworld, to which you once
condemned the wicked, are hideous enough, but at least they are more
homely than the heaven in which we ride. And the time will come when you
will all hide in them, to escape the horror of the stars.”

“I hope you will excuse my interrupting you,” said Michael, with a
slight cough, “but I have always noticed----”

“Go on, pray go on,” said Professor Lucifer, radiantly, “I really like
to draw out your simple ideas.”

“Well, the fact is,” said the other, “that much as I admire your
rhetoric and the rhetoric of your school, from a purely verbal point
of view, such little study of you and your school in human history as I
have been enabled to make has led me to--er--rather singular conclusion,
which I find great difficulty in expressing, especially in a foreign
language.”

“Come, come,” said the Professor, encouragingly, “I'll help you out. How
did my view strike you?”

“Well, the truth is, I know I don't express it properly, but somehow
it seemed to me that you always convey ideas of that kind with most
eloquence, when--er--when----”

“Oh! get on,” cried Lucifer, boisterously.

“Well, in point of fact when your flying ship is just going to run
into something. I thought you wouldn't mind my mentioning it, but it's
running into something now.”

Lucifer exploded with an oath and leapt erect, leaning hard upon the
handle that acted as a helm to the vessel. For the last ten minutes they
had been shooting downwards into great cracks and caverns of cloud. Now,
through a sort of purple haze, could be seen comparatively near to them
what seemed to be the upper part of a huge, dark orb or sphere, islanded
in a sea of cloud. The Professor's eyes were blazing like a maniac's.

“It is a new world,” he cried, with a dreadful mirth. “It is a new
planet and it shall bear my name. This star and not that other vulgar
one shall be 'Lucifer, sun of the morning.' Here we will have no
chartered lunacies, here we will have no gods. Here man shall be
as innocent as the daisies, as innocent and as cruel--here the
intellect----”

“There seems,” said Michael, timidly, “to be something sticking up in
the middle of it.”

“So there is,” said the Professor, leaning over the side of the ship,
his spectacles shining with intellectual excitement. “What can it be? It
might of course be merely a----”

Then a shriek indescribable broke out of him of a sudden, and he flung
up his arms like a lost spirit. The monk took the helm in a tired way;
he did not seem much astonished for he came from an ignorant part of the
world in which it is not uncommon for lost spirits to shriek when they
see the curious shape which the Professor had just seen on the top of
the mysterious ball, but he took the helm only just in time, and by
driving it hard to the left he prevented the flying ship from smashing
into St. Paul's Cathedral.

A plain of sad-coloured cloud lay along the level of the top of the
Cathedral dome, so that the ball and the cross looked like a buoy riding
on a leaden sea. As the flying ship swept towards it, this plain of
cloud looked as dry and definite and rocky as any grey desert. Hence it
gave to the mind and body a sharp and unearthly sensation when the ship
cut and sank into the cloud as into any common mist, a thing without
resistance. There was, as it were, a deadly shock in the fact that there
was no shock. It was as if they had cloven into ancient cliffs like so
much butter. But sensations awaited them which were much stranger than
those of sinking through the solid earth. For a moment their eyes and
nostrils were stopped with darkness and opaque cloud; then the darkness
warmed into a kind of brown fog. And far, far below them the brown fog
fell until it warmed into fire. Through the dense London atmosphere they
could see below them the flaming London lights; lights which lay beneath
them in squares and oblongs of fire. The fog and fire were mixed in a
passionate vapour; you might say that the fog was drowning the flames;
or you might say that the flames had set the fog on fire. Beside the
ship and beneath it (for it swung just under the ball), the immeasurable
dome itself shot out and down into the dark like a combination of
voiceless cataracts. Or it was like some cyclopean sea-beast sitting
above London and letting down its tentacles bewilderingly on every side,
a monstrosity in that starless heaven. For the clouds that belonged to
London had closed over the heads of the voyagers sealing up the entrance
of the upper air. They had broken through a roof and come into a temple
of twilight.

They were so near to the ball that Lucifer leaned his hand against it,
holding the vessel away, as men push a boat off from a bank. Above it
the cross already draped in the dark mists of the borderland was shadowy
and more awful in shape and size.

Professor Lucifer slapped his hand twice upon the surface of the great
orb as if he were caressing some enormous animal. “This is the fellow,”
 he said, “this is the one for my money.”

“May I with all respect inquire,” asked the old monk, “what on earth you
are talking about?”

“Why this,” cried Lucifer, smiting the ball again, “here is the only
symbol, my boy. So fat. So satisfied. Not like that scraggy individual,
stretching his arms in stark weariness.” And he pointed up to the cross,
his face dark with a grin. “I was telling you just now, Michael, that I
can prove the best part of the rationalist case and the Christian humbug
from any symbol you liked to give me, from any instance I came across.
Here is an instance with a vengeance. What could possibly express your
philosophy and my philosophy better than the shape of that cross and
the shape of this ball? This globe is reasonable; that cross is
unreasonable. It is a four-legged animal, with one leg longer than the
others. The globe is inevitable. The cross is arbitrary. Above all the
globe is at unity with itself; the cross is primarily and above all
things at enmity with itself. The cross is the conflict of two hostile
lines, of irreconcilable direction. That silent thing up there is
essentially a collision, a crash, a struggle in stone. Pah! that
sacred symbol of yours has actually given its name to a description of
desperation and muddle. When we speak of men at once ignorant of each
other and frustrated by each other, we say they are at cross-purposes.
Away with the thing! The very shape of it is a contradiction in terms.”

“What you say is perfectly true,” said Michael, with serenity. “But we
like contradictions in terms. Man is a contradiction in terms; he is a
beast whose superiority to other beasts consists in having fallen. That
cross is, as you say, an eternal collision; so am I. That is a struggle
in stone. Every form of life is a struggle in flesh. The shape of
the cross is irrational, just as the shape of the human animal is
irrational. You say the cross is a quadruped with one limb longer than
the rest. I say man is a quadruped who only uses two of his legs.”

The Professor frowned thoughtfully for an instant, and said: “Of
course everything is relative, and I would not deny that the element
of struggle and self-contradiction, represented by that cross, has a
necessary place at a certain evolutionary stage. But surely the cross
is the lower development and the sphere the higher. After all it is
easy enough to see what is really wrong with Wren's architectural
arrangement.”

“And what is that, pray?” inquired Michael, meekly.

“The cross is on top of the ball,” said Professor Lucifer, simply. “That
is surely wrong. The ball should be on top of the cross. The cross is a
mere barbaric prop; the ball is perfection. The cross at its best is but
the bitter tree of man's history; the ball is the rounded, the ripe and
final fruit. And the fruit should be at the top of the tree, not at the
bottom of it.”

“Oh!” said the monk, a wrinkle coming into his forehead, “so you think
that in a rationalistic scheme of symbolism the ball should be on top of
the cross?”

“It sums up my whole allegory,” said the professor.

“Well, that is really very interesting,” resumed Michael slowly,
“because I think in that case you would see a most singular effect, an
effect that has generally been achieved by all those able and powerful
systems which rationalism, or the religion of the ball, has produced to
lead or teach mankind. You would see, I think, that thing happen which
is always the ultimate embodiment and logical outcome of your logical
scheme.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Lucifer. “What would happen?”

“I mean it would fall down,” said the monk, looking wistfully into the
void.

Lucifer made an angry movement and opened his mouth to speak, but
Michael, with all his air of deliberation, was proceeding before he
could bring out a word.

“I once knew a man like you, Lucifer,” he said, with a maddening
monotony and slowness of articulation. “He took this----”

“There is no man like me,” cried Lucifer, with a violence that shook the
ship.

“As I was observing,” continued Michael, “this man also took the
view that the symbol of Christianity was a symbol of savagery and all
unreason. His history is rather amusing. It is also a perfect allegory
of what happens to rationalists like yourself. He began, of course, by
refusing to allow a crucifix in his house, or round his wife's neck,
or even in a picture. He said, as you say, that it was an arbitrary
and fantastic shape, that it was a monstrosity, loved because it was
paradoxical. Then he began to grow fiercer and more eccentric; he would
batter the crosses by the roadside; for he lived in a Roman Catholic
country. Finally in a height of frenzy he climbed the steeple of
the Parish Church and tore down the cross, waving it in the air, and
uttering wild soliloquies up there under the stars. Then one still
summer evening as he was wending his way homewards, along a lane, the
devil of his madness came upon him with a violence and transfiguration
which changes the world. He was standing smoking, for a moment, in the
front of an interminable line of palings, when his eyes were opened. Not
a light shifted, not a leaf stirred, but he saw as if by a sudden change
in the eyesight that this paling was an army of innumerable crosses
linked together over hill and dale. And he whirled up his heavy stick
and went at it as if at an army. Mile after mile along his homeward path
he broke it down and tore it up. For he hated the cross and every paling
is a wall of crosses. When he returned to his house he was a literal
madman. He sat upon a chair and then started up from it for the
cross-bars of the carpentry repeated the intolerable image. He flung
himself upon a bed only to remember that this, too, like all workmanlike
things, was constructed on the accursed plan. He broke his furniture
because it was made of crosses. He burnt his house because it was made
of crosses. He was found in the river.”

Lucifer was looking at him with a bitten lip.

“Is that story really true?” he asked.

“Oh, no,” said Michael, airily. “It is a parable. It is a parable of you
and all your rationalists. You begin by breaking up the Cross; but you
end by breaking up the habitable world. We leave you saying that nobody
ought to join the Church against his will. When we meet you again you
are saying that no one has any will to join it with. We leave you saying
that there is no such place as Eden. We find you saying that there is no
such place as Ireland. You start by hating the irrational and you come
to hate everything, for everything is irrational and so----”

Lucifer leapt upon him with a cry like a wild beast's. “Ah,” he
screamed, “to every man his madness. You are mad on the cross. Let it
save you.”

And with a herculean energy he forced the monk backwards out of the
reeling car on to the upper part of the stone ball. Michael, with
as abrupt an agility, caught one of the beams of the cross and saved
himself from falling. At the same instant Lucifer drove down a lever and
the ship shot up with him in it alone.

“Ha! ha!” he yelled, “what sort of a support do you find it, old
fellow?”

“For practical purposes of support,” replied Michael grimly, “it is at
any rate a great deal better than the ball. May I ask if you are going
to leave me here?”

“Yes, yes. I mount! I mount!” cried the professor in ungovernable
excitement. “_Altiora peto_. My path is upward.”

“How often have you told me, Professor, that there is really no up or
down in space?” said the monk. “I shall mount up as much as you will.”

“Indeed,” said Lucifer, leering over the side of the flying ship. “May I
ask what you are going to do?”

The monk pointed downward at Ludgate Hill. “I am going,” he said, “to
climb up into a star.”

Those who look at the matter most superficially regard paradox as
something which belongs to jesting and light journalism. Paradox of this
kind is to be found in the saying of the dandy, in the decadent comedy,
“Life is much too important to be taken seriously.” Those who look at
the matter a little more deeply or delicately see that paradox is a
thing which especially belongs to all religions. Paradox of this kind is
to be found in such a saying as “The meek shall inherit the earth.”
 But those who see and feel the fundamental fact of the matter know that
paradox is a thing which belongs not to religion only, but to all vivid
and violent practical crises of human living. This kind of paradox may
be clearly perceived by anybody who happens to be hanging in mid-space,
clinging to one arm of the Cross of St. Paul's.

Father Michael in spite of his years, and in spite of his asceticism
(or because of it, for all I know), was a very healthy and happy old
gentleman. And as he swung on a bar above the sickening emptiness of
air, he realized, with that sort of dead detachment which belongs to the
brains of those in peril, the deathless and hopeless contradiction which
is involved in the mere idea of courage. He was a happy and healthy old
gentleman and therefore he was quite careless about it. And he felt as
every man feels in the taut moment of such terror that his chief danger
was terror itself; his only possible strength would be a coolness
amounting to carelessness, a carelessness amounting almost to a suicidal
swagger. His one wild chance of coming out safely would be in not too
desperately desiring to be safe. There might be footholds down that
awful facade, if only he could not care whether they were footholds or
no. If he were foolhardy he might escape; if he were wise he would
stop where he was till he dropped from the cross like a stone. And this
antinomy kept on repeating itself in his mind, a contradiction as large
and staring as the immense contradiction of the Cross; he remembered
having often heard the words, “Whosoever shall lose his life the same
shall save it.” He remembered with a sort of strange pity that this had
always been made to mean that whoever lost his physical life should save
his spiritual life. Now he knew the truth that is known to all fighters,
and hunters, and climbers of cliffs. He knew that even his animal life
could only be saved by a considerable readiness to lose it.

Some will think it improbable that a human soul swinging desperately
in mid-air should think about philosophical inconsistencies. But such
extreme states are dangerous things to dogmatize about. Frequently they
produce a certain useless and joyless activity of the mere intellect,
thought not only divorced from hope but even from desire. And if it is
impossible to dogmatize about such states, it is still more impossible
to describe them. To this spasm of sanity and clarity in Michael's mind
succeeded a spasm of the elemental terror; the terror of the animal
in us which regards the whole universe as its enemy; which, when it is
victorious, has no pity, and so, when it is defeated has no imaginable
hope. Of that ten minutes of terror it is not possible to speak in human
words. But then again in that damnable darkness there began to grow
a strange dawn as of grey and pale silver. And of this ultimate
resignation or certainty it is even less possible to write; it is
something stranger than hell itself; it is perhaps the last of the
secrets of God. At the highest crisis of some incurable anguish there
will suddenly fall upon the man the stillness of an insane contentment.
It is not hope, for hope is broken and romantic and concerned with the
future; this is complete and of the present. It is not faith, for
faith by its very nature is fierce, and as it were at once doubtful and
defiant; but this is simply a satisfaction. It is not knowledge, for
the intellect seems to have no particular part in it. Nor is it (as the
modern idiots would certainly say it is) a mere numbness or negative
paralysis of the powers of grief. It is not negative in the least; it
is as positive as good news. In some sense, indeed, it is good news. It
seems almost as if there were some equality among things, some balance
in all possible contingencies which we are not permitted to know lest we
should learn indifference to good and evil, but which is sometimes shown
to us for an instant as a last aid in our last agony.

Michael certainly could not have given any sort of rational account of
this vast unmeaning satisfaction which soaked through him and filled him
to the brim. He felt with a sort of half-witted lucidity that the cross
was there, and the ball was there, and the dome was there, that he was
going to climb down from them, and that he did not mind in the least
whether he was killed or not. This mysterious mood lasted long enough to
start him on his dreadful descent and to force him to continue it. But
six times before he reached the highest of the outer galleries terror
had returned on him like a flying storm of darkness and thunder. By
the time he had reached that place of safety he almost felt (as in some
impossible fit of drunkenness) that he had two heads; one was calm,
careless, and efficient; the other saw the danger like a deadly map,
was wise, careful, and useless. He had fancied that he would have to let
himself vertically down the face of the whole building. When he dropped
into the upper gallery he still felt as far from the terrestrial globe
as if he had only dropped from the sun to the moon. He paused a little,
panting in the gallery under the ball, and idly kicked his heels, moving
a few yards along it. And as he did so a thunderbolt struck his soul.
A man, a heavy, ordinary man, with a composed indifferent face, and a
prosaic sort of uniform, with a row of buttons, blocked his way. Michael
had no mind to wonder whether this solid astonished man, with the brown
moustache and the nickel buttons, had also come on a flying ship. He
merely let his mind float in an endless felicity about the man. He
thought how nice it would be if he had to live up in that gallery with
that one man for ever. He thought how he would luxuriate in the nameless
shades of this man's soul and then hear with an endless excitement about
the nameless shades of the souls of all his aunts and uncles. A moment
before he had been dying alone. Now he was living in the same world with
a man; an inexhaustible ecstasy. In the gallery below the ball Father
Michael had found that man who is the noblest and most divine and most
lovable of all men, better than all the saints, greater than all the
heroes--man Friday.

In the confused colour and music of his new paradise, Michael heard only
in a faint and distant fashion some remarks that this beautiful solid
man seemed to be making to him; remarks about something or other being
after hours and against orders. He also seemed to be asking how Michael
“got up” there. This beautiful man evidently felt as Michael did that
the earth was a star and was set in heaven.

At length Michael sated himself with the mere sensual music of the voice
of the man in buttons. He began to listen to what he said, and even to
make some attempt at answering a question which appeared to have been
put several times and was now put with some excess of emphasis. Michael
realized that the image of God in nickel buttons was asking him how
he had come there. He said that he had come in Lucifer's ship. On
his giving this answer the demeanour of the image of God underwent a
remarkable change. From addressing Michael gruffly, as if he were a
malefactor, he began suddenly to speak to him with a sort of eager
and feverish amiability as if he were a child. He seemed particularly
anxious to coax him away from the balustrade. He led him by the arm
towards a door leading into the building itself, soothing him all the
time. He gave what even Michael (slight as was his knowledge of the
world) felt to be an improbable account of the sumptuous pleasures
and varied advantages awaiting him downstairs. Michael followed him,
however, if only out of politeness, down an apparently interminable
spiral of staircase. At one point a door opened. Michael stepped through
it, and the unaccountable man in buttons leapt after him and pinioned
him where he stood. But he only wished to stand; to stand and stare.
He had stepped as it were into another infinity, out under the dome of
another heaven. But this was a dome of heaven made by man. The gold and
green and crimson of its sunset were not in the shapeless clouds but in
shapes of cherubim and seraphim, awful human shapes with a passionate
plumage. Its stars were not above but far below, like fallen stars still
in unbroken constellations; the dome itself was full of darkness.
And far below, lower even than the lights, could be seen creeping or
motionless, great black masses of men. The tongue of a terrible organ
seemed to shake the very air in the whole void; and through it there
came up to Michael the sound of a tongue more terrible; the dreadful
everlasting voice of man, calling to his gods from the beginning to the
end of the world. Michael felt almost as if he were a god, and all the
voices were hurled at him.

“No, the pretty things aren't here,” said the demi-god in buttons,
caressingly. “The pretty things are downstairs. You come along with me.
There's something that will surprise you downstairs; something you want
very much to see.”

Evidently the man in buttons did not feel like a god, so Michael made no
attempt to explain his feelings to him, but followed him meekly enough
down the trail of the serpentine staircase. He had no notion where or at
what level he was. He was still full of the cold splendour of space,
and of what a French writer has brilliantly named the “vertigo of the
infinite,” when another door opened, and with a shock indescribable he
found himself on the familiar level, in a street full of faces, with the
houses and even the lamp-posts above his head. He felt suddenly happy
and suddenly indescribably small. He fancied he had been changed into a
child again; his eyes sought the pavement seriously as children's do, as
if it were a thing with which something satisfactory could be done.
He felt the full warmth of that pleasure from which the proud shut
themselves out; the pleasure which not only goes with humiliation, but
which almost is humiliation. Men who have escaped death by a hair have
it, and men whose love is returned by a woman unexpectedly, and men
whose sins are forgiven them. Everything his eye fell on it feasted on,
not aesthetically, but with a plain, jolly appetite as of a boy eating
buns. He relished the squareness of the houses; he liked their clean
angles as if he had just cut them with a knife. The lit squares of the
shop windows excited him as the young are excited by the lit stage of
some promising pantomime. He happened to see in one shop which projected
with a bulging bravery on to the pavement some square tins of potted
meat, and it seemed like a hint of a hundred hilarious high teas in a
hundred streets of the world. He was, perhaps, the happiest of all the
children of men. For in that unendurable instant when he hung, half
slipping, to the ball of St. Paul's, the whole universe had been
destroyed and re-created.

Suddenly through all the din of the dark streets came a crash of glass.
With that mysterious suddenness of the Cockney mob, a rush was made
in the right direction, a dingy office, next to the shop of the potted
meat. The pane of glass was lying in splinters about the pavement. And
the police already had their hands on a very tall young man, with dark,
lank hair and dark, dazed eyes, with a grey plaid over his shoulder, who
had just smashed the shop window with a single blow of his stick.

“I'd do it again,” said the young man, with a furious white face.
“Anybody would have done it. Did you see what it said? I swear I'd do it
again.” Then his eyes encountered the monkish habit of Michael, and he
pulled off his grey tam-o'-shanter with the gesture of a Catholic.

“Father, did you see what they said?” he cried, trembling. “Did you see
what they dared to say? I didn't understand it at first. I read it half
through before I broke the window.”

Michael felt he knew not how. The whole peace of the world was pent up
painfully in his heart. The new and childlike world which he had seen
so suddenly, men had not seen at all. Here they were still at their old
bewildering, pardonable, useless quarrels, with so much to be said on
both sides, and so little that need be said at all. A fierce inspiration
fell on him suddenly; he would strike them where they stood with the
love of God. They should not move till they saw their own sweet and
startling existence. They should not go from that place till they went
home embracing like brothers and shouting like men delivered. From the
Cross from which he had fallen fell the shadow of its fantastic mercy;
and the first three words he spoke in a voice like a silver trumpet,
held men as still as stones. Perhaps if he had spoken there for an hour
in his illumination he might have founded a religion on Ludgate Hill.
But the heavy hand of his guide fell suddenly on his shoulder.

“This poor fellow is dotty,” he said good-humouredly to the crowd. “I
found him wandering in the Cathedral. Says he came in a flying ship. Is
there a constable to spare to take care of him?”

There was a constable to spare. Two other constables attended to the
tall young man in grey; a fourth concerned himself with the owner of the
shop, who showed some tendency to be turbulent. They took the tall young
man away to a magistrate, whither we shall follow him in an ensuing
chapter. And they took the happiest man in the world away to an asylum.




II. THE RELIGION OF THE STIPENDIARY MAGISTRATE

The editorial office of _The Atheist_ had for some years past become
less and less prominently interesting as a feature of Ludgate Hill. The
paper was unsuited to the atmosphere. It showed an interest in the Bible
unknown in the district, and a knowledge of that volume to which nobody
else on Ludgate Hill could make any conspicuous claim. It was in vain
that the editor of _The Atheist_ filled his front window with fierce
and final demands as to what Noah in the Ark did with the neck of the
giraffe. It was in vain that he asked violently, as for the last time,
how the statement “God is Spirit” could be reconciled with the statement
“The earth is His footstool.” It was in vain that he cried with an
accusing energy that the Bishop of London was paid L12,000 a year for
pretending to believe that the whale swallowed Jonah. It was in vain
that he hung in conspicuous places the most thrilling scientific
calculations about the width of the throat of a whale. Was it nothing
to them all they that passed by? Did his sudden and splendid and truly
sincere indignation never stir any of the people pouring down Ludgate
Hill? Never. The little man who edited _The Atheist_ would rush from his
shop on starlit evenings and shake his fist at St. Paul's in the passion
of his holy war upon the holy place. He might have spared his emotion.
The cross at the top of St. Paul's and _The Atheist_ shop at the foot of
it were alike remote from the world. The shop and the Cross were equally
uplifted and alone in the empty heavens.

To the little man who edited _The Atheist_, a fiery little Scotchman,
with fiery, red hair and beard, going by the name of Turnbull, all this
decline in public importance seemed not so much sad or even mad, but
merely bewildering and unaccountable. He had said the worst thing that
could be said; and it seemed accepted and ignored like the ordinary
second best of the politicians. Every day his blasphemies looked more
glaring, and every day the dust lay thicker upon them. It made him feel
as if he were moving in a world of idiots. He seemed among a race of men
who smiled when told of their own death, or looked vacantly at the Day
of Judgement. Year after year went by, and year after year the death of
God in a shop in Ludgate became a less and less important occurrence.
All the forward men of his age discouraged Turnbull. The socialists
said he was cursing priests when he should be cursing capitalists.
The artists said that the soul was most spiritual, not when freed from
religion, but when freed from morality. Year after year went by, and at
least a man came by who treated Mr. Turnbull's secularist shop with a
real respect and seriousness. He was a young man in a grey plaid, and he
smashed the window.

He was a young man, born in the Bay of Arisaig, opposite Rum and the
Isle of Skye. His high, hawklike features and snaky black hair bore the
mark of that unknown historic thing which is crudely called Celtic, but
which is probably far older than the Celts, whoever they were. He was in
name and stock a Highlander of the Macdonalds; but his family took, as
was common in such cases, the name of a subordinate sept as a surname,
and for all the purposes which could be answered in London, he called
himself Evan MacIan. He had been brought up in some loneliness and
seclusion as a strict Roman Catholic, in the midst of that little wedge
of Roman Catholics which is driven into the Western Highlands. And he
had found his way as far as Fleet Street, seeking some half-promised
employment, without having properly realized that there were in the
world any people who were not Roman Catholics. He had uncovered himself
for a few moments before the statue of Queen Anne, in front of St.
Paul's Cathedral, under the firm impression that it was a figure of the
Virgin Mary. He was somewhat surprised at the lack of deference shown to
the figure by the people bustling by. He did not understand that their
one essential historical principle, the one law truly graven on their
hearts, was the great and comforting statement that Queen Anne is dead.
This faith was as fundamental as his faith, that Our Lady was alive. Any
persons he had talked to since he had touched the fringe of our fashion
or civilization had been by a coincidence, sympathetic or hypocritical.
Or if they had spoken some established blasphemies, he had been unable
to understand them merely owing to the preoccupied satisfaction of his
mind.

On that fantastic fringe of the Gaelic land where he walked as a boy,
the cliffs were as fantastic as the clouds. Heaven seemed to humble
itself and come closer to the earth. The common paths of his little
village began to climb quite suddenly and seemed resolved to go to
heaven. The sky seemed to fall down towards the hills; the hills took
hold upon the sky. In the sumptuous sunset of gold and purple and
peacock green cloudlets and islets were the same. Evan lived like a man
walking on a borderland, the borderland between this world and another.
Like so many men and nations who grow up with nature and the common
things, he understood the supernatural before he understood the natural.
He had looked at dim angels standing knee-deep in the grass before he
had looked at the grass. He knew that Our Lady's robes were blue before
he knew the wild roses round her feet were red. The deeper his memory
plunged into the dark house of childhood the nearer and nearer he came
to the things that cannot be named. All through his life he thought of
the daylight world as a sort of divine debris, the broken remainder
of his first vision. The skies and mountains were the splendid
off-scourings of another place. The stars were lost jewels of the Queen.
Our Lady had gone and left the stars by accident.

His private tradition was equally wild and unworldly. His
great-grandfather had been cut down at Culloden, certain in his last
instant that God would restore the King. His grandfather, then a boy of
ten, had taken the terrible claymore from the hand of the dead and hung
it up in his house, burnishing it and sharpening it for sixty years, to
be ready for the next rebellion. His father, the youngest son and the
last left alive, had refused to attend on Queen Victoria in Scotland.
And Evan himself had been of one piece with his progenitors; and was not
dead with them, but alive in the twentieth century. He was not in the
least the pathetic Jacobite of whom we read, left behind by a final
advance of all things. He was, in his own fancy, a conspirator, fierce
and up to date. In the long, dark afternoons of the Highland winter, he
plotted and fumed in the dark. He drew plans of the capture of London on
the desolate sand of Arisaig.

When he came up to capture London, it was not with an army of white
cockades, but with a stick and a satchel. London overawed him a little,
not because he thought it grand or even terrible, but because it
bewildered him; it was not the Golden City or even hell; it was Limbo.
He had one shock of sentiment, when he turned that wonderful corner of
Fleet Street and saw St. Paul's sitting in the sky.

“Ah,” he said, after a long pause, “that sort of thing was built under
the Stuarts!” Then with a sour grin he asked himself what was
the corresponding monument of the Brunswicks and the Protestant
Constitution. After some warning, he selected a sky-sign of some pill.

Half an hour afterwards his emotions left him with an emptied mind on
the same spot. And it was in a mood of mere idle investigation that he
happened to come to a standstill opposite the office of _The Atheist_.
He did not see the word “atheist”, or if he did, it is quite possible
that he did not know the meaning of the word. Even as it was, the
document would not have shocked even the innocent Highlander, but for
the troublesome and quite unforeseen fact that the innocent Highlander
read it stolidly to the end; a thing unknown among the most enthusiastic
subscribers to the paper, and calculated in any case to create a new
situation.

With a smart journalistic instinct characteristic of all his school, the
editor of _The Atheist_ had put first in his paper and most prominently
in his window an article called “The Mesopotamian Mythology and its
Effects on Syriac Folk Lore.” Mr. Evan MacIan began to read this quite
idly, as he would have read a public statement beginning with a young
girl dying in Brighton and ending with Bile Beans. He received the very
considerable amount of information accumulated by the author with
that tired clearness of the mind which children have on heavy summer
afternoons--that tired clearness which leads them to go on asking
questions long after they have lost interest in the subject and are
as bored as their nurse. The streets were full of people and empty of
adventures. He might as well know about the gods of Mesopotamia as not;
so he flattened his long, lean face against the dim bleak pane of the
window and read all there was to read about Mesopotamian gods. He read
how the Mesopotamians had a god named Sho (sometimes pronounced Ji), and
that he was described as being very powerful, a striking similarity to
some expressions about Jahveh, who is also described as having power.
Evan had never heard of Jahveh in his life, and imagining him to be some
other Mesopotamian idol, read on with a dull curiosity. He learnt that
the name Sho, under its third form of Psa, occurs in an early legend
which describes how the deity, after the manner of Jupiter on so many
occasions, seduced a Virgin and begat a hero. This hero, whose name is
not essential to our existence, was, it was said, the chief hero and
Saviour of the Mesopotamian ethical scheme. Then followed a paragraph
giving other examples of such heroes and Saviours being born of
some profligate intercourse between God and mortal. Then followed a
paragraph--but Evan did not understand it. He read it again and then
again. Then he did understand it. The glass fell in ringing fragments
on to the pavement, and Evan sprang over the barrier into the shop,
brandishing his stick.

“What is this?” cried little Mr. Turnbull, starting up with hair aflame.
“How dare you break my window?”

“Because it was the quickest cut to you,” cried Evan, stamping. “Stand
up and fight, you crapulous coward. You dirty lunatic, stand up, will
you? Have you any weapons here?”

“Are you mad?” asked Turnbull, glaring.

“Are you?” cried Evan. “Can you be anything else when you plaster your
own house with that God-defying filth? Stand up and fight, I say.”

A great light like dawn came into Mr. Turnbull's face. Behind his red
hair and beard he turned deadly pale with pleasure. Here, after twenty
lone years of useless toil, he had his reward. Someone was angry with
the paper. He bounded to his feet like a boy; he saw a new youth opening
before him. And as not unfrequently happens to middle-aged gentlemen
when they see a new youth opening before them, he found himself in the
presence of the police.

The policemen, after some ponderous questionings, collared both the two
enthusiasts. They were more respectful, however, to the young man who
had smashed the window, than to the miscreant who had had his window
smashed. There was an air of refined mystery about Evan MacIan, which
did not exist in the irate little shopkeeper, an air of refined mystery
which appealed to the policemen, for policemen, like most other
English types, are at once snobs and poets. MacIan might possibly be a
gentleman, they felt; the editor manifestly was not. And the editor's
fine rational republican appeals to his respect for law, and his ardour
to be tried by his fellow citizens, seemed to the police quite as much
gibberish as Evan's mysticism could have done. The police were not used
to hearing principles, even the principles of their own existence.

The police magistrate, before whom they were hurried and tried, was
a Mr. Cumberland Vane, a cheerful, middle-aged gentleman, honourably
celebrated for the lightness of his sentences and the lightness of his
conversation. He occasionally worked himself up into a sort of theoretic
rage about certain particular offenders, such as the men who took
pokers to their wives, talked in a loose, sentimental way about the
desirability of flogging them, and was hopelessly bewildered by the fact
that the wives seemed even more angry with him than with their
husbands. He was a tall, spruce man, with a twist of black moustache
and incomparable morning dress. He looked like a gentleman, and yet,
somehow, like a stage gentleman.

He had often treated serious crimes against mere order or property
with a humane flippancy. Hence, about the mere breaking of an editor's
window, he was almost uproarious.

“Come, Mr. MacIan, come,” he said, leaning back in his chair, “do you
generally enter you friends' houses by walking through the glass?”
 (Laughter.)

“He is not my friend,” said Evan, with the stolidity of a dull child.

“Not your friend, eh?” said the magistrate, sparkling. “Is he your
brother-in-law?” (Loud and prolonged laughter.)

“He is my enemy,” said Evan, simply; “he is the enemy of God.”

Mr. Vane shifted sharply in his seat, dropping the eye-glass out of his
eye in a momentary and not unmanly embarrassment.

“You mustn't talk like that here,” he said, roughly, and in a kind of
hurry, “that has nothing to do with us.”

Evan opened his great, blue eyes; “God,” he began.

“Be quiet,” said the magistrate, angrily, “it is most undesirable that
things of that sort should be spoken about--a--in public, and in an
ordinary Court of Justice. Religion is--a--too personal a matter to be
mentioned in such a place.”

“Is it?” answered the Highlander, “then what did those policemen swear
by just now?”

“That is no parallel,” answered Vane, rather irritably; “of course there
is a form of oath--to be taken reverently--reverently, and there's an
end of it. But to talk in a public place about one's most sacred and
private sentiments--well, I call it bad taste. (Slight applause.) I
call it irreverent. I call it irreverent, and I'm not specially orthodox
either.”

“I see you are not,” said Evan, “but I am.”

“We are wondering from the point,” said the police magistrate, pulling
himself together.

“May I ask why you smashed this worthy citizen's window?”

Evan turned a little pale at the mere memory, but he answered with the
same cold and deadly literalism that he showed throughout.

“Because he blasphemed Our Lady.”

“I tell you once and for all,” cried Mr. Cumberland Vane, rapping his
knuckles angrily on the table, “I tell you, once and for all, my man,
that I will not have you turning on any religious rant or cant here.
Don't imagine that it will impress me. The most religious people are
not those who talk about it. (Applause.) You answer the questions and do
nothing else.”

“I did nothing else,” said Evan, with a slight smile.

“Eh,” cried Vane, glaring through his eye-glass.

“You asked me why I broke his window,” said MacIan, with a face of wood.
“I answered, 'Because he blasphemed Our Lady.' I had no other reason. So
I have no other answer.” Vane continued to gaze at him with a sternness
not habitual to him.

“You are not going the right way to work, Sir,” he said, with severity.
“You are not going the right way to work to--a--have your case treated
with special consideration. If you had simply expressed regret for what
you had done, I should have been strongly inclined to dismiss the matter
as an outbreak of temper. Even now, if you say that you are sorry I
shall only----”

“But I am not in the least sorry,” said Evan, “I am very pleased.”

“I really believe you are insane,” said the stipendiary, indignantly,
for he had really been doing his best as a good-natured man, to compose
the dispute. “What conceivable right have you to break other people's
windows because their opinions do not agree with yours? This man only
gave expression to his sincere belief.”

“So did I,” said the Highlander.

“And who are you?” exploded Vane. “Are your views necessarily the right
ones? Are you necessarily in possession of the truth?”

“Yes,” said MacIan.

The magistrate broke into a contemptuous laugh.

“Oh, you want a nurse to look after you,” he said. “You must pay L10.”

Evan MacIan plunged his hands into his loose grey garment and drew out a
queer looking leather purse. It contained exactly twelve sovereigns.
He paid down the ten, coin by coin, in silence, and equally silently
returned the remaining two to the receptacle. Then he said, “May I say a
word, your worship?”

Cumberland Vane seemed half hypnotized with the silence and automatic
movements of the stranger; he made a movement with his head which might
have been either “yes” or “no”. “I only wished to say, your worship,”
 said MacIan, putting back the purse in his trouser pocket, “that
smashing that shop window was, I confess, a useless and rather irregular
business. It may be excused, however, as a mere preliminary to further
proceedings, a sort of preface. Wherever and whenever I meet that man,”
 and he pointed to the editor of _The Atheist_, “whether it be outside
this door in ten minutes from now, or twenty years hence in some distant
country, wherever and whenever I meet that man, I will fight him. Do not
be afraid. I will not rush at him like a bully, or bear him down with
any brute superiority. I will fight him like a gentleman; I will fight
him as our fathers fought. He shall choose how, sword or pistol, horse
or foot. But if he refuses, I will write his cowardice on every wall
in the world. If he had said of my mother what he said of the Mother of
God, there is not a club of clean men in Europe that would deny my
right to call him out. If he had said it of my wife, you English would
yourselves have pardoned me for beating him like a dog in the market
place. Your worship, I have no mother; I have no wife. I have only that
which the poor have equally with the rich; which the lonely have equally
with the man of many friends. To me this whole strange world is homely,
because in the heart of it there is a home; to me this cruel world is
kindly, because higher than the heavens there is something more human
than humanity. If a man must not fight for this, may he fight for
anything? I would fight for my friend, but if I lost my friend, I should
still be there. I would fight for my country, but if I lost my country,
I should still exist. But if what that devil dreams were true, I should
not be--I should burst like a bubble and be gone. I could not live in
that imbecile universe. Shall I not fight for my own existence?”

The magistrate recovered his voice and his presence of mind. The first
part of the speech, the bombastic and brutally practical challenge,
stunned him with surprise; but the rest of Evan's remarks, branching off
as they did into theoretic phrases, gave his vague and very English
mind (full of memories of the hedging and compromise in English public
speaking) an indistinct sensation of relief, as if the man, though mad,
were not so dangerous as he had thought. He went into a sort of weary
laughter.

“For Heaven's sake, man,” he said, “don't talk so much. Let other people
have a chance (laughter). I trust all that you said about asking Mr.
Turnbull to fight, may be regarded as rubbish. In case of accidents,
however, I must bind you over to keep the peace.”

“To keep the peace,” repeated Evan, “with whom?”

“With Mr. Turnbull,” said Vane.

“Certainly not,” answered MacIan. “What has he to do with peace?”

“Do you mean to say,” began the magistrate, “that you refuse to...” The
voice of Turnbull himself clove in for the first time.

“Might I suggest,” he said, “That I, your worship, can settle to some
extent this absurd matter myself. This rather wild gentleman promises
that he will not attack me with any ordinary assault--and if he does,
you may be sure the police shall hear of it. But he says he will not. He
says he will challenge me to a duel; and I cannot say anything stronger
about his mental state than to say that I think that it is highly
probable that he will. (Laughter.) But it takes two to make a duel, your
worship (renewed laughter). I do not in the least mind being described
on every wall in the world as the coward who would not fight a man
in Fleet Street, about whether the Virgin Mary had a parallel in
Mesopotamian mythology. No, your worship. You need not trouble to bind
him over to keep the peace. I bind myself over to keep the peace, and
you may rest quite satisfied that there will be no duel with me in it.”

Mr. Cumberland Vane rolled about, laughing in a sort of relief.

“You're like a breath of April, sir,” he cried. “You're ozone after
that fellow. You're perfectly right. Perhaps I have taken the thing too
seriously. I should love to see him sending you challenges and to see
you smiling. Well, well.”

Evan went out of the Court of Justice free, but strangely shaken, like
a sick man. Any punishment of suppression he would have felt as natural;
but the sudden juncture between the laughter of his judge and the
laughter of the man he had wronged, made him feel suddenly small, or at
least, defeated. It was really true that the whole modern world regarded
his world as a bubble. No cruelty could have shown it, but their
kindness showed it with a ghastly clearness. As he was brooding, he
suddenly became conscious of a small, stern figure, fronting him
in silence. Its eyes were grey and awful, and its beard red. It was
Turnbull.

“Well, sir,” said the editor of _The Atheist_, “where is the fight to
be? Name the field, sir.”

Evan stood thunderstruck. He stammered out something, he knew not what;
he only guessed it by the answer of the other.

“Do I want to fight? Do I want to fight?” cried the furious
Free-thinker. “Why, you moonstruck scarecrow of superstition, do you
think your dirty saints are the only people who can die? Haven't you
hung atheists, and burned them, and boiled them, and did they ever deny
their faith? Do you think we don't want to fight? Night and day I have
prayed--I have longed--for an atheist revolution--I have longed to see
your blood and ours on the streets. Let it be yours or mine?”

“But you said...” began MacIan.

“I know,” said Turnbull scornfully. “And what did you say? You damned
fool, you said things that might have got us locked up for a year, and
shadowed by the coppers for half a decade. If you wanted to fight, why
did you tell that ass you wanted to? I got you out, to fight if you want
to. Now, fight if you dare.”

“I swear to you, then,” said MacIan, after a pause. “I swear to you that
nothing shall come between us. I swear to you that nothing shall be in
my heart or in my head till our swords clash together. I swear it by the
God you have denied, by the Blessed Lady you have blasphemed; I swear it
by the seven swords in her heart. I swear it by the Holy Island where my
fathers are, by the honour of my mother, by the secret of my people, and
by the chalice of the Blood of God.”

The atheist drew up his head. “And I,” he said, “give my word.”




III. SOME OLD CURIOSITIES

The evening sky, a dome of solid gold, unflaked even by a single sunset
cloud, steeped the meanest sights of London in a strange and mellow
light. It made a little greasy street of St. Martin's Lane look as if it
were paved with gold. It made the pawnbroker's half-way down it shine as
if it were really that Mountain of Piety that the French poetic instinct
has named it; it made the mean pseudo-French bookshop, next but one to
it, a shop packed with dreary indecency, show for a moment a kind of
Parisian colour. And the shop that stood between the pawnshop and the
shop of dreary indecency, showed with quite a blaze of old world beauty,
for it was, by accident, a shop not unbeautiful in itself. The front
window had a glimmer of bronze and blue steel, lit, as by a few stars,
by the sparks of what were alleged to be jewels; for it was in brief,
a shop of bric-a-brac and old curiosities. A row of half-burnished
seventeenth-century swords ran like an ornate railing along the front of
the window; behind was a darker glimmer of old oak and old armour;
and higher up hung the most extraordinary looking South Sea tools or
utensils, whether designed for killing enemies or merely for cooking
them, no mere white man could possibly conjecture. But the romance of
the eye, which really on this rich evening, clung about the shop, had
its main source in the accident of two doors standing open, the front
door that opened on the street and a back door that opened on an odd
green square of garden, that the sun turned to a square of gold. There
is nothing more beautiful than thus to look as it were through the
archway of a house; as if the open sky were an interior chamber, and the
sun a secret lamp of the place.

I have suggested that the sunset light made everything lovely. To say
that it made the keeper of the curiosity shop lovely would be a tribute
to it perhaps too extreme. It would easily have made him beautiful if he
had been merely squalid; if he had been a Jew of the Fagin type. But
he was a Jew of another and much less admirable type; a Jew with a very
well-sounding name. For though there are no hard tests for separating
the tares and the wheat of any people, one rude but efficient guide is
that the nice Jew is called Moses Solomon, and the nasty Jew is called
Thornton Percy. The keeper of the curiosity shop was of the Thornton
Percy branch of the chosen people; he belonged to those Lost Ten Tribes
whose industrious object is to lose themselves. He was a man still
young, but already corpulent, with sleek dark hair, heavy handsome
clothes, and a full, fat, permanent smile, which looked at the first
glance kindly, and at the second cowardly. The name over his shop was
Henry Gordon, but two Scotchmen who were in his shop that evening could
come upon no trace of a Scotch accent.

These two Scotchmen in this shop were careful purchasers, but
free-handed payers. One of them who seemed to be the principal and the
authority (whom, indeed, Mr. Henry Gordon fancied he had seen somewhere
before), was a small, sturdy fellow, with fine grey eyes, a square red
tie and a square red beard, that he carried aggressively forward as if
he defied anyone to pull it. The other kept so much in the background in
comparison that he looked almost ghostly in his grey cloak or plaid, a
tall, sallow, silent young man.

The two Scotchmen were interested in seventeenth-century swords. They
were fastidious about them. They had a whole armoury of these weapons
brought out and rolled clattering about the counter, until they found
two of precisely the same length. Presumably they desired the exact
symmetry for some decorative trophy. Even then they felt the points,
poised the swords for balance and bent them in a circle to see that they
sprang straight again; which, for decorative purposes, seems carrying
realism rather far.

“These will do,” said the strange person with the red beard. “And
perhaps I had better pay for them at once. And as you are the
challenger, Mr. MacIan, perhaps you had better explain the situation.”

The tall Scotchman in grey took a step forward and spoke in a voice
quite clear and bold, and yet somehow lifeless, like a man going through
an ancient formality.

“The fact is, Mr. Gordon, we have to place our honour in your hands.
Words have passed between Mr. Turnbull and myself on a grave
and invaluable matter, which can only be atoned for by fighting.
Unfortunately, as the police are in some sense pursuing us, we are
hurried, and must fight now and without seconds. But if you will be so
kind as to take us into your little garden and see far play, we shall
feel how----”

The shopman recovered himself from a stunning surprise and burst out:

“Gentlemen, are you drunk? A duel! A duel in my garden. Go home,
gentlemen, go home. Why, what did you quarrel about?”

“We quarrelled,” said Evan, in the same dead voice, “about religion.”
 The fat shopkeeper rolled about in his chair with enjoyment.

“Well, this is a funny game,” he said. “So you want to commit murder
on behalf of religion. Well, well my religion is a little respect for
humanity, and----”

“Excuse me,” cut in Turnbull, suddenly and fiercely, pointing towards
the pawnbroker's next door. “Don't you own that shop?”

“Why--er--yes,” said Gordon.

“And don't you own that shop?” repeated the secularist, pointing
backward to the pornographic bookseller.

“What if I do?”

“Why, then,” cried Turnbull, with grating contempt. “I will leave
the religion of humanity confidently in your hands; but I am sorry
I troubled you about such a thing as honour. Look here, my man. I do
believe in humanity. I do believe in liberty. My father died for it
under the swords of the Yeomanry. I am going to die for it, if need be,
under that sword on your counter. But if there is one sight that makes
me doubt it it is your foul fat face. It is hard to believe you were not
meant to be ruled like a dog or killed like a cockroach. Don't try your
slave's philosophy on me. We are going to fight, and we are going to
fight in your garden, with your swords. Be still! Raise your voice above
a whisper, and I run you through the body.”

Turnbull put the bright point of the sword against the gay waistcoat of
the dealer, who stood choking with rage and fear, and an astonishment so
crushing as to be greater than either.

“MacIan,” said Turnbull, falling almost into the familiar tone of a
business partner, “MacIan, tie up this fellow and put a gag in his
mouth. Be still, I say, or I kill you where you stand.”

The man was too frightened to scream, but he struggled wildly, while
Evan MacIan, whose long, lean hands were unusually powerful, tightened
some old curtain cords round him, strapped a rope gag in his mouth and
rolled him on his back on the floor.

“There's nothing very strong here,” said Evan, looking about him. “I'm
afraid he'll work through that gag in half an hour or so.”

“Yes,” said Turnbull, “but one of us will be killed by that time.”

“Well, let's hope so,” said the Highlander, glancing doubtfully at the
squirming thing on the floor.

“And now,” said Turnbull, twirling his fiery moustache and fingering his
sword, “let us go into the garden. What an exquisite summer evening!”

MacIan said nothing, but lifting his sword from the counter went out
into the sun.

The brilliant light ran along the blades, filling the channels of them
with white fire; the combatants stuck their swords in the turf and took
off their hats, coats, waistcoats, and boots. Evan said a short Latin
prayer to himself, during which Turnbull made something of a parade of
lighting a cigarette which he flung away the instant after, when he saw
MacIan apparently standing ready. Yet MacIan was not exactly ready. He
stood staring like a man stricken with a trance.

“What are you staring at?” asked Turnbull. “Do you see the bobbies?”

“I see Jerusalem,” said Evan, “all covered with the shields and
standards of the Saracens.”

“Jerusalem!” said Turnbull, laughing. “Well, we've taken the only
inhabitant into captivity.”

And he picked up his sword and made it whistle like a boy's wand.

“I beg your pardon,” said MacIan, dryly. “Let us begin.”

MacIan made a military salute with his weapon, which Turnbull copied or
parodied with an impatient contempt; and in the stillness of the garden
the swords came together with a clear sound like a bell. The instant
the blades touched, each felt them tingle to their very points with a
personal vitality, as if they were two naked nerves of steel. Evan had
worn throughout an air of apathy, which might have been the stale apathy
of one who wants nothing. But it was indeed the more dreadful apathy
of one who wants something and will care for nothing else. And this was
seen suddenly; for the instant Evan engaged he disengaged and lunged
with an infernal violence. His opponent with a desperate promptitude
parried and riposted; the parry only just succeeded, the riposte failed.
Something big and unbearable seemed to have broken finally out of
Evan in that first murderous lunge, leaving him lighter and cooler and
quicker upon his feet. He fell to again, fiercely still, but now with a
fierce caution. The next moment Turnbull lunged; MacIan seemed to catch
the point and throw it away from him, and was thrusting back like a
thunderbolt, when a sound paralysed him; another sound beside their
ringing weapons. Turnbull, perhaps from an equal astonishment, perhaps
from chivalry, stopped also and forebore to send his sword through his
exposed enemy.

“What's that?” asked Evan, hoarsely.

A heavy scraping sound, as of a trunk being dragged along a littered
floor, came from the dark shop behind them.

“The old Jew has broken one of his strings, and he's crawling about,”
 said Turnbull. “Be quick! We must finish before he gets his gag out.”

“Yes, yes, quick! On guard!” cried the Highlander. The blades crossed
again with the same sound like song, and the men went to work again with
the same white and watchful faces. Evan, in his impatience, went back a
little to his wildness. He made windmills, as the French duellists say,
and though he was probably a shade the better fencer of the two, he
found the other's point pass his face twice so close as almost to graze
his cheek. The second time he realized the actual possibility of defeat
and pulled himself together under a shock of the sanity of anger. He
narrowed, and, so to speak, tightened his operations: he fenced (as the
swordsman's boast goes), in a wedding ring; he turned Turnbull's thrusts
with a maddening and almost mechanical click, like that of a machine.
Whenever Turnbull's sword sought to go over that other mere white streak
it seemed to be caught in a complex network of steel. He turned one
thrust, turned another, turned another. Then suddenly he went forward at
the lunge with his whole living weight. Turnbull leaped back, but
Evan lunged and lunged and lunged again like a devilish piston rod or
battering ram. And high above all the sound of the struggle there broke
into the silent evening a bellowing human voice, nasal, raucous, at the
highest pitch of pain. “Help! Help! Police! Murder! Murder!” The gag was
broken; and the tongue of terror was loose.

“Keep on!” gasped Turnbull. “One may be killed before they come.”

The voice of the screaming shopkeeper was loud enough to drown not only
the noise of the swords but all other noises around it, but even through
its rending din there seemed to be some other stir or scurry. And Evan,
in the very act of thrusting at Turnbull, saw something in his eyes that
made him drop his sword. The atheist, with his grey eyes at their
widest and wildest, was staring straight over his shoulder at the little
archway of shop that opened on the street beyond. And he saw the archway
blocked and blackened with strange figures.

“We must bolt, MacIan,” he said abruptly. “And there isn't a damned
second to lose either. Do as I do.”

With a bound he was beside the little cluster of his clothes and boots
that lay on the lawn; he snatched them up, without waiting to put any of
them on; and tucking his sword under his other arm, went wildly at
the wall at the bottom of the garden and swung himself over it. Three
seconds after he had alighted in his socks on the other side, MacIan
alighted beside him, also in his socks and also carrying clothes and
sword in a desperate bundle.

They were in a by-street, very lean and lonely itself, but so close to
a crowded thoroughfare that they could see the vague masses of vehicles
going by, and could even see an individual hansom cab passing the
corner at the instant. Turnbull put his fingers to his mouth like a
gutter-snipe and whistled twice. Even as he did so he could hear the
loud voices of the neighbours and the police coming down the garden.

The hansom swung sharply and came tearing down the little lane at his
call. When the cabman saw his fares, however, two wild-haired men
in their shirts and socks with naked swords under their arms, he
not unnaturally brought his readiness to a rigid stop and stared
suspiciously.

“You talk to him a minute,” whispered Turnbull, and stepped back into
the shadow of the wall.

“We want you,” said MacIan to the cabman, with a superb Scotch drawl of
indifference and assurance, “to drive us to St. Pancras Station--verra
quick.”

“Very sorry, sir,” said the cabman, “but I'd like to know it was all
right. Might I arst where you come from, sir?”

A second after he spoke MacIan heard a heavy voice on the other side of
the wall, saying: “I suppose I'd better get over and look for them. Give
me a back.”

“Cabby,” said MacIan, again assuming the most deliberate and lingering
lowland Scotch intonation, “if ye're really verra anxious to ken whar a'
come fra', I'll tell ye as a verra great secret. A' come from Scotland.
And a'm gaein' to St. Pancras Station. Open the doors, cabby.”

The cabman stared, but laughed. The heavy voice behind the wall said:
“Now then, a better back this time, Mr. Price.” And from the shadow
of the wall Turnbull crept out. He had struggled wildly into his coat
(leaving his waistcoat on the pavement), and he was with a fierce pale
face climbing up the cab behind the cabman. MacIan had no glimmering
notion of what he was up to, but an instinct of discipline, inherited
from a hundred men of war, made him stick to his own part and trust the
other man's.

“Open the doors, cabby,” he repeated, with something of the obstinate
solemnity of a drunkard, “open the doors. Did ye no hear me say St.
Pancras Station?”

The top of a policeman's helmet appeared above the garden wall. The
cabman did not see it, but he was still suspicious and began:

“Very sorry, sir, but...” and with that the catlike Turnbull tore him
out of his seat and hurled him into the street below, where he lay
suddenly stunned.

“Give me his hat,” said Turnbull in a silver voice, that the other
obeyed like a bugle. “And get inside with the swords.”

And just as the red and raging face of a policeman appeared above the
wall, Turnbull struck the horse with a terrible cut of the whip and the
two went whirling away like a boomerang.

They had spun through seven streets and three or four squares before
anything further happened. Then, in the neighbourhood of Maida Vale,
the driver opened the trap and talked through it in a manner not wholly
common in conversations through that aperture.

“Mr. MacIan,” he said shortly and civilly.

“Mr. Turnbull,” replied his motionless fare.

“Under circumstances such as those in which we were both recently placed
there was no time for anything but very abrupt action. I trust therefore
that you have no cause to complain of me if I have deferred until this
moment a consultation with you on our present position or future action.
Our present position, Mr. MacIan, I imagine that I am under no special
necessity of describing. We have broken the law and we are fleeing
from its officers. Our future action is a thing about which I myself
entertain sufficiently strong views; but I have no right to assume or to
anticipate yours, though I may have formed a decided conception of your
character and a decided notion of what they will probably be. Still, by
every principle of intellectual justice, I am bound to ask you now and
seriously whether you wish to continue our interrupted relations.”

MacIan leant his white and rather weary face back upon the cushions in
order to speak up through the open door.

“Mr. Turnbull,” he said, “I have nothing to add to what I have said
before. It is strongly borne in upon me that you and I, the sole
occupants of this runaway cab, are at this moment the two most important
people in London, possibly in Europe. I have been looking at all the
streets as we went past, I have been looking at all the shops as we went
past, I have been looking at all the churches as we went past. At
first, I felt a little dazed with the vastness of it all. I could not
understand what it all meant. But now I know exactly what it all means.
It means us. This whole civilization is only a dream. You and I are the
realities.”

“Religious symbolism,” said Mr. Turnbull, through the trap, “does not,
as you are probably aware, appeal ordinarily to thinkers of the school
to which I belong. But in symbolism as you use it in this instance, I
must, I think, concede a certain truth. We _must_ fight this thing
out somewhere; because, as you truly say, we have found each other's
reality. We _must_ kill each other--or convert each other. I used to
think all Christians were hypocrites, and I felt quite mildly towards
them really. But I know you are sincere--and my soul is mad against you.
In the same way you used, I suppose, to think that all atheists thought
atheism would leave them free for immorality--and yet in your heart you
tolerated them entirely. Now you _know_ that I am an honest man, and you
are mad against me, as I am against you. Yes, that's it. You can't be
angry with bad men. But a good man in the wrong--why one thirsts for his
blood. Yes, you open for me a vista of thought.”

“Don't run into anything,” said Evan, immovably.

“There's something in that view of yours, too,” said Turnbull, and shut
down the trap.

They sped on through shining streets that shot by them like arrows. Mr.
Turnbull had evidently a great deal of unused practical talent which was
unrolling itself in this ridiculous adventure. They had got away with
such stunning promptitude that the police chase had in all probability
not even properly begun. But in case it had, the amateur cabman chose
his dizzy course through London with a strange dexterity. He did not
do what would have first occurred to any ordinary outsider desiring to
destroy his tracks. He did not cut into by-ways or twist his way through
mean streets. His amateur common sense told him that it was precisely
the poor street, the side street, that would be likely to remember
and report the passing of a hansom cab, like the passing of a royal
procession. He kept chiefly to the great roads, so full of hansoms that
a wilder pair than they might easily have passed in the press. In one of
the quieter streets Evan put on his boots.

Towards the top of Albany Street the singular cabman again opened the
trap.

“Mr. MacIan,” he said, “I understand that we have now definitely settled
that in the conventional language honour is not satisfied. Our action
must at least go further than it has gone under recent interrupted
conditions. That, I believe, is understood.”

“Perfectly,” replied the other with his bootlace in his teeth.

“Under those conditions,” continued Turnbull, his voice coming through
the hole with a slight note of trepidation very unusual with him, “I
have a suggestion to make, if that can be called a suggestion, which
has probably occurred to you as readily as to me. Until the actual event
comes off we are practically in the position if not of comrades, at
least of business partners. Until the event comes off, therefore
I should suggest that quarrelling would be inconvenient and rather
inartistic; while the ordinary exchange of politeness between man and
man would be not only elegant but uncommonly practical.”

“You are perfectly right,” answered MacIan, with his melancholy voice,
“in saying that all this has occurred to me. All duellists should behave
like gentlemen to each other. But we, by the queerness of our position,
are something much more than either duellists or gentlemen. We are, in
the oddest and most exact sense of the term, brothers--in arms.”

“Mr. MacIan,” replied Turnbull, calmly, “no more need be said.” And he
closed the trap once more.

They had reached Finchley Road before he opened it again.

Then he said, “Mr. MacIan, may I offer you a cigar. It will be a touch
of realism.”

“Thank you,” answered Evan. “You are very kind.” And he began to smoke
in the cab.




IV. A DISCUSSION AT DAWN

The duellists had from their own point of view escaped or conquered the
chief powers of the modern world. They had satisfied the magistrate,
they had tied the tradesman neck and heels, and they had left the
police behind. As far as their own feelings went they had melted into a
monstrous sea; they were but the fare and driver of one of the million
hansoms that fill London streets. But they had forgotten something; they
had forgotten journalism. They had forgotten that there exists in the
modern world, perhaps for the first time in history, a class of people
whose interest is not that things should happen well or happen badly,
should happen successfully or happen unsuccessfully, should happen to
the advantage of this party or the advantage of that part, but whose
interest simply is that things should happen.

It is the one great weakness of journalism as a picture of our modern
existence, that it must be a picture made up entirely of exceptions. We
announce on flaring posters that a man has fallen off a scaffolding.
We do not announce on flaring posters that a man has not fallen off a
scaffolding. Yet this latter fact is fundamentally more exciting, as
indicating that that moving tower of terror and mystery, a man, is still
abroad upon the earth. That the man has not fallen off a scaffolding is
really more sensational; and it is also some thousand times more common.
But journalism cannot reasonably be expected thus to insist upon the
permanent miracles. Busy editors cannot be expected to put on their
posters, “Mr. Wilkinson Still Safe,” or “Mr. Jones, of Worthing, Not
Dead Yet.” They cannot announce the happiness of mankind at all. They
cannot describe all the forks that are not stolen, or all the marriages
that are not judiciously dissolved. Hence the complete picture they
give of life is of necessity fallacious; they can only represent what
is unusual. However democratic they may be, they are only concerned with
the minority.

The incident of the religious fanatic who broke a window on Ludgate Hill
was alone enough to set them up in good copy for the night. But when the
same man was brought before a magistrate and defied his enemy to
mortal combat in the open court, then the columns would hardly hold the
excruciating information, and the headlines were so large that there was
hardly room for any of the text. The _Daily Telegraph_ headed a column,
“A Duel on Divinity,” and there was a correspondence afterwards which
lasted for months, about whether police magistrates ought to mention
religion. The _Daily Mail_ in its dull, sensible way, headed the events,
“Wanted to fight for the Virgin.” Mr. James Douglas, in _The Star_,
presuming on his knowledge of philosophical and theological terms,
described the Christian's outbreak under the title of “Dualist and
Duellist.” The _Daily News_ inserted a colourless account of the matter,
but was pursued and eaten up for some weeks, with letters from outlying
ministers, headed “Murder and Mariolatry.” But the journalistic
temperature was steadily and consistently heated by all these
influences; the journalists had tasted blood, prospectively, and were
in the mood for more; everything in the matter prepared them for further
outbursts of moral indignation. And when a gasping reporter rushed in in
the last hours of the evening with the announcement that the two heroes
of the Police Court had literally been found fighting in a London back
garden, with a shopkeeper bound and gagged in the front of the house,
the editors and sub-editors were stricken still as men are by great
beatitudes.

The next morning, five or six of the great London dailies burst out
simultaneously into great blossoms of eloquent leader-writing. Towards
the end all the leaders tended to be the same, but they all began
differently. The _Daily Telegraph_, for instance began, “There will
be little difference among our readers or among all truly English and
law-abiding men touching the, etc. etc.” The _Daily Mail_ said, “People
must learn, in the modern world, to keep their theological differences
to themselves. The fracas, etc. etc.” The _Daily News_ started, “Nothing
could be more inimical to the cause of true religion than, etc. etc.”
 The _Times_ began with something about Celtic disturbances of the
equilibrium of Empire, and the _Daily Express_ distinguished itself
splendidly by omitting altogether so controversial a matter and
substituting a leader about goloshes.

And the morning after that, the editors and the newspapers were in such
a state, that, as the phrase is, there was no holding them. Whatever
secret and elvish thing it is that broods over editors and suddenly
turns their brains, that thing had seized on the story of the broken
glass and the duel in the garden. It became monstrous and omnipresent,
as do in our time the unimportant doings of the sect of the
Agapemonites, or as did at an earlier time the dreary dishonesties
of the Rhodesian financiers. Questions were asked about it, and even
answered, in the House of Commons. The Government was solemnly denounced
in the papers for not having done something, nobody knew what, to
prevent the window being broken. An enormous subscription was started
to reimburse Mr. Gordon, the man who had been gagged in the shop. Mr.
MacIan, one of the combatants, became for some mysterious reason, singly
and hugely popular as a comic figure in the comic papers and on the
stage of the music hall. He was always represented (in defiance of
fact), with red whiskers, and a very red nose, and in full Highland
costume. And a song, consisting of an unimaginable number of verses,
in which his name was rhymed with flat iron, the British Lion, sly 'un,
dandelion, Spion (With Kop in the next line), was sung to crowded houses
every night. The papers developed a devouring thirst for the capture of
the fugitives; and when they had not been caught for forty-eight hours,
they suddenly turned the whole matter into a detective mystery. Letters
under the heading, “Where are They,” poured in to every paper, with
every conceivable kind of explanation, running them to earth in the
Monument, the Twopenny Tube, Epping Forest, Westminster Abbey, rolled up
in carpets at Shoolbreds, locked up in safes in Chancery Lane. Yes, the
papers were very interesting, and Mr. Turnbull unrolled a whole bundle
of them for the amusement of Mr. MacIan as they sat on a high common to
the north of London, in the coming of the white dawn.

The darkness in the east had been broken with a bar of grey; the bar
of grey was split with a sword of silver and morning lifted itself
laboriously over London. From the spot where Turnbull and MacIan were
sitting on one of the barren steeps behind Hampstead, they could see
the whole of London shaping itself vaguely and largely in the grey and
growing light, until the white sun stood over it and it lay at their
feet, the splendid monstrosity that it is. Its bewildering squares and
parallelograms were compact and perfect as a Chinese puzzle; an enormous
hieroglyphic which man must decipher or die. There fell upon both of
them, but upon Turnbull more than the other, because he know more what
the scene signified, that quite indescribable sense as of a sublime and
passionate and heart-moving futility, which is never evoked by deserts
or dead men or men neglected and barbarous, which can only be invoked by
the sight of the enormous genius of man applied to anything other than
the best. Turnbull, the old idealistic democrat, had so often reviled
the democracy and reviled them justly for their supineness, their
snobbishness, their evil reverence for idle things. He was right enough;
for our democracy has only one great fault; it is not democratic. And
after denouncing so justly average modern men for so many years as
sophists and as slaves, he looked down from an empty slope in Hampstead
and saw what gods they are. Their achievement seemed all the more heroic
and divine, because it seemed doubtful whether it was worth doing at
all. There seemed to be something greater than mere accuracy in making
such a mistake as London. And what was to be the end of it all? what was
to be the ultimate transformation of this common and incredible London
man, this workman on a tram in Battersea, his clerk on an omnibus in
Cheapside? Turnbull, as he stared drearily, murmured to himself
the words of the old atheistic and revolutionary Swinburne who had
intoxicated his youth:

        “And still we ask if God or man
        Can loosen thee Lazarus;
        Bid thee rise up republican,
        And save thyself and all of us.
        But no disciple's tongue can say
        If thou can'st take our sins away.”

Turnbull shivered slightly as if behind the earthly morning he felt the
evening of the world, the sunset of so many hopes. Those words were from
“Songs before Sunrise”. But Turnbull's songs at their best were songs
after sunrise, and sunrise had been no such great thing after all.
Turnbull shivered again in the sharp morning air. MacIan was also gazing
with his face towards the city, but there was that about his blind and
mystical stare that told one, so to speak, that his eyes were turned
inwards. When Turnbull said something to him about London, they seemed
to move as at a summons and come out like two householders coming out
into their doorways.

“Yes,” he said, with a sort of stupidity. “It's a very big place.”

There was a somewhat unmeaning silence, and then MacIan said again:

“It's a very big place. When I first came into it I was frightened of
it. Frightened exactly as one would be frightened at the sight of a
man forty feet high. I am used to big things where I come from, big
mountains that seem to fill God's infinity, and the big sea that goes
to the end of the world. But then these things are all shapeless and
confused things, not made in any familiar form. But to see the plain,
square, human things as large as that, houses so large and streets
so large, and the town itself so large, was like having screwed some
devil's magnifying glass into one's eye. It was like seeing a porridge
bowl as big as a house, or a mouse-trap made to catch elephants.”

“Like the land of the Brobdingnagians,” said Turnbull, smiling.

“Oh! Where is that?” said MacIan.

Turnbull said bitterly, “In a book,” and the silence fell suddenly
between them again.

They were sitting in a sort of litter on the hillside; all the things
they had hurriedly collected, in various places, for their flight, were
strewn indiscriminately round them. The two swords with which they had
lately sought each other's lives were flung down on the grass at random,
like two idle walking-sticks. Some provisions they had bought last
night, at a low public house, in case of undefined contingencies, were
tossed about like the materials of an ordinary picnic, here a basket
of chocolate, and there a bottle of wine. And to add to the disorder
finally, there were strewn on top of everything, the most disorderly
of modern things, newspapers, and more newspapers, and yet again
newspapers, the ministers of the modern anarchy. Turnbull picked up one
of them drearily, and took out a pipe.

“There's a lot about us,” he said. “Do you mind if I light up?”

“Why should I mind?” asked MacIan.

Turnbull eyed with a certain studious interest, the man who did not
understand any of the verbal courtesies; he lit his pipe and blew great
clouds out of it.

“Yes,” he resumed. “The matter on which you and I are engaged is at this
moment really the best copy in England. I am a journalist, and I know.
For the first time, perhaps, for many generations, the English are
really more angry about a wrong thing done in England than they are
about a wrong thing done in France.”

“It is not a wrong thing,” said MacIan.

Turnbull laughed. “You seem unable to understand the ordinary use of the
human language. If I did not suspect that you were a genius, I should
certainly know you were a blockhead. I fancy we had better be getting
along and collecting our baggage.”

And he jumped up and began shoving the luggage into his pockets, or
strapping it on to his back. As he thrust a tin of canned meat, anyhow,
into his bursting side pocket, he said casually:

“I only meant that you and I are the most prominent people in the
English papers.”

“Well, what did you expect?” asked MacIan, opening his great grave blue
eyes.

“The papers are full of us,” said Turnbull, stooping to pick up one of
the swords.

MacIan stooped and picked up the other.

“Yes,” he said, in his simple way. “I have read what they have to say.
But they don't seem to understand the point.”

“The point of what?” asked Turnbull.

“The point of the sword,” said MacIan, violently, and planted the steel
point in the soil like a man planting a tree.

“That is a point,” said Turnbull, grimly, “that we will discuss later.
Come along.”

Turnbull tied the last tin of biscuits desperately to himself with
string; and then spoke, like a diver girt for plunging, short and sharp.

“Now, Mr. MacIan, you must listen to me. You must listen to me, not
merely because I know the country, which you might learn by looking at
a map, but because I know the people of the country, whom you could
not know by living here thirty years. That infernal city down there is
awake; and it is awake against us. All those endless rows of windows and
windows are all eyes staring at us. All those forests of chimneys are
fingers pointing at us, as we stand here on the hillside. This thing has
caught on. For the next six mortal months they will think of nothing
but us, as for six mortal months they thought of nothing but the Dreyfus
case. Oh, I know it's funny. They let starving children, who don't
want to die, drop by the score without looking round. But because two
gentlemen, from private feelings of delicacy, do want to die, they will
mobilize the army and navy to prevent them. For half a year or more, you
and I, Mr. MacIan, will be an obstacle to every reform in the British
Empire. We shall prevent the Chinese being sent out of the Transvaal and
the blocks being stopped in the Strand. We shall be the conversational
substitute when anyone recommends Home Rule, or complains of sky signs.
Therefore, do not imagine, in your innocence, that we have only to melt
away among those English hills as a Highland cateran might into your
god-forsaken Highland mountains. We must be eternally on our guard; we
must live the hunted life of two distinguished criminals. We must expect
to be recognized as much as if we were Napoleon escaping from Elba. We
must be prepared for our descriptions being sent to every tiny village,
and for our faces being recognized by every ambitious policeman. We
must often sleep under the stars as if we were in Africa. Last and most
important we must not dream of effecting our--our final settlement,
which will be a thing as famous as the Phoenix Park murders, unless we
have made real and precise arrangements for our isolation--I will not
say our safety. We must not, in short, fight until we have thrown them
off our scent, if only for a moment. For, take my word for it, Mr.
MacIan, if the British Public once catches us up, the British Public
will prevent the duel, if it is only by locking us both up in asylums
for the rest of our days.”

MacIan was looking at the horizon with a rather misty look.

“I am not at all surprised,” he said, “at the world being against us. It
makes me feel I was right to----”

“Yes?” said Turnbull.

“To smash your window,” said MacIan. “I have woken up the world.”

“Very well, then,” said Turnbull, stolidly. “Let us look at a few
final facts. Beyond that hill there is comparatively clear country.
Fortunately, I know the part well, and if you will follow me exactly,
and, when necessary, on your stomach, we may be able to get ten miles
out of London, literally without meeting anyone at all, which will be
the best possible beginning, at any rate. We have provisions for at
least two days and two nights, three days if we do it carefully. We may
be able to get fifty or sixty miles away without even walking into an
inn door. I have the biscuits and the tinned meat, and the milk. You
have the chocolate, I think? And the brandy?”

“Yes,” said MacIan, like a soldier taking orders.

“Very well, then, come on. March. We turn under that third bush and so
down into the valley.” And he set off ahead at a swinging walk.

Then he stopped suddenly; for he realized that the other was not
following. Evan MacIan was leaning on his sword with a lowering face,
like a man suddenly smitten still with doubt.

“What on earth is the matter?” asked Turnbull, staring in some anger.

Evan made no reply.

“What the deuce is the matter with you?” demanded the leader, again, his
face slowly growing as red as his beard; then he said, suddenly, and in
a more human voice, “Are you in pain, MacIan?”

“Yes,” replied the Highlander, without lifting his face.

“Take some brandy,” cried Turnbull, walking forward hurriedly towards
him. “You've got it.”

“It's not in the body,” said MacIan, in his dull, strange way. “The
pain has come into my mind. A very dreadful thing has just come into my
thoughts.”

“What the devil are you talking about?” asked Turnbull.

MacIan broke out with a queer and living voice.

“We must fight now, Turnbull. We must fight now. A frightful thing has
come upon me, and I know it must be now and here. I must kill you here,”
 he cried, with a sort of tearful rage impossible to describe. “Here,
here, upon this blessed grass.”

“Why, you idiot,” began Turnbull.

“The hour has come--the black hour God meant for it. Quick, it will soon
be gone. Quick!”

And he flung the scabbard from him furiously, and stood with the
sunlight sparkling along his sword.

“You confounded fool,” repeated Turnbull. “Put that thing up again,
you ass; people will come out of that house at the first clash of the
steel.”

“One of us will be dead before they come,” said the other, hoarsely,
“for this is the hour God meant.”

“Well, I never thought much of God,” said the editor of _The Atheist_,
losing all patience. “And I think less now. Never mind what God meant.
Kindly enlighten my pagan darkness as to what the devil _you_ mean.”

“The hour will soon be gone. In a moment it will be gone,” said the
madman. “It is now, now, now that I must nail your blaspheming body to
the earth--now, now that I must avenge Our Lady on her vile slanderer.
Now or never. For the dreadful thought is in my mind.”

“And what thought,” asked Turnbull, with frantic composure, “occupies
what you call your mind?”

“I must kill you now,” said the fanatic, “because----”

“Well, because,” said Turnbull, patiently.

“Because I have begun to like you.”

Turnbull's face had a sudden spasm in the sunlight, a change so
instantaneous that it left no trace behind it; and his features seemed
still carved into a cold stare. But when he spoke again he seemed like
a man who was placidly pretending to misunderstand something that he
understood perfectly well.

“Your affection expresses itself in an abrupt form,” he began, but
MacIan broke the brittle and frivolous speech to pieces with a violent
voice. “Do not trouble to talk like that,” he said. “You know what I
mean as well as I know it. Come on and fight, I say. Perhaps you are
feeling just as I do.”

Turnbull's face flinched again in the fierce sunlight, but his attitude
kept its contemptuous ease.

“Your Celtic mind really goes too fast for me,” he said; “let me be
permitted in my heavy Lowland way to understand this new development. My
dear Mr. MacIan, what do you really mean?”

MacIan still kept the shining sword-point towards the other's breast.

“You know what I mean. You mean the same yourself. We must fight now or
else----”

“Or else?” repeated Turnbull, staring at him with an almost blinding
gravity.

“Or else we may not want to fight at all,” answered Evan, and the end of
his speech was like a despairing cry.

Turnbull took out his own sword suddenly as if to engage; then planting
it point downwards for a moment, he said, “Before we begin, may I ask
you a question?”

MacIan bowed patiently, but with burning eyes.

“You said, just now,” continued Turnbull, presently, “that if we did not
fight now, we might not want to fight at all. How would you feel about
the matter if we came not to want to fight at all?”

“I should feel,” answered the other, “just as I should feel if you had
drawn your sword, and I had run away from it. I should feel that because
I had been weak, justice had not been done.”

“Justice,” answered Turnbull, with a thoughtful smile, “but we are
talking about your feelings. And what do you mean by justice, apart from
your feelings?”

MacIan made a gesture of weary recognition! “Oh, Nominalism,” he said,
with a sort of sigh, “we had all that out in the twelfth century.”

“I wish we could have it out now,” replied the other, firmly. “Do you
really mean that if you came to think me right, you would be certainly
wrong?”

“If I had a blow on the back of my head, I might come to think you a
green elephant,” answered MacIan, “but have I not the right to say now,
that if I thought that I should think wrong?”

“Then you are quite certain that it would be wrong to like me?” asked
Turnbull, with a slight smile.

“No,” said Evan, thoughtfully, “I do not say that. It may not be the
devil, it may be some part of God I am not meant to know. But I had a
work to do, and it is making the work difficult.”

“And I suppose,” said the atheist, quite gently, “that you and I know
all about which part of God we ought to know.”

MacIan burst out like a man driven back and explaining everything.

“The Church is not a thing like the Athenaeum Club,” he cried. “If the
Athenaeum Club lost all its members, the Athenaeum Club would dissolve
and cease to exist. But when we belong to the Church we belong to
something which is outside all of us; which is outside everything you
talk about, outside the Cardinals and the Pope. They belong to it, but
it does not belong to them. If we all fell dead suddenly, the Church
would still somehow exist in God. Confound it all, don't you see that I
am more sure of its existence than I am of my own existence? And yet you
ask me to trust my temperament, my own temperament, which can be turned
upside down by two bottles of claret or an attack of the jaundice. You
ask me to trust that when it softens towards you and not to trust the
thing which I believe to be outside myself and more real than the blood
in my body.”

“Stop a moment,” said Turnbull, in the same easy tone, “Even in the very
act of saying that you believe this or that, you imply that there is a
part of yourself that you trust even if there are many parts which you
mistrust. If it is only you that like me, surely, also, it is only you
that believe in the Catholic Church.”

Evan remained in an unmoved and grave attitude. “There is a part of me
which is divine,” he answered, “a part that can be trusted, but there
are also affections which are entirely animal and idle.”

“And you are quite certain, I suppose,” continued Turnbull, “that if
even you esteem me the esteem would be wholly animal and idle?” For the
first time MacIan started as if he had not expected the thing that was
said to him. At last he said:

“Whatever in earth or heaven it is that has joined us two together, it
seems to be something which makes it impossible to lie. No, I do not
think that the movement in me towards you was...was that surface sort of
thing. It may have been something deeper...something strange. I cannot
understand the thing at all. But understand this and understand it
thoroughly, if I loved you my love might be divine. No, it is not some
trifle that we are fighting about. It is not some superstition or some
symbol. When you wrote those words about Our Lady, you were in that act
a wicked man doing a wicked thing. If I hate you it is because you have
hated goodness. And if I like you...it is because you are good.”

Turnbull's face wore an indecipherable expression.

“Well, shall we fight now?” he said.

“Yes,” said MacIan, with a sudden contraction of his black brows, “yes,
it must be now.”

The bright swords crossed, and the first touch of them, travelling
down blade and arm, told each combatant that the heart of the other was
awakened. It was not in that way that the swords rang together when they
had rushed on each other in the little garden behind the dealer's shop.

There was a pause, and then MacIan made a movement as if to thrust,
and almost at the same moment Turnbull suddenly and calmly dropped his
sword. Evan stared round in an unusual bewilderment, and then realized
that a large man in pale clothes and a Panama hat was strolling serenely
towards them.




V. THE PEACEMAKER

When the combatants, with crossed swords, became suddenly conscious of
a third party, they each made the same movement. It was as quick as
the snap of a pistol, and they altered it instantaneously and recovered
their original pose, but they had both made it, they had both seen it,
and they both knew what it was. It was not a movement of anger at being
interrupted. Say or think what they would, it was a movement of relief.
A force within them, and yet quite beyond them, seemed slowly and
pitilessly washing away the adamant of their oath. As mistaken lovers
might watch the inevitable sunset of first love, these men watched the
sunset of their first hatred.

Their hearts were growing weaker and weaker against each other. When
their weapons rang and riposted in the little London garden, they
could have been very certain that if a third party had interrupted them
something at least would have happened. They would have killed each
other or they would have killed him. But now nothing could undo or
deny that flash of fact, that for a second they had been glad to be
interrupted. Some new and strange thing was rising higher and higher in
their hearts like a high sea at night. It was something that seemed all
the more merciless, because it might turn out an enormous mercy. Was
there, perhaps, some such fatalism in friendship as all lovers talk
about in love? Did God make men love each other against their will?

“I'm sure you'll excuse my speaking to you,” said the stranger, in a
voice at once eager and deprecating.

The voice was too polite for good manners. It was incongruous with the
eccentric spectacle of the duellists which ought to have startled a sane
and free man. It was also incongruous with the full and healthy, though
rather loose physique of the man who spoke. At the first glance he
looked a fine animal, with curling gold beard and hair, and blue eyes,
unusually bright. It was only at the second glance that the mind felt
a sudden and perhaps unmeaning irritation at the way in which the gold
beard retreated backwards into the waistcoat, and the way in which the
finely shaped nose went forward as if smelling its way. And it was
only, perhaps, at the hundredth glance that the bright blue eyes,
which normally before and after the instant seemed brilliant with
intelligence, seemed as it were to be brilliant with idiocy. He was a
heavy, healthy-looking man, who looked all the larger because of the
loose, light coloured clothes that he wore, and that had in their
extreme lightness and looseness, almost a touch of the tropics. But
a closer examination of his attire would have shown that even in the
tropics it would have been unique; but it was all woven according to
some hygienic texture which no human being had ever heard of before, and
which was absolutely necessary even for a day's health. He wore a huge
broad-brimmed hat, equally hygienic, very much at the back of his head,
and his voice coming out of so heavy and hearty a type of man was, as I
have said, startlingly shrill and deferential.

“I'm sure you'll excuse my speaking to you,” he said. “Now, I wonder if
you are in some little difficulty which, after all, we could settle very
comfortably together? Now, you don't mind my saying this, do you?”

The face of both combatants remained somewhat solid under this appeal.
But the stranger, probably taking their silence for a gathering shame,
continued with a kind of gaiety:

“So you are the young men I have read about in the papers. Well, of
course, when one is young, one is rather romantic. Do you know what I
always say to young people?”

A blank silence followed this gay inquiry. Then Turnbull said in a
colourless voice:

“As I was forty-seven last birthday, I probably came into the world too
soon for the experience.”

“Very good, very good,” said the friendly person. “Dry Scotch humour.
Dry Scotch humour. Well now. I understand that you two people want to
fight a duel. I suppose you aren't much up in the modern world. We've
quite outgrown duelling, you know. In fact, Tolstoy tells us that we
shall soon outgrow war, which he says is simply a duel between nations.
A duel between nations. But there is no doubt about our having outgrown
duelling.”

Waiting for some effect upon his wooden auditors, the stranger stood
beaming for a moment and then resumed:

“Now, they tell me in the newspapers that you are really wanting to
fight about something connected with Roman Catholicism. Now, do you know
what I always say to Roman Catholics?”

“No,” said Turnbull, heavily. “Do _they_?” It seemed to be a
characteristic of the hearty, hygienic gentleman that he always forgot
the speech he had made the moment before. Without enlarging further on
the fixed form of his appeal to the Church of Rome, he laughed cordially
at Turnbull's answer; then his wandering blue eyes caught the sunlight
on the swords, and he assumed a good-humoured gravity.

“But you know this is a serious matter,” he said, eyeing Turnbull and
MacIan, as if they had just been keeping the table in a roar with their
frivolities. “I am sure that if I appealed to your higher natures...your
higher natures. Every man has a higher nature and a lower nature. Now,
let us put the matter very plainly, and without any romantic nonsense
about honour or anything of that sort. Is not bloodshed a great sin?”

“No,” said MacIan, speaking for the first time.

“Well, really, really!” said the peacemaker.

“Murder is a sin,” said the immovable Highlander. “There is no sin of
bloodshed.”

“Well, we won't quarrel about a word,” said the other, pleasantly.

“Why on earth not?” said MacIan, with a sudden asperity. “Why shouldn't
we quarrel about a word? What is the good of words if they aren't
important enough to quarrel over? Why do we choose one word more than
another if there isn't any difference between them? If you called a
woman a chimpanzee instead of an angel, wouldn't there be a quarrel
about a word? If you're not going to argue about words, what are you
going to argue about? Are you going to convey your meaning to me by
moving your ears? The Church and the heresies always used to fight about
words, because they are the only things worth fighting about. I say
that murder is a sin, and bloodshed is not, and that there is as much
difference between those words as there is between the word 'yes' and
the word 'no'; or rather more difference, for 'yes' and 'no', at least,
belong to the same category. Murder is a spiritual incident. Bloodshed
is a physical incident. A surgeon commits bloodshed.

“Ah, you're a casuist!” said the large man, wagging his head. “Now, do
you know what I always say to casuists...?”

MacIan made a violent gesture; and Turnbull broke into open laughter.
The peacemaker did not seem to be in the least annoyed, but continued in
unabated enjoyment.

“Well, well,” he said, “let us get back to the point. Now Tolstoy has
shown that force is no remedy; so you see the position in which I am
placed. I am doing my best to stop what I'm sure you won't mind my
calling this really useless violence, this really quite wrong violence
of yours. But it's against my principles to call in the police against
you, because the police are still on a lower moral plane, so to speak,
because, in short, the police undoubtedly sometimes employ force.
Tolstoy has shown that violence merely breeds violence in the person
towards whom it is used, whereas Love, on the other hand, breeds Love.
So you see how I am placed. I am reduced to use Love in order to stop
you. I am obliged to use Love.”

He gave to the word an indescribable sound of something hard and heavy,
as if he were saying “boots”. Turnbull suddenly gripped his sword and
said, shortly, “I see how you are placed quite well, sir. You will not
call the police. Mr. MacIan, shall we engage?” MacIan plucked his sword
out of the grass.

“I must and will stop this shocking crime,” cried the Tolstoian,
crimson in the face. “It is against all modern ideas. It is against the
principle of love. How you, sir, who pretend to be a Christian...”

MacIan turned upon him with a white face and bitter lip. “Sir,” he said,
“talk about the principle of love as much as you like. You seem to me
colder than a lump of stone; but I am willing to believe that you may at
some time have loved a cat, or a dog, or a child. When you were a baby,
I suppose you loved your mother. Talk about love, then, till the world
is sick of the word. But don't you talk about Christianity. Don't you
dare to say one word, white or black, about it. Christianity is, as far
as you are concerned, a horrible mystery. Keep clear of it, keep silent
upon it, as you would upon an abomination. It is a thing that has made
men slay and torture each other; and you will never know why. It is a
thing that has made men do evil that good might come; and you will never
understand the evil, let alone the good. Christianity is a thing that
could only make you vomit, till you are other than you are. I would not
justify it to you even if I could. Hate it, in God's name, as Turnbull
does, who is a man. It is a monstrous thing, for which men die. And if
you will stand here and talk about love for another ten minutes it is
very probable that you will see a man die for it.”

And he fell on guard. Turnbull was busy settling something loose in his
elaborate hilt, and the pause was broken by the stranger.

“Suppose I call the police?” he said, with a heated face.

“And deny your most sacred dogma,” said MacIan.

“Dogma!” cried the man, in a sort of dismay. “Oh, we have no _dogmas_,
you know!”

There was another silence, and he said again, airily:

“You know, I think, there's something in what Shaw teaches about no
moral principles being quite fixed. Have you ever read _The Quintessence
of Ibsenism_? Of course he went very wrong over the war.”

Turnbull, with a bent, flushed face, was tying up the loose piece of the
pommel with string. With the string in his teeth, he said, “Oh, make up
your damned mind and clear out!”

“It's a serious thing,” said the philosopher, shaking his head. “I must
be alone and consider which is the higher point of view. I rather feel
that in a case so extreme as this...” and he went slowly away. As he
disappeared among the trees, they heard him murmuring in a sing-song
voice, “New occasions teach new duties,” out of a poem by James Russell
Lowell.

“Ah,” said MacIan, drawing a deep breath. “Don't you believe in prayer
now? I prayed for an angel.”

“An hour ago,” said the Highlander, in his heavy meditative voice, “I
felt the devil weakening my heart and my oath against you, and I prayed
that God would send an angel to my aid.”

“Well?” inquired the other, finishing his mending and wrapping the rest
of the string round his hand to get a firmer grip.

“Well?”

“Well, that man was an angel,” said MacIan.

“I didn't know they were as bad as that,” answered Turnbull.

“We know that devils sometimes quote Scripture and counterfeit good,”
 replied the mystic. “Why should not angels sometimes come to show us the
black abyss of evil on whose brink we stand. If that man had not tried
to stop us...I might...I might have stopped.”

“I know what you mean,” said Turnbull, grimly.

“But then he came,” broke out MacIan, “and my soul said to me: 'Give up
fighting, and you will become like That. Give up vows and dogmas, and
fixed things, and you may grow like That. You may learn, also, that
fog of false philosophy. You may grow fond of that mire of crawling,
cowardly morals, and you may come to think a blow bad, because it hurts,
and not because it humiliates. You may come to think murder wrong,
because it is violent, and not because it is unjust. Oh, you blasphemer
of the good, an hour ago I almost loved you! But do not fear for me now.
I have heard the word Love pronounced in _his_ intonation; and I know
exactly what it means. On guard!'”

The swords caught on each other with a dreadful clang and jar, full of
the old energy and hate; and at once plunged and replunged. Once more
each man's heart had become the magnet of a mad sword. Suddenly, furious
as they were, they were frozen for a moment motionless.

“What noise is that?” asked the Highlander, hoarsely.

“I think I know,” replied Turnbull.

“What?... What?” cried the other.

“The student of Shaw and Tolstoy has made up his remarkable mind,” said
Turnbull, quietly. “The police are coming up the hill.”




VI. THE OTHER PHILOSOPHER

Between high hedges in Hertfordshire, hedges so high as to create a
kind of grove, two men were running. They did not run in a scampering
or feverish manner, but in the steady swing of the pendulum. Across the
great plains and uplands to the right and left of the lane, a long tide
of sunset light rolled like a sea of ruby, lighting up the long terraces
of the hills and picking out the few windows of the scattered hamlets
in startling blood-red sparks. But the lane was cut deep in the hill
and remained in an abrupt shadow. The two men running in it had an
impression not uncommonly experienced between those wild green English
walls; a sense of being led between the walls of a maze.

Though their pace was steady it was vigorous; their faces were heated
and their eyes fixed and bright. There was, indeed, something a little
mad in the contrast between the evening's stillness over the empty
country-side, and these two figures fleeing wildly from nothing. They
had the look of two lunatics, possibly they were.

“Are you all right?” said Turnbull, with civility. “Can you keep this
up?”

“Quite easily, thank you,” replied MacIan. “I run very well.”

“Is that a qualification in a family of warriors?” asked Turnbull.

“Undoubtedly. Rapid movement is essential,” answered MacIan, who never
saw a joke in his life.

Turnbull broke out into a short laugh, and silence fell between them,
the panting silence of runners.

Then MacIan said: “We run better than any of those policemen. They are
too fat. Why do you make your policemen so fat?”

“I didn't do much towards making them fat myself,” replied Turnbull,
genially, “but I flatter myself that I am now doing something towards
making them thin. You'll see they will be as lean as rakes by the time
they catch us. They will look like your friend, Cardinal Manning.”

“But they won't catch us,” said MacIan, in his literal way.

“No, we beat them in the great military art of running away,” returned
the other. “They won't catch us unless----”

MacIan turned his long equine face inquiringly. “Unless what?” he
said, for Turnbull had gone silent suddenly, and seemed to be listening
intently as he ran as a horse does with his ears turned back.

“Unless what?” repeated the Highlander.

“Unless they do--what they have done. Listen.” MacIan slackened his
trot, and turned his head to the trail they had left behind them. Across
two or three billows of the up and down lane came along the ground the
unmistakable throbbing of horses' hoofs.

“They have put the mounted police on us,” said Turnbull, shortly. “Good
Lord, one would think we were a Revolution.”

“So we are,” said MacIan calmly. “What shall we do? Shall we turn on
them with our points?”

“It may come to that,” answered Turnbull, “though if it does, I reckon
that will be the last act. We must put it off if we can.” And he stared
and peered about him between the bushes. “If we could hide somewhere
the beasts might go by us,” he said. “The police have their faults, but
thank God they're inefficient. Why, here's the very thing. Be quick and
quiet. Follow me.”

He suddenly swung himself up the high bank on one side of the lane. It
was almost as high and smooth as a wall, and on the top of it the black
hedge stood out over them as an angle, almost like a thatched roof of
the lane. And the burning evening sky looked down at them through the
tangle with red eyes as of an army of goblins.

Turnbull hoisted himself up and broke the hedge with his body. As his
head and shoulders rose above it they turned to flame in the full glow
as if lit up by an immense firelight. His red hair and beard looked
almost scarlet, and his pale face as bright as a boy's. Something
violent, something that was at once love and hatred, surged in the
strange heart of the Gael below him. He had an unutterable sense of epic
importance, as if he were somehow lifting all humanity into a prouder
and more passionate region of the air. As he swung himself up also into
the evening light he felt as if he were rising on enormous wings.

Legends of the morning of the world which he had heard in childhood or
read in youth came back upon him in a cloudy splendour, purple tales
of wrath and friendship, like Roland and Oliver, or Balin and Balan,
reminding him of emotional entanglements. Men who had loved each other
and then fought each other; men who had fought each other and then loved
each other, together made a mixed but monstrous sense of momentousness.
The crimson seas of the sunset seemed to him like a bursting out of some
sacred blood, as if the heart of the world had broken.

Turnbull was wholly unaffected by any written or spoken poetry; his was
a powerful and prosaic mind. But even upon him there came for the moment
something out of the earth and the passionate ends of the sky. The only
evidence was in his voice, which was still practical but a shade more
quiet.

“Do you see that summer-house-looking thing over there?” he asked
shortly. “That will do for us very well.”

Keeping himself free from the tangle of the hedge he strolled across
a triangle of obscure kitchen garden, and approached a dismal shed or
lodge a yard or two beyond it. It was a weather-stained hut of grey
wood, which with all its desolation retained a tag or two of trivial
ornament, which suggested that the thing had once been a sort of
summer-house, and the place probably a sort of garden.

“That is quite invisible from the road,” said Turnbull, as he entered
it, “and it will cover us up for the night.”

MacIan looked at him gravely for a few moments. “Sir,” he said, “I ought
to say something to you. I ought to say----”

“Hush,” said Turnbull, suddenly lifting his hand; “be still, man.”

In the sudden silence, the drumming of the distant horses grew louder
and louder with inconceivable rapidity, and the cavalcade of police
rushed by below them in the lane, almost with the roar and rattle of an
express train.

“I ought to tell you,” continued MacIan, still staring stolidly at the
other, “that you are a great chief, and it is good to go to war behind
you.”

Turnbull said nothing, but turned and looked out of the foolish lattice
of the little windows, then he said, “We must have food and sleep
first.”

When the last echo of their eluded pursuers had died in the distant
uplands, Turnbull began to unpack the provisions with the easy air of
a man at a picnic. He had just laid out the last items, put a bottle
of wine on the floor, and a tin of salmon on the window-ledge, when the
bottomless silence of that forgotten place was broken. And it was broken
by three heavy blows of a stick delivered upon the door.

Turnbull looked up in the act of opening a tin and stared silently at
his companion. MacIan's long, lean mouth had shut hard.

“Who the devil can that be?” said Turnbull.

“God knows,” said the other. “It might be God.”

Again the sound of the wooden stick reverberated on the wooden door. It
was a curious sound and on consideration did not resemble the ordinary
effects of knocking on a door for admittance. It was rather as if the
point of a stick were plunged again and again at the panels in an absurd
attempt to make a hole in them.

A wild look sprang into MacIan's eyes and he got up half stupidly, with
a kind of stagger, put his hand out and caught one of the swords. “Let
us fight at once,” he cried, “it is the end of the world.”

“You're overdone, MacIan,” said Turnbull, putting him on one side. “It's
only someone playing the goat. Let me open the door.”

But he also picked up a sword as he stepped to open it.

He paused one moment with his hand on the handle and then flung the door
open. Almost as he did so the ferrule of an ordinary bamboo cane came at
his eyes, so that he had actually to parry it with the naked weapon in
his hands. As the two touched, the point of the stick was dropped very
abruptly, and the man with the stick stepped hurriedly back.

Against the heraldic background of sprawling crimson and gold offered
him by the expiring sunset, the figure of the man with the stick showed
at first merely black and fantastic. He was a small man with two wisps
of long hair that curled up on each side, and seen in silhouette, looked
like horns. He had a bow tie so big that the two ends showed on each
side of his neck like unnatural stunted wings. He had his long black
cane still tilted in his hand like a fencing foil and half presented
at the open door. His large straw hat had fallen behind him as he leapt
backwards.

“With reference to your suggestion, MacIan,” said Turnbull, placidly, “I
think it looks more like the Devil.”

“Who on earth are you?” cried the stranger in a high shrill voice,
brandishing his cane defensively.

“Let me see,” said Turnbull, looking round to MacIan with the same
blandness. “Who are we?”

“Come out,” screamed the little man with the stick.

“Certainly,” said Turnbull, and went outside with the sword, MacIan
following.

Seen more fully, with the evening light on his face, the strange man
looked a little less like a goblin. He wore a square pale-grey jacket
suit, on which the grey butterfly tie was the only indisputable touch
of affectation. Against the great sunset his figure had looked merely
small: seen in a more equal light it looked tolerably compact and
shapely. His reddish-brown hair, combed into two great curls, looked
like the long, slow curling hair of the women in some pre-Raphaelite
pictures. But within this feminine frame of hair his face was
unexpectedly impudent, like a monkey's.

“What are you doing here?” he said, in a sharp small voice.

“Well,” said MacIan, in his grave childish way, “what are _you_ doing
here?”

“I,” said the man, indignantly, “I'm in my own garden.”

“Oh,” said MacIan, simply, “I apologize.”

Turnbull was coolly curling his red moustache, and the stranger stared
from one to the other, temporarily stunned by their innocent assurance.

“But, may I ask,” he said at last, “what the devil you are doing in my
summer-house?”

“Certainly,” said MacIan. “We were just going to fight.”

“To fight!” repeated the man.

“We had better tell this gentleman the whole business,” broke in
Turnbull. Then turning to the stranger he said firmly, “I am sorry, sir,
but we have something to do that must be done. And I may as well tell
you at the beginning and to avoid waste of time or language, that we
cannot admit any interference.”

“We were just going to take some slight refreshment when you interrupted
us...”

The little man had a dawning expression of understanding and stooped and
picked up the unused bottle of wine, eyeing it curiously.

Turnbull continued:

“But that refreshment was preparatory to something which I fear you will
find less comprehensible, but on which our minds are entirely fixed,
sir. We are forced to fight a duel. We are forced by honour and an
internal intellectual need. Do not, for your own sake, attempt to stop
us. I know all the excellent and ethical things that you will want to
say to us. I know all about the essential requirements of civil order:
I have written leading articles about them all my life. I know all about
the sacredness of human life; I have bored all my friends with it. Try
and understand our position. This man and I are alone in the modern
world in that we think that God is essentially important. I think He
does not exist; that is where the importance comes in for me. But this
man thinks that He does exist, and thinking that very properly thinks
Him more important than anything else. Now we wish to make a great
demonstration and assertion--something that will set the world on fire
like the first Christian persecutions. If you like, we are attempting
a mutual martyrdom. The papers have posted up every town against us.
Scotland Yard has fortified every police station with our enemies; we
are driven therefore to the edge of a lonely lane, and indirectly to
taking liberties with your summer-house in order to arrange our...”

“Stop!” roared the little man in the butterfly necktie. “Put me out of
my intellectual misery. Are you really the two tomfools I have read of
in all the papers? Are you the two people who wanted to spit each other
in the Police Court? Are you? Are you?”

“Yes,” said MacIan, “it began in a Police Court.”

The little man slung the bottle of wine twenty yards away like a stone.

“Come up to my place,” he said. “I've got better stuff than that. I've
got the best Beaune within fifty miles of here. Come up. You're the very
men I wanted to see.”

Even Turnbull, with his typical invulnerability, was a little taken
aback by this boisterous and almost brutal hospitality.

“Why...sir...” he began.

“Come up! Come in!” howled the little man, dancing with delight. “I'll
give you a dinner. I'll give you a bed! I'll give you a green smooth
lawn and your choice of swords and pistols. Why, you fools, I adore
fighting! It's the only good thing in God's world! I've walked about
these damned fields and longed to see somebody cut up and killed and the
blood running. Ha! Ha!”

And he made sudden lunges with his stick at the trunk of a neighbouring
tree so that the ferrule made fierce prints and punctures in the bark.

“Excuse me,” said MacIan suddenly with the wide-eyed curiosity of a
child, “excuse me, but...”

“Well?” said the small fighter, brandishing his wooden weapon.

“Excuse me,” repeated MacIan, “but was that what you were doing at the
door?”

The little man stared an instant and then said: “Yes,” and Turnbull
broke into a guffaw.

“Come on!” cried the little man, tucking his stick under his arm and
taking quite suddenly to his heels. “Come on! Confound me, I'll see both
of you eat and then I'll see one of you die. Lord bless me, the gods
must exist after all--they have sent me one of my day-dreams! Lord! A
duel!”

He had gone flying along a winding path between the borders of the
kitchen garden, and in the increasing twilight he was as hard to follow
as a flying hare. But at length the path after many twists betrayed its
purpose and led abruptly up two or three steps to the door of a tiny but
very clean cottage. There was nothing about the outside to distinguish
it from other cottages, except indeed its ominous cleanliness and one
thing that was out of all the custom and tradition of all cottages
under the sun. In the middle of the little garden among the stocks and
marigolds there surged up in shapeless stone a South Sea Island idol.
There was something gross and even evil in that eyeless and alien god
among the most innocent of the English flowers.

“Come in!” cried the creature again. “Come in! it's better inside!”

Whether or no it was better inside it was at least a surprise. The
moment the two duellists had pushed open the door of that inoffensive,
whitewashed cottage they found that its interior was lined with fiery
gold. It was like stepping into a chamber in the Arabian Nights. The
door that closed behind them shut out England and all the energies of
the West. The ornaments that shone and shimmered on every side of them
were subtly mixed from many periods and lands, but were all oriental.
Cruel Assyrian bas-reliefs ran along the sides of the passage; cruel
Turkish swords and daggers glinted above and below them; the two
were separated by ages and fallen civilizations. Yet they seemed to
sympathize since they were both harmonious and both merciless. The house
seemed to consist of chamber within chamber and created that impression
as of a dream which belongs also to the Arabian Nights themselves. The
innermost room of all was like the inside of a jewel. The little man who
owned it all threw himself on a heap of scarlet and golden cushions and
struck his hands together. A negro in a white robe and turban appeared
suddenly and silently behind them.

“Selim,” said the host, “these two gentlemen are staying with me
tonight. Send up the very best wine and dinner at once. And Selim,
one of these gentlemen will probably die tomorrow. Make arrangements,
please.”

The negro bowed and withdrew.

Evan MacIan came out the next morning into the little garden to a fresh
silver day, his long face looking more austere than ever in that
cold light, his eyelids a little heavy. He carried one of the swords.
Turnbull was in the little house behind him, demolishing the end of
an early breakfast and humming a tune to himself, which could be heard
through the open window. A moment or two later he leapt to his feet and
came out into the sunlight, still munching toast, his own sword stuck
under his arm like a walking-stick.

Their eccentric host had vanished from sight, with a polite gesture,
some twenty minutes before. They imagined him to be occupied on
some concerns in the interior of the house, and they waited for his
emergence, stamping the garden in silence--the garden of tall, fresh
country flowers, in the midst of which the monstrous South Sea idol
lifted itself as abruptly as the prow of a ship riding on a sea of red
and white and gold.

It was with a start, therefore, that they came upon the man himself
already in the garden. They were all the more startled because of the
still posture in which they found him. He was on his knees in front
of the stone idol, rigid and motionless, like a saint in a trance or
ecstasy. Yet when Turnbull's tread broke a twig, he was on his feet in a
flash.

“Excuse me,” he said with an irradiation of smiles, but yet with a kind
of bewilderment. “So sorry...family prayers...old fashioned...mother's
knee. Let us go on to the lawn behind.”

And he ducked rapidly round the statue to an open space of grass on the
other side of it.

“This will do us best, Mr. MacIan,” said he. Then he made a gesture
towards the heavy stone figure on the pedestal which had now its blank
and shapeless back turned towards them. “Don't you be afraid,” he added,
“he can still see us.”

MacIan turned his blue, blinking eyes, which seemed still misty with
sleep (or sleeplessness) towards the idol, but his brows drew together.

The little man with the long hair also had his eyes on the back view
of the god. His eyes were at once liquid and burning, and he rubbed his
hands slowly against each other.

“Do you know,” he said, “I think he can see us better this way. I often
think that this blank thing is his real face, watching, though it cannot
be watched. He! he! Yes, I think he looks nice from behind. He looks
more cruel from behind, don't you think?”

“What the devil is the thing?” asked Turnbull gruffly.

“It is the only Thing there is,” answered the other. “It is Force.”

“Oh!” said Turnbull shortly.

“Yes, my friends,” said the little man, with an animated countenance,
fluttering his fingers in the air, “it was no chance that led you to
this garden; surely it was the caprice of some old god, some happy,
pitiless god. Perhaps it was his will, for he loves blood; and on that
stone in front of him men have been butchered by hundreds in the fierce,
feasting islands of the South. In this cursed, craven place I have
not been permitted to kill men on his altar. Only rabbits and cats,
sometimes.”

In the stillness MacIan made a sudden movement, unmeaning apparently,
and then remained rigid.

“But today, today,” continued the small man in a shrill voice. “Today
his hour is come. Today his will is done on earth as it is in heaven.
Men, men, men will bleed before him today.” And he bit his forefinger in
a kind of fever.

Still, the two duellists stood with their swords as heavily as statues,
and the silence seemed to cool the eccentric and call him back to more
rational speech.

“Perhaps I express myself a little too lyrically,” he said with an
amicable abruptness. “My philosophy has its higher ecstasies, but
perhaps you are hardly worked up to them yet. Let us confine ourselves
to the unquestioned. You have found your way, gentlemen, by a beautiful
accident, to the house of the only man in England (probably) who will
favour and encourage your most reasonable project. From Cornwall to Cape
Wrath this county is one horrible, solid block of humanitarianism. You
will find men who will defend this or that war in a distant continent.
They will defend it on the contemptible ground of commerce or the more
contemptible ground of social good. But do not fancy that you will find
one other person who will comprehend a strong man taking the sword in
his hand and wiping out his enemy. My name is Wimpey, Morrice Wimpey. I
had a Fellowship at Magdalen. But I assure you I had to drop it, owing
to my having said something in a public lecture infringing the popular
prejudice against those great gentlemen, the assassins of the Italian
Renaissance. They let me say it at dinner and so on, and seemed to like
it. But in a public lecture...so inconsistent. Well, as I say, here is
your only refuge and temple of honour. Here you can fall back on that
naked and awful arbitration which is the only thing that balances the
stars--a still, continuous violence. _Vae Victis!_ Down, down, down
with the defeated! Victory is the only ultimate fact. Carthage _was_
destroyed, the Red Indians are being exterminated: that is the single
certainty. In an hour from now that sun will still be shining and that
grass growing, and one of you will be conquered; one of you will be the
conqueror. When it has been done, nothing will alter it. Heroes, I give
you the hospitality fit for heroes. And I salute the survivor. Fall on!”

The two men took their swords. Then MacIan said steadily: “Mr. Turnbull,
lend me your sword a moment.”

Turnbull, with a questioning glance, handed him the weapon. MacIan took
the second sword in his left hand and, with a violent gesture, hurled it
at the feet of little Mr. Wimpey.

“Fight!” he said in a loud, harsh voice. “Fight me now!”

Wimpey took a step backward, and bewildered words bubbled on his lips.

“Pick up that sword and fight me,” repeated MacIan, with brows as black
as thunder.

The little man turned to Turnbull with a gesture, demanding judgement or
protection.

“Really, sir,” he began, “this gentleman confuses...”

“You stinking little coward,” roared Turnbull, suddenly releasing his
wrath. “Fight, if you're so fond of fighting! Fight, if you're so fond
of all that filthy philosophy! If winning is everything, go in and win!
If the weak must go to the wall, go to the wall! Fight, you rat! Fight,
or if you won't fight--run!”

And he ran at Wimpey, with blazing eyes.

Wimpey staggered back a few paces like a man struggling with his own
limbs. Then he felt the furious Scotchman coming at him like an express
train, doubling his size every second, with eyes as big as windows and
a sword as bright as the sun. Something broke inside him, and he found
himself running away, tumbling over his own feet in terror, and crying
out as he ran.

“Chase him!” shouted Turnbull as MacIan snatched up the sword and joined
in the scamper. “Chase him over a county! Chase him into the sea! Shoo!
Shoo! Shoo!”

The little man plunged like a rabbit among the tall flowers, the two
duellists after him. Turnbull kept at his tail with savage ecstasy,
still shooing him like a cat. But MacIan, as he ran past the South Sea
idol, paused an instant to spring upon its pedestal. For five seconds
he strained against the inert mass. Then it stirred; and he sent it over
with a great crash among the flowers, that engulfed it altogether. Then
he went bounding after the runaway.

In the energy of his alarm the ex-Fellow of Magdalen managed to leap
the paling of his garden. The two pursuers went over it after him like
flying birds. He fled frantically down a long lane with his two terrors
on his trail till he came to a gap in the hedge and went across a steep
meadow like the wind. The two Scotchmen, as they ran, kept up a cheery
bellowing and waved their swords. Up three slanting meadows, down four
slanting meadows on the other side, across another road, across a heath
of snapping bracken, through a wood, across another road, and to the
brink of a big pool, they pursued the flying philosopher. But when he
came to the pool his pace was so precipitate that he could not stop
it, and with a kind of lurching stagger, he fell splash into the greasy
water. Getting dripping to his feet, with the water up to his knees, the
worshipper of force and victory waded disconsolately to the other side
and drew himself on to the bank. And Turnbull sat down on the grass and
went off into reverberations of laughter. A second afterwards the most
extraordinary grimaces were seen to distort the stiff face of MacIan,
and unholy sounds came from within. He had never practised laughing, and
it hurt him very much.




VII. THE VILLAGE OF GRASSLEY-IN-THE-HOLE

At about half past one, under a strong blue sky, Turnbull got up out
of the grass and fern in which he had been lying, and his still
intermittent laughter ended in a kind of yawn.

“I'm hungry,” he said shortly. “Are you?”

“I have not noticed,” answered MacIan. “What are you going to do?”

“There's a village down the road, past the pool,” answered Turnbull. “I
can see it from here. I can see the whitewashed walls of some cottages
and a kind of corner of the church. How jolly it all looks. It looks
so--I don't know what the word is--so sensible. Don't fancy I'm under
any illusions about Arcadian virtue and the innocent villagers. Men make
beasts of themselves there with drink, but they don't deliberately make
devils of themselves with mere talking. They kill wild animals in
the wild woods, but they don't kill cats to the God of Victory. They
don't----” He broke off and suddenly spat on the ground.

“Excuse me,” he said; “it was ceremonial. One has to get the taste out
of one's mouth.”

“The taste of what?” asked MacIan.

“I don't know the exact name for it,” replied Turnbull. “Perhaps it is
the South Sea Islands, or it may be Magdalen College.”

There was a long pause, and MacIan also lifted his large limbs off the
ground--his eyes particularly dreamy.

“I know what you mean, Turnbull,” he said, “but... I always thought you
people agreed with all that.”

“With all that about doing as one likes, and the individual, and Nature
loving the strongest, and all the things which that cockroach talked
about.”

Turnbull's big blue-grey eyes stood open with a grave astonishment.

“Do you really mean to say, MacIan,” he said, “that you fancied that we,
the Free-thinkers, that Bradlaugh, or Holyoake, or Ingersoll, believe
all that dirty, immoral mysticism about Nature? Damn Nature!”

“I supposed you did,” said MacIan calmly. “It seems to me your most
conclusive position.”

“And you mean to tell me,” rejoined the other, “that you broke my
window, and challenged me to mortal combat, and tied a tradesman up with
ropes, and chased an Oxford Fellow across five meadows--all under the
impression that I am such an illiterate idiot as to believe in Nature!”

“I supposed you did,” repeated MacIan with his usual mildness; “but I
admit that I know little of the details of your belief--or disbelief.”

Turnbull swung round quite suddenly, and set off towards the village.

“Come along,” he cried. “Come down to the village. Come down to the
nearest decent inhabitable pub. This is a case for beer.”

“I do not quite follow you,” said the Highlander.

“Yes, you do,” answered Turnbull. “You follow me slap into the
inn-parlour. I repeat, this is a case for beer. We must have the whole
of this matter out thoroughly before we go a step farther. Do you know
that an idea has just struck me of great simplicity and of some
cogency. Do not by any means let us drop our intentions of settling our
differences with two steel swords. But do you not think that with two
pewter pots we might do what we really have never thought of doing
yet--discover what our difference is?”

“It never occurred to me before,” answered MacIan with tranquillity. “It
is a good suggestion.”

And they set out at an easy swing down the steep road to the village of
Grassley-in-the-Hole.

Grassley-in-the-Hole was a rude parallelogram of buildings, with two
thoroughfares which might have been called two high streets if it had
been possible to call them streets. One of these ways was higher on the
slope than the other, the whole parallelogram lying aslant, so to speak,
on the side of the hill. The upper of these two roads was decorated with
a big public house, a butcher's shop, a small public house, a sweetstuff
shop, a very small public house, and an illegible signpost. The lower of
the two roads boasted a horse-pond, a post office, a gentleman's garden
with very high hedges, a microscopically small public house, and two
cottages. Where all the people lived who supported all the public houses
was in this, as in many other English villages, a silent and smiling
mystery. The church lay a little above and beyond the village, with a
square grey tower dominating it decisively.

But even the church was scarcely so central and solemn an institution
as the large public house, the Valencourt Arms. It was named after some
splendid family that had long gone bankrupt, and whose seat was occupied
by a man who had invented a hygienic bootjack; but the unfathomable
sentimentalism of the English people insisted in regarding the Inn,
the seat and the sitter in it, as alike parts of a pure and marmoreal
antiquity. And in the Valencourt Arms festivity itself had some
solemnity and decorum; and beer was drunk with reverence, as it ought to
be. Into the principal parlour of this place entered two strangers, who
found themselves, as is always the case in such hostels, the object,
not of fluttered curiosity or pert inquiry, but of steady, ceaseless,
devouring ocular study. They had long coats down to their heels, and
carried under each coat something that looked like a stick. One was
tall and dark, the other short and red-haired. They ordered a pot of ale
each.

“MacIan,” said Turnbull, lifting his tankard, “the fool who wanted us to
be friends made us want to go on fighting. It is only natural that
the fool who wanted us to fight should make us friendly. MacIan, your
health!”

Dusk was already dropping, the rustics in the tavern were already
lurching and lumbering out of it by twos and threes, crying clamorous
good nights to a solitary old toper that remained, before MacIan and
Turnbull had reached the really important part of their discussion.

MacIan wore an expression of sad bewilderment not uncommon with him. “I
am to understand, then,” he said, “that you don't believe in nature.”

“You may say so in a very special and emphatic sense,” said Turnbull.
“I do not believe in nature, just as I do not believe in Odin. She is a
myth. It is not merely that I do not believe that nature can guide us.
It is that I do not believe that nature exists.”

“Exists?” said MacIan in his monotonous way, settling his pewter pot on
the table.

“Yes, in a real sense nature does not exist. I mean that nobody can
discover what the original nature of things would have been if things
had not interfered with it. The first blade of grass began to tear up
the earth and eat it; it was interfering with nature, if there is any
nature. The first wild ox began to tear up the grass and eat it; he
was interfering with nature, if there is any nature. In the same way,”
 continued Turnbull, “the human when it asserts its dominance over nature
is just as natural as the thing which it destroys.”

“And in the same way,” said MacIan almost dreamily, “the superhuman, the
supernatural is just as natural as the nature which it destroys.”

Turnbull took his head out of his pewter pot in some anger.

“The supernatural, of course,” he said, “is quite another thing; the
case of the supernatural is simple. The supernatural does not exist.”

“Quite so,” said MacIan in a rather dull voice; “you said the same about
the natural. If the natural does not exist the supernatural obviously
can't.” And he yawned a little over his ale.

Turnbull turned for some reason a little red and remarked quickly, “That
may be jolly clever, for all I know. But everyone does know that there
is a division between the things that as a matter of fact do commonly
happen and the things that don't. Things that break the evident laws of
nature----”

“Which does not exist,” put in MacIan sleepily. Turnbull struck the
table with a sudden hand.

“Good Lord in heaven!” he cried----

“Who does not exist,” murmured MacIan.

“Good Lord in heaven!” thundered Turnbull, without regarding the
interruption. “Do you really mean to sit there and say that you, like
anybody else, would not recognize the difference between a natural
occurrence and a supernatural one--if there could be such a thing? If I
flew up to the ceiling----”

“You would bump your head badly,” cried MacIan, suddenly starting up.
“One can't talk of this kind of thing under a ceiling at all. Come
outside! Come outside and ascend into heaven!”

He burst the door open on a blue abyss of evening and they stepped out
into it: it was suddenly and strangely cool.

“Turnbull,” said MacIan, “you have said some things so true and some
so false that I want to talk; and I will try to talk so that you
understand. For at present you do not understand at all. We don't seem
to mean the same things by the same words.”

He stood silent for a second or two and then resumed.

“A minute or two ago I caught you out in a real contradiction. At that
moment logically I was right. And at that moment I knew I was
wrong. Yes, there is a real difference between the natural and the
supernatural: if you flew up into that blue sky this instant, I should
think that you were moved by God--or the devil. But if you want to know
what I really think...I must explain.”

He stopped again, abstractedly boring the point of his sword into the
earth, and went on:

“I was born and bred and taught in a complete universe. The supernatural
was not natural, but it was perfectly reasonable. Nay, the supernatural
to me is more reasonable than the natural; for the supernatural is a
direct message from God, who is reason. I was taught that some things
are natural and some things divine. I mean that some things are
mechanical and some things divine. But there is the great difficulty,
Turnbull. The great difficulty is that, according to my teaching, you
are divine.”

“Me! Divine?” said Turnbull truculently. “What do you mean?”

“That is just the difficulty,” continued MacIan thoughtfully. “I was
told that there was a difference between the grass and a man's will;
and the difference was that a man's will was special and divine. A man's
free will, I heard, was supernatural.”

“Rubbish!” said Turnbull.

“Oh,” said MacIan patiently, “then if a man's free will isn't
supernatural, why do your materialists deny that it exists?”

Turnbull was silent for a moment. Then he began to speak, but MacIan
continued with the same steady voice and sad eyes:

“So what I feel is this: Here is the great divine creation I was
taught to believe in. I can understand your disbelieving in it, but
why disbelieve in a part of it? It was all one thing to me. God had
authority because he was God. Man had authority because he was man. You
cannot prove that God is better than a man; nor can you prove that a man
is better than a horse. Why permit any ordinary thing? Why do you let a
horse be saddled?”

“Some modern thinkers disapprove of it,” said Turnbull a little
doubtfully.

“I know,” said MacIan grimly; “that man who talked about love, for
instance.”

Turnbull made a humorous grimace; then he said: “We seem to be talking
in a kind of shorthand; but I won't pretend not to understand you. What
you mean is this: that you learnt about all your saints and angels at
the same time as you learnt about common morality, from the same people,
in the same way. And you mean to say that if one may be disputed, so
may the other. Well, let that pass for the moment. But let me ask you
a question in turn. Did not this system of yours, which you swallowed
whole, contain all sorts of things that were merely local, the respect
for the chief of your clan, or such things; the village ghost, the
family feud, or what not? Did you not take in those things, too, along
with your theology?”

MacIan stared along the dim village road, down which the last straggler
from the inn was trailing his way.

“What you say is not unreasonable,” he said. “But it is not quite true.
The distinction between the chief and us did exist; but it was never
anything like the distinction between the human and the divine, or
the human and the animal. It was more like the distinction between one
animal and another. But----”

“Well?” said Turnbull.

MacIan was silent.

“Go on,” repeated Turnbull; “what's the matter with you? What are you
staring at?”

“I am staring,” said MacIan at last, “at that which shall judge us
both.”

“Oh, yes,” said Turnbull in a tired way, “I suppose you mean God.”

“No, I don't,” said MacIan, shaking his head. “I mean him.”

And he pointed to the half-tipsy yokel who was ploughing down the road.

“What do you mean?” asked the atheist.

“I mean him,” repeated MacIan with emphasis. “He goes out in the early
dawn; he digs or he ploughs a field. Then he comes back and drinks ale,
and then he sings a song. All your philosophies and political systems
are young compared to him. All your hoary cathedrals, yes, even the
Eternal Church on earth is new compared to him. The most mouldering gods
in the British Museum are new facts beside him. It is he who in the end
shall judge us all.”

And MacIan rose to his feet with a vague excitement.

“What are you going to do?”

“I am going to ask him,” cried MacIan, “which of us is right.”

Turnbull broke into a kind of laugh. “Ask that intoxicated
turnip-eater----” he began.

“Yes--which of us is right,” cried MacIan violently. “Oh, you have long
words and I have long words; and I talk of every man being the image of
God; and you talk of every man being a citizen and enlightened enough to
govern. But if every man typifies God, there is God. If every man is an
enlightened citizen, there is your enlightened citizen. The first man
one meets is always man. Let us catch him up.”

And in gigantic strides the long, lean Highlander whirled away into the
grey twilight, Turnbull following with a good-humoured oath.

The track of the rustic was easy to follow, even in the faltering
dark; for he was enlivening his wavering walk with song. It was an
interminable poem, beginning with some unspecified King William, who (it
appeared) lived in London town and who after the second rise vanished
rather abruptly from the train of thought. The rest was almost entirely
about beer and was thick with local topography of a quite unrecognizable
kind. The singer's step was neither very rapid, nor, indeed,
exceptionally secure; so the song grew louder and louder and the two
soon overtook him.

He was a man elderly or rather of any age, with lean grey hair and a
lean red face, but with that remarkable rustic physiognomy in which it
seems that all the features stand out independently from the face; the
rugged red nose going out like a limb; the bleared blue eyes standing
out like signals.

He gave them greeting with the elaborate urbanity of the slightly
intoxicated. MacIan, who was vibrating with one of his silent,
violent decisions, opened the question without delay. He explained the
philosophic position in words as short and simple as possible. But
the singular old man with the lank red face seemed to think uncommonly
little of the short words. He fixed with a fierce affection upon one or
two of the long ones.

“Atheists!” he repeated with luxurious scorn. “Atheists! I know their
sort, master. Atheists! Don't talk to me about 'un. Atheists!”

The grounds of his disdain seemed a little dark and confused; but they
were evidently sufficient. MacIan resumed in some encouragement:

“You think as I do, I hope; you think that a man should be connected
with the Church; with the common Christian----”

The old man extended a quivering stick in the direction of a distant
hill.

“There's the church,” he said thickly. “Grassley old church that is.
Pulled down it was, in the old squire's time, and----”

“I mean,” explained MacIan elaborately, “that you think that there
should be someone typifying religion, a priest----”

“Priests!” said the old man with sudden passion. “Priests! I know
'un. What they want in England? That's what I say. What they want in
England?”

“They want you,” said MacIan.

“Quite so,” said Turnbull, “and me; but they won't get us. MacIan, your
attempt on the primitive innocence does not seem very successful. Let
me try. What you want, my friend, is your rights. You don't want any
priests or churches. A vote, a right to speak is what you----”

“Who says I a'n't got a right to speak?” said the old man, facing round
in an irrational frenzy. “I got a right to speak. I'm a man, I am. I
don't want no votin' nor priests. I say a man's a man; that's what I
say. If a man a'n't a man, what is he? That's what I say, if a man a'n't
a man, what is he? When I sees a man, I sez 'e's a man.”

“Quite so,” said Turnbull, “a citizen.”

“I say he's a man,” said the rustic furiously, stopping and striking his
stick on the ground. “Not a city or owt else. He's a man.”

“You're perfectly right,” said the sudden voice of MacIan, falling like
a sword. “And you have kept close to something the whole world of today
tries to forget.”

“Good night.”

And the old man went on wildly singing into the night.

“A jolly old creature,” said Turnbull; “he didn't seem able to get much
beyond that fact that a man is a man.”

“Has anybody got beyond it?” asked MacIan.

Turnbull looked at him curiously. “Are you turning an agnostic?” he
asked.

“Oh, you do not understand!” cried out MacIan. “We Catholics are all
agnostics. We Catholics have only in that sense got as far as realizing
that man is a man. But your Ibsens and your Zolas and your Shaws and
your Tolstoys have not even got so far.”




VIII. AN INTERLUDE OF ARGUMENT

Morning broke in bitter silver along the grey and level plain; and
almost as it did so Turnbull and MacIan came out of a low, scrubby wood
on to the empty and desolate flats. They had walked all night.

They had walked all night and talked all night also, and if the subject
had been capable of being exhausted they would have exhausted it.
Their long and changing argument had taken them through districts and
landscapes equally changing. They had discussed Haeckel upon hills so
high and steep that in spite of the coldness of the night it seemed as
if the stars might burn them. They had explained and re-explained
the Massacre of St. Bartholomew in little white lanes walled in with
standing corn as with walls of gold. They had talked about Mr. Kensit
in dim and twinkling pine woods, amid the bewildering monotony of
the pines. And it was with the end of a long speech from MacIan,
passionately defending the practical achievements and the solid
prosperity of the Catholic tradition, that they came out upon the open
land.

MacIan had learnt much and thought more since he came out of the
cloudy hills of Arisaig. He had met many typical modern figures under
circumstances which were sharply symbolic; and, moreover, he had
absorbed the main modern atmosphere from the mere presence and chance
phrases of Turnbull, as such atmospheres can always be absorbed from the
presence and the phrases of any man of great mental vitality. He had at
last begun thoroughly to understand what are the grounds upon which the
mass of the modern world solidly disapprove of her creed; and he threw
himself into replying to them with a hot intellectual enjoyment.

“I begin to understand one or two of your dogmas, Mr. Turnbull,” he had
said emphatically as they ploughed heavily up a wooded hill. “And every
one that I understand I deny. Take any one of them you like. You hold
that your heretics and sceptics have helped the world forward and handed
on a lamp of progress. I deny it. Nothing is plainer from real history
than that each of your heretics invented a complete cosmos of his own
which the next heretic smashed entirely to pieces. Who knows now exactly
what Nestorius taught? Who cares? There are only two things that we know
for certain about it. The first is that Nestorius, as a heretic, taught
something quite opposite to the teaching of Arius, the heretic who came
before him, and something quite useless to James Turnbull, the heretic
who comes after. I defy you to go back to the Free-thinkers of the past
and find any habitation for yourself at all. I defy you to read
Godwin or Shelley or the deists of the eighteenth century of the
nature-worshipping humanists of the Renaissance, without discovering
that you differ from them twice as much as you differ from the Pope. You
are a nineteenth-century sceptic, and you are always telling me that
I ignore the cruelty of nature. If you had been an eighteenth-century
sceptic you would have told me that I ignore the kindness and
benevolence of nature. You are an atheist, and you praise the deists of
the eighteenth century. Read them instead of praising them, and you will
find that their whole universe stands or falls with the deity. You are a
materialist, and you think Bruno a scientific hero. See what he said and
you will think him an insane mystic. No, the great Free-thinker,
with his genuine ability and honesty, does not in practice destroy
Christianity. What he does destroy is the Free-thinker who went before.
Free-thought may be suggestive, it may be inspiriting, it may have as
much as you please of the merits that come from vivacity and
variety. But there is one thing Free-thought can never be by any
possibility--Free-thought can never be progressive. It can never be
progressive because it will accept nothing from the past; it begins
every time again from the beginning; and it goes every time in a
different direction. All the rational philosophers have gone along
different roads, so it is impossible to say which has gone farthest. Who
can discuss whether Emerson was a better optimist than Schopenhauer was
pessimist? It is like asking if this corn is as yellow as that hill is
steep. No; there are only two things that really progress; and they both
accept accumulations of authority. They may be progressing uphill and
down; they may be growing steadily better or steadily worse; but they
have steadily increased in certain definable matters; they have steadily
advanced in a certain definable direction; they are the only two things,
it seems, that ever _can_ progress. The first is strictly physical
science. The second is the Catholic Church.”

“Physical science and the Catholic Church!” said Turnbull sarcastically;
“and no doubt the first owes a great deal to the second.”

“If you pressed that point I might reply that it was very probable,”
 answered MacIan calmly. “I often fancy that your historical
generalizations rest frequently on random instances; I should not be
surprised if your vague notions of the Church as the persecutor of
science was a generalization from Galileo. I should not be at all
surprised if, when you counted the scientific investigations and
discoveries since the fall of Rome, you found that a great mass of them
had been made by monks. But the matter is irrelevant to my meaning. I
say that if you want an example of anything which has progressed in
the moral world by the same method as science in the material world, by
continually adding to without unsettling what was there before, then I
say that there _is_ only one example of it. And that is Us.”

“With this enormous difference,” said Turnbull, “that however elaborate
be the calculations of physical science, their net result can be tested.
Granted that it took millions of books I never read and millions of men
I never heard of to discover the electric light. Still I can see the
electric light. But I cannot see the supreme virtue which is the result
of all your theologies and sacraments.”

“Catholic virtue is often invisible because it is the normal,” answered
MacIan. “Christianity is always out of fashion because it is always
sane; and all fashions are mild insanities. When Italy is mad on art
the Church seems too Puritanical; when England is mad on Puritanism the
Church seems too artistic. When you quarrel with us now you class us
with kingship and despotism; but when you quarrelled with us first it
was because we would not accept the divine despotism of Henry VIII. The
Church always seems to be behind the times, when it is really beyond the
times; it is waiting till the last fad shall have seen its last summer.
It keeps the key of a permanent virtue.”

“Oh, I have heard all that!” said Turnbull with genial contempt. “I have
heard that Christianity keeps the key of virtue, and that if you read
Tom Paine you will cut your throat at Monte Carlo. It is such rubbish
that I am not even angry at it. You say that Christianity is the prop
of morals; but what more do you do? When a doctor attends you and could
poison you with a pinch of salt, do you ask whether he is a Christian?
You ask whether he is a gentleman, whether he is an M.D.--anything but
that. When a soldier enlists to die for his country or disgrace it, do
you ask whether he is a Christian? You are more likely to ask whether
he is Oxford or Cambridge at the boat race. If you think your creed
essential to morals why do you not make it a test for these things?”

“We once did make it a test for these things,” said MacIan smiling, “and
then you told us that we were imposing by force a faith unsupported
by argument. It seems rather hard that having first been told that our
creed must be false because we did use tests, we should now be told that
it must be false because we don't. But I notice that most anti-Christian
arguments are in the same inconsistent style.”

“That is all very well as a debating-club answer,” replied Turnbull
good-humouredly, “but the question still remains: Why don't you confine
yourself more to Christians if Christians are the only really good men?”

“Who talked of such folly?” asked MacIan disdainfully. “Do you suppose
that the Catholic Church ever held that Christians were the only good
men? Why, the Catholics of the Catholic Middle Ages talked about the
virtues of all the virtuous Pagans until humanity was sick of the
subject. No, if you really want to know what we mean when we say that
Christianity has a special power of virtue, I will tell you. The Church
is the only thing on earth that can perpetuate a type of virtue and make
it something more than a fashion. The thing is so plain and historical
that I hardly think you will ever deny it. You cannot deny that it is
perfectly possible that tomorrow morning, in Ireland or in Italy, there
might appear a man not only as good but good in exactly the same way
as St. Francis of Assisi. Very well, now take the other types of human
virtue; many of them splendid. The English gentleman of Elizabeth was
chivalrous and idealistic. But can you stand still here in this meadow
and _be_ an English gentleman of Elizabeth? The austere republican of
the eighteenth century, with his stern patriotism and his simple life,
was a fine fellow. But have you ever seen him? have you ever seen an
austere republican? Only a hundred years have passed and that volcano of
revolutionary truth and valour is as cold as the mountains of the moon.
And so it is and so it will be with the ethics which are buzzing down
Fleet Street at this instant as I speak. What phrase would inspire
the London clerk or workman just now? Perhaps that he is a son of the
British Empire on which the sun never sets; perhaps that he is a prop of
his Trades Union, or a class-conscious proletarian something or other;
perhaps merely that he is a gentleman when he obviously is not. Those
names and notions are all honourable; but how long will they last?
Empires break; industrial conditions change; the suburbs will not last
for ever. What will remain? I will tell you. The Catholic Saint will
remain.”

“And suppose I don't like him?” said Turnbull.

“On my theory the question is rather whether he will like you: or
more probably whether he will ever have heard of you. But I grant the
reasonableness of your query. You have a right, if you speak as the
ordinary man, to ask if you will like the saint. But as the ordinary man
you do like him. You revel in him. If you dislike him it is not because
you are a nice ordinary man, but because you are (if you will excuse me)
a sophisticated prig of a Fleet Street editor. That is just the funny
part of it. The human race has always admired the Catholic virtues,
however little it can practise them; and oddly enough it has admired
most those of them that the modern world most sharply disputes. You
complain of Catholicism for setting up an ideal of virginity; it did
nothing of the kind. The whole human race set up an ideal of virginity;
the Greeks in Athene, the Romans in the Vestal fire, set up an ideal of
virginity. What then is your real quarrel with Catholicism? Your
quarrel can only be, your quarrel really only is, that Catholicism has
_achieved_ an ideal of virginity; that it is no longer a mere piece
of floating poetry. But if you, and a few feverish men, in top hats,
running about in a street in London, choose to differ as to the ideal
itself, not only from the Church, but from the Parthenon whose name
means virginity, from the Roman Empire which went outwards from the
virgin flame, from the whole legend and tradition of Europe, from the
lion who will not touch virgins, from the unicorn who respects them, and
who make up together the bearers of your own national shield, from the
most living and lawless of your own poets, from Massinger, who wrote the
_Virgin Martyr_, from Shakespeare, who wrote _Measure for Measure_--if
you in Fleet Street differ from all this human experience, does it never
strike you that it may be Fleet Street that is wrong?”

“No,” answered Turnbull; “I trust that I am sufficiently fair-minded to
canvass and consider the idea; but having considered it, I think Fleet
Street is right, yes--even if the Parthenon is wrong. I think that as
the world goes on new psychological atmospheres are generated, and in
these atmospheres it is possible to find delicacies and combinations
which in other times would have to be represented by some ruder symbol.
Every man feels the need of some element of purity in sex; perhaps
they can only typify purity as the absence of sex. You will laugh if I
suggest that we may have made in Fleet Street an atmosphere in which
a man can be so passionate as Sir Lancelot and as pure as Sir
Galahad. But, after all, we have in the modern world erected many such
atmospheres. We have, for instance, a new and imaginative appreciation
of children.”

“Quite so,” replied MacIan with a singular smile. “It has been very well
put by one of the brightest of your young authors, who said: 'Unless
you become as little children ye shall in no wise enter the kingdom of
heaven.' But you are quite right; there is a modern worship of children.
And what, I ask you, is this modern worship of children? What, in the
name of all the angels and devils, is it except a worship of virginity?
Why should anyone worship a thing merely because it is small or
immature? No; you have tried to escape from this thing, and the very
thing you point to as the goal of your escape is only the thing again.
Am I wrong in saying that these things seem to be eternal?”

And it was with these words that they came in sight of the great
plains. They went a little way in silence, and then James Turnbull said
suddenly, “But I _cannot_ believe in the thing.” MacIan answered nothing
to the speech; perhaps it is unanswerable. And indeed they scarcely
spoke another word to each other all that day.




IX. THE STRANGE LADY

Moonrise with a great and growing moon opened over all those flats,
making them seem flatter and larger than they were, turning them to a
lake of blue light. The two companions trudged across the moonlit plain
for half an hour in full silence. Then MacIan stopped suddenly and
planted his sword-point in the ground like one who plants his tent-pole
for the night. Leaving it standing there, he clutched his black-haired
skull with his great claws of hands, as was his custom when forcing the
pace of his brain. Then his hands dropped again and he spoke.

“I'm sure you're thinking the same as I am,” he said; “how long are we
to be on this damned seesaw?”

The other did not answer, but his silence seemed somehow solid as
assent; and MacIan went on conversationally. Neither noticed that both
had instinctively stood still before the sign of the fixed and standing
sword.

“It is hard to guess what God means in this business. But he means
something--or the other thing, or both. Whenever we have tried to
fight each other something has stopped us. Whenever we have tried to be
reconciled to each other, something has stopped us again. By the run
of our luck we have never had time to be either friends or enemies.
Something always jumped out of the bushes.”

Turnbull nodded gravely and glanced round at the huge and hedgeless
meadow which fell away towards the horizon into a glimmering high road.

“Nothing will jump out of bushes here anyhow,” he said.

“That is what I meant,” said MacIan, and stared steadily at the heavy
hilt of his standing sword, which in the slight wind swayed on its
tempered steel like some huge thistle on its stalk.

“That is what I meant; we are quite alone here. I have not heard a
horse-hoof or a footstep or the hoot of a train for miles. So I think we
might stop here and ask for a miracle.”

“Oh! might we?” said the atheistic editor with a sort of gusto of
disgust.

“I beg your pardon,” said MacIan, meekly. “I forgot your prejudices.”
 He eyed the wind-swung sword-hilt in sad meditation and resumed: “What
I mean is, we might find out in this quiet place whether there really is
any fate or any commandment against our enterprise. I will engage on my
side, like Elijah, to accept a test from heaven. Turnbull, let us draw
swords here in this moonlight and this monstrous solitude. And if here
in this moonlight and solitude there happens anything to interrupt
us--if it be lightning striking our sword-blades or a rabbit running
under our legs--I will take it as a sign from God and we will shake
hands for ever.”

Turnbull's mouth twitched in angry humour under his red moustache. He
said: “I will wait for signs from God until I have any signs of His
existence; but God--or Fate--forbid that a man of scientific culture
should refuse any kind of experiment.”

“Very well, then,” said MacIan, shortly. “We are more quiet here than
anywhere else; let us engage.” And he plucked his sword-point out of the
turf.

Turnbull regarded him for a second and a half with a baffling visage
almost black against the moonrise; then his hand made a sharp movement
to his hip and his sword shone in the moon.

As old chess-players open every game with established gambits, they
opened with a thrust and parry, orthodox and even frankly ineffectual.
But in MacIan's soul more formless storms were gathering, and he made
a lunge or two so savage as first to surprise and then to enrage his
opponent. Turnbull ground his teeth, kept his temper, and waiting for
the third lunge, and the worst, had almost spitted the lunger when a
shrill, small cry came from behind him, a cry such as is not made by any
of the beasts that perish.

Turnbull must have been more superstitious than he knew, for he stopped
in the act of going forward. MacIan was brazenly superstitious, and he
dropped his sword. After all, he had challenged the universe to send
an interruption; and this was an interruption, whatever else it was. An
instant afterwards the sharp, weak cry was repeated. This time it was
certain that it was human and that it was female.

MacIan stood rolling those great blue Gaelic eyes that contrasted with
his dark hair. “It is the voice of God,” he said again and again.

“God hasn't got much of a voice,” said Turnbull, who snatched at every
chance of cheap profanity. “As a matter of fact, MacIan, it isn't the
voice of God, but it's something a jolly sight more important--it is the
voice of man--or rather of woman. So I think we'd better scoot in its
direction.”

MacIan snatched up his fallen weapon without a word, and the two raced
away towards that part of the distant road from which the cry was now
constantly renewed.

They had to run over a curve of country that looked smooth but was very
rough; a neglected field which they soon found to be full of the tallest
grasses and the deepest rabbit-holes. Moreover, that great curve of the
countryside which looked so slow and gentle when you glanced over it,
proved to be highly precipitous when you scampered over it; and Turnbull
was twice nearly flung on his face. MacIan, though much heavier, avoided
such an overthrow only by having the quick and incalculable feet of the
mountaineer; but both of them may be said to have leapt off a low cliff
when they leapt into the road.

The moonlight lay on the white road with a more naked and electric glare
than on the grey-green upland, and though the scene which it revealed
was complicated, it was not difficult to get its first features at a
glance.

A small but very neat black-and-yellow motor-car was standing stolidly,
slightly to the left of the road. A somewhat larger light-green
motor-car was tipped half-way into a ditch on the same side, and four
flushed and staggering men in evening dress were tipped out of it. Three
of them were standing about the road, giving their opinions to the
moon with vague but echoing violence. The fourth, however, had
already advanced on the chauffeur of the black-and-yellow car, and was
threatening him with a stick. The chauffeur had risen to defend himself.
By his side sat a young lady.

She was sitting bolt upright, a slender and rigid figure gripping the
sides of her seat, and her first few cries had ceased. She was clad in
close-fitting dark costume, a mass of warm brown hair went out in two
wings or waves on each side of her forehead; and even at that distance
it could be seen that her profile was of the aquiline and eager sort,
like a young falcon hardly free of the nest.

Turnbull had concealed in him somewhere a fund of common sense and
knowledge of the world of which he himself and his best friends were
hardly aware. He was one of those who take in much of the shows of
things absent-mindedly, and in an irrelevant reverie. As he stood at
the door of his editorial shop on Ludgate Hill and meditated on the
non-existence of God, he silently absorbed a good deal of varied
knowledge about the existence of men. He had come to know types by
instinct and dilemmas with a glance; he saw the crux of the situation in
the road, and what he saw made him redouble his pace.

He knew that the men were rich; he knew that they were drunk; and he
knew, what was worst of all, that they were fundamentally frightened.
And he knew this also, that no common ruffian (such as attacks ladies
in novels) is ever so savage and ruthless as a coarse kind of gentleman
when he is really alarmed. The reason is not recondite; it is simply
because the police-court is not such a menacing novelty to the poor
ruffian as it is to the rich. When they came within hail and heard the
voices, they confirmed all Turnbull's anticipations. The man in the
middle of the road was shouting in a hoarse and groggy voice that the
chauffeur had smashed their car on purpose; that they must get to the
Cri that evening, and that he would jolly well have to take them there.
The chauffeur had mildly objected that he was driving a lady. “Oh! we'll
take care of the lady,” said the red-faced young man, and went off into
gurgling and almost senile laughter.

By the time the two champions came up, things had grown more serious.
The intoxication of the man talking to the chauffeur had taken one of
its perverse and catlike jumps into mere screaming spite and rage. He
lifted his stick and struck at the chauffeur, who caught hold of it, and
the drunkard fell backwards, dragging him out of his seat on the car.
Another of the rowdies rushed forward booing in idiot excitement, fell
over the chauffeur, and, either by accident or design, kicked him as he
lay. The drunkard got to his feet again; but the chauffeur did not.

The man who had kicked kept a kind of half-witted conscience or
cowardice, for he stood staring at the senseless body and murmuring
words of inconsequent self-justification, making gestures with his hands
as if he were arguing with somebody. But the other three, with a mere
whoop and howl of victory, were boarding the car on three sides at once.
It was exactly at this moment that Turnbull fell among them like one
fallen from the sky. He tore one of the climbers backward by the collar,
and with a hearty push sent him staggering over into the ditch upon his
nose. One of the remaining two, who was too far gone to notice anything,
continued to clamber ineffectually over the high back of the car,
kicking and pouring forth a rivulet of soliloquy. But the other dropped
at the interruption, turned upon Turnbull and began a battering bout
of fisticuffs. At the same moment the man crawled out of the ditch in a
masquerade of mud and rushed at his old enemy from behind. The whole
had not taken a second; and an instant after MacIan was in the midst of
them.

Turnbull had tossed away his sheathed sword, greatly preferring his
hands, except in the avowed etiquette of the duel; for he had learnt to
use his hands in the old street-battles of Bradlaugh. But to MacIan the
sword even sheathed was a more natural weapon, and he laid about him
on all sides with it as with a stick. The man who had the walking-stick
found his blows parried with promptitude; and a second after, to his
great astonishment, found his own stick fly up in the air as by a
conjuring trick, with a turn of the swordsman's wrist. Another of the
revellers picked the stick out of the ditch and ran in upon MacIan,
calling to his companion to assist him.

“I haven't got a stick,” grumbled the disarmed man, and looked vaguely
about the ditch.

“Perhaps,” said MacIan, politely, “you would like this one.” With the
word the drunkard found his hand that had grasped the stick suddenly
twisted and empty; and the stick lay at the feet of his companion on the
other side of the road. MacIan felt a faint stir behind him; the girl
had risen to her feet and was leaning forward to stare at the fighters.
Turnbull was still engaged in countering and pommelling with the third
young man. The fourth young man was still engaged with himself, kicking
his legs in helpless rotation on the back of the car and talking with
melodious rationality.

At length Turnbull's opponent began to back before the battery of his
heavy hands, still fighting, for he was the soberest and boldest of the
four. If these are annals of military glory, it is due to him to say
that he need not have abandoned the conflict; only that as he backed
to the edge of the ditch his foot caught in a loop of grass and he
went over in a flat and comfortable position from which it took him a
considerable time to rise. By the time he had risen, Turnbull had come
to the rescue of MacIan, who was at bay but belabouring his two enemies
handsomely. The sight of the liberated reserve was to them like that
of Blucher at Waterloo; the two set off at a sullen trot down the road,
leaving even the walking-stick lying behind them in the moonlight.
MacIan plucked the struggling and aspiring idiot off the back of the car
like a stray cat, and left him swaying unsteadily in the moon. Then he
approached the front part of the car in a somewhat embarrassed manner
and pulled off his cap.

For some solid seconds the lady and he merely looked at each other, and
MacIan had an irrational feeling of being in a picture hung on a
wall. That is, he was motionless, even lifeless, and yet staringly
significant, like a picture. The white moonlight on the road, when he
was not looking at it, gave him a vision of the road being white with
snow. The motor-car, when he was not looking at it, gave him a rude
impression of a captured coach in the old days of highwaymen. And
he whose whole soul was with the swords and stately manners of the
eighteenth century, he who was a Jacobite risen from the dead, had an
overwhelming sense of being once more in the picture, when he had so
long been out of the picture.

In that short and strong silence he absorbed the lady from head to foot.
He had never really looked at a human being before in his life. He saw
her face and hair first, then that she had long suede gloves; then that
there was a fur cap at the back of her brown hair. He might, perhaps,
be excused for this hungry attention. He had prayed that some sign might
come from heaven; and after an almost savage scrutiny he came to the
conclusion that his one did. The lady's instantaneous arrest of speech
might need more explaining; but she may well have been stunned with
the squalid attack and the abrupt rescue. Yet it was she who remembered
herself first and suddenly called out with self-accusing horror:

“Oh, that poor, poor man!”

They both swung round abruptly and saw that Turnbull, with his recovered
sword under his arm-pit, was already lifting the fallen chauffeur into
the car. He was only stunned and was slowly awakening, feebly waving his
left arm.

The lady in long gloves and the fur cap leapt out and ran rapidly
towards them, only to be reassured by Turnbull, who (unlike many of his
school) really knew a little science when he invoked it to redeem the
world. “He's all right,” said he; “he's quite safe. But I'm afraid he
won't be able to drive the car for half an hour or so.”

“I can drive the car,” said the young woman in the fur cap with stony
practicability.

“Oh, in that case,” began MacIan, uneasily; and that paralysing shyness
which is a part of romance induced him to make a backward movement as
if leaving her to herself. But Turnbull was more rational than he, being
more indifferent.

“I don't think you ought to drive home alone, ma'am,” he said, gruffly.
“There seem to be a lot of rowdy parties along this road, and the man
will be no use for an hour. If you will tell us where you are going, we
will see you safely there and say good night.”

The young lady exhibited all the abrupt disturbance of a person who is
not commonly disturbed. She said almost sharply and yet with evident
sincerity: “Of course I am awfully grateful to you for all you've
done--and there's plenty of room if you'll come in.”

Turnbull, with the complete innocence of an absolutely sound motive,
immediately jumped into the car; but the girl cast an eye at MacIan, who
stood in the road for an instant as if rooted like a tree. Then he also
tumbled his long legs into the tonneau, having that sense of degradedly
diving into heaven which so many have known in so many human houses when
they consented to stop to tea or were allowed to stop to supper. The
slowly reviving chauffeur was set in the back seat; Turnbull and MacIan
had fallen into the middle one; the lady with a steely coolness had
taken the driver's seat and all the handles of that headlong machine. A
moment afterwards the engine started, with a throb and leap unfamiliar
to Turnbull, who had only once been in a motor during a general
election, and utterly unknown to MacIan, who in his present mood thought
it was the end of the world. Almost at the same instant that the car
plucked itself out of the mud and whipped away up the road, the man who
had been flung into the ditch rose waveringly to his feet. When he saw
the car escaping he ran after it and shouted something which, owing
to the increasing distance, could not be heard. It is awful to reflect
that, if his remark was valuable, it is quite lost to the world.

The car shot on up and down the shining moonlit lanes, and there was no
sound in it except the occasional click or catch of its machinery; for
through some cause or other no soul inside it could think of a word to
say. The lady symbolized her feelings, whatever they were, by urging the
machine faster and faster until scattered woodlands went by them in
one black blotch and heavy hills and valleys seemed to ripple under the
wheels like mere waves. A little while afterwards this mood seemed to
slacken and she fell into a more ordinary pace; but still she did not
speak. Turnbull, who kept a more common and sensible view of the case
than anyone else, made some remark about the moonlight; but something
indescribable made him also relapse into silence.

All this time MacIan had been in a sort of monstrous delirium, like some
fabulous hero snatched up into the moon. The difference between this
experience and common experiences was analogous to that between waking
life and a dream. Yet he did not feel in the least as if he were
dreaming; rather the other way; as waking was more actual than dreaming,
so this seemed by another degree more actual than waking itself. But it
was another life altogether, like a cosmos with a new dimension.

He felt he had been hurled into some new incarnation: into the midst
of new relations, wrongs and rights, with towering responsibilities and
almost tragic joys which he had as yet had no time to examine. Heaven
had not merely sent him a message; Heaven itself had opened around him
and given him an hour of its own ancient and star-shattering energy.
He had never felt so much alive before; and yet he was like a man in a
trance. And if you had asked him on what his throbbing happiness hung,
he could only have told you that it hung on four or five visible facts,
as a curtain hangs on four of five fixed nails. The fact that the lady
had a little fur at her throat; the fact that the curve of her cheek
was a low and lean curve and that the moonlight caught the height of
her cheek-bone; the fact that her hands were small but heavily gloved as
they gripped the steering-wheel; the fact that a white witch light was
on the road; the fact that the brisk breeze of their passage stirred and
fluttered a little not only the brown hair of her head but the black
fur on her cap. All these facts were to him certain and incredible, like
sacraments.

When they had driven half a mile farther, a big shadow was flung across
the path, followed by its bulky owner, who eyed the car critically but
let it pass. The silver moonlight picked out a piece or two of pewter
ornament on his blue uniform; and as they went by they knew it was a
sergeant of police. Three hundred yards farther on another policeman
stepped out into the road as if to stop them, then seemed to doubt his
own authority and stepped back again. The girl was a daughter of the
rich; and this police suspicion (under which all the poor live day and
night) stung her for the first time into speech.

“What can they mean?” she cried out in a kind of temper; “this car's
going like a snail.”

There was a short silence, and then Turnbull said: “It is certainly very
odd, you are driving quietly enough.”

“You are driving nobly,” said MacIan, and his words (which had no
meaning whatever) sounded hoarse and ungainly even in his own ears.

They passed the next mile and a half swiftly and smoothly; yet among the
many things which they passed in the course of it was a clump of eager
policemen standing at a cross-road. As they passed, one of the policemen
shouted something to the others; but nothing else happened. Eight
hundred yards farther on, Turnbull stood up suddenly in the swaying car.

“My God, MacIan!” he called out, showing his first emotion of that
night. “I don't believe it's the pace; it couldn't be the pace. I
believe it's us.”

MacIan sat motionless for a few moments and then turned up at his
companion a face that was as white as the moon above it.

“You may be right,” he said at last; “if you are, I must tell her.”

“I will tell the lady if you like,” said Turnbull, with his unconquered
good temper.

“You!” said MacIan, with a sort of sincere and instinctive astonishment.
“Why should you--no, I must tell her, of course----”

And he leant forward and spoke to the lady in the fur cap.

“I am afraid, madam, that we may have got you into some trouble,” he
said, and even as he said it it sounded wrong, like everything he said
to this particular person in the long gloves. “The fact is,” he resumed,
desperately, “the fact is, we are being chased by the police.” Then
the last flattening hammer fell upon poor Evan's embarrassment; for the
fluffy brown head with the furry black cap did not turn by a section of
the compass.

“We are chased by the police,” repeated MacIan, vigorously; then he
added, as if beginning an explanation, “You see, I am a Catholic.”

The wind whipped back a curl of the brown hair so as to necessitate a
new theory of aesthetics touching the line of the cheek-bone; but the
head did not turn.

“You see,” began MacIan, again blunderingly, “this gentleman wrote in
his newspaper that Our Lady was a common woman, a bad woman, and so we
agreed to fight; and we were fighting quite a little time ago--but that
was before we saw you.”

The young lady driving her car had half turned her face to listen; and
it was not a reverent or a patient face that she showed him. Her Norman
nose was tilted a trifle too high upon the slim stalk of her neck and
body.

When MacIan saw that arrogant and uplifted profile pencilled plainly
against the moonshine, he accepted an ultimate defeat. He had expected
the angels to despise him if he were wrong, but not to despise him so
much as this.

“You see,” said the stumbling spokesman, “I was angry with him when he
insulted the Mother of God, and I asked him to fight a duel with me; but
the police are all trying to stop it.”

Nothing seemed to waver or flicker in the fair young falcon profile; and
it only opened its lips to say, after a silence: “I thought people in
our time were supposed to respect each other's religion.”

Under the shadow of that arrogant face MacIan could only fall back on
the obvious answer: “But what about a man's irreligion?” The face only
answered: “Well, you ought to be more broadminded.”

If anyone else in the world had said the words, MacIan would have
snorted with his equine neigh of scorn. But in this case he seemed
knocked down by a superior simplicity, as if his eccentric attitude were
rebuked by the innocence of a child. He could not dissociate anything
that this woman said or did or wore from an idea of spiritual rarity and
virtue. Like most others under the same elemental passion, his soul was
at present soaked in ethics. He could have applied moral terms to the
material objects of her environment. If someone had spoken of
“her generous ribbon” or “her chivalrous gloves” or “her merciful
shoe-buckle,” it would not have seemed to him nonsense.

He was silent, and the girl went on in a lower key as if she were
momentarily softened and a little saddened also. “It won't do, you
know,” she said; “you can't find out the truth in that way. There are
such heaps of churches and people thinking different things nowadays,
and they all think they are right. My uncle was a Swedenborgian.”

MacIan sat with bowed head, listening hungrily to her voice but hardly
to her words, and seeing his great world drama grow smaller and smaller
before his eyes till it was no bigger than a child's toy theatre.

“The time's gone by for all that,” she went on; “you can't find out the
real thing like that--if there is really anything to find----” and
she sighed rather drearily; for, like many of the women of our wealthy
class, she was old and broken in thought, though young and clean enough
in her emotions.

“Our object,” said Turnbull, shortly, “is to make an effective
demonstration”; and after that word, MacIan looked at his vision again
and found it smaller than ever.

“It would be in the newspapers, of course,” said the girl. “People read
the newspapers, but they don't believe them, or anything else, I think.”
 And she sighed again.

She drove in silence a third of a mile before she added, as if
completing the sentence: “Anyhow, the whole thing's quite absurd.”

“I don't think,” began Turnbull, “that you quite realize----Hullo!
hullo--hullo--what's this?”

The amateur chauffeur had been forced to bring the car to a staggering
stoppage, for a file of fat, blue policemen made a wall across the way.
A sergeant came to the side and touched his peaked cap to the lady.

“Beg your pardon, miss,” he said with some embarrassment, for he knew
her for a daughter of a dominant house, “but we have reason to believe
that the gentlemen in your car are----” and he hesitated for a polite
phrase.

“I am Evan MacIan,” said that gentleman, and stood up in a sort of
gloomy pomp, not wholly without a touch of the sulks of a schoolboy.

“Yes, we will get out, sergeant,” said Turnbull, more easily; “my name
is James Turnbull. We must not incommode the lady.”

“What are you taking them up for?” asked the young woman, looking
straight in front of her along the road.

“It's under the new act,” said the sergeant, almost apologetically.
“Incurable disturbers of the peace.”

“What will happen to them?” she asked, with the same frigid clearness.

“Westgate Adult Reformatory,” he replied, briefly.

“Until when?”

“Until they are cured,” said the official.

“Very well, sergeant,” said the young lady, with a sort of tired common
sense. “I am sure I don't want to protect criminals or go against
the law; but I must tell you that these gentlemen have done me a
considerable service; you won't mind drawing your men a little farther
off while I say good night to them. Men like that always misunderstand.”

The sergeant was profoundly disquieted from the beginning at the mere
idea of arresting anyone in the company of a great lady; to refuse one
of her minor requests was quite beyond his courage. The police fell back
to a few yards behind the car. Turnbull took up the two swords that were
their only luggage; the swords that, after so many half duels, they were
now to surrender at last. MacIan, the blood thundering in his brain
at the thought of that instant of farewell, bent over, fumbled at the
handle and flung open the door to get out.

But he did not get out. He did not get out, because it is dangerous to
jump out of a car when it is going at full speed. And the car was going
at full speed, because the young lady, without turning her head or
so much as saying a syllable, had driven down a handle that made the
machine plunge forward like a buffalo and then fly over the landscape
like a greyhound. The police made one rush to follow, and then dropped
so grotesque and hopeless a chase. Away in the vanishing distance they
could see the sergeant furiously making notes.

The open door, still left loose on its hinges, swung and banged quite
crazily as they went whizzing up one road and down another. Nor did
MacIan sit down; he stood up stunned and yet staring, as he would have
stood up at the trumpet of the Last Day. A black dot in the distance
sprang up a tall black forest, swallowed them and spat them out again
at the other end. A railway bridge grew larger and larger till it leapt
upon their backs bellowing, and was in its turn left behind. Avenues of
poplars on both sides of the road chased each other like the figures
in a zoetrope. Now and then with a shock and rattle they went through
sleeping moonlit villages, which must have stirred an instant in their
sleep as at the passing of a fugitive earthquake. Sometimes in an
outlying house a light in one erratic, unexpected window would give them
a nameless hint of the hundred human secrets which they left behind them
with their dust. Sometimes even a slouching rustic would be afoot on
the road and would look after them, as after a flying phantom. But still
MacIan stood up staring at earth and heaven; and still the door he had
flung open flapped loose like a flag. Turnbull, after a few minutes of
dumb amazement, had yielded to the healthiest element in his nature and
gone off into uncontrollable fits of laughter. The girl had not stirred
an inch.

After another half mile that seemed a mere flash, Turnbull leant over
and locked the door. Evan staggered at last into his seat and hid his
throbbing head in his hands; and still the car flew on and its driver
sat inflexible and silent. The moon had already gone down, and the whole
darkness was faintly troubled with twilight and the first movement of
beasts and fowls. It was that mysterious moment when light is coming as
if it were something unknown whose nature one could not guess--a mere
alteration in everything. They looked at the sky and it seemed as dark
as ever; then they saw the black shape of a tower or tree against it and
knew that it was already grey. Save that they were driving southward and
had certainly passed the longitude of London, they knew nothing of their
direction; but Turnbull, who had spent a year on the Hampshire coast in
his youth, began to recognize the unmistakable but quite indescribable
villages of the English south. Then a white witch fire began to burn
between the black stems of the fir-trees; and, like so many things in
nature, though not in books on evolution, the daybreak, when it did
come, came much quicker than one would think. The gloomy heavens were
ripped up and rolled away like a scroll, revealing splendours, as the
car went roaring up the curve of a great hill; and above them and black
against the broadening light, there stood one of those crouching and
fantastic trees that are first signals of the sea.




X. THE SWORDS REJOINED

As they came over the hill and down on the other side of it, it

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