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Title: The Ball and The Cross

Author: G.K. Chesterton

Release Date: March, 2004 [EBook #5265]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on June 19, 2002]
[Date last updated: July 10th, 2002]

Edition: 10

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BALL AND THE CROSS ***





Produced by Ben Crowder <crowderb@blankslate.net>





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
is not too much to say that the whole universe of God opened over
them and under them, like a thing unfolding to five times its
size.  Almost under their feet opened the enormous sea, at the
bottom of a steep valley which fell down into a bay; and the sea
under their feet blazed at them almost as lustrous and almost as
empty as the sky.  The sunrise opened above them like some cosmic
explosion, shining and shattering and yet silent; as if the world
were blown to pieces without a sound.  Round the rays of the
victorious sun swept a sort of rainbow of confused and conquered
colours--brown and blue and green and flaming rose-colour; as
though gold were driving before it all the colours of the world.
The lines of the landscape down which they sped, were the simple,
strict, yet swerving, lines of a rushing river; so that it was
almost as if they were being sucked down in a huge still
whirlpool.  Turnbull had some such feeling, for he spoke for the
first time for many hours.

"If we go down at this rate we shall be over the sea cliff," he
said.

"How glorious!" said MacIan.

When, however, they had come into the wide hollow at the bottom
of that landslide, the car took a calm and graceful curve along
the side of the sea, melted into the fringe of a few trees, and
quietly, yet astonishingly, stopped.  A belated light was burning
in the broad morning in the window of a sort of lodge- or
gate-keepers' cottage; and the girl stood up in the car and
turned her splendid face to the sun.

Evan seemed startled by the stillness, like one who had been born
amid sound and speed.  He wavered on his long legs as he stood up;
he pulled himself together, and the only consequence was that he
trembled from head to foot.  Turnbull had already opened the door
on his side and jumped out.

The moment he had done so the strange young woman had one more
mad movement, and deliberately drove the car a few yards farther.
Then she got out with an almost cruel coolness and began pulling
off her long gloves and almost whistling.

"You can leave me here," she said, quite casually, as if they had
met five minutes before.  "That is the lodge of my father's place.
Please come in, if you like--but I understood that you had some
business."

Evan looked at that lifted face and found it merely lovely; he
was far too much of a fool to see that it was working with a
final fatigue and that its austerity was agony.  He was even fool
enough to ask it a question.  "Why did you save us?" he said,
quite humbly.

The girl tore off one of her gloves, as if she were tearing off
her hand.  "Oh, I don't know," she said, bitterly.  "Now I come
to think of it, I can't imagine."

Evan's thoughts, that had been piled up to the morning star,
abruptly let him down with a crash into the very cellars of the
emotional universe.  He remained in a stunned silence for a long
time; and that, if he had only known, was the wisest thing that
he could possibly do at the moment.

Indeed, the silence and the sunrise had their healing effect, for
when the extraordinary lady spoke again, her tone was more
friendly and apologetic.  "I'm not really ungrateful," she said;
"it was very good of you to save me from those men."

"But why?" repeated the obstinate and dazed MacIan, "why did you
save us from the other men?  I mean the policemen?"

The girl's great brown eyes were lit up with a flash that was at
once final desperation and the loosening of some private and
passionate reserve.

"Oh, God knows!" she cried.  "God knows that if there is a God He
has turned His big back on everything.  God knows I have had no
pleasure in my life, though I am pretty and young and father has
plenty of money.  And then people come and tell me that I ought to
do things and I do them and it's all drivel.  They want you to do
work among the poor; which means reading Ruskin and feeling
self-righteous in the best room in a poor tenement.  Or to help
some cause or other, which always means bundling people out of
crooked houses, in which they've always lived, into straight
houses, in which they often die.  And all the time you have inside
only the horrid irony of your own empty head and empty heart.  I
am to give to the unfortunate, when my whole misfortune is that I
have nothing to give.  I am to teach, when I believe nothing at
all that I was taught.  I am to save the children from death, and
I am not even certain that I should not be better dead.  I suppose
if I actually saw a child drowning I should save it.  But that
would be from the same motive from which I have saved you, or
destroyed you, whichever it is that I have done."

"What was the motive?" asked Evan, in a low voice.

"My motive is too big for my mind," answered the girl.

Then, after a pause, as she stared with a rising colour at the
glittering sea, she said: "It can't be described, and yet I am
trying to describe it.  It seems to me not only that I am unhappy,
but that there is no way of being happy.  Father is not happy,
though he is a Member of Parliament----"  She paused a moment and
added with a ghost of a smile: "Nor Aunt Mabel, though a man from
India has told her the secret of all creeds.  But I may be wrong;
there may be a way out.  And for one stark, insane second, I felt
that, after all, you had got the way out and that was why the
world hated you.  You see, if there were a way out, it would be
sure to be something that looked very queer."

Evan put his hand to his forehead and began stumblingly: "Yes, I
suppose we do seem----"

"Oh, yes, you look queer enough," she said, with ringing
sincerity.  "You'll be all the better for a wash and brush up."

"You forget our business, madam," said Evan, in a shaking voice;
"we have no concern but to kill each other."

"Well, I shouldn't be killed looking like that if I were you,"
she replied, with inhuman honesty.

Evan stood and rolled his eyes in masculine bewilderment. Then
came the final change in this Proteus, and she put out both her
hands for an instant and said in a low tone on which he lived for
days and nights:

"Don't you understand that I did not dare to stop you?  What you
are doing is so mad that it may be quite true.  Somehow one can
never really manage to be an atheist."

Turnbull stood staring at the sea; but his shoulders showed that
he heard, and after one minute he turned his head.  But the girl
had only brushed Evan's hand with hers and had fled up the dark
alley by the lodge gate.

Evan stood rooted upon the road, literally like some heavy statue
hewn there in the age of the Druids.  It seemed impossible that he
should ever move.  Turnbull grew restless with this rigidity, and
at last, after calling his companion twice or thrice, went up and
clapped him impatiently on one of his big shoulders.  Evan winced
and leapt away from him with a repulsion which was not the hate
of an unclean thing nor the dread of a dangerous one, but was a
spasm of awe and separation from something from which he was now
sundered as by the sword of God.  He did not hate the atheist; it
is possible that he loved him.  But Turnbull was now something
more dreadful than an enemy: he was a thing sealed and devoted--a
thing now hopelessly doomed to be either a corpse or an
executioner.

"What is the matter with you?" asked Turnbull, with his hearty
hand still in the air; and yet he knew more about it than his
innocent action would allow.

"James," said Evan, speaking like one under strong bodily pain,
"I asked for God's answer and I have got it--got it in my vitals.
He knows how weak I am, and that I might forget the peril of the
faith, forget the face of Our Lady--yes, even with your blow upon
her cheek.  But the honour of this earth has just this about it,
that it can make a man's heart like iron.  I am from the Lords of
the Isles and I dare not be a mere deserter.  Therefore, God has
tied me by the chain of my worldly place and word, and there is
nothing but fighting now."

"I think I understand you," said Turnbull, "but you say
everything tail foremost."

"She wants us to do it," said Evan, in a voice crushed with
passion.  "She has hurt herself so that we might do it.  She has
left her good name and her good sleep and all her habits and
dignity flung away on the other side of England in the hope that
she may hear of us and that we have broken some hole into
heaven."

"I thought I knew what you mean," said Turnbull, biting his
beard; "it does seem as if we ought to do something after all she
has done this night."

"I never liked you so much before," said MacIan, in bitter
sorrow.

As he spoke, three solemn footmen came out of the lodge gate and
assembled to assist the chauffeur to his room.  The mere sight of
them made the two wanderers flee as from a too frightful
incongruity, and before they knew where they were, they were well
upon the grassy ledge of England that overlooks the Channel.  Evan
said suddenly: "Will they let me see her in heaven once in a
thousand ages?" and addressed the remark to the editor of _The
Atheist_, as on which he would be likely or qualified to answer.
But no answer came; a silence sank between the two.

Turnbull strode sturdily to the edge of the cliff and looked out,
his companion following, somewhat more shaken by his recent
agitation.

"If that's the view you take," said Turnbull, "and I don't say
you are wrong, I think I know where we shall be best off for the
business.  As it happens, I know this part of the south coast
pretty well.  And unless I am mistaken there's a way down the
cliff just here which will land us on a stretch of firm sand
where no one is likely to follow us."

The Highlander made a gesture of assent and came also almost to
the edge of the precipice.  The sunrise, which was broadening over
sea and shore, was one of those rare and splendid ones in which
there seems to be no mist or doubt, and nothing but a universal
clarification more and more complete.  All the colours were
transparent.  It seemed like a triumphant prophecy of some perfect
world where everything being innocent will be intelligible; a
world where even our bodies, so to speak, may be as of burning
glass.  Such a world is faintly though fiercely figured in the
coloured windows of Christian architecture.  The sea that lay
before them was like a pavement of emerald, bright and almost
brittle; the sky against which its strict horizon hung was almost
absolutely white, except that close to the sky line, like scarlet
braids on the hem of a garment, lay strings of flaky cloud of so
gleaming and gorgeous a red that they seemed cut out of some
strange blood-red celestial metal, of which the mere gold of this
earth is but a drab yellow imitation.

"The hand of Heaven is still pointing," muttered the man of
superstition to himself.  "And now it is a blood-red hand."

The cool voice of his companion cut in upon his monologue,
calling to him from a little farther along the cliff, to tell him
that he had found the ladder of descent.  It began as a steep and
somewhat greasy path, which then tumbled down twenty or thirty
feet in the form of a fall of rough stone steps.  After that,
there was a rather awkward drop on to a ledge of stone and then
the journey was undertaken easily and even elegantly by the
remains of an ornamental staircase, such as might have belonged
to some long-disused watering-place.  All the time that the two
travellers sank from stage to stage of this downward journey,
there closed over their heads living bridges and caverns of the
most varied foliage, all of which grew greener, redder, or more
golden, in the growing sunlight of the morning.  Life, too, of the
more moving sort rose at the sun on every side of them.  Birds
whirred and fluttered in the undergrowth, as if imprisoned in
green cages.  Other birds were shaken up in great clouds from the
tree-tops, as if they were blossoms detached and scattered up to
heaven.  Animals which Turnbull was too much of a Londoner and
MacIan too much of a Northerner to know, slipped by among the
tangle or ran pattering up the tree-trunks.  Both the men,
according to their several creeds, felt the full thunder of the
psalm of life as they had never heard it before; MacIan felt God
the Father, benignant in all His energies, and Turnbull that
ultimate anonymous energy, that _Natura Naturans_, which is the
whole theme of Lucretius.  It was down this clamorous ladder of
life that they went down to die.

They broke out upon a brown semicircle of sand, so free from
human imprint as to justify Turnbull's profession.  They strode
out upon it, stuck their swords in the sand, and had a pause too
important for speech.  Turnbull eyed the coast curiously for a
moment, like one awakening memories of childhood; then he said
abruptly, like a man remembering somebody's name: "But, of
course, we shall be better off still round the corner of Cragness
Point; nobody ever comes there at all."  And picking up his sword
again, he began striding towards a big bluff of the rocks which
stood out upon their left.  MacIan followed him round the corner
and found himself in what was certainly an even finer fencing
court, of flat, firm sand, enclosed on three sides by white walls
of rock, and on the fourth by the green wall of the advancing
sea.

"We are quite safe here," said Turnbull, and, to the other's
surprise, flung himself down, sitting on the brown beach.

"You see, I was brought up near here," he explained.  "I was sent
from Scotland to stop with my aunt.  It is highly probable that I
may die here.  Do you mind if I light a pipe?"

"Of course, do whatever you like," said MacIan, with a choking
voice, and he went and walked alone by himself along the wet,
glistening sands.

Ten minutes afterwards he came back again, white with his own
whirlwind of emotions; Turnbull was quite cheerful and was
knocking out the end of his pipe.

"You see, we have to do it," said MacIan. "She tied us to it."

"Of course, my dear fellow," said the other, and leapt up as
lightly as a monkey.

They took their places gravely in the very centre of the great
square of sand, as if they had thousands of spectators.  Before
saluting, MacIan, who, being a mystic, was one inch nearer to
Nature, cast his eye round the huge framework of their heroic
folly.  The three walls of rock all leant a little outward, though
at various angles; but this impression was exaggerated in the
direction of the incredible by the heavy load of living trees and
thickets which each wall wore on its top like a huge shock of
hair.  On all that luxurious crest of life the risen and
victorious sun was beating, burnishing it all like gold, and
every bird that rose with that sunrise caught a light like a star
upon it like the dove of the Holy Spirit.  Imaginative life had
never so much crowded upon MacIan.  He felt that he could write
whole books about the feelings of a single bird.  He felt that for
two centuries he would not tire of being a rabbit.  He was in the
Palace of Life, of which the very tapestries and curtains were
alive.  Then he recovered himself, and remembered his affairs.
Both men saluted, and iron rang upon iron.  It was exactly at the
same moment that he realized that his enemy's left ankle was
encircled with a ring of salt water that had crept up to his
feet.

"What is the matter?" said Turnbull, stopping an instant, for he
had grown used to every movement of his extraordinary
fellow-traveller's face.

MacIan glanced again at that silver anklet of sea-water and then
looked beyond at the next promontory round which a deep sea was
boiling and leaping.  Then he turned and looked back and saw heavy
foam being shaken up to heaven about the base of Cragness Point.

"The sea has cut us off," he said, curtly.

"I have noticed it," said Turnbull with equal sobriety.  "What
view do you take of the development?"

Evan threw away his weapon, and, as his custom was, imprisoned
his big head in his hands.  Then he let them fall and said: "Yes,
I know what it means; and I think it is the fairest thing.  It is
the finger of God--red as blood--still pointing.  But now it
points to two graves."

There was a space filled with the sound of the sea, and then
MacIan spoke again in a voice pathetically reasonable: "You see,
we both saved her--and she told us both to fight--and it would
not be just that either should fail and fall alone, while the
other----"

"You mean," said Turnbull, in a voice surprisingly soft and
gentle, "that there is something fine about fighting in a place
where even the conqueror must die?"

"Oh, you have got it right, you have got it right!" cried out
Evan, in an extraordinary childish ecstasy.  "Oh, I'm sure that
you really believe in God!"

Turnbull answered not a word, but only took up his fallen sword.

For the third time Evan MacIan looked at those three sides of
English cliff hung with their noisy load of life.  He had been
at a loss to understand the almost ironical magnificence of all
those teeming creatures and tropical colours and smells that
smoked happily to heaven.  But now he knew that he was in the
closed court of death and that all the gates were sealed.

He drank in the last green and the last red and the last gold,
those unique and indescribable things of God, as a man drains
good wine at the bottom of his glass.  Then he turned and saluted
his enemy once more, and the two stood up and fought till the
foam flowed over their knees.

Then MacIan stepped backward suddenly with a splash and held up
his hand.  "Turnbull!" he cried; "I can't help it--fair fighting
is more even than promises.  And this is not fair fighting."

"What the deuce do you mean?" asked the other, staring.

"I've only just thought of it," cried Evan, brokenly.  "We're very
well matched--it may go on a good time--the tide is coming up
fast--and I'm a foot and a half taller.  You'll be washed away
like seaweed before it's above my breeches.  I'll not fight foul
for all the girls and angels in the universe."

"Will you oblige me," said Turnbull, with staring grey eyes and a
voice of distinct and violent politeness; "will you oblige me by
jolly well minding your own business?  Just you stand up and
fight, and we'll see who will be washed away like seaweed.  You
wanted to finish this fight and you shall finish it, or I'll
denounce you as a coward to the whole of that assembled company."

Evan looked very doubtful and offered a somewhat wavering weapon;
but he was quickly brought back to his senses by his opponent's
sword-point, which shot past him, shaving his shoulder by a hair.
By this time the waves were well up Turnbull's thigh, and what
was worse, they were beginning to roll and break heavily around
them.

MacIan parried this first lunge perfectly, the next less
perfectly; the third in all human probability he would not have
parried at all; the Christian champion would have been pinned
like a butterfly, and the atheistic champion left to drown like a
rat, with such consolation as his view of the cosmos afforded
him.  But just as Turnbull launched his heaviest stroke, the sea,
in which he stood up to his hips, launched a yet heavier one.  A
wave breaking beyond the others smote him heavily like a hammer
of water.  One leg gave way, he was swung round and sucked into
the retreating sea, still gripping his sword.

MacIan put his sword between his teeth and plunged after his
disappearing enemy.  He had the sense of having the whole universe
on top of him as crest after crest struck him down.  It seemed to
him quite a cosmic collapse, as if all the seven heavens were
falling on him one after the other.  But he got hold of the
atheist's left leg and he did not let it go.

After some ten minutes of foam and frenzy, in which all the
senses at once seemed blasted by the sea, Evan found himself
laboriously swimming on a low, green swell, with the sword still
in his teeth and the editor of _The Atheist_ still under his arm.
What he was going to do he had not even the most glimmering idea;
so he merely kept his grip and swam somehow with one hand.

He ducked instinctively as there bulked above him a big, black
wave, much higher than any that he had seen.  Then he saw that it
was hardly the shape of any possible wave.  Then he saw that it
was a fisherman's boat, and, leaping upward, caught hold of the
bow.  The boat pitched forward with its stern in the air for just
as much time as was needed to see that there was nobody in it.
After a moment or two of desperate clambering, however, there
were two people in it, Mr. Evan MacIan, panting and sweating, and
Mr. James Turnbull, uncommonly close to being drowned.  After ten
minutes' aimless tossing in the empty fishing-boat he recovered,
however, stirred, stretched himself, and looked round on the
rolling waters.  Then, while taking no notice of the streams of
salt water that were pouring from his hair, beard, coat, boots,
and trousers, he carefully wiped the wet off his sword-blade to
preserve it from the possibilities of rust.

MacIan found two oars in the bottom of the deserted boat and
began somewhat drearily to row.

           *                    *                   *

A rainy twilight was clearing to cold silver over the moaning
sea, when the battered boat that had rolled and drifted almost
aimlessly all night, came within sight of land, though of land
which looked almost as lost and savage as the waves.  All night
there had been but little lifting in the leaden sea, only now and
then the boat had been heaved up, as on a huge shoulder which
slipped from under it; such occasional sea-quakes came probably
from the swell of some steamer that had passed it in the dark;
otherwise the waves were harmless though restless.  But it was
piercingly cold, and there was, from time to time, a splutter of
rain like the splutter of the spray, which seemed almost to
freeze as it fell.  MacIan, more at home than his companion in
this quite barbarous and elemental sort of adventure, had rowed
toilsomely with the heavy oars whenever he saw anything that
looked like land; but for the most part had trusted with grim
transcendentalism to wind and tide.  Among the implements of their
first outfit the brandy alone had remained to him, and he gave it
to his freezing companion in quantities which greatly alarmed
that temperate Londoner; but MacIan came from the cold seas and
mists where a man can drink a tumbler of raw whisky in a boat
without it making him wink.

When the Highlander began to pull really hard upon the oars,
Turnbull craned his dripping red head out of the boat to see the
goal of his exertions.  It was a sufficiently uninviting one;
nothing so far as could be seen but a steep and shelving bank of
shingle, made of loose little pebbles such as children like, but
slanting up higher than a house.  On the top of the mound, against
the sky line, stood up the brown skeleton of some broken fence or
breakwater.  With the grey and watery dawn crawling up behind it,
the fence really seemed to say to our philosophic adventurers
that they had come at last to the other end of nowhere.

Bent by necessity to his labour, MacIan managed the heavy boat
with real power and skill, and when at length he ran it up on a
smoother part of the slope it caught and held so that they could
clamber out, not sinking farther than their knees into the water
and the shingle.  A foot or two farther up their feet found the
beach firmer, and a few moments afterwards they were leaning on
the ragged breakwater and looking back at the sea they had
escaped.

They had a dreary walk across wastes of grey shingle in the grey
dawn before they began to come within hail of human fields or
roads; nor had they any notion of what fields or roads they would
be.  Their boots were beginning to break up and the confusion of
stones tried them severely, so that they were glad to lean on
their swords, as if they were the staves of pilgrims. MacIan
thought vaguely of a weird ballad of his own country which
describes the soul in Purgatory as walking on a plain full of
sharp stones, and only saved by its own charities upon earth.

        If ever thou gavest hosen and shoon
            Every night and all,
        Sit thee down and put them on,
            And Christ receive thy soul.

Turnbull had no such lyrical meditations, but he was in an even
worse temper.

At length they came to a pale ribbon of road, edged by a shelf of
rough and almost colourless turf; and a few feet up the slope
there stood grey and weather-stained, one of those big wayside
crucifixes which are seldom seen except in Catholic countries.

MacIan put his hand to his head and found that his bonnet was not
there.  Turnbull gave one glance at the crucifix--a glance at once
sympathetic and bitter, in which was concentrated the whole of
Swinburne's poem on the same occasion.

        O hidden face of man, whereover
            The years have woven a viewless veil,
        If thou wert verily man's lover
            What did thy love or blood avail?
        Thy blood the priests mix poison of,
        And in gold shekels coin thy love.

Then, leaving MacIan in his attitude of prayer, Turnbull began to
look right and left very sharply, like one looking for something.
Suddenly, with a little cry, he saw it and ran forward.  A few
yards from them along the road a lean and starved sort of hedge
came pitifully to an end.  Caught upon its prickly angle, however,
there was a very small and very dirty scrap of paper that might
have hung there for months, since it escaped from someone tearing
up a letter or making a spill out of a newspaper.  Turnbull
snatched at it and found it was the corner of a printed page,
very coarsely printed, like a cheap novelette, and just large
enough to contain the words: "_et c'est elle qui_----"

"Hurrah!" cried Turnbull, waving his fragment; "we are safe at
last.  We are free at last.  We are somewhere better than England
or Eden or Paradise.  MacIan, we are in the Land of the Duel!"

"Where do you say?" said the other, looking at him heavily and
with knitted brows, like one almost dazed with the grey doubts of
desolate twilight and drifting sea.

"We are in France!" cried Turnbull, with a voice like a trumpet,
"in the land where things really happen--_Tout arrive en France_.
We arrive in France.  Look at this little message," and he held
out the scrap of paper.  "There's an omen for you superstitious
hill folk.  _C'est elle qui--Mais oui, mais oui, c'est elle qui
sauvera encore le monde_."

"France!" repeated MacIan, and his eyes awoke again in his head
like large lamps lighted.

"Yes, France!" said Turnbull, and all the rhetorical part of him
came to the top, his face growing as red as his hair.  "France,
that has always been in rebellion for liberty and reason.  France,
that has always assailed superstition with the club of Rabelais
or the rapier of Voltaire.  France, at whose first council table
sits the sublime figure of Julian the Apostate.  France, where a
man said only the other day those splendid unanswerable
words"--with a superb gesture--"'we have extinguished in heaven
those lights that men shall never light again.'"

"No," said MacIan, in a voice that shook with a controlled
passion.  "But France, which was taught by St. Bernard and led to
war by Joan of Arc.  France that made the crusades.  France that
saved the Church and scattered the heresies by the mouths of
Bossuet and Massillon.  France, which shows today the conquering
march of Catholicism, as brain after brain surrenders to it,
Brunetière, Coppée, Hauptmann, Barrès, Bourget, Lemaître."

"France!" asserted Turnbull with a sort of rollicking
self-exaggeration, very unusual with him, "France, which is one
torrent of splendid scepticism from Abelard to Anatole France."

"France," said MacIan, "which is one cataract of clear faith from
St. Louis to Our Lady of Lourdes."

"France at least," cried Turnbull, throwing up his sword in
schoolboy triumph, "in which these things are thought about and
fought about.  France, where reason and religion clash in one
continual tournament.  France, above all, where men understand the
pride and passion which have plucked our blades from their
scabbards.  Here, at least, we shall not be chased and spied on by
sickly parsons and greasy policemen, because we wish to put our
lives on the game.  Courage, my friend, we have come to the
country of honour."

MacIan did not even notice the incongruous phrase "my friend",
but nodding again and again, drew his sword and flung the
scabbard far behind him in the road.

"Yes," he cried, in a voice of thunder, "we will fight here and
_He_ shall look on at it."

Turnbull glanced at the crucifix with a sort of scowling
good-humour and then said: "He may look and see His cross
defeated."

"The cross cannot be defeated," said MacIan, "for it is Defeat."

A second afterwards the two bright, blood-thirsty weapons made
the sign of the cross in horrible parody upon each other.

They had not touched each other twice, however, when upon the
hill, above the crucifix, there appeared another horrible parody
of its shape; the figure of a man who appeared for an instant
waving his outspread arms.  He had vanished in an instant; but
MacIan, whose fighting face was set that way, had seen the shape
momentarily but quite photographically.  And while it was like a
comic repetition of the cross, it was also, in that place and
hour, something more incredible.  It had been only instantaneously
on the retina of his eye; but unless his eye and mind were going
mad together, the figure was that of an ordinary London
policeman.

He tried to concentrate his senses on the sword-play; but one
half of his brain was wrestling with the puzzle; the apocalyptic
and almost seraphic apparition of a stout constable out of
Clapham on top of a dreary and deserted hill in France.  He did
not, however, have to puzzle long.  Before the duellists had
exchanged half a dozen passes, the big, blue policeman appeared
once more on the top of the hill, a palpable monstrosity in the
eye of heaven.  He was waving only one arm now and seemed to be
shouting directions.  At the same moment a mass of blue blocked
the corner of the road behind the small, smart figure of
Turnbull, and a small company of policemen in the English uniform
came up at a kind of half-military double.

Turnbull saw the stare of consternation in his enemy's face and
swung round to share its cause.  When he saw it, cool as he was,
he staggered back.

"What the devil are you doing here?" he called out in a high,
shrill voice of authority, like one who finds a tramp in his own
larder.

"Well, sir," said the sergeant in command, with that sort of
heavy civility shown only to the evidently guilty, "seems to me
we might ask what are you doing here?"

"We are having an affair of honour," said Turnbull, as if it were
the most rational thing in the world.  "If the French police like
to interfere, let them interfere.  But why the blue blazes should
you interfere, you great blue blundering sausages?"

"I'm afraid, sir," said the sergeant with restraint, "I'm afraid
I don't quite follow you."

"I mean, why don't the French police take this up if it's got to
be taken up?  I always heard that they were spry enough in their
own way."

"Well, sir," said the sergeant reflectively, "you see, sir, the
French police don't take this up--well, because you see, sir,
this ain't France.  This is His Majesty's dominions, same as
'Ampstead 'eath."

"Not France?" repeated Turnbull, with a sort of dull incredulity.

"No, sir," said the sergeant; "though most of the people talk
French.  This is the island called St. Loup, sir, an island in the
Channel.  We've been sent down specially from London, as you were
such specially distinguished criminals, if you'll allow me to say
so.  Which reminds me to warn you that anything you say may be
used against you at your trial."

"Quite so," said Turnbull, and lurched suddenly against the
sergeant, so as to tip him over the edge of the road with a crash
into the shingle below.  Then leaving MacIan and the policemen
equally and instantaneously nailed to the road, he ran a little
way along it, leapt off on to a part of the beach, which he had
found in his journey to be firmer, and went across it with a
clatter of pebbles.  His sudden calculation was successful; the
police, unacquainted with the various levels of the loose beach,
tried to overtake him by the shorter cut and found themselves,
being heavy men, almost up to their knees in shoals of slippery
shingle.  Two who had been slower with their bodies were quicker
with their minds, and seeing Turnbull's trick, ran along the edge
of the road after him.  Then MacIan finally awoke, and leaving
half his sleeve in the grip of the only man who tried to hold
him, took the two policemen in the small of their backs with the
impetus of a cannon-ball and, sending them also flat among the
stones, went tearing after his twin defier of the law.

As they were both good runners, the start they had gained was
decisive.  They dropped over a high breakwater farther on upon the
beach, turned sharply, and scrambled up a line of ribbed rocks,
crowned with a thicket, crawled through it, scratching their
hands and faces, and dropped into another road; and there found
that they could slacken their speed into a steady trot.  In all
this desperate dart and scramble, they still kept hold of their
drawn swords, which now, indeed, in the vigorous phrase of
Bunyan, seemed almost to grow out of their hands.

They had run another half mile or so when it became apparent that
they were entering a sort of scattered village.  One or two
whitewashed cottages and even a shop had appeared along the side
of the road.  Then, for the first time, Turnbull twisted round his
red bear to get a glimpse of his companion, who was a foot or two
behind, and remarked abruptly: "Mr. MacIan, we've been going the
wrong way to work all along.  We're traced everywhere, because
everybody knows about us.  It's as if one went about with Kruger's
beard on Mafeking Night."

"What do you mean?" said MacIan, innocently.

"I mean," said Turnbull, with steady conviction, "that what we
want is a little diplomacy, and I am going to buy some in a
shop."



XI. A SCANDAL IN THE VILLAGE

In the little hamlet of Haroc, in the Isle of St. Loup, there
lived a man who--though living under the English flag--was
absolutely untypical of the French tradition.  He was quite
unnoticeable, but that was exactly where he was quite himself.  He
was not even extraordinarily French; but then it is against the
French tradition to be extraordinarily French.  Ordinary
Englishmen would only have thought him a little old-fashioned;
imperialistic Englishmen would really have mistaken him for the
old John Bull of the caricatures.  He was stout; he was quite
undistinguished; and he had side-whiskers, worn just a little
longer than John Bull's.  He was by name Pierre Durand; he was by
trade a wine merchant; he was by politics a conservative
republican; he had been brought up a Catholic, had always thought
and acted as an agnostic, and was very mildly returning to the
Church in his later years.  He had a genius (if one can even use
so wild a word in connexion with so tame a person) a genius for
saying the conventional thing on every conceivable subject; or
rather what we in England would call the conventional thing.  For
it was not convention with him, but solid and manly conviction.
Convention implies cant or affectation, and he had not the
faintest smell of either.  He was simply an ordinary citizen with
ordinary views; and if you had told him so he would have taken it
as an ordinary compliment.  If you had asked him about women, he
would have said that one must preserve their domesticity and
decorum; he would have used the stalest words, but he would have
in reserve the strongest arguments.  If you had asked him about
government, he would have said that all citizens were free and
equal, but he would have meant what he said.  If you had asked him
about education, he would have said that the young must be
trained up in habits of industry and of respect for their
parents.  Still he would have set them the example of industry,
and he would have been one of the parents whom they could
respect.  A state of mind so hopelessly central is depressing to
the English instinct.  But then in England a man announcing these
platitudes is generally a fool and a frightened fool, announcing
them out of mere social servility.  But Durand was anything but a
fool; he had read all the eighteenth century, and could have
defended his platitudes round every angle of eighteenth-century
argument.  And certainly he was anything but a coward: swollen and
sedentary as he was, he could have hit any man back who touched
him with the instant violence of an automatic machine; and dying
in a uniform would have seemed to him only the sort of thing that
sometimes happens.  I am afraid it is impossible to explain this
monster amid the exaggerative sects and the eccentric clubs of my
country.  He was merely a man.

He lived in a little villa which was furnished well with
comfortable chairs and tables and highly uncomfortable classical
pictures and medallions.  The art in his home contained nothing
between the two extremes of hard, meagre designs of Greek heads
and Roman togas, and on the other side a few very vulgar Catholic
images in the crudest colours; these were mostly in his
daughter's room.  He had recently lost his wife, whom he had loved
heartily and rather heavily in complete silence, and upon whose
grave he was constantly in the habit of placing hideous little
wreaths, made out of a sort of black-and-white beads.  To his only
daughter he was equally devoted, though he restricted her a good
deal under a sort of theoretic alarm about her innocence; an
alarm which was peculiarly unnecessary, first, because she was an
exceptionally reticent and religious girl, and secondly, because
there was hardly anybody else in the place.

Madeleine Durand was physically a sleepy young woman, and might
easily have been supposed to be morally a lazy one.  It is,
however, certain that the work of her house was done somehow, and
it is even more rapidly ascertainable that nobody else did it.
The logician is, therefore, driven back upon the assumption that
she did it; and that lends a sort of mysterious interest to her
personality at the beginning.  She had very broad, low, and level
brows, which seemed even lower because her warm yellow hair
clustered down to her eyebrows; and she had a face just plump
enough not to look as powerful as it was.  Anything that was heavy
in all this was abruptly lightened by two large, light china-blue
eyes, lightened all of a sudden as if it had been lifted into the
air by two big blue butterflies.  The rest of her was less than
middle-sized, and was of a casual and comfortable sort; and she
had this difference from such girls as the girl in the motor-car,
that one did not incline to take in her figure at all, but only
her broad and leonine and innocent head.

Both the father and the daughter were of the sort that would
normally have avoided all observation; that is, all observation
in that extraordinary modern world which calls out everything
except strength.  Both of them had strength below the surface;
they were like quiet peasants owning enormous and unquarried
mines.  The father with his square face and grey side whiskers,
the daughter with her square face and golden fringe of hair, were
both stronger than they know; stronger than anyone knew.  The
father believed in civilization, in the storied tower we have
erected to affront nature; that is, the father believed in Man.
The daughter believed in God; and was even stronger.  They neither
of them believed in themselves; for that is a decadent weakness.

The daughter was called a devotee.  She left upon ordinary people
the impression--the somewhat irritating impression--produced by
such a person; it can only be described as the sense of strong
water being perpetually poured into some abyss.  She did her
housework easily; she achieved her social relations sweetly; she
was never neglectful and never unkind.  This accounted for all
that was soft in her, but not for all that was hard.  She trod
firmly as if going somewhere; she flung her face back as if
defying something; she hardly spoke a cross word, yet there was
often battle in her eyes.  The modern man asked doubtfully where
all this silent energy went to.  He would have stared still more
doubtfully if he had been told that it all went into her prayers.

The conventions of the Isle of St. Loup were necessarily a
compromise or confusion between those of France and England; and
it was vaguely possible for a respectable young lady to have
half-attached lovers, in a way that would be impossible to the
_bourgeoisie_ of France.  One man in particular had made himself
an unmistakable figure in the track of this girl as she went to
church.  He was a short, prosperous-looking man, whose long, bushy
black beard and clumsy black umbrella made him seem both shorter
and older than he really was; but whose big, bold eyes, and step
that spurned the ground, gave him an instant character of youth.

His name was Camille Bert, and he was a commercial traveller who
had only been in the island an idle week before he began to
hover in the tracks of Madeleine Durand.  Since everyone knows
everyone in so small a place, Madeleine certainly knew him to
speak to; but it is not very evident that she ever spoke.  He
haunted her, however; especially at church, which was, indeed,
one of the few certain places for finding her.  In her home she
had a habit of being invisible, sometimes through insatiable
domesticity, sometimes through an equally insatiable solitude.  M.
Bert did not give the impression of a pious man, though he did
give, especially with his eyes, the impression of an honest one.
But he went to Mass with a simple exactitude that could not be
mistaken for a pose, or even for a vulgar fascination.  It was
perhaps this religious regularity which eventually drew Madeleine
into recognition of him.  At least it is certain that she twice
spoke to him with her square and open smile in the porch of the
church; and there was human nature enough in the hamlet to turn
even that into gossip.

But the real interest arose suddenly as a squall arises with the
extraordinary affair that occurred about five days after.  There
was about a third of a mile beyond the village of Haroc a large
but lonely hotel upon the London or Paris model, but commonly
almost entirely empty.  Among the accidental group of guests who
had come to it at this season was a man whose nationality no one
could fix and who bore the non-committal name of Count Gregory.
He treated everybody with complete civility and almost in
complete silence.  On the few occasions when he spoke, he spoke
either French, English, or once (to the priest) Latin; and the
general opinion was that he spoke them all wrong.  He was a large,
lean man, with the stoop of an aged eagle, and even the eagle's
nose to complete it; he had old-fashioned military whiskers and
moustache dyed with a garish and highly incredible yellow.  He had
the dress of a showy gentleman and the manners of a decayed
gentleman; he seemed (as with a sort of simplicity) to be trying
to be a dandy when he was too old even to know that he was old.
Ye he was decidedly a handsome figure with his curled yellow hair
and lean fastidious face; and he wore a peculiar frock-coat of
bright turquoise blue, with an unknown order pinned to it, and he
carried a huge and heavy cane.  Despite his silence and his
dandified dress and whiskers, the island might never have heard
of him but for the extraordinary event of which I have spoken,
which fell about in the following way:

In such casual atmospheres only the enthusiastic go to
Benediction; and as the warm blue twilight closed over the little
candle-lit church and village, the line of worshippers who went
home from the former to the latter thinned out until it broke.  On
one such evening at least no one was in church except the quiet,
unconquerable Madeleine, four old women, one fisherman, and, of
course, the irrepressible M. Camille Bert.  The others seemed to
melt away afterwards into the peacock colours of the dim green
grass and the dark blue sky.  Even Durand was invisible instead of
being merely reverentially remote; and Madeleine set forth
through the patch of black forest alone.  She was not in the least
afraid of loneliness, because she was not afraid of devils.  I
think they were afraid of her.

In a clearing of the wood, however, which was lit up with a last
patch of the perishing sunlight, there advanced upon her suddenly
one who was more startling than a devil.  The incomprehensible
Count Gregory, with his yellow hair like flame and his face like
the white ashes of the flame, was advancing bareheaded towards
her, flinging out his arms and his long fingers with a frantic
gesture.

"We are alone here," he cried, "and you would be at my mercy,
only that I am at yours."

Then his frantic hands fell by his sides and he looked up under
his brows with an expression that went well with his hard
breathing.  Madeleine Durand had come to a halt at first in
childish wonder, and now, with more than masculine self-control,
"I fancy I know your face, sir," she said, as if to gain time.

"I know I shall not forget yours," said the other, and extended
once more his ungainly arms in an unnatural gesture.  Then of a
sudden there came out of him a spout of wild and yet pompous
phrases.  "It is as well that you should know the worst and the
best.  I am a man who knows no limit; I am the most callous of
criminals, the most unrepentant of sinners.  There is no man in my
dominions so vile as I.  But my dominions stretch from the olives
of Italy to the fir-woods of Denmark, and there is no nook of all
of them in which I have not done a sin.  But when I bear you away
I shall be doing my first sacrilege, and also my first act of
virtue."  He seized her suddenly by the elbow; and she did not
scream but only pulled and tugged.  Yet though she had not
screamed, someone astray in the woods seemed to have heard the
struggle.  A short but nimble figure came along the woodland path
like a humming bullet and had caught Count Gregory a crack across
the face before his own could be recognized.  When it was
recognized it was that of Camille, with the black elderly beard
and the young ardent eyes.

Up to the moment when Camille had hit the Count, Madeleine had
entertained no doubt that the Count was merely a madman.  Now she
was startled with a new sanity; for the tall man in the yellow
whiskers and yellow moustache first returned the blow of Bert, as
if it were a sort of duty, and then stepped back with a slight
bow and an easy smile.

"This need go no further here, M. Bert," he said.  "I need not
remind you how far it should go elsewhere."

"Certainly, you need remind me of nothing," answered Camille,
stolidly.  "I am glad that you are just not too much of a
scoundrel for a gentleman to fight."

"We are detaining the lady," said Count Gregory, with politeness;
and, making a gesture suggesting that he would have taken off his
hat if he had had one, he strode away up the avenue of trees and
eventually disappeared.  He was so complete an aristocrat that he
could offer his back to them all the way up that avenue; and his
back never once looked uncomfortable.

"You must allow me to see you home," said Bert to the girl, in a
gruff and almost stifled voice; "I think we have only a little
way to go."

"Only a little way," she said, and smiled once more that night,
in spite of fatigue and fear and the world and the flesh and the
devil.  The glowing and transparent blue of twilight had long been
covered by the opaque and slatelike blue of night, when he
handed her into the lamp-lit interior of her home.  He went out
himself into the darkness, walking sturdily, but tearing at his
black beard.

All the French or semi-French gentry of the district considered
this a case in which a duel was natural and inevitable, and
neither party had any difficulty in finding seconds, strangers as
they were in the place.  Two small landowners, who were careful,
practising Catholics, willingly undertook to represent that
strict church-goer Camille Burt; while the profligate but
apparently powerful Count Gregory found friends in an energetic
local doctor who was ready for social promotion and an accidental
Californian tourist who was ready for anything.  As no particular
purpose could be served by delay, it was arranged that the affair
should fall out three days afterwards.  And when this was settled
the whole community, as it were, turned over again in bed and
thought no more about the matter.  At least there was only one
member of it who seemed to be restless, and that was she who was
commonly most restful.  On the next night Madeleine Durand went to
church as usual; and as usual the stricken Camille was there
also.  What was not so usual was that when they were a bow-shot
from the church Madeleine turned round and walked back to him.
"Sir," she began, "it is not wrong of me to speak to you," and
the very words gave him a jar of unexpected truth; for in all the
novels he had ever read she would have begun: "It is wrong of me
to speak to you."  She went on with wide and serious eyes like an
animal's: "It is not wrong of me to speak to you, because your
soul, or anybody's soul, matters so much more than what the world
says about anybody.  I want to talk to you about what you are
going to do."

Bert saw in front of him the inevitable heroine of the novels
trying to prevent bloodshed; and his pale firm face became
implacable.

"I would do anything but that for you," he said; "but no man can
be called less than a man."

She looked at him for a moment with a face openly puzzled, and
then broke into an odd and beautiful half-smile.

"Oh, I don't mean that," she said; "I don't talk about what I
don't understand.  No one has ever hit me; and if they had I
should not feel as a man may.  I am sure it is not the best thing
to fight.  It would be better to forgive--if one could really
forgive.  But when people dine with my father and say that
fighting a duel is mere murder--of course I can see that is not
just.  It's all so different--having a reason--and letting the
other man know--and using the same guns and things--and doing it
in front of your friends.  I'm awfully stupid, but I know that men
like you aren't murderers.  But it wasn't that that I meant."

"What did you mean?" asked the other, looking broodingly at the
earth.

"Don't you know," she said, "there is only one more celebration?
I thought that as you always go to church--I thought you would
communicate this morning."

Bert stepped backward with a sort of action she had never seen in
him before.  It seemed to alter his whole body.

"You may be right or wrong to risk dying," said the girl, simply;
"the poor women in our village risk it whenever they have a baby.
You men are the other half of the world.  I know nothing about
when you ought to die.  But surely if you are daring to try and
find God beyond the grave and appeal to Him--you ought to let Him
find you when He comes and stands there every morning in our
little church."

And placid as she was, she made a little gesture of argument, of
which the pathos wrung the heart.

M. Camille Bert was by no means placid.  Before that incomplete
gesture and frankly pleading face he retreated as if from the
jaws of a dragon.  His dark black hair and beard looked utterly
unnatural against the startling pallor of his face.  When at last
he said something it was: "O God!  I can't stand this!"  He did not
say it in French.  Nor did he, strictly speaking, say it in
English.  The truth (interesting only to anthropologists) is that
he said it in Scotch.

"There will be another mass in a matter of eight hours," said
Madeleine, with a sort of business eagerness and energy, "and you
can do it then before the fighting.  You must forgive me, but I
was so frightened that you would not do it at all."

Bert seemed to crush his teeth together until they broke, and
managed to say between them: "And why should you suppose that I
shouldn't do as you say--I mean not to do it at all?"

"You always go to Mass," answered the girl, opening her wide blue
eyes, "and the Mass is very long and tiresome unless one loves
God."

Then it was that Bert exploded with a brutality which might have
come from Count Gregory, his criminal opponent.  He advanced upon
Madeleine with flaming eyes, and almost took her by the two
shoulders.  "I do not love God," he cried, speaking French with
the broadest Scotch accent; "I do not want to find Him; I do not
think He is there to be found.  I must burst up the show; I must
and will say everything.  You are the happiest and honestest thing
I ever saw in this godless universe.  And I am the dirtiest and
most dishonest."

Madeleine looked at him doubtfully for an instant, and then said
with a sudden simplicity and cheerfulness: "Oh, but if you are
really sorry it is all right.  If you are horribly sorry it is all
the better.  You have only to go and tell the priest so and he
will give you God out of his own hands."

"I hate your priest and I deny your God!" cried the man, "and I
tell you God is a lie and a fable and a mask.  And for the first
time in my life I do not feel superior to God."

"What can it all mean?" said Madeleine, in massive wonder.

"Because I am a fable also and a mask," said the man.  He had been
plucking fiercely at his black beard and hair all the time; now
he suddenly plucked them off and flung them like moulted feathers
in the mire.  This extraordinary spoliation left in the sunlight
the same face, but a much younger head--a head with close
chestnut curls and a short chestnut beard.

"Now you know the truth," he answered, with hard eyes.  "I am a
cad who has played a crooked trick on a quiet village and a
decent woman for a private reason of his own.  I might have played
it successfully on any other woman; I have hit the one woman on
whom it cannot be played.  It's just like my damned luck.  The
plain truth is," and here when he came to the plain truth he
boggled and blundered as Evan had done in telling it to the girl
in the motor-car.

"The plain truth is," he said at last, "that I am James Turnbull
the atheist.  The police are after me; not for atheism but for
being ready to fight for it."

"I saw something about you in a newspaper," said the girl, with a
simplicity which even surprise could never throw off its balance.

"Evan MacIan said there was a God," went on the other,
stubbornly, "and I say there isn't.  And I have come to fight for
the fact that there is no God; it is for that that I have seen
this cursed island and your blessed face."

"You want me really to believe," said Madeleine, with parted
lips, "that you think----"

"I want you to hate me!" cried Turnbull, in agony.  "I want you to
be sick when you think of my name.  I am sure there is no God."

"But there is," said Madeleine, quite quietly, and rather with
the air of one telling children about an elephant.  "Why, I
touched His body only this morning."

"You touched a bit of bread," said Turnbull, biting his knuckles.
"Oh, I will say anything that can madden you!"

"You think it is only a bit of bread," said the girl, and her
lips tightened ever so little.

"I know it is only a bit of bread," said Turnbull, with violence.

She flung back her open face and smiled.  "Then why did you refuse
to eat it?" she said.

James Turnbull made a little step backward, and for the first
time in his life there seemed to break out and blaze in his head
thoughts that were not his own.

"Why, how silly of them," cried out Madeleine, with quite a
schoolgirl gaiety, "why, how silly of them to call _you_ a
blasphemer!  Why, you have wrecked your whole business because you
would not commit blasphemy."

The man stood, a somewhat comic figure in his tragic
bewilderment, with the honest red head of James Turnbull sticking
out of the rich and fictitious garments of Camille Bert.  But the
startled pain of his face was strong enough to obliterate the
oddity.

"You come down here," continued the lady, with that female
emphasis which is so pulverizing in conversation and so feeble at
a public meeting, "you and your MacIan come down here and put on
false beards or noses in order to fight.  You pretend to be a
Catholic commercial traveller from France.  Poor Mr. MacIan has to
pretend to be a dissolute nobleman from nowhere.  Your scheme
succeeds; you pick a quite convincing quarrel; you arrange a
quite respectable duel; the duel you have planned so long will
come off tomorrow with absolute certainty and safety.  And then
you throw off your wig and throw up your scheme and throw over
your colleague, because I ask you to go into a building and eat a
bit of bread.  And _then_ you dare to tell me that you are sure
there is nothing watching us.  Then you say you know there is
nothing on the very altar you run away from.  You know----"

"I only know," said Turnbull, "that I must run away from you.
This has got beyond any talking."  And he plunged along into the
village, leaving his black wig and beard lying behind him on the
road.

As the market-place opened before him he saw Count Gregory, that
distinguished foreigner, standing and smoking in elegant
meditation at the corner of the local café.  He immediately made
his way rapidly towards him, considering that a consultation was
urgent.  But he had hardly crossed half of that stony quadrangle
when a window burst open above him and a head was thrust out,
shouting.  The man was in his woollen undershirt, but Turnbull
knew the energetic, apologetic head of the sergeant of police.  He
pointed furiously at Turnbull and shouted his name.  A policeman
ran excitedly from under an archway and tried to collar him.  Two
men selling vegetables dropped their baskets and joined in the
chase.  Turnbull dodged the constable, upset one of the men into
his own basket, and bounding towards the distinguished foreign
Count, called to him clamorously: "Come on, MacIan, the hunt is
up again."

The prompt reply of Count Gregory was to pull off his large
yellow whiskers and scatter them on the breeze with an air of
considerable relief.  Then he joined the flight of Turnbull, and
even as he did so, with one wrench of his powerful hands rent and
split the strange, thick stick that he carried.  Inside it was a
naked old-fashioned rapier.  The two got a good start up the road
before the whole town was awakened behind them; and half-way up
it a similar transformation was seen to take place in Mr.
Turnbull's singular umbrella.

The two had a long race for the harbour; but the English police
were heavy and the French inhabitants were indifferent.  In any
case, they got used to the notion of the road being clear; and
just as they had come to the cliffs MacIan banged into another
gentleman with unmistakable surprise.  How he knew he was another
gentleman merely by banging into him, must remain a mystery.
MacIan was a very poor and very sober Scotch gentleman.  The other
was a very drunk and very wealthy English gentleman.  But there
was something in the staggered and openly embarrassed apologies
that made them understand each other as readily and as quickly
and as much as two men talking French in the middle of China.  The
nearest expression of the type is that it either hits or
apologizes; and in this case both apologized.

"You seem to be in a hurry," said the unknown Englishman, falling
back a step or two in order to laugh with an unnatural
heartiness.  "What's it all about, eh?"  Then before MacIan could
get past his sprawling and staggering figure he ran forward again
and said with a sort of shouting and ear-shattering whisper: "I
say, my name is Wilkinson.  _You_ know--Wilkinson's Entire was my
grandfather.  Can't drink beer myself.  Liver."  And he shook his
head with extraordinary sagacity.

"We really are in a hurry, as you say," said MacIan, summoning a
sufficiently pleasant smile, "so if you will let us pass----"

"I'll tell you what, you fellows," said the sprawling gentleman,
confidentially, while Evan's agonized ears heard behind him the
first paces of the pursuit, "if you really are, as you say, in a
hurry, I know what it is to be in a hurry--Lord, what a hurry I
was in when we all came out of Cartwright's rooms--if you really
are in a hurry"--and he seemed to steady his voice into a sort of
solemnity--"if you are in a hurry, there's nothing like a good
yacht for a man in a hurry."

"No doubt you're right," said MacIan, and dashed past him in
despair.  The head of the pursuing host was just showing over the
top of the hill behind him.  Turnbull had already ducked under the
intoxicated gentleman's elbow and fled far in front.

"No, but look here," said Mr. Wilkinson, enthusiastically running
after MacIan and catching him by the sleeve of his coat.  "If you
want to hurry you should take a yacht, and if"--he said, with a
burst of rationality, like one leaping to a further point in
logic--"if you want a yacht--you can have mine."

Evan pulled up abruptly and looked back at him.  "We are really in
the devil of a hurry," he said, "and if you really have a yacht,
the truth is that we would give our ears for it."

"You'll find it in harbour," said Wilkinson, struggling with his
speech.  "Left side of harbour--called _Gibson Girl_--can't think
why, old fellow, I never lent it you before."

With these words the benevolent Mr. Wilkinson fell flat on his
face in the road, but continued to laugh softly, and turned
towards his flying companion a face of peculiar peace and
benignity.  Evan's mind went through a crisis of instantaneous
casuistry, in which it may be that he decided wrongly; but about
how he decided his biographer can profess no doubt.  Two minutes
afterwards he had overtaken Turnbull and told the tale; ten
minutes afterwards he and Turnbull had somehow tumbled into the
yacht called the _Gibson Girl_ and had somehow pushed off from
the Isle of St. Loup.



XII. THE DESERT ISLAND

Those who happen to hold the view (and Mr. Evan MacIan, now alive
and comfortable, is among the number) that something
supernatural, some eccentric kindness from god or fairy had
guided our adventurers through all their absurd perils, might
have found his strongest argument perhaps in their management or
mismanagement of Mr. Wilkinson's yacht.  Neither of them had the
smallest qualification for managing such a vessel; but MacIan had
a practical knowledge of the sea in much smaller and quite
different boats, while Turnbull had an abstract knowledge of
science and some of its applications to navigation, which was
worse.  The presence of the god or fairy can only be deduced from
the fact that they never definitely ran into anything, either a
boat, a rock, a quicksand, or a man-of-war.  Apart from this
negative description, their voyage would be difficult to
describe.  It took at least a fortnight, and MacIan, who was
certainly the shrewder sailor of the two, realized that they were
sailing west into the Atlantic and were probably by this time
past the Scilly Isles.  How much farther they stood out into the
western sea it was impossible to conjecture.  But they felt
certain, at least, that they were far enough into that awful gulf
between us and America to make it unlikely that they would soon
see land again.  It was therefore with legitimate excitement that
one rainy morning after daybreak they saw that distinct shape of
a solitary island standing up against the encircling strip of
silver which ran round the skyline and separated the grey and
green of the billows from the grey and mauve of the morning
clouds.

"What can it be?" cried MacIan, in a dry-throated excitement.  "I
didn't know there were any Atlantic islands so far beyond the
Scillies--Good Lord, it can't be Madeira, yet?"

"I thought you were fond of legends and lies and fables," said
Turnbull, grimly.  "Perhaps it's Atlantis."

"Of course, it might be," answered the other, quite innocently
and gravely; "but I never thought the story about Atlantis was
very solidly established."

"Whatever it is, we are running on to it," said Turnbull,
equably, "and we shall be shipwrecked twice, at any rate."

The naked-looking nose of land projecting from the unknown island
was, indeed, growing larger and larger, like the trunk of some
terrible and advancing elephant.  There seemed to be nothing in
particular, at least on this side of the island, except shoals of
shellfish lying so thick as almost to make it look like one of
those toy grottos that the children make.  In one place, however,
the coast offered a soft, smooth bay of sand, and even the
rudimentary ingenuity of the two amateur mariners managed to run
up the little ship with her prow well on shore and her bowsprit
pointing upward, as in a sort of idiotic triumph.

They tumbled on shore and began to unload the vessel, setting the
stores out in rows upon the sand with something of the solemnity
of boys playing at pirates.  There were Mr. Wilkinson's
cigar-boxes and Mr. Wilkinson's dozen of champagne and Mr.
Wilkinson's tinned salmon and Mr. Wilkinson's tinned tongue and
Mr. Wilkinson's tinned sardines, and every sort of preserved
thing that could be seen at the Army and Navy stores.  Then MacIan
stopped with a jar of pickles in his hand and said abruptly:

"I don't know why we're doing all this; I suppose we ought really
to fall to and get it over."

Then he added more thoughtfully: "Of course this island seems
rather bare and the survivor----"

"The question is," said Turnbull, with cheerful speculation,
"whether the survivor will be in a proper frame of mind for
potted prawns."

MacIan looked down at the rows of tins and bottles, and the cloud
of doubt still lowered upon his face.

"You will permit me two liberties, my dear sir," said Turnbull at
last: "The first is to break open this box and light one of Mr.
Wilkinson's excellent cigars, which will, I am sure, assist my
meditations; the second is to offer a penny for your thoughts; or
rather to convulse the already complex finances of this island by
betting a penny that I know them."

"What on earth are you talking about?" asked MacIan, listlessly,
in the manner of an inattentive child.

"I know what you are really thinking, MacIan," repeated Turnbull,
laughing.  "I know what I am thinking, anyhow.  And I rather fancy
it's the same."

"What are you thinking?" asked Evan.

"I am thinking and you are thinking," said Turnbull, "that it is
damned silly to waste all that champagne."

Something like the spectre of a smile appeared on the unsmiling
visage of the Gael; and he made at least no movement of dissent.

"We could drink all the wine and smoke all the cigars easily in a
week," said Turnbull; "and that would be to die feasting like
heroes."

"Yes, and there is something else," said MacIan, with slight
hesitation.  "You see, we are on an almost unknown rock, lost in
the Atlantic.  The police will never catch us; but then neither
may the public ever hear of us; and that was one of the things we
wanted."  Then, after a pause, he said, drawing in the sand with
his sword-point: "She may never hear of it at all."

"Well?" inquired the other, puffing at his cigar.

"Well," said MacIan, "we might occupy a day or two in drawing up
a thorough and complete statement of what we did and why we did
it, and all about both our points of view.  Then we could leave
one copy on the island whatever happens to us and put another in
an empty bottle and send it out to sea, as they do in the books."

"A good idea," said Turnbull, "and now let us finish unpacking."

As MacIan, a tall, almost ghostly figure, paced along the edge of
sand that ran round the islet, the purple but cloudy poetry which
was his native element was piled up at its thickest upon his
soul.  The unique island and the endless sea emphasized the thing
solely as an epic.  There were no ladies or policemen here to give
him a hint either of its farce or its tragedy.

"Perhaps when the morning stars were made," he said to himself,
"God built this island up from the bottom of the world to be a
tower and a theatre for the fight between yea and nay."

Then he wandered up to the highest level of the rock, where there
was a roof or plateau of level stone.  Half an hour afterwards,
Turnbull found him clearing away the loose sand from this
table-land and making it smooth and even.

"We will fight up here, Turnbull," said MacIan, "when the time
comes.  And till the time comes this place shall be sacred."

"I thought of having lunch up here," said Turnbull, who had a
bottle of champagne in his hand.

"No, no--not up here," said MacIan, and came down from the height
quite hastily.  Before he descended, however, he fixed the two
swords upright, one at each end of the platform, as if they were
human sentinels to guard it under the stars.

Then they came down and lunched plentifully in a nest of loose
rocks.  In the same place that night they supped more plentifully
still.  The smoke of Mr. Wilkinson's cigars went up ceaseless and
strong smelling, like a pagan sacrifice; the golden glories of
Mr. Wilkinson's champagne rose to their heads and poured out of
them in fancies and philosophies.  And occasionally they would
look up at the starlight and the rock and see the space guarded
by the two cross-hilted swords, which looked like two black
crosses at either end of a grave.

In this primitive and Homeric truce the week passed by; it
consisted almost entirely of eating, drinking, smoking, talking,
and occasionally singing.  They wrote their records and cast loose
their bottle.  They never ascended to the ominous plateau; they
had never stood there save for that single embarrassed minute
when they had had no time to take stock of the seascape or the
shape of the land.  They did not even explore the island; for
MacIan was partly concerned in prayer and Turnbull entirely
concerned with tobacco; and both these forms of inspiration can
be enjoyed by the secluded and even the sedentary.  It was on a
golden afternoon, the sun sinking over the sea, rayed like the
very head of Apollo, when Turnbull tossed off the last half-pint
from the emptied Wilkinsonian bottle, hurled the bottle into the
sea with objectless energy, and went up to where his sword stood
waiting for him on the hill.  MacIan was already standing heavily
by his with bent head and eyes reading the ground.  He had not
even troubled to throw a glance round the island or the horizon.
But Turnbull being of a more active and birdlike type of mind did
throw a glance round the scene.  The consequence of which was that
he nearly fell off the rock.

On three sides of this shelly and sandy islet the sea stretched
blue and infinite without a speck of land or sail; the same as
Turnbull had first seen it, except that the tide being out it
showed a few yards more of slanting sand under the roots of the
rocks.  But on the fourth side the island exhibited a more
extraordinary feature.  In fact, it exhibited the extraordinary
feature of not being an island at all.  A long, curving neck of
sand, as smooth and wet as the neck of the sea serpent, ran out
into the sea and joined their rock to a line of low, billowing,
and glistening sand-hills, which the sinking sea had just bared
to the sun.  Whether they were firm sand or quicksand it was
difficult to guess; but there was at least no doubt that they lay
on the edge of some larger land; for colourless hills appeared
faintly behind them and no sea could be seen beyond.

"Sakes alive!" cried Turnbull, with rolling eyes; "this ain't an
island in the Atlantic.  We've butted the bally continent of
America."

MacIan turned his head, and his face, already pale, grew a shade
paler.  He was by this time walking in a world of omens and
hieroglyphics, and he could not read anything but what was
baffling or menacing in this brown gigantic arm of the earth
stretched out into the sea to seize him.

"MacIan," said Turnbull, in his temperate way, "whatever our
eternal interrupted tete-a-tetes have taught us or not taught us,
at least we need not fear the charge of fear.  If it is essential
to your emotions, I will cheerfully finish the fight here and
now; but I must confess that if you kill me here I shall die with
my curiosity highly excited and unsatisfied upon a minor point of
geography."

"I do not want to stop now," said the other, in his elephantine
simplicity, "but we must stop for a moment, because it is a
sign--perhaps it is a miracle.  We must see what is at the end of
the road of sand; it may be a bridge built across the gulf by
God."

"So long as you gratify my query," said Turnbull, laughing and
letting back his blade into the sheath, "I do not care for what
reason you choose to stop."

They clambered down the rocky peninsula and trudged along the
sandy isthmus with the plodding resolution of men who seemed
almost to have made up their minds to be wanderers on the face of
the earth.  Despite Turnbull's air of scientific eagerness, he was
really the less impatient of the two; and the Highlander went on
well ahead of him with passionate strides.  By the time they had
walked for about half an hour in the ups and downs of those
dreary sands, the distance between the two had lengthened and
MacIan was only a tall figure silhouetted for an instant upon the
crest of some sand-dune and then disappearing behind it.  This
rather increased the Robinson Crusoe feeling in Mr. Turnbull, and
he looked about almost disconsolately for some sign of life.  What
sort of life he expected it to be if it appeared, he did not very
clearly know.  He has since confessed that he thinks that in his
subconsciousness he expected an alligator.

The first sign of life that he did see, however, was something
more extraordinary than the largest alligator.  It was nothing
less than the notorious Mr. Evan MacIan coming bounding back
across the sand-heaps breathless, without his cap and keeping the
sword in his hand only by a habit now quite hardened.

"Take care, Turnbull," he cried out from a good distance as he
ran, "I've seen a native."

"A native?" repeated his companion, whose scenery had of late
been chiefly of shellfish, "what the deuce!  Do you mean an
oyster?"

"No," said MacIan, stopping and breathing hard, "I mean a savage.
A black man."

"Why, where did you see him?" asked the staring editor.

"Over there--behind that hill," said the gasping MacIan.  "He put
up his black head and grinned at me."

Turnbull thrust his hands through his red hair like one who gives
up the world as a bad riddle.  "Lord love a duck," said he, "can
it be Jamaica?"

Then glancing at his companion with a small frown, as of one
slightly suspicious, he said: "I say, don't think me rude--but
you're a visionary kind of fellow--and then we drank a great
deal.  Do you mind waiting here while I go and see for myself?"

"Shout if you get into trouble," said the Celt, with composure;
"you will find it as I say."

Turnbull ran off ahead with a rapidity now far greater than his
rival's, and soon vanished over the disputed sand-hill.  Then five
minutes passed, and then seven minutes; and MacIan bit his lip
and swung his sword, and the other did not reappear.  Finally,
with a Gaelic oath, Evan started forward to the rescue, and
almost at the same moment the small figure of the missing man
appeared on the ridge against the sky.

Even at that distance, however, there was something odd about his
attitude; so odd that MacIan continued to make his way in that
direction.  It looked as if he were wounded; or, still more, as if
he were ill.  He wavered as he came down the slope and seemed
flinging himself into peculiar postures.  But it was only when he
came within three feet of MacIan's face, that that observer of
mankind fully realized that Mr. James Turnbull was roaring with
laughter.

"You are quit right," sobbed that wholly demoralized journalist.
"He's black, oh, there's no doubt the black's all right--as far
as it goes."  And he went off again into convulsions of his
humorous ailment.

"What ever is the matter with you?" asked MacIan, with stern
impatience.  "Did you see the nigger----"

"I saw the nigger," gasped Turnbull.  "I saw the splendid
barbarian Chief.  I saw the Emperor of Ethiopia--oh, I saw him all
right.  The nigger's hands and face are a lovely colour--and the
nigger----" And he was overtaken once more.

"Well, well, well," said Evan, stamping each monosyllable on the
sand, "what about the nigger?"

"Well, the truth is," said Turnbull, suddenly and startlingly,
becoming quite grave and precise, "the truth is, the nigger is a
Margate nigger, and we are now on the edge of the Isle of Thanet,
a few miles from Margate."

Then he had a momentary return of his hysteria and said: "I say,
old boy, I should like to see a chart of our fortnight's cruise
in Wilkinson's yacht."

MacIan had no smile in answer, but his eager lips opened as if
parched for the truth.  "You mean to say," he began----

"Yes, I mean to say," said Turnbull, "and I mean to say something
funnier still.  I have learnt everything I wanted to know from the
partially black musician over there, who has taken a run in his
war-paint to meet a friend in a quiet pub along the coast--the
noble savage has told me all about it.  The bottle containing our
declaration, doctrines, and dying sentiments was washed up on
Margate beach yesterday in the presence of one alderman, two
bathing-machine men, three policemen, seven doctors, and a
hundred and thirteen London clerks on a holiday, to all of whom,
whether directly or indirectly, our composition gave enormous
literary pleasure.  Buck up, old man, this story of ours is a
switchback.  I have begun to understand the pulse and the time of
it; now we are up in a cathedral and then we are down in a
theatre, where they only play farces.  Come, I am quite
reconciled--let us enjoy the farce."

But MacIan said nothing, and an instant afterwards Turnbull
himself called out in an entirely changed voice: "Oh, this is
damnable!  This is not to be borne!"

MacIan followed his eye along the sand-hills.  He saw what looked
like the momentary and waving figure of the nigger minstrel, and
then he saw a heavy running policeman take the turn of the
sand-hill with the smooth solemnity of a railway train.



XIII. THE GARDEN OF PEACE

Up to this instant Evan MacIan had really understood nothing; but
when he saw the policeman he saw everything.  He saw his enemies,
all the powers and princes of the earth.  He suddenly altered from
a staring statue to a leaping man of the mountains.

"We must break away from him here," he cried, briefly, and went
like a whirlwind over the sand ridge in a straight line and at a
particular angle.  When the policeman had finished his admirable
railway curve, he found a wall of failing sand between him and
the pursued.  By the time he had scaled it thrice, slid down
twice, and crested it in the third effort, the two flying figures
were far in front.  They found the sand harder farther on; it
began to be crusted with scraps of turf and in a few moments they
were flying easily over an open common of rank sea-grass.  They
had no easy business, however; for the bottle which they had so
innocently sent into the chief gate of Thanet had called to life
the police of half a county on their trail.  From every side
across the grey-green common figures could be seen running and
closing in; and it was only when MacIan with his big body broke
down the tangled barrier of a little wood, as men break down a
door with the shoulder; it was only when they vanished crashing
into the underworld of the black wood, that their hunters were
even instantaneously thrown off the scent.

At the risk of struggling a little longer like flies in that
black web of twigs and trunks, Evan (who had an instinct of the
hunter or the hunted) took an incalculable course through the
forest, which let them out at last by a forest opening--quite
forgotten by the leaders of the chase.  They ran a mile or two
farther along the edge of the wood until they reached another and
somewhat similar opening.  Then MacIan stood utterly still and
listened, as animals listen, for every sound in the universe.
Then he said: "We are quit of them."  And Turnbull said: "Where
shall we go now?"

MacIan looked at the silver sunset that was closing in, barred by
plumy lines of purple cloud; he looked at the high tree-tops that
caught the last light and at the birds going heavily homeward,
just as if all these things were bits of written advice that he
could read.

Then he said: "The best place we can go to is to bed.  If we can
get some sleep in this wood, now everyone has cleared out of it,
it will be worth a handicap of two hundred yards tomorrow."

Turnbull, who was exceptionally lively and laughing in his
demeanour, kicked his legs about like a schoolboy and said he did
not want to go to sleep.  He walked incessantly and talked very
brilliantly.  And when at last he lay down on the hard earth,
sleep struck him senseless like a hammer.

Indeed, he needed the strongest sleep he could get; for the earth
was still full of darkness and a kind of morning fog when his
fellow-fugitive shook him awake.

"No more sleep, I'm afraid," said Evan, in a heavy, almost
submissive, voice of apology.  "They've gone on past us right
enough for a good thirty miles; but now they've found out their
mistake, and they're coming back."

"Are you sure?" said Turnbull, sitting up and rubbing his red
eyebrows with his hand.

The next moment, however, he had jumped up alive and leaping like
a man struck with a shock of cold water, and he was plunging
after MacIan along the woodland path.  The shape of their old
friend the constable had appeared against the pearl and pink of
the sunrise.  Somehow, it always looked a very funny shape when
seen against the sunrise.

           *                    *                   *

A wash of weary daylight was breaking over the country-side, and
the fields and roads were full of white mist--the kind of white
mist that clings in corners like cotton wool.  The empty road,
along which the chase had taken its turn, was overshadowed on one
side by a very high discoloured wall, stained, and streaked
green, as with seaweed--evidently the high-shouldered sentinel of
some great gentleman's estate.  A yard or two from the wall ran
parallel to it a linked and tangled line of lime-trees, forming a
kind of cloister along the side of the road.  It was under this
branching colonnade that the two fugitives fled, almost concealed
from their pursuers by the twilight, the mist and the leaping
zoetrope of shadows.  Their feet, though beating the ground
furiously, made but a faint noise; for they had kicked away their
boots in the wood; their long, antiquated weapons made no jingle
or clatter, for they had strapped them across their backs like
guitars.  They had all the advantages that invisibility and
silence can add to speed.

A hundred and fifty yards behind them down the centre of the
empty road the first of their pursuers came pounding and
panting--a fat but powerful policeman who had distanced all the
rest.  He came on at a splendid pace for so portly a figure; but,
like all heavy bodies in motion, he gave the impression that it
would be easier for him to increase his pace than to slacken it
suddenly.  Nothing short of a brick wall could have abruptly
brought him up.  Turnbull turned his head slightly and found
breath to say something to MacIan.  MacIan nodded.

Pursuer and pursued were fixed in their distance as they fled,
for some quarter of a mile, when they came to a place where two
or three of the trees grew twistedly together, making a special
obscurity.  Past this place the pursuing policeman went thundering
without thought or hesitation.  But he was pursuing his shadow or
the wind; for Turnbull had put one foot in a crack of the tree
and gone up it as quickly and softly as a cat.  Somewhat more
laboriously but in equal silence the long legs of the Highlander
had followed; and crouching in crucial silence in the cloud of
leaves, they saw the whole posse of their pursuers go by and die
into the dust and mists of the distance.

The white vapour lay, as it often does, in lean and palpable
layers; and even the head of the tree was above it in the
half-daylight, like a green ship swinging on a sea of foam.  But
higher yet behind them, and readier to catch the first coming of
the sun, ran the rampart of the top of the wall, which in their
excitement of escape looked at once indispensable and
unattainable, like the wall of heaven.  Here, however, it was
MacIan's turn to have the advantage; for, though less
light-limbed and feline, he was longer and stronger in the arms.
In two seconds he had tugged up his chin over the wall like a
horizontal bar; the next he sat astride of it, like a horse of
stone.  With his assistance Turnbull vaulted to the same perch,
and the two began cautiously to shift along the wall in the
direction by which they had come, doubling on their tracks to
throw off the last pursuit.  MacIan could not rid himself of the
fancy of bestriding a steed; the long, grey coping of the wall
shot out in front of him, like the long, grey neck of some
nightmare Rosinante.  He had the quaint thought that he and
Turnbull were two knights on one steed on the old shield of the
Templars.

The nightmare of the stone horse was increased by the white fog,
which seemed thicker inside the wall than outside.  They could
make nothing of the enclosure upon which they were partial
trespassers, except that the green and crooked branches of a big
apple-tree came crawling at them out of the mist, like the
tentacles of some green cuttlefish.  Anything would serve,
however, that was likely to confuse their trail, so they both
decided without need of words to use this tree also as a
ladder--a ladder of descent.  When they dropped from the lowest
branch to the ground their stockinged feet felt hard gravel
beneath them.

They had alighted in the middle of a very broad garden path, and
the clearing mist permitted them to see the edge of a
well-clipped lawn.  Though the white vapour was still a veil, it
was like the gauzy veil of a transformation scene in a pantomime;
for through it there glowed shapeless masses of colour, masses
which might be clouds of sunrise or mosaics of gold and crimson,
or ladies robed in ruby and emerald draperies.  As it thinned yet
farther they saw that it was only flowers; but flowers in such
insolent mass and magnificence as can seldom be seen out of the
tropics.  Purple and crimson rhododendrons rose arrogantly, like
rampant heraldic animals against their burning background of
laburnum gold.  The roses were red hot; the clematis was, so to
speak, blue hot.  And yet the mere whiteness of the syringa seemed
the most violent colour of all.  As the golden sunlight gradually
conquered the mists, it had really something of the sensational
sweetness of the slow opening of the gates of Eden.  MacIan, whose
mind was always haunted with such seraphic or titanic parallels,
made some such remark to his companion.  But Turnbull only cursed
and said that it was the back garden of some damnable rich man.

When the last haze had faded from the ordered paths, the open
lawns, and the flaming flower-beds, the two realized, not without
an abrupt re-examination of their position, that they were not
alone in the garden.

Down the centre of the central garden path, preceded by a blue
cloud from a cigarette, was walking a gentleman who evidently
understood all the relish of a garden in the very early morning.
He was a slim yet satisfied figure, clad in a suit of pale-grey
tweed, so subdued that the pattern was imperceptible--a costume
that was casual but not by any means careless.  His face, which
was reflective and somewhat over-refined, was the face of a quite
elderly man, though his stringy hair and moustache were still
quite yellow.  A double eye-glass, with a broad, black ribbon,
drooped from his aquiline nose, and he smiled, as he communed
with himself, with a self-content which was rare and almost
irritating.  The straw panama on his head was many shades shabbier
than his clothes, as if he had caught it up by accident.

It needed the full shock of the huge shadow of MacIan, falling
across his sunlit path, to rouse him from his smiling reverie.
When this had fallen on him he lifted his head a little and
blinked at the intruders with short-sighted benevolence, but with
far less surprise than might have been expected.  He was a
gentleman; that is, he had social presence of mind, whether for
kindness or for insolence.

"Can I do anything for you?" he said, at last.

MacIan bowed.  "You can extend to us your pardon," he said, for he
also came of a whole race of gentlemen--of gentlemen without
shirts to their backs.  "I am afraid we are trespassing.  We have
just come over the wall."

"Over the wall?" repeated the smiling old gentleman, still
without letting his surprise come uppermost.

"I suppose I am not wrong, sir," continued MacIan, "in supposing
that these grounds inside the wall belong to you?"

The man in the panama looked at the ground and smoked
thoughtfully for a few moments, after which he said, with a sort
of matured conviction:

"Yes, certainly; the grounds inside the wall really belong to me,
and the grounds outside the wall, too."

"A large proprietor, I imagine," said Turnbull, with a truculent
eye.

"Yes," answered the old gentleman, looking at him with a steady
smile.  "A large proprietor."

Turnbull's eye grew even more offensive, and he began biting his
red beard; but MacIan seemed to recognize a type with which he
could deal and continued quite easily:

"I am sure that a man like you will not need to be told that one
sees and does a good many things that do not get into the
newspapers.  Things which, on the whole, had better not get into
the newspapers."

The smile of the large proprietor broadened for a moment under
his loose, light moustache, and the other continued with
increased confidence:

"One sometimes wants to have it out with another man.  The police
won't allow it in the streets--and then there's the County
Council--and in the fields even nothing's allowed but posters of
pills.  But in a gentleman's garden, now----"

The strange gentleman smiled again and said, easily enough: "Do
you want to fight?  What do you want to fight about?"

MacIan had understood his man pretty well up to that point; an
instinct common to all men with the aristocratic tradition of
Europe had guided him.  He knew that the kind of man who in his
own back garden wears good clothes and spoils them with a bad hat
is not the kind of man who has an abstract horror of illegal
actions of violence or the evasion of the police.  But a man may
understand ragging and yet be very far from understanding
religious ragging.  This seeming host of theirs might comprehend a
quarrel of husband and lover or a difficulty at cards or even
escape from a pursuing tailor; but it still remained doubtful
whether he would feel the earth fail under him in that earthquake
instant when the Virgin is compared to a goddess of Mesopotamia.
Even MacIan, therefore (whose tact was far from being his strong
point), felt the necessity for some compromise in the mode of
approach.  At last he said, and even then with hesitation:

"We are fighting about God; there can be nothing so important as
that."

The tilted eye-glasses of the old gentleman fell abruptly from
his nose, and he thrust his aristocratic chin so far forward that
his lean neck seemed to shoot out longer like a telescope.

"About God?" he queried, in a key completely new.

"Look here!" cried Turnbull, taking his turn roughly, "I'll tell
you what it's all about.  I think that there's no God.  I take it
that it's nobody's business but mine--or God's, if there is one.
This young gentleman from the Highlands happens to think that
it's his business.  In consequence, he first takes a walking-stick
and smashes my shop; then he takes the same walking-stick and
tries to smash me.  To this I naturally object.  I suggest that if
it comes to that we should both have sticks.  He improves on the
suggestion and proposes that we should both have steel-pointed
sticks.  The police (with characteristic unreasonableness) will
not accept either of our proposals; the result is that we run
about dodging the police and have jumped over our garden wall
into your magnificent garden to throw ourselves on your
magnificent hospitality."

The face of the old gentleman had grown redder and redder during
this address, but it was still smiling; and when he broke out it
was with a kind of guffaw.

"So you really want to fight with drawn swords in my garden," he
asked, "about whether there is really a God?"

"Why not?" said MacIan, with his simple monstrosity of speech;
"all man's worship began when the Garden of Eden was founded."

"Yes, by----!" said Turnbull, with an oath, "and ended when the
Zoological Gardens were founded."

"In this garden!  In my presence!" cried the stranger, stamping up
and down the gravel and choking with laughter," whether there is
a God!"  And he went stamping up and down the garden, making it
echo with his unintelligible laughter.  Then he came back to them
more composed and wiping his eyes.

"Why, how small the world is!" he cried at last.  "I can settle
the whole matter.  Why, I am God!"

And he suddenly began to kick and wave his well-clad legs about
the lawn.

"You are what?" repeated Turnbull, in a tone which is beyond
description.

"Why, God, of course!" answered the other, thoroughly amused.
"How funny it is to think that you have tumbled over a garden
wall and fallen exactly on the right person!  You might have gone
floundering about in all sorts of churches and chapels and
colleges and schools of philosophy looking for some evidence of
the existence of God.  Why, there is no evidence, except seeing
him.  And now you've seen him.  You've seen him dance!"

And the obliging old gentleman instantly stood on one leg without
relaxing at all the grave and cultured benignity of his
expression.

"I understood that this garden----" began the bewildered MacIan.

"Quite so!  Quite so!" said the man on one leg, nodding gravely.
"I said this garden belonged to me and the land outside it.  So
they do.  So does the country beyond that and the sea beyond that
and all the rest of the earth.  So does the moon.  So do the sun
and stars."  And he added, with a smile of apology: "You see, I'm
God."

Turnbull and MacIan looked at him for one moment with a sort of
notion that perhaps he was not too old to be merely playing the
fool.  But after staring steadily for an instant Turnbull saw the
hard and horrible earnestness in the man's eyes behind all his
empty animation.  Then Turnbull looked very gravely at the strict
gravel walls and the gay flower-beds and the long rectangular
red-brick building, which the mist had left evident beyond them.
Then he looked at MacIan.

Almost at the same moment another man came walking quickly round
the regal clump of rhododendrons.  He had the look of a prosperous
banker, wore a good tall silk hat, was almost stout enough to
burst the buttons of a fine frock-coat; but he was talking to
himself, and one of his elbows had a singular outward jerk as he
went by.



XIV. A MUSEUM OF SOULS

The man with the good hat and the jumping elbow went by very
quickly; yet the man with the bad hat, who thought he was God,
overtook him.  He ran after him and jumped over a bed of geraniums
to catch him.

"I beg your Majesty's pardon," he said, with mock humility, "but
here is a quarrel which you ought really to judge."

Then as he led the heavy, silk-hatted man back towards the group,
he caught MacIan's ear in order to whisper: "This poor gentleman
is mad; he thinks he is Edward VII."  At this the self-appointed
Creator slightly winked.  "Of course you won't trust him much;
come to me for everything.  But in my position one has to meet so
many people.  One has to be broadminded."

The big banker in the black frock-coat and hat was standing quite
grave and dignified on the lawn, save for his slight twitch of
one limb, and he did not seem by any means unworthy of the part
which the other promptly forced upon him.

"My dear fellow," said the man in the straw hat, "these two
gentlemen are going to fight a duel of the utmost importance.
Your own royal position and my much humbler one surely indicate
us as the proper seconds.  Seconds--yes, seconds----" and here
the speaker was once more shaken with his old malady of
laughter.

"Yes, you and I are both seconds--and these two gentlemen can
obviously fight in front of us.  You, he-he, are the king.  I am
God; really, they could hardly have better supporters.  They have
come to the right place."

Then Turnbull, who had been staring with a frown at the fresh
turf, burst out with a rather bitter laugh and cried, throwing
his red head in the air:

"Yes, by God, MacIan, I think we have come to the right place!"
And MacIan answered, with an adamantine stupidity:

"Any place is the right place where they will let us do it."

There was a long stillness, and their eyes involuntarily took in
the landscape, as they had taken in all the landscapes of their
everlasting combat; the bright, square garden behind the shop;
the whole lift and leaning of the side of Hampstead Heath; the
little garden of the decadent choked with flowers; the square of
sand beside the sea at sunrise.  They both felt at the same moment
all the breadth and blossoming beauty of that paradise, the
coloured trees, the natural and restful nooks and also the great
wall of stone--more awful than the wall of China--from which no
flesh could flee.

Turnbull was moodily balancing his sword in his hand as the other
spoke; then he started, for a mouth whispered quite close to his
ear.  With a softness incredible in any cat, the huge, heavy man
in the black hat and frock-coat had crept across the lawn from
his own side and was saying in his ear: "Don't trust that second
of yours.  He's mad and not so mad, either; for he frightfully
cunning and sharp.  Don't believe the story he tells you about why
I hate him.  I know the story he'll tell; I overheard it when the
housekeeper was talking to the postman.  It's too long to talk
about now, and I expect we're watched, but----"

Something in Turnbull made him want suddenly to be sick on the
grass; the mere healthy and heathen horror of the unclean; the
mere inhumane hatred of the inhuman state of madness.  He seemed
to hear all round him the hateful whispers of that place,
innumerable as leaves whispering in the wind, and each of them
telling eagerly some evil that had not happened or some terrific
secret which was not true.  All the rationalist and plain man
revolted within him against bowing down for a moment in that
forest of deception and egotistical darkness.  He wanted to blow
up that palace of delusions with dynamite; and in some wild way,
which I will not defend, he tried to do it.

He looked across at MacIan and said: "Oh, I can't stand this!"

"Can't stand what?" asked his opponent, eyeing him doubtfully.

"Shall we say the atmosphere?" replied Turnbull; "one can't use
uncivil expressions even to a--deity.  The fact is, I don't like
having God for my second."

"Sir!" said that being in a state of great offence, "in my
position I am not used to having my favours refused.  Do you know
who I am?"

The editor of _The Atheist_ turned upon him like one who has lost
all patience, and exploded: "Yes, you are God, aren't you?" he
said, abruptly, "why do we have two sets of teeth?"

"Teeth?" spluttered the genteel lunatic; "teeth?"

"Yes," cried Turnbull, advancing on him swiftly and with animated
gestures, "why does teething hurt?  Why do growing pains hurt?  Why
are measles catching?  Why does a rose have thorns?  Why do
rhinoceroses have horns?  Why is the horn on the top of the nose?
Why haven't I a horn on the top of my nose, eh?"  And he struck
the bridge of his nose smartly with his forefinger to indicate
the place of the omission and then wagged the finger menacingly
at the Creator.

"I've often wanted to meet you," he resumed, sternly, after a
pause, "to hold you accountable for all the idiocy and cruelty of
this muddled and meaningless world of yours.  You make a hundred
seeds and only one bears fruit.  You make a million worlds and
only one seems inhabited.  What do you mean by it, eh?  What do you
mean by it?"

The unhappy lunatic had fallen back before this quite novel form
of attack, and lifted his burnt-out cigarette almost like one
warding off a blow.  Turnbull went on like a torrent.

"A man died yesterday in Ealing.  You murdered him.  A girl had the
toothache in Croydon.  You gave it her.  Fifty sailors were drowned
off Selsey Bill.  You scuttled their ship.  What have you got to
say for yourself, eh?"

The representative of omnipotence looked as if he had left most
of these things to his subordinates; he passed a hand over his
wrinkling brow and said in a voice much saner than any he had yet
used:

"Well, if you dislike my assistance, of course--perhaps the other
gentleman----"

"The other gentleman," cried Turnbull, scornfully, "is a
submissive and loyal and obedient gentleman.  He likes the people
who wear crowns, whether of diamonds or of stars.  He believes in
the divine right of kings, and it is appropriate enough that he
should have the king for his second.  But it is not appropriate to
me that I should have God for my second.  God is not good enough.
I dislike and I deny the divine right of kings.  But I dislike
more and I deny more the divine right of divinity."

Then after a pause in which he swallowed his passion, he said to
MacIan: "You have got the right second, anyhow."

The Highlander did not answer, but stood as if thunderstruck with
one long and heavy thought.  Then at last he turned abruptly to
his second in the silk hat and said: "Who are you?"

The man in the silk hat blinked and bridled in affected surprise,
like one who was in truth accustomed to be doubted.

"I am King Edward VII," he said, with shaky arrogance.  "Do you
doubt my word?"

"I do not doubt it in the least," answered MacIan.

"Then, why," said the large man in the silk hat, trembling from
head to foot, "why do you wear your hat before the king?"

"Why should I take it off," retorted MacIan, with equal heat,
"before a usurper?"

Turnbull swung round on his heel.  "Well, really," he said, "I
thought at least you were a loyal subject."

"I am the only loyal subject," answered the Gael.  "For nearly
thirty years I have walked these islands and have not found
another."

"You are always hard to follow," remarked Turnbull, genially,
"and sometimes so much so as to be hardly worth following."

"I alone am loyal," insisted MacIan; "for I alone am in
rebellion.  I am ready at any instant to restore the Stuarts.  I
am ready at any instant to defy the Hanoverian brood--and I defy
it now even when face to face with the actual ruler of the
enormous British Empire!"

And folding his arms and throwing back his lean, hawklike face,
he haughtily confronted the man with the formal frock-coat and
the eccentric elbow.

"What right had you stunted German squires," he cried, "to
interfere in a quarrel between Scotch and English and Irish
gentlemen?  Who made you, whose fathers could not splutter English
while they walked in Whitehall, who made you the judge between
the republic of Sidney and the monarchy of Montrose?  What had
your sires to do with England that they should have the foul
offering of the blood of Derwentwater and the heart of Jimmy
Dawson?  Where are the corpses of Culloden?  Where is the blood of
Lochiel?"  MacIan advanced upon his opponent with a bony and
pointed finger, as if indicating the exact pocket in which the
blood of that Cameron was probably kept; and Edward VII fell back
a few paces in considerable confusion.

"What good have you ever done to us?" he continued in harsher and
harsher accents, forcing the other back towards the flower-beds.
"What good have you ever done, you race of German sausages?  Yards
of barbarian etiquette, to throttle the freedom of aristocracy!
Gas of northern metaphysics to blow up Broad Church bishops like
balloons.  Bad pictures and bad manners and pantheism and the
Albert Memorial.  Go back to Hanover, you humbug?  Go to----"

Before the end of this tirade the arrogance of the monarch had
entirely given way; he had fairly turned tail and was trundling
away down the path.  MacIan strode after him still preaching and
flourishing his large, lean hands.  The other two remained in the
centre of the lawn--Turnbull in convulsions of laughter, the
lunatic in convulsions of disgust.  Almost at the same moment a
third figure came stepping swiftly across the lawn.

The advancing figure walked with a stoop, and yet somehow flung
his forked and narrow beard forward.  That carefully cut and
pointed yellow beard was, indeed, the most emphatic thing about
him.  When he clasped his hands behind him, under the tails of his
coat, he would wag his beard at a man like a big forefinger.  It
performed almost all his gestures; it was more important than the
glittering eye-glasses through which he looked or the beautiful
bleating voice in which he spoke.  His face and neck were of a
lusty red, but lean and stringy; he always wore his expensive
gold-rim eye-glasses slightly askew upon his aquiline nose; and
he always showed two gleaming foreteeth under his moustache, in a
smile so perpetual as to earn the reputation of a sneer.  But for
the crooked glasses his dress was always exquisite; and but for
the smile he was perfectly and perennially depressed.

"Don't you think," said the new-comer, with a sort of
supercilious entreaty, "that we had better all come into
breakfast?  It is such a mistake to wait for breakfast.  It spoils
one's temper so much."

"Quite so," replied Turnbull, seriously.

"There seems almost to have been a little quarrelling here," said
the man with the goatish beard.

"It is rather a long story," said Turnbull, smiling.  "Originally,
it might be called a phase in the quarrel between science and
religion."

The new-comer started slightly, and Turnbull replied to the
question on his face.

"Oh, yes," he said, "I am science!"

"I congratulate you heartily," answered the other, "I am Doctor
Quayle."

Turnbull's eyes did not move, but he realized that the man in the
panama hat had lost all his ease of a landed proprietor and had
withdrawn to a distance of thirty yards, where he stood glaring
with all the contraction of fear and hatred that can stiffen a
cat.

           *                    *                   *

MacIan was sitting somewhat disconsolately on a stump of tree,
his large black head half buried in his large brown hands, when
Turnbull strode up to him chewing a cigarette.  He did not look
up, but his comrade and enemy addressed him like one who must
free himself of his feelings.

"Well, I hope, at any rate," he said, "that you like your
precious religion now.  I hope you like the society of this poor
devil whom your damned tracts and hymns and priests have driven
out of his wits.  Five men in this place, they tell me, five men
in this place who might have been fathers of families, and every
one of them thinks he is God the Father.  Oh! you may talk about
the ugliness of science, but there is no one here who thinks he
is Protoplasm."

"They naturally prefer a bright part," said MacIan, wearily.
"Protoplasm is not worth going mad about."

"At least," said Turnbull, savagely, "it was your Jesus Christ
who started all this bosh about being God."

For one instant MacIan opened the eyes of battle; then his
tightened lips took a crooked smile and he said, quite calmly:

"No, the idea is older; it was Satan who first said that he was
God."

"Then, what," asked Turnbull, very slowly, as he softly picked a
flower, "what is the difference between Christ and Satan?"

"It is quite simple," replied the Highlander.  "Christ descended
into hell; Satan fell into it."

"Does it make much odds?" asked the free-thinker.

"It makes all the odds," said the other.  "One of them wanted to
go up and went down; the other wanted to go down and went up.  A
god can be humble, a devil can only be humbled."

"Why are you always wanting to humble a man?" asked Turnbull,
knitting his brows.  "It affects me as ungenerous."

"Why were you wanting to humble a god when you found him in this
garden?" asked MacIan.

"That was an extreme case of impudence," said Turnbull.

"Granting the man his almighty pretensions, I think he was very
modest," said MacIan.  "It is we who are arrogant, who know we are
only men.  The ordinary man in the street is more of a monster
than that poor fellow; for the man in the street treats himself
as God Almighty when he knows he isn't.  He expects the universe
to turn round him, though he knows he isn't the centre."

"Well," said Turnbull, sitting down on the grass, "this is a
digression, anyhow.  What I want to point out is, that your faith
does end in asylums and my science doesn't."

"Doesn't it, by George!" cried MacIan, scornfully.  "There are a
few men here who are mad on God and a few who are mad on the
Bible.  But I bet there are many more who are simply mad on
madness."

"Do you really believe it?" asked the other.

"Scores of them, I should say," answered MacIan.  "Fellows who
have read medical books or fellows whose fathers and uncles had
something hereditary in their heads--the whole air they breathe
is mad."

"All the same," said Turnbull, shrewdly, "I bet you haven't found
a madman of that sort."

"I bet I have!" cried Evan, with unusual animation.  "I've been
walking about the garden talking to a poor chap all the morning.
He's simply been broken down and driven raving by your damned
science.  Talk about believing one is God--why, it's quite an old,
comfortable, fireside fancy compared with the sort of things this
fellow believes.  He believes that there is a God, but that he is
better than God.  He says God will be afraid to face him.  He says
one is always progressing beyond the best.  He put his arm in mine
and whispered in my ear, as if it were the apocalypse: 'Never
trust a God that you can't improve on.'"

"What can he have meant?" said the atheist, with all his logic
awake.  "Obviously one should not trust any God that one can
improve on."

"It is the way he talks," said MacIan, almost indifferently; "but
he says rummier things than that.  He says that a man's doctor
ought to decide what woman he marries; and he says that children
ought not to be brought up by their parents, because a physical
partiality will then distort the judgement of the educator."

"Oh, dear!" said Turnbull, laughing, "you have certainly come
across a pretty bad case, and incidentally proved your own.  I
suppose some men do lose their wits through science as through
love and other good things."

"And he says," went on MacIan, monotonously, "that he cannot see
why anyone should suppose that a triangle is a three-sided
figure.  He says that on some higher plane----"

Turnbull leapt to his feet as by an electric shock.  "I never
could have believed," he cried, "that you had humour enough to
tell a lie.  You've gone a bit too far, old man, with your little
joke.  Even in a lunatic asylum there can't be anybody who, having
thought about the matter, thinks that a triangle has not got
three sides.  If he exists he must be a new era in human
psychology.  But he doesn't exist."

"I will go and fetch him," said MacIan, calmly; "I left the poor
fellow wandering about by the nasturtium bed."

MacIan vanished, and in a few moments returned, trailing with him
his own discovery among lunatics, who was a slender man with a
fixed smile and an unfixed and rolling head.  He had a goatlike
beard just long enough to be shaken in a strong wind.  Turnbull
sprang to his feet and was like one who is speechless through
choking a sudden shout of laughter.

"Why, you great donkey," he shouted, in an ear-shattering
whisper, "that's not one of the patients at all.  That's one of
the doctors."

Evan looked back at the leering head with the long-pointed beard
and repeated the word inquiringly: "One of the doctors?"

"Oh, you know what I mean," said Turnbull, impatiently.  "The
medical authorities of the place."

Evan was still staring back curiously at the beaming and bearded
creature behind him.

"The mad doctors," said Turnbull, shortly.

"Quite so," said MacIan.

After a rather restless silence Turnbull plucked MacIan by the
elbow and pulled him aside.

"For goodness sake," he said, "don't offend this fellow; he may
be as mad as ten hatters, if you like, but he has us between his
finger and thumb.  This is the very time he appointed to talk with
us about our--well, our exeat."

"But what can it matter?" asked the wondering MacIan.  "He can't
keep us in the asylum.  We're not mad."

"Jackass!" said Turnbull, heartily, "of course we're not mad.  Of
course, if we are medically examined and the thing is thrashed
out, they will find we are not mad.  But don't you see that if the
thing is thrashed out it will mean letters to this reference and
telegrams to that; and at the first word of who we are, we shall
be taken out of a madhouse, where we may smoke, to a jail, where
we mayn't.  No, if we manage this very quietly, he may merely let
us out at the front door as stray revellers.  If there's half an
hour of inquiry, we are cooked."

MacIan looked at the grass frowningly for a few seconds, and then
said in a new, small and childish voice: "I am awfully stupid,
Mr. Turnbull; you must be patient with me."

Turnbull caught Evan's elbow again with quite another gesture.
"Come," he cried, with the harsh voice of one who hides emotion,
"come and let us be tactful in chorus."

The doctor with the pointed beard was already slanting it forward
at a more than usually acute angle, with the smile that expressed
expectancy.

"I hope I do not hurry you, gentlemen," he said, with the
faintest suggestion of a sneer at their hurried consultation,
"but I believe you wanted to see me at half past eleven."

"I am most awfully sorry, Doctor," said Turnbull, with ready
amiability; "I never meant to keep you waiting; but the silly
accident that has landed us in your garden may have some rather
serious consequences to our friends elsewhere, and my friend here
was just drawing my attention to some of them."

"Quite so!  Quite so!" said the doctor, hurriedly.  "If you really
want to put anything before me, I can give you a few moments in
my consulting-room."

He led them rapidly into a small but imposing apartment, which
seemed to be built and furnished entirely in red-varnished wood.
There was one desk occupied with carefully docketed papers; and
there were several chairs of the red-varnished wood--though of
different shape.  All along the wall ran something that might have
been a bookcase, only that it was not filled with books, but with
flat, oblong slabs or cases of the same polished dark-red
consistency.  What those flat wooden cases were they could form no
conception.

The doctor sat down with a polite impatience on his professional
perch; MacIan remained standing, but Turnbull threw himself
almost with luxury into a hard wooden arm-chair.

"This is a most absurd business, Doctor," he said, "and I am
ashamed to take up the time of busy professional men with such
pranks from outside.  The plain fact is, that he and I and a pack
of silly men and girls have organized a game across this part of
the country--a sort of combination of hare and hounds and hide
and seek--I dare say you've heard of it.  We are the hares, and,
seeing your high wall look so inviting, we tumbled over it, and
naturally were a little startled with what we found on the other
side."

"Quite so!" said the doctor, mildly.  "I can understand that you
were startled."

Turnbull had expected him to ask what place was the headquarters
of the new exhilarating game, and who were the male and female
enthusiasts who had brought it to such perfection; in fact,
Turnbull was busy making up these personal and topographical
particulars.  As the doctor did not ask the question, he grew
slightly uneasy, and risked the question: "I hope you will accept
my assurance that the thing was an accident and that no intrusion
was meant."

"Oh, yes, sir," replied the doctor, smiling, "I accept everything
that you say."

"In that case," said Turnbull, rising genially, "we must not
further interrupt your important duties.  I suppose there will be
someone to let us out?"

"No," said the doctor, still smiling steadily and pleasantly,
"there will be no one to let you out."

"Can we let ourselves out, then?" asked Turnbull, in some
surprise.

"Why, of course not," said the beaming scientist; "think how
dangerous that would be in a place like this."

"Then, how the devil are we to get out?" cried Turnbull, losing
his manners for the first time.

"It is a question of time, of receptivity, and treatment," said
the doctor, arching his eyebrows indifferently.  "I do not regard
either of your cases as incurable."

And with that the man of the world was struck dumb, and, as in
all intolerable moments, the word was with the unworldly.

MacIan took one stride to the table, leant across it, and said:
"We can't stop here, we're not mad people!"

"We don't use the crude phrase," said the doctor, smiling at his
patent-leather boots.

"But you _can't_ think us mad," thundered MacIan.  "You never saw
us before.  You know nothing about us.  You haven't even examined
us."

The doctor threw back his head and beard.  "Oh, yes," he said,
"very thoroughly."

"But you can't shut a man up on your mere impressions without
documents or certificates or anything?"

The doctor got languidly to his feet.  "Quite so," he said.  "You
certainly ought to see the documents."

He went across to the curious mock book-shelves and took down one
of the flat mahogany cases.  This he opened with a curious key at
his watch-chain, and laying back a flap revealed a quire of
foolscap covered with close but quite clear writing.  The first
three words were in such large copy-book hand that they caught
the eye even at a distance.  They were: "MacIan, Evan Stuart."

Evan bent his angry eagle face over it; yet something blurred it
and he could never swear he saw it distinctly.  He saw something
that began: "Prenatal influences predisposing to mania.
Grandfather believed in return of the Stuarts.  Mother carried
bone of St. Eulalia with which she touched children in sickness.
Marked religious mania at early age----"

Evan fell back and fought for his speech.  "Oh!" he burst out at
last.  "Oh! if all this world I have walked in had been as sane as
my mother was."

Then he compressed his temples with his hands, as if to crush
them.  And then lifted suddenly a face that looked fresh and
young, as if he had dipped and washed it in some holy well.

"Very well," he cried; "I will take the sour with the sweet.  I
will pay the penalty of having enjoyed God in this monstrous
modern earth that cannot enjoy man or beast.  I will die happy in
your madhouse, only because I know what I know.  Let it be
granted, then--MacIan is a mystic; MacIan is a maniac.  But this
honest shopkeeper and editor whom I have dragged on my inhuman
escapades, you cannot keep him.  He will go free, thank God, he is
not down in any damned document.  His ancestor, I am certain, did
not die at Culloden.  His mother, I swear, had no relics.  Let my
friend out of your front door, and as for me----"

The doctor had already gone across to the laden shelves, and
after a few minutes' short-sighted peering, had pulled down
another parallelogram of dark-red wood.

This also he unlocked on the table, and with the same unerring
egotistic eye on of the company saw the words, written in large
letters: "Turnbull, James."

Hitherto Turnbull himself had somewhat scornfully surrendered his
part in the whole business; but he was too honest and unaffected
not to start at his own name.  After the name, the inscription
appeared to run: "Unique case of Eleutheromania.  Parentage, as so
often in such cases, prosaic and healthy.  Eleutheromaniac signs
occurred early, however, leading him to attach himself to the
individualist Bradlaugh.  Recent outbreak of pure anarchy----"

Turnbull slammed the case to, almost smashing it, and said with a
burst of savage laughter: "Oh! come along, MacIan; I don't care
so much, even about getting out of the madhouse, if only we get
out of this room.  You were right enough, MacIan, when you spoke
about--about mad doctors."

Somehow they found themselves outside in the cool, green garden,
and then, after a stunned silence, Turnbull said: "There is one
thing that was puzzling me all the time, and I understand it
now."

"What do you mean?" asked Evan.

"No man by will or wit," answered Turnbull, "can get out of this
garden; and yet we got into it merely by jumping over a garden
wall.  The whole thing explains itself easily enough.  That
undefended wall was an open trap.  It was a trap laid for two
celebrated lunatics.  They saw us get in right enough.  And they
will see that we do not get out."

Evan gazed at the garden wall, gravely for more than a minute,
and then he nodded without a word.



XV. THE DREAM OF MACIAN

The system of espionage in the asylum was so effective and
complete that in practice the patients could often enjoy a sense
of almost complete solitude.  They could stray up so near to the
wall in an apparently unwatched garden as to find it easy to jump
over it.  They would only have found the error of their
calculations if they had tried to jump.

Under this insulting liberty, in this artificial loneliness, Evan
MacIan was in the habit of creeping out into the garden after
dark--especially upon moonlight nights.  The moon, indeed, was for
him always a positive magnet in a manner somewhat hard to explain
to those of a robuster attitude.  Evidently, Apollo is to the full
as poetical as Diana; but it is not a question of poetry in the
matured and intellectual sense of the word.  It is a question of a
certain solid and childish fancy.  The sun is in the strict and
literal sense invisible; that is to say, that by our bodily eyes
it cannot properly be seen.  But the moon is a much simpler thing;
a naked and nursery sort of thing.  It hangs in the sky quite
solid and quite silver and quite useless; it is one huge
celestial snowball.  It was at least some such infantile facts and
fancies which led Evan again and again during his dehumanized
imprisonment to go out as if to shoot the moon.

He was out in the garden on one such luminous and ghostly night,
when the steady moonshine toned down all the colours of the
garden until almost the strongest tints to be seen were the
strong soft blue of the sky and the large lemon moon.  He was
walking with his face turned up to it in that rather half-witted
fashion which might have excused the error of his keepers; and as
he gazed he became aware of something little and lustrous flying
close to the lustrous orb, like a bright chip knocked off the
moon.  At first he thought it was a mere sparkle or refraction in
his own eyesight; he blinked and cleared his eyes.  Then he
thought it was a falling star; only it did not fall.  It jerked
awkwardly up and down in a way unknown among meteors and
strangely reminiscent of the works of man.  The next moment the
thing drove right across the moon, and from being silver upon
blue, suddenly became black upon silver; then although it passed
the field of light in a flash its outline was unmistakable though
eccentric.  It was a flying ship.

The vessel took one long and sweeping curve across the sky and
came nearer and nearer to MacIan, like a steam-engine coming
round a bend.  It was of pure white steel, and in the moon it
gleamed like the armour of Sir Galahad.  The simile of such
virginity is not inappropriate; for, as it grew larger and larger
and lower and lower, Evan saw that the only figure in it was
robed in white from head to foot and crowned with snow-white
hair, on which the moonshine lay like a benediction.  The figure
stood so still that he could easily have supposed it to be a
statue.  Indeed, he thought it was until it spoke.

"Evan," said the voice, and it spoke with the simple authority of
some forgotten father revisiting his children, "you have remained
here long enough, and your sword is wanted elsewhere."

"Wanted for what?" asked the young man, accepting the monstrous
event with a queer and clumsy naturalness; "what is my sword
wanted for?"

"For all that you hold dear," said the man standing in the
moonlight; "for the thrones of authority and for all ancient
loyalty to law."

Evan looked up at the lunar orb again as if in irrational
appeal--a moon calf bleating to his mother the moon.  But the face
of Luna seemed as witless as his own; there is no help in nature
against the supernatural; and he looked again at the tall marble
figure that might have been made out of solid moonlight.

Then he said in a loud voice: "Who are you?" and the next moment
was seized by a sort of choking terror lest his question should
be answered.  But the unknown preserved an impenetrable silence
for a long space and then only answered: "I must not say who I am
until the end of the world; but I may say what I am.  I am the
law."

And he lifted his head so that the moon smote full upon his
beautiful and ancient face.

The face was the face of a Greek god grown old, but not grown
either weak or ugly; there was nothing to break its regularity
except a rather long chin with a cleft in it, and this rather
added distinction than lessened beauty.  His strong, well-opened
eyes were very brilliant but quite colourless like steel.

MacIan was one of those to whom a reverence and self-submission
in ritual come quite easy, and are ordinary things.  It was not
artificial in him to bend slightly to this solemn apparition or
to lower his voice when he said: "Do you bring me some message?"

"I do bring you a message," answered the man of moon and marble.
"The king has returned."

Evan did not ask for or require any explanation.  "I suppose you
can take me to the war," he said, and the silent silver figure
only bowed its head again.  MacIan clambered into the silver boat,
and it rose upward to the stars.

To say that it rose to the stars is no mere metaphor, for the sky
had cleared to that occasional and astonishing transparency in
which one can see plainly both stars and moon.

As the white-robed figure went upward in his white chariot, he
said quite quietly to Evan: "There is an answer to all the folly
talked about equality.  Some stars are big and some small; some
stand still and some circle around them as they stand.  They can
be orderly, but they cannot be equal."

"They are all very beautiful," said Evan, as if in doubt.

"They are all beautiful," answered the other, "because each is in
his place and owns his superior.  And now England will be
beautiful after the same fashion.  The earth will be as beautiful
as the heavens, because our kings have come back to us."

"The Stuart----" began Evan, earnestly.

"Yes," answered the old man, "that which has returned is Stuart
and yet older than Stuart.  It is Capet and Plantagenet and
Pendragon.  It is all that good old time of which proverbs tell,
that golden reign of Saturn against which gods and men were
rebels.  It is all that was ever lost by insolence and overwhelmed
in rebellion.  It is your own forefather, MacIan with the broken
sword, bleeding without hope at Culloden.  It is Charles refusing
to answer the questions of the rebel court.  It is Mary of the
magic face confronting the gloomy and grasping peers and the
boorish moralities of Knox.  It is Richard, the last Plantagenet,
giving his crown to Bolingbroke as to a common brigand.  It is
Arthur, overwhelmed in Lyonesse by heathen armies and dying in
the mist, doubtful if ever he shall return."

"But now----" said Evan, in a low voice.

"But now!" said the old man; "he has returned."

"Is the war still raging?" asked MacIan.

"It rages like the pit itself beyond the sea whither I am taking
you," answered the other.  "But in England the king enjoys his own
again.  The people are once more taught and ruled as is best; they
are happy knights, happy squires, happy servants, happy serfs, if
you will; but free at last of that load of vexation and lonely
vanity which was called being a citizen."

"Is England, indeed, so secure?" asked Evan.

"Look out and see," said the guide.  "I fancy you have seen this
place before."

They were driving through the air towards one region of the sky
where the hollow of night seemed darkest and which was quite
without stars.  But against this black background there sprang up,
picked out in glittering silver, a dome and a cross.  It seemed
that it was really newly covered with silver, which in the strong
moonlight was like white flame.  But, however, covered or painted,
Evan had no difficult in knowing the place again.  He saw the
great thoroughfare that sloped upward to the base of its huge
pedestal of steps.  And he wondered whether the little shop was
still by the side of it and whether its window had been mended.

As the flying ship swept round the dome he observed other
alterations.  The dome had been redecorated so as to give it a
more solemn and somewhat more ecclesiastical note; the ball was
draped or destroyed, and round the gallery, under the cross, ran
what looked like a ring of silver statues, like the little leaden
images that stood round the hat of Louis XI.  Round the second
gallery, at the base of the dome, ran a second rank of such
images, and Evan thought there was another round the steps below.
When they came closer he saw that they were figures in complete
armour of steel or silver, each with a naked sword, point upward;
and then he saw one of the swords move.  These were not statues
but an armed order of chivalry thrown in three circles round the
cross.  MacIan drew in his breath, as children do at anything they
think utterly beautiful.  For he could imagine nothing that so
echoed his own visions of pontifical or chivalric art as this
white dome sitting like a vast silver tiara over London, ringed
with a triple crown of swords.

As they went sailing down Ludgate Hill, Evan saw that the state
of the streets fully answered his companion's claim about the
reintroduction of order.  All the old blackcoated bustle with its
cockney vivacity and vulgarity had disappeared.  Groups of
labourers, quietly but picturesquely clad, were passing up and
down in sufficiently large numbers; but it required but a few
mounted men to keep the streets in order.  The mounted men were
not common policemen, but knights with spurs and plume whose
smooth and splendid armour glittered like diamond rather than
steel.  Only in one place--at the corner of Bouverie Street--did
there appear to be a moment's confusion, and that was due to
hurry rather than resistance.  But one old grumbling man did not
get out of the way quick enough, and the man on horseback struck
him, not severely, across the shoulders with the flat of his
sword.

"The soldier had no business to do that," said MacIan, sharply.
"The old man was moving as quickly as he could."

"We attach great importance to discipline in the streets," said
the man in white, with a slight smile.

"Discipline is not so important as justice," said MacIan.

The other did not answer.

Then after a swift silence that took them out across St. James's
Park, he said: "The people must be taught to obey; they must
learn their own ignorance.  And I am not sure," he continued,
turning his back on Evan and looking out of the prow of the ship
into the darkness, "I am not sure that I agree with your little
maxim about justice.  Discipline for the whole society is surely
more important than justice to an individual."

Evan, who was also leaning over the edge, swung round with
startling suddenness and stared at the other's back.

"Discipline for society----" he repeated, very staccato, "more
important--justice to individual?"

Then after a long silence he called out: "Who and what are you?"

"I am an angel," said the white-robed figure, without turning
round.

"You are not a Catholic," said MacIan.

The other seemed to take no notice, but reverted to the main
topic.

"In our armies up in heaven we learn to put a wholesome fear into
subordinates."

MacIan sat craning his neck forward with an extraordinary and
unaccountable eagerness.

"Go on!" he cried, twisting and untwisting his long, bony
fingers, "go on!"

"Besides," continued he, in the prow, "you must allow for a
certain high spirit and haughtiness in the superior type."

"Go on!" said Evan, with burning eyes.

"Just as the sight of sin offends God," said the unknown, "so
does the sight of ugliness offend Apollo.  The beautiful and
princely must, of necessity, be impatient with the squalid
and----"

"Why, you great fool!" cried MacIan, rising to the top of his
tremendous stature, "did you think I would have doubted only for
that rap with a sword?  I know that noble orders have bad knights,
that good knights have bad tempers, that the Church has rough
priests and coarse cardinals; I have known it ever since I was
born.  You fool! you had only to say, 'Yes, it is rather a shame,'
and I should have forgotten the affair.  But I saw on your mouth
the twitch of your infernal sophistry; I knew that something was
wrong with you and your cathedrals.  Something is wrong;
everything is wrong.  You are not an angel.  That is not a church.
It is not the rightful king who has come home."

"That is unfortunate," said the other, in a quiet but hard voice,
"because you are going to see his Majesty."

"No," said MacIan, "I am going to jump over the side."

"Do you desire death?"

"No," said Evan, quite composedly, "I desire a miracle."

"From whom do you ask it?  To whom do you appeal?" said his
companion, sternly.  "You have betrayed the king, renounced his
cross on the cathedral, and insulted an archangel."

"I appeal to God," said Evan, and sprang up and stood upon the
edge of the swaying ship.

The being in the prow turned slowly round; he looked at Evan with
eyes which were like two suns, and put his hand to his mouth just
too late to hide an awful smile.

"And how do you know," he said, "how do you know that I am not
God?"

MacIan screamed.  "Ah!" he cried.  "Now I know who you really are.
You are not God.  You are not one of God's angels.  But you were
once."

The being's hand dropped from his mouth and Evan dropped out of
the car.



XVI. THE DREAM OF TURNBULL

Turnbull was walking rather rampantly up and down the garden on a
gusty evening chewing his cigar and in that mood when every man
suppresses an instinct to spit.  He was not, as a rule, a man much
acquainted with moods; and the storms and sunbursts of MacIan's
soul passed before him as an impressive but unmeaning panorama,
like the anarchy of Highland scenery.  Turnbull was one of those
men in whom a continuous appetite and industry of the intellect
leave the emotions very simple and steady.  His heart was in the
right place; but he was quite content to leave it there.  It was
his head that was his hobby.  His mornings and evenings were
marked not by impulses or thirsty desires, not by hope or by
heart-break; they were filled with the fallacies he had detected,
the problems he had made plain, the adverse theories he had
wrestled with and thrown, the grand generalizations he had
justified.  But even the cheerful inner life of a logician may be
upset by a lunatic asylum, to say nothing of whiffs of memory
from a lady in Jersey, and the little red-bearded man on this
windy evening was in a dangerous frame of mind.

Plain and positive as he was, the influence of earth and sky may
have been greater on him than he imagined; and the weather that
walked the world at that moment was as red and angry as Turnbull.
Long strips and swirls of tattered and tawny cloud were dragged
downward to the west exactly as torn red raiment would be
dragged.  And so strong and pitiless was the wind that it whipped
away fragments of red-flowering bushes or of copper beech, and
drove them also across the garden, a drift of red leaves, like
the leaves of autumn, as in parody of the red and driven rags of
cloud.

There was a sense in earth and heaven as of everything breaking
up, and all the revolutionist in Turnbull rejoiced that it was
breaking up.  The trees were breaking up under the wind, even in
the tall strength of their bloom: the clouds were breaking up and
losing even their large heraldic shapes.  Shards and shreds of
copper cloud split off continually and floated by themselves, and
for some reason the truculent eye of Turnbull was attracted to
one of these careering cloudlets, which seemed to him to career
in an exaggerated manner.  Also it kept its shape, which is
unusual with clouds shaken off; also its shape was of an odd
sort.

Turnbull continued to stare at it, and in a little time occurred
that crucial instant when a thing, however incredible, is
accepted as a fact.  The copper cloud was tumbling down towards
the earth, like some gigantic leaf from the copper beeches.  And
as it came nearer it was evident, first, that it was not a cloud,
and, second, that it was not itself of the colour of copper;
only, being burnished like a mirror, it had reflected the
red-brown colours of the burning clouds.  As the thing whirled
like a windswept leaf down towards the wall of the garden it was
clear that it was some sort of air-ship made of metal, and
slapping the air with big broad fins of steel.  When it came about
a hundred feet above the garden, a shaggy, lean figure leapt up
in it, almost black against the bronze and scarlet of the west,
and, flinging out a kind of hook or anchor, caught on to the
green apple-tree just under the wall; and from that fixed holding
ground the ship swung in the red tempest like a captive balloon.

While our friend stood frozen for an instant by his astonishment,
the queer figure in the airy car tipped the vehicle almost upside
down by leaping over the side of it, seemed to slide or drop down
the rope like a monkey, and alighted (with impossible precision
and placidity) seated on the edge of the wall, over which he
kicked and dangled his legs as he grinned at Turnbull.  The wind
roared in the trees yet more ruinous and desolate, the red tails
of the sunset were dragged downward like red dragons sucked down
to death, and still on the top of the asylum wall sat the
sinister figure with the grimace, swinging his feet in tune with
the tempest; while above him, at the end of its tossing or
tightened cord, the enormous iron air-ship floated as light and
as little noticed as a baby's balloon upon its string.

Turnbull's first movement after sixty motionless seconds was to
turn round and look at the large, luxuriant parallelogram of the
garden and the long, low rectangular building beyond.  There was
not a soul or a stir of life within sight.  And he had a quite
meaningless sensation, as if there never really had been any one
else there except he since the foundation of the world.

Stiffening in himself the masculine but mirthless courage of the
atheist, he drew a little nearer to the wall and, catching the
man at a slightly different angle of the evening light, could see
his face and figure quite plain.  Two facts about him stood out in
the picked colours of some piratical schoolboy's story.  The first
was that his lean brown body was bare to the belt of his loose
white trousers; the other that through hygiene, affectation, or
whatever other cause, he had a scarlet handkerchief tied tightly
but somewhat aslant across his brow.  After these two facts had
become emphatic, others appeared sufficiently important.  One was
that under the scarlet rag the hair was plentiful, but white as
with the last snows of mortality.  Another was that under the mop
of white and senile hair the face was strong, handsome, and
smiling, with a well-cut profile and a long cloven chin.  The
length of this lower part of the face and the strange cleft in it
(which gave the man, in quite another sense from the common one,
a double chin) faintly spoilt the claim of the face to absolute
regularity, but it greatly assisted it in wearing the expression
of half-smiling and half-sneering arrogance with which it was
staring at all the stones, all the flowers, but especially at the
solitary man.

"What do you want?" shouted Turnbull.

"I want you, Jimmy," said the eccentric man on the wall, and with
the very word he had let himself down with a leap on to the
centre of the lawn, where he bounded once literally like an
India-rubber ball and then stood grinning with his legs astride.
The only three facts that Turnbull could now add to his inventory
were that the man had an ugly-looking knife swinging at his
trousers belt, that his brown feet were as bare as his bronzed
trunk and arms, and that his eyes had a singular bleak brilliancy
which was of no particular colour.

"Excuse my not being in evening dress," said the newcomer with an
urbane smile.  "We scientific men, you know--I have to work my own
engines--electrical engineer--very hot work."

"Look here," said Turnbull, sturdily clenching his fists in his
trousers pockets, "I am bound to expect lunatics inside these
four walls; but I do bar their coming from outside, bang out of
the sunset clouds."

"And yet you came from the outside, too, Jim," said the stranger
in a voice almost affectionate.

"What do you want?" asked Turnbull, with an explosion of temper
as sudden as a pistol shot.

"I have already told you," said the man, lowering his voice and
speaking with evident sincerity; "I want you."

"What do you want with me?"

"I want exactly what you want," said the new-comer with a new
gravity.  "I want the Revolution."

Turnbull looked at the fire-swept sky and the wind-stricken
woodlands, and kept on repeating the word voicelessly to
himself--the word that did indeed so thoroughly express his mood
of rage as it had been among those red clouds and rocking
tree-tops.  "Revolution!" he said to himself.  "The
Revolution--yes, that is what I want right enough--anything, so
long as it is a Revolution."

To some cause he could never explain he found himself completing
the sentence on the top of the wall, having automatically
followed the stranger so far.  But when the stranger silently
indicated the rope that led to the machine, he found himself
pausing and saying: "I can't leave MacIan behind in this den."

"We are going to destroy the Pope and all the kings," said the
new-comer.  "Would it be wiser to take him with us?"

Somehow the muttering Turnbull found himself in the flying ship
also, and it swung up into the sunset.

"All the great rebels have been very little rebels," said the man
with the red scarf.  "They have been like fourth-form boys who
sometimes venture to hit a fifth-form boy.  That was all the worth
of their French Revolution and regicide.  The boys never really
dared to defy the schoolmaster."

"Whom do you mean by the schoolmaster?" asked Turnbull.

"You know whom I mean," answered the strange man, as he lay back
on cushions and looked up into the angry sky.

They seemed rising into stronger and stronger sunlight, as if it
were sunrise rather than sunset.  But when they looked down at the
earth they saw it growing darker and darker.  The lunatic asylum
in its large rectangular grounds spread below them in a
foreshortened and infantile plan, and looked for the first time
the grotesque thing that it was.  But the clear colours of the
plan were growing darker every moment.  The masses of rose or
rhododendron deepened from crimson to violet.  The maze of gravel
pathways faded from gold to brown.  By the time they had risen a
few hundred feet higher nothing could be seen of that darkening
landscape except the lines of lighted windows, each one of which,
at least, was the light of one lost intelligence.  But on them as
they swept upward better and braver winds seemed to blow, and on
them the ruby light of evening seemed struck, and splashed like
red spurts from the grapes of Dionysus.  Below them the fallen
lights were literally the fallen stars of servitude.  And above
them all the red and raging clouds were like the leaping flags of
liberty.

The man with the cloven chin seemed to have a singular power of
understanding thoughts; for, as Turnbull felt the whole universe
tilt and turn over his head, the stranger said exactly the right
thing.

"Doesn't it seem as if everything were being upset?" said he;
"and if once everything is upset, He will be upset on top of it."

Then, as Turnbull made no answer, his host continued:

"That is the really fine thing about space.  It is topsy-turvy.
You have only to climb far enough towards the morning star to
feel that you are coming down to it.  You have only to dive deep
enough into the abyss to feel that you are rising.  That is the
only glory of this universe--it is a giddy universe."

Then, as Turnbull was still silent, he added:

"The heavens are full of revolution--of the real sort of
revolution.  All the high things are sinking low and all the big
things looking small.  All the people who think they are aspiring
find they are falling head foremost.  And all the people who think
they are condescending find they are climbing up a precipice.
That is the intoxication of space.  That is the only joy of
eternity--doubt.  There is only one pleasure the angels can
possibly have in flying, and that is, that they do not know
whether they are on their head or their heels."

Then, finding his companion still mute, he fell himself into a
smiling and motionless meditation, at the end of which he said
suddenly:

"So MacIan converted you?"

Turnbull sprang up as if spurning the steel car from under his
feet.  "Converted me!" he cried.  "What the devil do you mean?  I
have known him for a month, and I have not retracted a
single----"

"This Catholicism is a curious thing," said the man of the cloven
chin in uninterrupted reflectiveness, leaning his elegant elbows
over the edge of the vessel; "it soaks and weakens men without
their knowing it, just as I fear it has soaked and weakened you."

Turnbull stood in an attitude which might well have meant
pitching the other man out of the flying ship.

"I am an atheist," he said, in a stifled voice.  "I have always
been an atheist.  I am still an atheist."  Then, addressing the
other's indolent and indifferent back, he cried: "In God's name
what do you mean?"

And the other answered without turning round:

"I mean nothing in God's name."

Turnbull spat over the edge of the car and fell back furiously
into his seat.

The other continued still unruffled, and staring over the edge
idly as an angler stares down at a stream.

"The truth is that we never thought that you could have been
caught," he said; "we counted on you as the one red-hot
revolutionary left in the world.  But, of course, these men like
MacIan are awfully clever, especially when they pretend to be
stupid."

Turnbull leapt up again in a living fury and cried: "What have I
got to do with MacIan?  I believe all I ever believed, and
disbelieve all I ever disbelieved.  What does all this mean, and
what do you want with me here?"

Then for the first time the other lifted himself from the edge of
the car and faced him.

"I have brought you here," he answered, "to take part in the last
war of the world."

"The last war!" repeated Turnbull, even in his dazed state a
little touchy about such a dogma; "how do you know it will be the
last?"

The man laid himself back in his reposeful attitude, and said:

"It is the last war, because if it does not cure the world for
ever, it will destroy it."

"What do you mean?"

"I only mean what you mean," answered the unknown in a temperate
voice.  "What was it that you always meant on those million and
one nights when you walked outside your Ludgate Hill shop and
shook your hand in the air?"

"Still I do not see," said Turnbull, stubbornly.

"You will soon," said the other, and abruptly bent downward one
iron handle of his huge machine.  The engine stopped, stooped, and
dived almost as deliberately as a man bathing; in their downward
rush they swept within fifty yards of a big bulk of stone that
Turnbull knew only too well.  The last red anger of the sunset was
ended; the dome of heaven was dark; the lanes of flaring light in
the streets below hardly lit up the base of the building.  But he
saw that it was St. Paul's Cathedral, and he saw that on the top
of it the ball was still standing erect, but the cross was
stricken and had fallen sideways.  Then only he cared to look down
into the streets, and saw that they were inflamed with uproar and
tossing passions.

"We arrive at a happy moment," said the man steering the ship.
"The insurgents are bombarding the city, and a cannon-ball has
just hit the cross.  Many of the insurgents are simple people, and
they naturally regard it as a happy omen."

"Quite so," said Turnbull, in a rather colourless voice.

"Yes," replied the other.  "I thought you would be glad to see
your prayer answered.  Of course I apologize for the word prayer."

"Don't mention it," said Turnbull.

The flying ship had come down upon a sort of curve, and was now
rising again.  The higher and higher it rose the broader and
broader became the scenes of flame and desolation underneath.

Ludgate Hill indeed had been an uncaptured and comparatively
quiet height, altered only by the startling coincidence of the
cross fallen awry.  All the other thoroughfares on all sides of
that hill were full of the pulsation and the pain of battle, full
of shaking torches and shouting faces.  When at length they had
risen high enough to have a bird's-eye view of the whole
campaign, Turnbull was already intoxicated.  He had smelt
gunpowder, which was the incense of his own revolutionary
religion.

"Have the people really risen?" he asked, breathlessly.  "What are
they fighting about?"

"The programme is rather elaborate," said his entertainer with
some indifference.  "I think Dr. Hertz drew it up."

Turnbull wrinkled his forehead.  "Are all the poor people with the
Revolution?" he asked.

The other shrugged his shoulders.  "All the instructed and
class-conscious part of them without exception," he replied.
"There were certainly a few districts; in fact, we are passing
over them just now----"

Turnbull looked down and saw that the polished car was literally
lit up from underneath by the far-flung fires from below.
Underneath whole squares and solid districts were in flames, like
prairies or forests on fire.

"Dr. Hertz has convinced everybody," said Turnbull's cicerone in
a smooth voice, "that nothing can really be done with the real
slums.  His celebrated maxim has been quite adopted.  I mean the
three celebrated sentences: 'No man should be unemployed.  Employ
the employables.  Destroy the unemployables.'"

There was a silence, and then Turnbull said in a rather strained
voice: "And do I understand that this good work is going on under
here?"

"Going on splendidly," replied his companion in the heartiest
voice.  "You see, these people were much too tired and weak even
to join the social war.  They were a definite hindrance to it."

"And so you are simply burning them out?"

"It _does_ seem absurdly simple," said the man, with a beaming
smile, "when one thinks of all the worry and talk about helping a
hopeless slave population, when the future obviously was only
crying to be rid of them.  There are happy babes unborn ready to
burst the doors when these drivellers are swept away."

"Will you permit me to say," said Turnbull, after reflection,
"that I don't like all this?"

"And will you permit me to say," said the other, with a snap,
"that I don't like Mr. Evan MacIan?"

Somewhat to the speaker's surprise this did not inflame the
sensitive sceptic; he had the air of thinking thoroughly, and
then he said: "No, I don't think it's my friend MacIan that
taught me that.  I think I should always have said that I don't
like this.  These people have rights."

"Rights!" repeated the unknown in a tone quite indescribable.
Then he added with a more open sneer: "Perhaps they also have
souls."

"They have lives!" said Turnbull, sternly; "that is quite enough
for me.  I understood you to say that you thought life sacred."

"Yes, indeed!" cried his mentor with a sort of idealistic
animation.  "Yes, indeed!  Life is sacred--but lives are not
sacred.  We are improving Life by removing lives.  Can you, as a
free-thinker, find any fault in that?"

"Yes," said Turnbull with brevity.

"Yet you applaud tyrannicide," said the stranger with
rationalistic gaiety.  "How inconsistent!  It really comes to
this: You approve of taking away life from those to whom it is a
triumph and a pleasure.  But you will not take away life from
those to whom it is a burden and a toil."

Turnbull rose to his feet in the car with considerable
deliberation, but his face seemed oddly pale.  The other went on
with enthusiasm.

"Life, yes, Life is indeed sacred!" he cried; "but new lives for
old!  Good lives for bad!  On that very place where now there
sprawls one drunken wastrel of a pavement artist more or less
wishing he were dead--on that very spot there shall in the future
be living pictures; there shall be golden girls and boys leaping
in the sun."

Turnbull, still standing up, opened his lips.  "Will you put me
down, please?" he said, quite calmly, like on stopping an
omnibus.

"Put you down--what do you mean?" cried his leader.  "I am taking
you to the front of the revolutionary war, where you will be one
of the first of the revolutionary leaders."

"Thank you," replied Turnbull with the same painful constraint.
"I have heard about your revolutionary war, and I think on the
whole that I would rather be anywhere else."

"Do you want to be taken to a monastery," snarled the other,
"with MacIan and his winking Madonnas."

"I want to be taken to a madhouse," said Turnbull distinctly,
giving the direction with a sort of precision.  "I want to go back
to exactly the same lunatic asylum from which I came."

"Why?" asked the unknown.

"Because I want a little sane and wholesome society," answered
Turnbull.

There was a long and peculiar silence, and then the man driving
the flying machine said quite coolly: "I won't take you back."

And then Turnbull said equally coolly: "Then I'll jump out of the
car."

The unknown rose to his full height, and the expression in his
eyes seemed to be made of ironies behind ironies, as two mirrors
infinitely reflect each other.  At last he said, very gravely: "Do
you think I am the devil?"

"Yes," said Turnbull, violently.  "For I think the devil is a
dream, and so are you.  I don't believe in you or your flying ship
or your last fight of the world.  It is all a nightmare.  I say as
a fact of dogma and faith that it is all a nightmare.  And I will
be a martyr for my faith as much as St. Catherine, for I will
jump out of this ship and risk waking up safe in bed."

After swaying twice with the swaying vessel he dived over the
side as one dives into the sea.  For some incredible moments stars
and space and planets seemed to shoot up past him as the sparks
fly upward; and yet in that sickening descent he was full of some
unnatural happiness.  He could connect it with no idea except one
that half escaped him--what Evan had said of the difference
between Christ and Satan; that it was by Christ's own choice that
He descended into hell.

When he again realized anything, he was lying on his elbow on the
lawn of the lunatic asylum, and the last red of the sunset had
not yet disappeared.



XVII. THE IDIOT

Evan MacIan was standing a few yards off looking at him in
absolute silence.

He had not the moral courage to ask MacIan if there had been
anything astounding in the manner of his coming there, nor did
MacIan seem to have any question to ask, or perhaps any need to
ask it.  The two men came slowly towards each other, and found the
same expression on each other's faces.  Then, for the first time
in all their acquaintance, they shook hands.

Almost as if this were a kind of unconscious signal, it brought
Dr. Quayle bounding out of a door and running across the lawn.

"Oh, there you are!" he exclaimed with a relieved giggle.  "Will
you come inside, please?  I want to speak to you both."

They followed him into his shiny wooden office where their
damning record was kept.  Dr. Quayle sat down on a swivel chair
and swung round to face them.  His carved smile had suddenly
disappeared.

"I will be plain with you gentlemen," he said, abruptly; "you
know quite well we do our best for everybody here.  Your cases
have been under special consideration, and the Master himself has
decided that you ought to be treated specially and--er--under
somewhat simpler conditions."

"You mean treated worse, I suppose," said Turnbull, gruffly.

The doctor did not reply, and MacIan said: "I expected this."  His
eyes had begun to glow.

The doctor answered, looking at his desk and playing with a key:
"Well, in certain cases that give anxiety--it is often
better----"

"Give anxiety," said Turnbull, fiercely.  "Confound your
impudence!  What do you mean?  You imprison two perfectly sane men
in a madhouse because you have made up a long word.  They take it
in good temper, walk and talk in your garden like monks who have
found a vocation, are civil even to you, you damned druggists'
hack!  Behave not only more sanely than any of your patients, but
more sanely than half the sane men outside, and you have the
soul-stifling cheek to say that they give anxiety."

"The head of the asylum has settled it all," said Dr. Quayle,
still looking down.

MacIan took one of his immense strides forward and stood over the
doctor with flaming eyes.

"If the head has settled it let the head announce it," he said.
"I won't take it from you.  I believe you to be a low, gibbering
degenerate.  Let us see the head of the asylum."

"See the head of the asylum," repeated Dr. Quayle.  "Certainly
not."

The tall Highlander, bending over him, put one hand on his
shoulder with fatherly interest.

"You don't seem to appreciate the peculiar advantages of my
position as a lunatic," he said.  "I could kill you with my left
hand before such a rat as you could so much as squeak.  And I
wouldn't be hanged for it."

"I certainly agree with Mr. MacIan," said Turnbull with sobriety
and perfect respectfulness, "that you had better let us see the
head of the institution."

Dr. Quayle got to his feet in a mixture of sudden hysteria and
clumsy presence of mind.

"Oh, certainly," he said with a weak laugh.  "You can see the head
of the asylum if you particularly want to."  He almost ran out of
the room, and the two followed swiftly on his flying coat tails.
He knocked at an ordinary varnished door in the corridor.  When a
voice said, "Come in," MacIan's breath went hissing back through
his teeth into his chest.  Turnbull was more impetuous, and opened
the door.

It was a neat and well-appointed room entirely lined with a
medical library.  At the other end of it was a ponderous and
polished desk with an incandescent lamp on it, the light of which
was just sufficient to show a slender, well-bred figure in an
ordinary medical black frock-coat, whose head, quite silvered
with age, was bent over neat piles of notes.  This gentleman
looked up for an instant as they entered, and the lamplight fell
on his glittering spectacles and long, clean-shaven face--a face
which would have been simply like an aristocrat's but that a
certain lion poise of the head and long cleft in the chin made it
look more like a very handsome actor's.  It was only for a flash
that his face was thus lifted.  Then he bent his silver head over
his notes once more, and said, without looking up again:

"I told you, Dr. Quayle, that these men were to go to cells B and
C."

Turnbull and MacIan looked at each other, and said more than they
could ever say with tongues or swords.  Among other things they
said that to that particular Head of the institution it was a
waste of time to appeal, and they followed Dr. Quayle out of the
room.

The instant they stepped out into the corridor four sturdy
figures stepped from four sides, pinioned them, and ran them
along the galleries.  They might very likely have thrown their
captors right and left had they been inclined to resist, but for
some nameless reason they were more inclined to laugh.  A mixture
of mad irony with childish curiosity made them feel quite
inclined to see what next twist would be taken by their imbecile
luck.  They were dragged down countless cold avenues lined with
glazed tiles, different only in being of different lengths and
set at different angles.  They were so many and so monotonous that
to escape back by them would have been far harder than fleeing
from the Hampton Court maze.  Only the fact that windows grew
fewer, coming at longer intervals, and the fact that when the
windows did come they seemed shadowed and let in less light,
showed that they were winding into the core or belly of some
enormous building.  After a little time the glazed corridors began
to be lit by electricity.

At last, when they had walked nearly a mile in those white and
polished tunnels, they came with quite a shock to the futile
finality of a cul-de-sac.  All that white and weary journey ended
suddenly in an oblong space and a blank white wall.  But in the
white wall there were two iron doors painted white on which were
written, respectively, in neat black capitals B and C.

"You go in here, sir," said the leader of the officials, quite
respectfully, "and you in here."

But before the doors had clanged upon their dazed victims, MacIan
had been able to say to Turnbull with a strange drawl of
significance: "I wonder who A is."

Turnbull made an automatic struggle before he allowed himself to
be thrown into the cell.  Hence it happened that he was the last
to enter, and was still full of the exhilaration of the
adventures for at least five minutes after the echo of the
clanging door had died away.

Then, when silence had sunk deep and nothing happened for two and
a half hours, it suddenly occurred to him that this was the end
of his life.  He was hidden and sealed up in this little crack of
stone until the flesh should fall off his bones.  He was dead, and
the world had won.

His cell was of an oblong shape, but very long in comparison with
its width.  It was just wide enough to permit the arms to be fully
extended with the dumb-bells, which were hung up on the left
wall, very dusty.  It was, however, long enough for a man to walk
one thirty-fifth part of a mile if he traversed it entirely.  On
the same principle a row of fixed holes, quite close together,
let in to the cells by pipes what was alleged to be the freshest
air.  For these great scientific organizers insisted that a man
should be healthy even if he was miserable.  They provided a walk
long enough to give him exercise and holes large enough to give
him oxygen.  There their interest in human nature suddenly ceased.
It seemed never to have occurred to them that the benefit of
exercise belongs partly to the benefit of liberty.  They had not
entertained the suggestion that the open air is only one of the
advantages of the open sky.  They administered air in secret, but
in sufficient doses, as if it were a medicine.  They suggested
walking, as if no man had ever felt inclined to walk.  Above all,
the asylum authorities insisted on their own extraordinary
cleanliness.  Every morning, while Turnbull was still half asleep
on his iron bedstead which was lifted half-way up the wall and
clamped to it with iron, four sluices or metal mouths opened
above him at the four corners of the chamber and washed it white
of any defilement.  Turnbull's solitary soul surged up against
this sickening daily solemnity.

"I am buried alive!" he cried, bitterly; "they have hidden me
under mountains.  I shall be here till I rot.  Why the blazes
should it matter to them whether I am dirty or clean."

Every morning and evening an iron hatchway opened in his oblong
cell, and a brown hairy hand or two thrust in a plate of
perfectly cooked lentils and a big bowl of cocoa.  He was not
underfed any more than he was underexercised or asphyxiated.  He
had ample walking space, ample air, ample and even filling food.
The only objection was that he had nothing to walk towards,
nothing to feast about, and no reason whatever for drawing the
breath of life.

Even the shape of his cell especially irritated him.  It was a
long, narrow parallelogram, which had a flat wall at one end and
ought to have had a flat wall at the other; but that end was
broken by a wedge or angle of space, like the prow of a ship.
After three days of silence and cocoa, this angle at the end
began to infuriate Turnbull.  It maddened him to think that two
lines came together and pointed at nothing.  After the fifth day
he was reckless, and poked his head into the corner.  After
twenty-five days he almost broke his head against it.  Then he
became quite cool and stupid again, and began to examine it like
a sort of Robinson Crusoe.

Almost unconsciously it was his instinct to examine outlets, and
he found himself paying particular attention to the row of holes
which let in the air into his last house of life.  He soon
discovered that these air-holes were all the ends and mouths of
long leaden tubes which doubtless carried air from some remote
watering-place near Margate.  One evening while he was engaged in
the fifth investigation he noticed something like twilight in one
of these dumb mouths, as compared with the darkness of the
others.  Thrusting his finger in as far as it would go, he found a
hole and flapping edge in the tube.  This he rent open and
instantly saw a light behind; it was at least certain that he had
struck some other cell.

It is a characteristic of all things now called "efficient",
which means mechanical and calculated, that if they go wrong at
all they go entirely wrong.  There is no power of retrieving a
defeat, as in simpler and more living organisms.  A strong gun can
conquer a strong elephant, but a wounded elephant can easily
conquer a broken gun.  Thus the Prussian monarchy in the
eighteenth century, or now, can make a strong army merely by
making the men afraid.  But it does it with the permanent
possibility that the men may some day be more afraid of their
enemies than of their officers.  Thus the drainage in our cities
so long as it is quite solid means a general safety, but if there
is one leak it means concentrated poison--an explosion of deathly
germs like dynamite, a spirit of stink.  Thus, indeed, all that
excellent machinery which is the swiftest thing on earth in
saving human labour is also the slowest thing on earth in
resisting human interference.  It may be easier to get chocolate
for nothing out of a shopkeeper than out of an automatic machine.
But if you did manage to steal the chocolate, the automatic
machine would be much less likely to run after you.

Turnbull was not long in discovering this truth in connexion with
the cold and colossal machinery of this great asylum.  He had been
shaken by many spiritual states since the instant when he was
pitched head foremost into that private cell which was to be his
private room till death.  He had felt a high fit of pride and
poetry, which had ebbed away and left him deadly cold.  He had
known a period of mere scientific curiosity, in the course of
which he examined all the tiles of his cell, with the gratifying
conclusion that they were all the same shape and size; but was
greatly puzzled about the angle in the wall at the end, and also
about an iron peg or spike that stood out from the wall, the
object of which he does not know to this day.  Then he had a
period of mere madness not to be written of by decent men, but
only by those few dirty novelists hallooed on by the infernal
huntsman to hunt down and humiliate human nature.  This also
passed, but left behind it a feverish distaste for many of the
mere objects around him.  Long after he had returned to sanity and
such hopeless cheerfulness as a man might have on a desert
island, he disliked the regular squares of the pattern of wall
and floor and the triangle that terminated his corridor.  Above
all, he had a hatred, deep as the hell he did not believe in, for
the objectless iron peg in the wall.

But in all his moods, sane or insane, intolerant or stoical, he
never really doubted this: that the machine held him as light and
as hopelessly as he had from his birth been held by the hopeless
cosmos of his own creed.  He knew well the ruthless and
inexhaustible resources of our scientific civilization.  He no
more expected rescue from a medical certificate than rescue from
the solar system.  In many of his Robinson Crusoe moods he thought
kindly of MacIan as of some quarrelsome school-fellow who had
long been dead.  He thought of leaving in the cell when he died a
rigid record of his opinions, and when he began to write them
down on scraps of envelope in his pocket, he was startled to
discover how much they had changed.  Then he remembered the
Beauchamp Tower, and tried to write his blazing scepticism on the
wall, and discovered that it was all shiny tiles on which nothing
could be either drawn or carved.  Then for an instant there hung
and broke above him like a high wave the whole horror of
scientific imprisonment, which manages to deny a man not only
liberty, but every accidental comfort of bondage.  In the old
filthy dungeons men could carve their prayers or protests in the
rock.  Here the white and slippery walls escaped even from bearing
witness.  The old prisoners could make a pet of a mouse or a
beetle strayed out of a hole.  Here the unpierceable walls were
washed every morning by an automatic sluice.  There was no natural
corruption and no merciful decay by which a living thing could
enter in.  Then James Turnbull looked up and saw the high
invincible hatefulness of the society in which he lived, and saw
the hatefulness of something else also, which he told himself
again and again was not the cosmos in which he believed.  But all
the time he had never once doubted that the five sides of his
cell were for him the wall of the world henceforward, and it gave
him a shock of surprise even to discover the faint light through
the aperture in the ventilation tube.  But he had forgotten how
close efficiency has to pack everything together and how easily,
therefore, a pipe here or there may leak.

Turnbull thrust his first finger down the aperture, and at last
managed to make a slight further fissure in the piping.  The light
that came up from beyond was very faint, and apparently indirect;
it seemed to fall from some hole or window higher up.  As he was
screwing his eye to peer at this grey and greasy twilight he was
astonished to see another human finger very long and lean come
down from above towards the broken pipe and hook it up to
something higher.  The lighted aperture was abruptly blackened and
blocked, presumably by a face and mouth, for something human
spoke down the tube, though the words were not clear.

"Who is that?" asked Turnbull, trembling with excitement, yet
wary and quite resolved not to spoil any chance.

After a few indistinct sounds the voice came down with a strong
Argyllshire accent:

"I say, Turnbull, we couldn't fight through this tube, could we?"

Sentiments beyond speech surged up in Turnbull and silenced him
for a space just long enough to be painful.  Then he said with his
old gaiety: "I vote we talk a little first; I don't want to
murder the first man I have met for ten million years."

"I know what you mean," answered the other.  "It has been awful.
For a mortal month I have been alone with God."

Turnbull started, and it was on the tip of his tongue to answer:
"Alone with God!  Then you do not know what loneliness is."

But he answered, after all, in his old defiant style: "Alone with
God, were you?  And I suppose you found his Majesty's society
rather monotonous?"

"Oh, no," said MacIan, and his voice shuddered; "it was a great
deal too exciting."

After a very long silence the voice of MacIan said: "What do you
really hate most in your place?"

"You'd think I was really mad if I told you," answered Turnbull,
bitterly.

"Then I expect it's the same as mine," said the other voice.

"I am sure it's not the same as anybody's," said Turnbull, "for
it has no rhyme or reason.  Perhaps my brain really has gone, but
I detest that iron spike in the left wall more than the damned
desolation or the damned cocoa.  Have you got one in your cell?"

"Not now," replied MacIan with serenity.  "I've pulled it out."

His fellow-prisoner could only repeat the words.

"I pulled it out the other day when I was off my head," continued
the tranquil Highland voice.  "It looked so unnecessary."

"You must be ghastly strong," said Turnbull.

"One is, when one is mad," was the careless reply, "and it had
worn a little loose in the socket.  Even now I've got it out I
can't discover what it was for.  But I've found out something a
long sight funnier."

"What do you mean?" asked Turnbull.

"I have found out where A is," said the other.

Three weeks afterwards MacIan had managed to open up
communications which made his meaning plain.  By that time the two
captives had fully discovered and demonstrated that weakness in
the very nature of modern machinery to which we have already
referred.  The very fact that they were isolated from all
companions meant that they were free from all spies, and as there
were no gaolers to be bribed, so there were none to be baffled.
Machinery brought them their cocoa and cleaned their cells; that
machinery was as helpless as it was pitiless.  A little patient
violence, conducted day after day amid constant mutual
suggestion, opened an irregular hole in the wall, large enough to
let in a small man, in the exact place where there had been
before the tiny ventilation holes.  Turnbull tumbled somehow into
MacIan's apartment, and his first glance found out that the iron
spike was indeed plucked from its socket, and left, moreover,
another ragged hole into some hollow place behind.  But for this
MacIan's cell was the duplicate of Turnbull's--a long oblong
ending in a wedge and lined with cold and lustrous tiles.  The
small hole from which the peg had been displaced was in that
short oblique wall at the end nearest to Turnbull's.  That
individual looked at it with a puzzled face.

"What is in there?" he asked.

MacIan answered briefly: "Another cell."

"But where can the door of it be?" said his companion, even more
puzzled; "the doors of our cells are at the other end."

"It has no door," said Evan.

In the pause of perplexity that followed, an eerie and sinister
feeling crept over Turnbull's stubborn soul in spite of himself.
The notion of the doorless room chilled him with that sense of
half-witted curiosity which one has when something horrible is
half understood.

"James Turnbull," said MacIan, in a low and shaken voice, "these
people hate us more than Nero hated Christians, and fear us more
than any man feared Nero.  They have filled England with frenzy
and galloping in order to capture us and wipe us out--in order to
kill us.  And they have killed us, for you and I have only made a
hole in our coffins.  But though this hatred that they felt for us
is bigger than they felt for Bonaparte, and more plain and
practical than they would feel for Jack the Ripper, yet it is not
we whom the people of this place hate most."

A cold and quivering impatience continued to crawl up Turnbull's
spine; he had never felt so near to superstition and
supernaturalism, and it was not a pretty sort of superstition
either.

"There is another man more fearful and hateful," went on MacIan,
in his low monotone voice, "and they have buried him even deeper.
God knows how they did it, for he was let in by neither door nor
window, nor lowered through any opening above.  I expect these
iron handles that we both hate have been part of some damned
machinery for walling him up.  He is there.  I have looked through
the hole at him; but I cannot stand looking at him long, because
his face is turned away from me and he does not move."

Al Turnbull's unnatural and uncompleted feelings found their
outlet in rushing to the aperture and looking into the unknown
room.

It was a third oblong cell exactly like the other two except that
it was doorless, and except that on one of the walls was painted
a large black A like the B and C outside their own doors.  The
letter in this case was not painted outside, because this prison
had no outside.

On the same kind of tiled floor, of which the monotonous squares
had maddened Turnbull's eye and brain, was sitting a figure which
was startlingly short even for a child, only that the enormous
head was ringed with hair of a frosty grey.  The figure was
draped, both insecurely and insufficiently, in what looked like
the remains of a brown flannel dressing-gown; an emptied cup of
cocoa stood on the floor beside it, and the creature had his big
grey head cocked at a particular angle of inquiry or attention
which amid all that gathering gloom and mystery struck one as
comic if not cocksure.

After six still seconds Turnbull could stand it no longer, but
called out to the dwarfish thing--in what words heaven knows.  The
thing got up with the promptitude of an animal, and turning round
offered the spectacle of two owlish eyes and a huge
grey-and-white beard not unlike the plumage of an owl.  This
extraordinary beard covered him literally to his feet (not that
that was very far), and perhaps it was as well that it did, for
portions of his remaining clothing seemed to fall off whenever he
moved.  One talks trivially of a face like parchment, but this old
man's face was so wrinkled that it was like a parchment loaded
with hieroglyphics.  The lines of his face were so deep and
complex that one could see five or ten different faces besides
the real one, as one can see them in an elaborate wall-paper.  And
yet while his face seemed like a scripture older than the gods,
his eyes were quite bright, blue, and startled like those of a
baby.  They looked as if they had only an instant before been
fitted into his head.

Everything depended so obviously upon whether this buried monster
spoke that Turnbull did not know or care whether he himself had
spoken.  He said something or nothing.  And then he waited for this
dwarfish voice that had been hidden under the mountains of the
world.  At last it did speak, and spoke in English, with a foreign
accent that was neither Latin nor Teutonic.  He suddenly stretched
out a long and very dirty forefinger, and cried in a voice of
clear recognition, like a child's: "That's a hole."

He digested the discovery for some seconds, sucking his finger,
and then he cried, with a crow of laughter: "And that's a head
come through it."

The hilarious energy in this idiot attitude gave Turnbull another
sick turn.  He had grown to tolerate those dreary and mumbling
madmen who trailed themselves about the beautiful asylum gardens.
But there was something new and subversive of the universe in the
combination of so much cheerful decision with a body without a
brain.

"Why did they put you in such a place?" he asked at last with
embarrassment.

"Good place.  Yes," said the old man, nodding a great many times
and beaming like a flattered landlord.  "Good shape.  Long and
narrow, with a point.  Like this," and he made lovingly with his
hands a map of the room in the air.

"But that's not the best," he added, confidentially.  "Squares
very good; I have a nice long holiday, and can count them.  But
that's not the best."

"What is the best?" asked Turnbull in great distress.

"Spike is the best," said the old man, opening his blue eyes
blazing; "it sticks out."

The words Turnbull spoke broke out of him in pure pity.  "Can't we
do anything for you?" he said.

"I am very happy," said the other, alphabetically.  "You are a
good man.  Can I help you?"

"No, I don't think you can, sir," said Turnbull with rough
pathos; "I am glad you are contented at least."

The weird old person opened his broad blue eyes and fixed
Turnbull with a stare extraordinarily severe.  "You are quite
sure," he said, "I cannot help you?"

"Quite sure, thank you," said Turnbull with broken brevity.  "Good
day."

Then he turned to MacIan who was standing close behind him, and
whose face, now familiar in all its moods, told him easily that
Evan had heard the whole of the strange dialogue.

"Curse those cruel beasts!" cried Turnbull.  "They've turned him
to an imbecile just by burying him alive.  His brain's like a
pin-point now."

"You are sure he is a lunatic?" said Evan, slowly.

"Not a lunatic," said Turnbull, "an idiot.  He just points to
things and says that they stick out."

"He had a notion that he could help us," said MacIan moodily, and
began to pace towards the other end of his cell.

"Yes, it was a bit pathetic," assented Turnbull; "such a Thing
offering help, and besides---- Hallo!  Hallo!  What's the matter?"

"God Almighty guide us all!" said MacIan.

He was standing heavy and still at the other end of the room and
staring quietly at the door which for thirty days had sealed them
up from the sun.  Turnbull, following the other's eye, stared at
the door likewise, and then he also uttered an exclamation.  The
iron door was standing about an inch and a half open.

"He said----" began Evan, in a trembling voice--"he offered----"

"Come along, you fool!" shouted Turnbull with a sudden and
furious energy.  "I see it all now, and it's the best stroke of
luck in the world.  You pulled out that iron handle that had
screwed up his cell, and it somehow altered the machinery and
opened all the doors."

Seizing MacIan by the elbow he bundled him bodily out into the
open corridor and ran him on till they saw daylight through a
half-darkened window.

"All the same," said Evan, like one answering in an ordinary
conversation, "he did ask you whether he could help you."

All this wilderness of windowless passages was so built into the
heart of that fortress of fear that it seemed more than an hour
before the fugitives had any good glimpse of the outer world.
They did not even know what hour of the day it was; and when,
turning a corner, they saw the bare tunnel of the corridor end
abruptly in a shining square of garden, the grass burning in that
strong evening sunshine which makes it burnished gold rather than
green, the abrupt opening on to the earth seemed like a hole
knocked in the wall of heaven.  Only once or twice in life is it
permitted to a man thus to see the very universe from outside,
and feel existence itself as an adorable adventure not yet begun.
As they found this shining escape out of that hellish labyrinth
they both had simultaneously the sensation of being babes unborn,
of being asked by God if they would like to live upon the earth.
They were looking in at one of the seven gates of Eden.

Turnbull was the first to leap into the garden, with an
earth-spurning leap like that of one who could really spread his
wings and fly.  MacIan, who came an instant after, was less full
of mere animal gusto and fuller of a more fearful and quivering
pleasure in the clear and innocent flower colours and the high
and holy trees.  With one bound they were in that cool and cleared
landscape, and they found just outside the door the black-clad
gentleman with the cloven chin smilingly regarding them; and his
chin seemed to grow longer and longer as he smiled.



XVIII. A RIDDLE OF FACES

Just behind him stood two other doctors: one, the familiar Dr.
Quayle, of the blinking eyes and bleating voice; the other, a
more commonplace but much more forcible figure, a stout young
doctor with short, well-brushed hair and a round but resolute
face.  At the sight of the escape these two subordinates uttered a
cry and sprang forward, but their superior remained motionless
and smiling, and somehow the lack of his support seemed to arrest
and freeze them in the very gesture of pursuit.

"Let them be," he cried in a voice that cut like a blade of ice;
and not only of ice, but of some awful primordial ice that had
never been water.

"I want no devoted champions," said the cutting voice; "even the
folly of one's friends bores one at last.  You don't suppose I
should have let these lunatics out of their cells without good
reason.  I have the best and fullest reason.  They can be let out
of their cell today, because today the whole world has become
their cell.  I will have no more medieval mummery of chains and
doors.  Let them wander about the earth as they wandered about
this garden, and I shall still be their easy master.  Let them
take the wings of the morning and abide in the uttermost parts of
the sea--I am there.  Whither shall they go from my presence and
whither shall they flee from my spirit?  Courage, Dr. Quayle, and
do not be downhearted; the real days of tyranny are only
beginning on this earth."

And with that the Master laughed and swung away from them, almost
as if his laugh was a bad thing for people to see.

"Might I speak to you a moment?" said Turnbull, stepping forward
with a respectful resolution.  But the shoulders of the Master
only seemed to take on a new and unexpected angle of mockery as
he strode away.

Turnbull swung round with great abruptness to the other two
doctors, and said, harshly: "What in snakes does he mean--and who
are you?"

"My name is Hutton," said the short, stout man, "and I am--well,
one of those whose business it is to uphold this establishment."

"My name is Turnbull," said the other; "I am one of those whose
business it is to tear it to the ground."

The small doctor smiled, and Turnbull's anger seemed suddenly to
steady him.

"But I don't want to talk about that," he said, calmly; "I only
want to know what the Master of this asylum really means."

Dr. Hutton's smile broke into a laugh which, short as it was, had
the suspicion of a shake in it.  "I suppose you think that quite a
simple question," he said.

"I think it a plain question," said Turnbull, "and one that
deserves a plain answer.  Why did the Master lock us up in a
couple of cupboards like jars of pickles for a mortal month, and
why does he now let us walk free in the garden again?"

"I understand," said Hutton, with arched eyebrows, "that your
complaint is that you are now free to walk in the garden."

"My complaint is," said Turnbull, stubbornly, "that if I am fit
to walk freely now, I have been as fit for the last month.  No one
has examined me, no one has come near me.  Your chief says that I
am only free because he has made other arrangements.  What are
those arrangements?"

The young man with the round face looked down for a little while
and smoked reflectively.  The other and elder doctor had gone
pacing nervously by himself upon the lawn.  At length the round
face was lifted again, and showed two round blue eyes with a
certain frankness in them.

"Well, I don't see that it can do any harm to tell you know," he
said.  "You were shut up just then because it was just during that
month that the Master was bringing off his big scheme.  He was
getting his bill through Parliament, and organizing the new
medical police.  But of course you haven't heard of all that; in
fact, you weren't meant to."

"Heard of all what?" asked the impatient inquirer.

"There's a new law now, and the asylum powers are greatly
extended.  Even if you did escape now, any policeman would take
you up in the next town if you couldn't show a certificate of
sanity from us."

"Well," continued Dr. Hutton, "the Master described before both
Houses of Parliament the real scientific objection to all
existing legislation about lunacy.  As he very truly said, the
mistake was in supposing insanity to be merely an exception or an
extreme.  Insanity, like forgetfulness, is simply a quality which
enters more or less into all human beings; and for practical
purposes it is more necessary to know whose mind is really
trustworthy than whose has some accidental taint.  We have
therefore reversed the existing method, and people now have to
prove that they are sane.  In the first village you entered, the
village constable would notice that you were not wearing on the
left lapel of your coat the small pewter S which is now necessary
to any one who walks about beyond asylum bounds or outside asylum
hours."

"You mean to say," said Turnbull, "that this was what the Master
of the asylum urged before the House of Commons?"

Dr. Hutton nodded with gravity.

"And you mean to say," cried Turnbull, with a vibrant snort,
"that that proposal was passed in an assembly that calls itself
democratic?"

The doctor showed his whole row of teeth in a smile.  "Oh, the
assembly calls itself Socialist now," he said, "But we explained
to them that this was a question for men of science."

Turnbull gave one stamp upon the gravel, then pulled himself
together, and resumed: "But why should your infernal head
medicine-man lock us up in separate cells while he was turning
England into a madhouse?  I'm not the Prime Minister; we're not
the House of Lords."

"He wasn't afraid of the Prime Minister," replied Dr. Hutton; "he
isn't afraid of the House of Lords.  But----"

"Well?" inquired Turnbull, stamping again.

"He is afraid of you," said Hutton, simply.  "Why, didn't you
know?"

MacIan, who had not spoken yet, made one stride forward and stood
with shaking limbs and shining eyes.

"He was afraid!" began Evan, thickly.  "You mean to say that
we----"

"I mean to say the plain truth now that the danger is over," said
Hutton, calmly; "most certainly you two were the only people he
ever was afraid of."  Then he added in a low but not inaudible
voice: "Except one--whom he feared worse, and has buried deeper."

"Come away," cried MacIan, "this has to be thought about."

Turnbull followed him in silence as he strode away, but just
before he vanished, turned and spoke again to the doctors.

"But what has got hold of people?" he asked, abruptly.  "Why
should all England have gone dotty on the mere subject of
dottiness?"

Dr. Hutton smiled his open smile once more and bowed slightly.
"As to that also," he replied, "I don't want to make you vain."

Turnbull swung round without a word, and he and his companion
were lost in the lustrous leafage of the garden.  They noticed
nothing special about the scene, except that the garden seemed
more exquisite than ever in the deepening sunset, and that there
seemed to be many more people, whether patients or attendants,
walking about in it.

From behind the two black-coated doctors as they stood on the
lawn another figure somewhat similarly dressed strode hurriedly
past them, having also grizzled hair and an open flapping
frock-coat.  Both his decisive step and dapper black array marked
him out as another medical man, or at least a man in authority,
and as he passed Turnbull the latter was aroused by a strong
impression of having seen the man somewhere before.  It was no one
that he knew well, yet he was certain that it was someone at
whom he had at sometime or other looked steadily.  It was neither
the face of a friend nor of an enemy; it aroused neither
irritation nor tenderness, yet it was a face which had for some
reason been of great importance in his life.  Turning and
returning, and making detours about the garden, he managed to
study the man's face again and again--a moustached, somewhat
military face with a monocle, the sort of face that is
aristocratic without being distinguished.  Turnbull could not
remember any particular doctors in his decidedly healthy
existence.  Was the man a long-lost uncle, or was he only somebody
who had sat opposite him regularly in a railway train?  At that
moment the man knocked down his own eye-glass with a gesture of
annoyance; Turnbull remembered the gesture, and the truth sprang
up solid in front of him.  The man with the moustaches was
Cumberland Vane, the London police magistrate before whom he and
MacIan had once stood on their trial.  The magistrate must have
been transferred to some other official duties--to something
connected with the inspection of asylums.

Turnbull's heart gave a leap of excitement which was half hope.
As a magistrate Mr. Cumberland Vane had been somewhat careless
and shallow, but certainly kindly, and not inaccessible to common
sense so long as it was put to him in strictly conventional
language.  He was at least an authority of a more human and
refreshing sort than the crank with the wagging beard or the
fiend with the forked chin.

He went straight up to the magistrate, and said: "Good evening,
Mr. Vane; I doubt if you remember me."

Cumberland Vane screwed the eye-glass into his scowling face for
an instant, and then said curtly but not uncivilly: "Yes, I
remember you, sir; assault or battery, wasn't it?--a fellow broke
your window.  A tall fellow--McSomething--case made rather a noise
afterwards."

"MacIan is the name, sir," said Turnbull, respectfully; "I have
him here with me."

"Eh!" said Vane very sharply.  "Confound him!  Has he got anything
to do with this game?"

"Mr. Vane," said Turnbull, pacifically, "I will not pretend that
either he or I acted quite decorously on that occasion.  You were
very lenient with us, and did not treat us as criminals when you
very well might.  So I am sure you will give us your testimony
that, even if we were criminals, we are not lunatics in any legal
or medical sense whatever.  I am sure you will use your influence
for us."

"My influence!" repeated the magistrate, with a slight start.  "I
don't quite understand you."

"I don't know in what capacity you are here," continued Turnbull,
gravely, "but a legal authority of your distinction must
certainly be here in an important one.  Whether you are visiting
and inspecting the place, or attached to it as some kind of
permanent legal adviser, your opinion must still----"

Cumberland Vane exploded with a detonation of oaths; his face was
transfigured with fury and contempt, and yet in some odd way he
did not seem specially angry with Turnbull.

"But Lord bless us and save us!" he gasped, at length; "I'm not
here as an official at all.  I'm here as a patient.  The cursed
pack of rat-catching chemists all say that I've lost my wits."

"You!" cried Turnbull with terrible emphasis.  "You!  Lost your
wits!"

In the rush of his real astonishment at this towering unreality
Turnbull almost added: "Why, you haven't got any to lose."  But he
fortunately remembered the remains of his desperate diplomacy.

"This can't go on," he said, positively.  "Men like MacIan and I
may suffer unjustly all our lives, but a man like you must have
influence."

"There is only one man who has any influence in England now,"
said Vane, and his high voice fell to a sudden and convincing
quietude.

"Whom do you mean?" asked Turnbull.

"I mean that cursed fellow with the long split chin," said the
other.

"Is it really true," asked Turnbull, "that he has been allowed to
buy up and control such a lot?  What put the country into such a
state?"

Mr. Cumberland Vane laughed outright.  "What put the country into
such a state?" he asked.  "Why, you did.  When you were fool enough
to agree to fight MacIan, after all, everybody was ready to
believe that the Bank of England might paint itself pink with
white spots."

"I don't understand," answered Turnbull.  "Why should you be
surprised at my fighting?  I hope I have always fought."

"Well," said Cumberland Vane, airily, "you didn't believe in
religion, you see--so we thought you were safe at any rate.  You
went further in your language than most of us wanted to go; no
good in just hurting one's mother's feelings, I think.  But of
course we all knew you were right, and, really, we relied on
you."

"Did you?" said the editor of _The Atheist_ with a bursting
heart.  "I am sorry you did not tell me so at the time."

He walked away very rapidly and flung himself on a garden seat,
and for some six minutes his own wrongs hid from him the huge and
hilarious fact that Cumberland Vane had been locked up as a
lunatic.

The garden of the madhouse was so perfectly planned, and answered
so exquisitely to every hour of daylight, that one could almost
fancy that the sunlight was caught there tangled in its tinted
trees, as the wise men of Gotham tried to chain the spring to a
bush.  Or it seemed as if this ironic paradise still kept its
unique dawn or its special sunset while the rest of the earthly
globe rolled through its ordinary hours.  There was one evening,
or late afternoon, in particular, which Evan MacIan will remember
in the last moments of death.  It was what artists call a daffodil
sky, but it is coarsened even by reference to a daffodil.  It was
of that innocent lonely yellow which has never heard of orange,
though it might turn quite unconsciously into green.  Against it
the tops, one might say the turrets, of the clipt and ordered
trees were outlined in that shade of veiled violet which tints
the tops of lavender.  A white early moon was hardly traceable
upon that delicate yellow.  MacIan, I say, will remember this
tender and transparent evening, partly because of its virgin gold
and silver, and partly because he passed beneath it through the
most horrible instant of his life.

Turnbull was sitting on his seat on the lawn, and the golden
evening impressed even his positive nature, as indeed it might
have impressed the oxen in a field.  He was shocked out of his
idle mood of awe by seeing MacIan break from behind the bushes
and run across the lawn with an action he had never seen in the
man before, with all his experience of the eccentric humours of
this Celt.  MacIan fell on the bench, shaking it so that it
rattled, and gripped it with his knees like one in dreadful pain
of body.  That particular run and tumble is typical only of a man
who has been hit by some sudden and incurable evil, who is bitten
by a viper or condemned to be hanged.  Turnbull looked up in the
white face of his friend and enemy, and almost turned cold at
what he saw there.  He had seen the blue but gloomy eyes of the
western Highlander troubled by as many tempests as his own west
Highland seas, but there had always been a fixed star of faith
behind the storms.  Now the star had gone out, and there was only
misery.

Yet MacIan had the strength to answer the question where
Turnbull, taken by surprise, had not the strength to ask it.

"They are right, they are right!" he cried.  "O my God! they are
right, Turnbull.  I ought to be here!"

He went on with shapeless fluency as if he no longer had the
heart to choose or check his speech.  "I suppose I ought to have
guessed long ago--all my big dreams and schemes--and everyone
being against us--but I was stuck up, you know."

"Do tell me about it, really," cried the atheist, and, faced with
the furnace of the other's pain, he did not notice that he spoke
with the affection of a father.

"I am mad, Turnbull," said Evan, with a dead clearness of speech,
and leant back against the garden seat.

"Nonsense," said the other, clutching at the obvious cue of
benevolent brutality, "this is one of your silly moods."

MacIan shook his head.  "I know enough about myself," he said, "to
allow for any mood, though it opened heaven or hell.  But to see
things--to see them walking solid in the sun--things that can't
be there--real mystics never do that, Turnbull."

"What things?" asked the other, incredulously.

MacIan lowered his voice.  "I saw _her_," he said, "three minutes
ago--walking here in this hell yard."

Between trying to look scornful and really looking startled,
Turnbull's face was confused enough to emit no speech, and Evan
went on in monotonous sincerity:

"I saw her walk behind those blessed trees against that holy sky
of gold as plain as I can see her whenever I shut my eyes.  I did
shut them, and opened them again, and she was still there--that
is, of course, she wasn't---- She still had a little fur round
her neck, but her dress was a shade brighter than when I really
saw her."

"My dear fellow," cried Turnbull, rallying a hearty laugh, "the
fancies have really got hold of you.  You mistook some other poor
girl here for her."

"Mistook some other----" said MacIan, and words failed him
altogether.

They sat for some moments in the mellow silence of the evening
garden, a silence that was stifling for the sceptic, but utterly
empty and final for the man of faith.  At last he broke out again
with the words: "Well, anyhow, if I'm mad, I'm glad I'm mad on
that."

Turnbull murmured some clumsy deprecation, and sat stolidly
smoking to collect his thoughts; the next instant he had all his
nerves engaged in the mere effort to sit still.

Across the clear space of cold silver and a pale lemon sky which
was left by the gap in the ilex-trees there passed a slim, dark
figure, a profile and the poise of a dark head like a bird's,
which really pinned him to his seat with the point of
coincidence.  With an effort he got to his feet, and said with a
voice of affected insouciance: "By George!  MacIan, she is
uncommonly like----"

"What!" cried MacIan, with a leap of eagerness that was
heart-breaking, "do you see her, too?"  And the blaze came back
into the centre of his eyes.

Turnbull's tawny eyebrows were pulled together with a peculiar
frown of curiosity, and all at once he walked quickly across the
lawn.  MacIan sat rigid, but peered after him with open and
parched lips.  He saw the sight which either proved him sane or
proved the whole universe half-witted; he saw the man of flesh
approach that beautiful phantom, saw their gestures of
recognition, and saw them against the sunset joining hands.

He could stand it no longer, but ran across to the path, turned
the corner and saw standing quite palpable in the evening
sunlight, talking with a casual grace to Turnbull, the face and
figure which had filled his midnights with frightfully vivid or
desperately half-forgotten features.  She advanced quite
pleasantly and coolly, and put out her hand.  The moment that he
touched it he knew that he was sane even if the solar system was
crazy.

She was entirely elegant and unembarrassed.  That is the awful
thing about women--they refuse to be emotional at emotional
moments, upon some such ludicrous pretext as there being someone
else there.  But MacIan was in a condition of criticism much less
than the average masculine one, being in fact merely overturned
by the rushing riddle of the events.

Evan does not know to this day what particular question he asked,
but he vividly remembers that she answered, and every line or
fluctuation of her face as she said it.

"Oh, don't you know?" she said, smiling, and suddenly lifting her
level brown eyebrows.  "Haven't you heard the news?  I'm a
lunatic."

Then she added after a short pause, and with a sort of pride:
"I've got a certificate."

Her manner, by the matchless social stoicism of her sex, was
entirely suited to a drawing-room, but Evan's reply fell somewhat
far short of such a standard, as he only said: "What the devil in
hell does all this nonsense mean?"

"Really," said the young lady, and laughed.

"I beg your pardon," said the unhappy young man, rather wildly,
"but what I mean is, why are you here in an asylum?"

The young woman broke again into one of the maddening and
mysterious laughs of femininity.  Then she composed her features,
and replied with equal dignity: "Well, if it comes to that, why
are you?"

The fact that Turnbull had strolled away and was investigating
rhododendrons may have been due to Evan's successful prayers to
the other world, or possibly to his own pretty successful
experience of this one.  But though they two were as isolated as a
new Adam and Eve in a pretty ornamental Eden, the lady did not
relax by an inch the rigour of her badinage.

"I am locked up in the madhouse," said Evan, with a sort of stiff
pride, "because I tried to keep my promise to you."

"Quite so," answered the inexplicable lady, nodding with a
perfectly blazing smile, "and I am locked up because it was to me
you promised."

"It is outrageous!" cried Evan; "it is impossible!"

"Oh, you can see my certificate if you like," she replied with
some hauteur.

MacIan stared at her and then at his boots, and then at the sky
and then at her again.  He was quite sure now that he himself was
not mad, and the fact rather added to his perplexity.

Then he drew nearer to her, and said in a dry and dreadful voice:
"Oh, don't condescend to play the fool with such a fool as me.
Are you really locked up here as a patient--because you helped us
to escape?"

"Yes," she said, still smiling, but her steady voice had a shake
in it.

Evan flung his big elbow across his forehead and burst into
tears.

The pure lemon of the sky faded into purer white as the great
sunset silently collapsed.  The birds settled back into the trees;
the moon began to glow with its own light.  Mr. James Turnbull
continued his botanical researches into the structure of the
rhododendron.  But the lady did not move an inch until Evan had
flung up his face again; and when he did he saw by the last gleam
of sunlight that it was not only his face that was wet.

Mr. James Turnbull had all his life professed a profound interest
in physical science, and the phenomena of a good garden were
really a pleasure to him; but after three-quarters of an hour or
so even the apostle of science began to find rhododendrus a bore,
and was somewhat relieved when an unexpected development of
events obliged him to transfer his researches to the equally
interesting subject of hollyhocks, which grew some fifty feet
farther along the path.  The ostensible cause of his removal was
the unexpected reappearance of his two other acquaintances
walking and talking laboriously along the way, with the black
head bent close to the brown one.  Even hollyhocks detained
Turnbull but a short time.  Having rapidly absorbed all the
important principles affecting the growth of those vegetables, he
jumped over a flower-bed and walked back into the building.  The
other two came up along the slow course of the path talking and
talking.  No one but God knows what they said (for they certainly
have forgotten), and if I remembered it I would not repeat it.
When they parted at the head of the walk she put out her hand
again in the same well-bred way, although it trembled; he seemed
to restrain a gesture as he let it fall.

"If it is really always to be like this," he said, thickly, "it
would not matter if we were here for ever."

"You tried to kill yourself four times for me," she said,
unsteadily, "and I have been chained up as a madwoman for you.
I really think that after that----"

"Yes, I know," said Evan in a low voice, looking down.  "After
that we belong to each other.  We are sort of sold to each
other--until the stars fall."  Then he looked up suddenly, and
said: "By the way, what is your name?"

"My name is Beatrice Drake," she replied with complete gravity.
"You can see it on my certificate of lunacy."



XIX. THE LAST PARLEY

Turnbull walked away, wildly trying to explain to himself the
presence of two personal acquaintances so different as Vane and
the girl.  As he skirted a low hedge of laurel, an enormously tall
young man leapt over it, stood in front of him, and almost fell
on his neck as if seeking to embrace him.

"Don't you know me?" almost sobbed the young man, who was in the
highest spirits.  "Ain't I written on your heart, old boy?  I say,
what did you do with my yacht?"

"Take your arms off my neck," said Turnbull, irritably.  "Are you
mad?"

The young man sat down on the gravel path and went into ecstasies
of laughter.  "No, that's just the fun of it--I'm not mad," he
replied.  "They've shut me up in this place, and I'm not mad."  And
he went off again into mirth as innocent as wedding-bells.

Turnbull, whose powers of surprise were exhausted, rolled his
round grey eyes and said, "Mr. Wilkinson, I think," because he
could not think of anything else to say.

The tall man sitting on the gravel bowed with urbanity, and said:
"Quite at your service.  Not to be confused with the Wilkinsons of
Cumberland; and as I say, old boy, what have you done with my
yacht?  You see, they've locked me up here--in this garden--and a
yacht would be a sort of occupation for an unmarried man."

"I am really horribly sorry," began Turnbull, in the last stage
of bated bewilderment and exasperation, "but really----"

"Oh, I can see you can't have it on you at the moment," said Mr.
Wilkinson with much intellectual magnanimity.

"Well, the fact is----" began Turnbull again, and then the phrase
was frozen on his mouth, for round the corner came the goatlike
face and gleaming eye-glasses of Dr. Quayle.

"Ah, my dear Mr. Wilkinson," said the doctor, as if delighted at
a coincidence; "and Mr. Turnbull, too.  Why, I want to speak to
Mr. Turnbull."

Mr. Turnbull made some movement rather of surrender than assent,
and the doctor caught it up exquisitely, showing even more of his
two front teeth.  "I am sure Mr. Wilkinson will excuse us a
moment."  And with flying frock-coat he led Turnbull rapidly round
the corner of a path.

"My dear sir," he said, in a quite affectionate manner, "I do not
mind telling you--you are such a very hopeful case--you
understand so well the scientific point of view; and I don't like
to see you bothered by the really hopeless cases.  They are
monotonous and maddening.  The man you have just been talking to,
poor fellow, is one of the strongest cases of pure _idee fixe_
that we have.  It's very sad, and I'm afraid utterly incurable.  He
keeps on telling everybody"--and the doctor lowered his voice
confidentially--"he tells everybody that two people have taken is
yacht.  His account of how he lost it is quite incoherent."

Turnbull stamped his foot on the gravel path, and called out:
"Oh, I can't stand this.  Really----"

"I know, I know," said the psychologist, mournfully; "it is a
most melancholy case, and also fortunately a very rare one.  It is
so rare, in fact, that in one classification of these maladies it
is entered under a heading by itself--Perdinavititis, mental
inflammation creating the impression that one has lost a ship.
Really," he added, with a kind of half-embarrassed guilt, "it's
rather a feather in my cap.  I discovered the only existing case of
perdinavititis."

"But this won't do, doctor," said Turnbull, almost tearing his
hair, "this really won't do.  The man really did lose a ship.
Indeed, not to put too fine a point on it, I took his ship."

Dr. Quayle swung round for an instant so that his silk-lined
overcoat rustled, and stared singularly at Turnbull.  Then he said
with hurried amiability: "Why, of course you did.  Quite so, quite
so," and with courteous gestures went striding up the garden
path.  Under the first laburnum-tree he stopped, however, and
pulling out his pencil and notebook wrote down feverishly:
"Singular development in the Elenthero-maniac, Turnbull.  Sudden
manifestation of Rapinavititis--the delusion that one has stolen
a ship.  First case ever recorded."

Turnbull stood for an instant staggered into stillness.  Then he
ran raging round the garden to find MacIan, just as a husband,
even a bad husband, will run raging to find his wife if he is
full of a furious query.  He found MacIan stalking moodily about
the half-lit garden, after his extraordinary meeting with
Beatrice.  No one who saw his slouching stride and sunken head
could have known that his soul was in the seventh heaven of
ecstasy.  He did not think; he did not even very definitely
desire.  He merely wallowed in memories, chiefly in material
memories; words said with a certain cadence or trivial turns of
the neck or wrist.  Into the middle of his stationary and
senseless enjoyment were thrust abruptly the projecting elbow and
the projecting red beard of Turnbull.  MacIan stepped back a
little, and the soul in his eyes came very slowly to its windows.
When James Turnbull had the glittering sword-point planted upon
his breast he was in far less danger.  For three pulsating seconds
after the interruption MacIan was in a mood to have murdered his
father.

And yet his whole emotional anger fell from him when he saw
Turnbull's face, in which the eyes seemed to be bursting from the
head like bullets.  All the fire and fragrance even of young and
honourable love faded for a moment before that stiff agony of
interrogation.

"Are you hurt, Turnbull?" he asked, anxiously.

"I am dying," answered the other quite calmly.  "I am in the quite
literal sense of the words dying to know something.  I want to
know what all this can possibly mean."

MacIan did not answer, and he continued with asperity: "You are
still thinking about that girl, but I tell you the whole thing is
incredible.  She's not the only person here.  I've met the fellow
Wilkinson, whose yacht we lost.  I've met the very magistrate you
were hauled up to when you broke my window.  What can it
mean--meeting all these old people again?  One never meets such
old friends again except in a dream."

Then after a silence he cried with a rending sincerity: "Are you
really there, Evan?  Have you ever been really there?  Am I simply
dreaming?"

MacIan had been listening with a living silence to every word,
and now his face flamed with one of his rare revelations of life.

"No, you good atheist," he cried; "no, you clean, courteous,
reverent, pious old blasphemer.  No, you are not dreaming--you are
waking up."

"What do you mean?"

"There are two states where one meets so many old friends," said
MacIan; "one is a dream, the other is the end of the world."

"And you say----"

"I say this is not a dream," said Evan in a ringing voice.

"You really mean to suggest----" began Turnbull.

"Be silent! or I shall say it all wrong," said MacIan, breathing
hard.  "It's hard to explain, anyhow.  An apocalypse is the
opposite of a dream.  A dream is falser than the outer life.  But
the end of the world is more actual than the world it ends.  I
don't say this is really the end of the world, but it's something
like that--it's the end of something.  All the people are crowding
into one corner.  Everything is coming to a point."

"What is the point?" asked Turnbull.

"I can't see it," said Evan; "it is too large and plain."

Then after a silence he said: "I can't see it--and yet I will try
to describe it.  Turnbull, three days ago I saw quite suddenly
that our duel was not right after all."

"Three days ago!" repeated Turnbull.  "When and why did this
illumination occur?"

"I knew I was not quite right," answered Evan, "the moment I saw
the round eyes of that old man in the cell."

"Old man in the cell!" repeated his wondering companion.  "Do you
mean the poor old idiot who likes spikes to stick out?"

"Yes," said MacIan, after a slight pause, "I mean the poor old
idiot who likes spikes to stick out.  When I saw his eyes and
heard his old croaking accent, I knew that it would not really
have been right to kill you.  It would have been a venial sin."

"I am much obliged," said Turnbull, gruffly.

"You must give me time," said MacIan, quite patiently, "for I am
trying to tell the whole truth.  I am trying to tell more of it
than I know."

"So you see I confess"--he went on with laborious distinctness--
"I confess that all the people who called our duel mad were right
in a way.  I would confess it to old Cumberland Vane and his
eye-glass.  I would confess it even to that old ass in brown
flannel who talked to us about Love.  Yes, they are right in a
way.  I am a little mad."

He stopped and wiped his brow as if he were literally doing heavy
labour.  Then he went on:

"I am a little mad; but, after all, it is only a little madness.
When hundreds of high-minded men had fought duesl about a jostle
with the elbow or the ace of spades, the whole world need not
have gone wild over my one little wildness.  Plenty of other
people have killed themselves between then and now.  But all
England has gone into captivity in order to take us captive.  All
England has turned into a lunatic asylum in order to prove us
lunatics.  Compared with the general public, I might positively be
called sane."

He stopped again, and went on with the same air of travailing
with the truth:

"When I saw that, I saw everything; I saw the Church and the
world.  The Church in its earthly action has really touched morbid
things--tortures and bleeding visions and blasts of
extermination.  The Church has had her madnesses, and I am one of
them.  I am the massacre of St. Bartholomew.  I am the Inquisition
of Spain.  I do not say that we have never gone mad, but I say
that we are fit to act as keepers to our enemies.  Massacre is
wicked even with a provocation, as in the Bartholomew.  But your
modern Nietzsche will tell you that massacre would be glorious
without a provocation.  Torture should be violently stopped,
though the Church is doing it.  But your modern Tolstoy will tell
you that it ought not to be violently stopped whoever is doing
it.  In the long run, which is most mad--the Church or the world?
Which is madder, the Spanish priest who permitted tyranny, or the
Prussian sophist who admired it?  Which is madder, the Russian
priest who discourages righteous rebellion, or the Russian
novelist who forbids it?  That is the final and blasting test.  The
world left to itself grows wilder than any creed.  A few days ago
you and I were the maddest people in England.  Now, by God!  I
believe we are the sanest.  That is the only real question--
whether the Church is really madder than the world.  Let the
rationalists run their own race, and let us see where _they_ end.
If the world has some healthy balance other than God, let the
world find it.  Does the world find it?  Cut the world loose," he
cried with a savage gesture.  "Does the world stand on its own
end?  Does it stand, or does it stagger?"

Turnbull remained silent, and MacIan said to him, looking once
more at the earth: "It staggers, Turnbull.  It cannot stand by
itself; you know it cannot.  It has been the sorrow of your life.
Turnbull, this garden is not a dream, but an apocalyptic
fulfilment.  This garden is the world gone mad."

Turnbull did not move his head, and he had been listening all the
time; yet, somehow, the other knew that for the first time he was
listening seriously.

"The world has gone mad," said MacIan, "and it has gone mad about
Us.  The world takes the trouble to make a big mistake about every
little mistake made by the Church.  That is why they have turned
ten counties to a madhouse; that is why crowds of kindly people
are poured into this filthy melting-pot.  Now is the judgement of
this world.  The Prince of this World is judged, and he is judged
exactly because he is judging.  There is at last one simple
solution to the quarrel between the ball and the cross----"

Turnbull for the first time started.

"The ball and----" he repeated.

"What is the matter with you?" asked MacIan.

"I had a dream," said Turnbull, thickly and obscurely, "in which
I saw the cross struck crooked and the ball secure----"

"I had a dream," said MacIan, "in which I saw the cross erect and
the ball invisible.  They were both dreams from hell.  There must
be some round earth to plant the cross upon.  But here is the
awful difference--that the round world will not consent even to
continue round.  The astronomers are always telling us that it is
shaped like an orange, or like an egg, or like a German sausage.
They beat the old world about like a bladder and thump it into a
thousand shapeless shapes.  Turnbull, we cannot trust the ball to
be always a ball; we cannot trust reason to be reasonable.  In the
end the great terrestrial globe will go quite lop-sided, and only
the cross will stand upright."

There was a long silence, and then Turnbull said, hesitatingly:
"Has it occurred to you that since--since those two dreams, or
whatever they were----"

"Well?" murmured MacIan.

"Since then," went on Turnbull, in the same low voice, "since
then we have never even looked for our swords."

"You are right," answered Evan almost inaudibly.  "We have found
something which we both hate more than we ever hated each other,
and I think I know its name."

Turnbull seemed to frown and flinch for a moment.  "It does not
much matter what you call it," he said, "so long as you keep out
of its way."

The bushes broke and snapped abruptly behind them, and a very
tall figure towered above Turnbull with an arrogant stoop and a
projecting chin, a chin of which the shape showed queerly even in
its shadow upon the path.

"You see that is not so easy," said MacIan between his teeth.

They looked up into the eyes of the Master, but looked only for a
moment.  The eyes were full of a frozen and icy wrath, a kind of
utterly heartless hatred.  His voice was for the first time devoid
of irony.  There was no more sarcasm in it than there is in an
iron club.

"You will be inside the building in three minutes," he said, with
pulverizing precision, "or you will be fired on by the artillery
at all the windows.  There is too much talking in this garden; we
intend to close it.  You will be accommodated indoors."

"Ah!" said MacIan, with a long and satisfied sigh, "then I was
right."

And he turned his back and walked obediently towards the
building.  Turnbull seemed to canvass for a few minutes the notion
of knocking the Master down, and then fell under the same almost
fairy fatalism as his companion.  In some strange way it did seem
that the more smoothly they yielded, the more swiftly would
events sweep on to some great collision.



XX. DIES IRAE

As they advanced towards the asylum they looked up at its rows on
rows of windows, and understood the Master's material threat.  By
means of that complex but concealed machinery which ran like a
network of nerves over the whole fabric, there had been shot out
under every window-ledge rows and rows of polished-steel
cylinders, the cold miracles of modern gunnery.  They commanded
the whole garden and the whole country-side, and could have blown
to pieces an army corps.

This silent declaration of war had evidently had its complete
effect.  As MacIan and Turnbull walked steadily but slowly towards
the entrance hall of the institution, they could see that most,
or at least many, of the patients had already gathered there as
well as the staff of doctors and the whole regiment of keepers and
assistants.  But when they entered the lamp-lit hall, and the high
iron door was clashed to and locked behind them, yet a new
amazement leapt into their eyes, and the stalwart Turnbull almost
fell.  For he saw a sight which was indeed, as MacIan had
said--either the Day of Judgement or a dream.

Within a few feet of him at one corner of the square of standing
people stood the girl he had known in Jersey, Madeleine Durand.
She looked straight at him with a steady smile which lit up the
scene of darkness and unreason like the light of some honest
fireside.  Her square face and throat were thrown back, as her
habit was, and there was something almost sleepy in the geniality
of her eyes.  He saw her first, and for a few seconds saw her
only; then the outer edge of his eyesight took in all the other
staring faces, and he saw all the faces he had ever seen for
weeks and months past.  There was the Tolstoyan in Jaeger flannel,
with the yellow beard that went backward and the foolish nose and
eyes that went forward, with the curiosity of a crank.  He was
talking eagerly to Mr. Gordon, the corpulent Jew shopkeeper whom
they had once gagged in his own shop.  There was the tipsy old
Hertfordshire rustic; he was talking energetically to himself.
There was not only Mr. Vane the magistrate, but the clerk of Mr.
Vane, the magistrate.  There was not only Miss Drake of the
motor-car, but also Miss Drake's chauffeur.  Nothing wild or
unfamiliar could have produced upon Turnbull such a nightmare
impression as that ring of familiar faces.  Yet he had one
intellectual shock which was greater than all the others.  He
stepped impulsively forward towards Madeleine, and then wavered
with a kind of wild humility.  As he did so he caught sight of
another square face behind Madeleine's, a face with long grey
whiskers and an austere stare.  It was old Durand, the girls'
father; and when Turnbull saw him he saw the last and worst
marvel of that monstrous night.  He remembered Durand; he
remembered his monotonous, everlasting lucidity, his stupefyingly
sensible views of everything, his colossal contentment with
truisms merely because they were true.  "Confound it all!" cried
Turnbull to himself, "if _he_ is in the asylum, there can't be
anyone outside."  He drew nearer to Madeleine, but still
doubtfully and all the more so because she still smiled at him.
MacIan had already gone across to Beatrice with an air of fright.

Then all these bewildered but partly amicable recognitions were
cloven by a cruel voice which always made all human blood turn
bitter.  The Master was standing in the middle of the room
surveying the scene like a great artist looking at a completed
picture.  Handsome as he looked, they had never seen so clearly
what was really hateful in his face; and even then they could
only express it by saying that the arched brows and the long
emphatic chin gave it always a look of being lit from below, like
the face of some infernal actor.

"This is indeed a cosy party," he said, with glittering eyes.

The Master evidently meant to say more, but before he could say
anything M. Durand had stepped right up to him and was speaking.

He was speaking exactly as a French bourgeois speaks to the
manager of a restaurant.  That is, he spoke with rattling and
breathless rapidity, but with no incoherence, and therefore with
no emotion.  It was a steady, monotonous vivacity, which came not
seemingly from passion, but merely from the reason having been
sent off at a gallop.  He was saying something like this:

"You refuse me my half-bottle of Medoc, the drink the most
wholesome and the most customary.  You refuse me the company and
obedience of my daughter, which Nature herself indicates.  You
refuse me the beef and mutton, without pretence that it is a fast
of the Church.  You now forbid me the promenade, a thing necessary
to a person of my age.  It is useless to tell me that you do all
this by law.  Law rests upon the social contract.  If the citizen
finds himself despoiled of such pleasures and powers as he would
have had even in the savage state, the social contract is
annulled."

"It's no good chattering away, Monsieur," said Hutton, for the
Master was silent.  "The place is covered with machine-guns.  We've
got to obey our orders, and so have you."

"The machinery is of the most perfect," assented Durand, somewhat
irrelevantly; "worked by petroleum, I believe.  I only ask you to
admit that if such things fall below the comfort of barbarism,
the social contract is annulled.  It is a pretty little point of
theory."

"Oh!  I dare say," said Hutton.

Durand bowed quite civilly and withdrew.

"A cosy party," resumed the Master, scornfully, "and yet I
believe some of you are in doubt about how we all came together.
I will explain it, ladies and gentlemen; I will explain
everything.  To whom shall I specially address myself?  To Mr.
James Turnbull.  He has a scientific mind."

Turnbull seemed to choke with sudden protest.  The Master seemed
only to cough out of pure politeness and proceeded: "Mr. Turnbull
will agree with me," he said, "when I say that we long felt in
scientific circles that great harm was done by such a legend as
that of the Crucifixion."

Turnbull growled something which was presumably assent.

The Master went on smoothly: "It was in vain for us to urge that
the incident was irrelevant; that there were many such fanatics,
many such executions.  We were forced to take the thing thoroughly
in hand, to investigate it in the spirit of scientific history,
and with the assistance of Mr. Turnbull and others we were happy
in being able to announce that this alleged Crucifixion never
occurred at all."

MacIan lifted his head and looked at the Master steadily, but
Turnbull did not look up.

"This, we found, was the only way with all superstitions,"
continued the speaker; "it was necessary to deny them
historically, and we have done it with great success in the case
of miracles and such things.  Now within our own time there arose
an unfortunate fuss which threatened (as Mr. Turnbull would say)
to galvanize the corpse of Christianity into a fictitious
life--the alleged case of a Highland eccentric who wanted to
fight for the Virgin."

MacIan, quite white, made a step forward, but the speaker did not
alter his easy attitude or his flow of words.  "Again we urged
that this duel was not to be admired, that it was a mere brawl,
but the people were ignorant and romantic.  There were signs of
treating this alleged Highlander and his alleged opponent as
heroes.  We tried all other means of arresting this reactionary
hero worship.  Working men who betted on the duel were imprisoned
for gambling.  Working men who drank the health of a duellist were
imprisoned for drunkenness.  But the popular excitement about the
alleged duel continued, and we had to fall back on our old
historical method.  We investigated, on scientific principles, the
story of MacIan's challenge, and we are happy to be able to
inform you that the whole story of the attempted duel is a fable.
There never was any challenge.  There never was any man named
MacIan.  It is a melodramatic myth, like Calvary."

Not a soul moved save Turnbull, who lifted his head; yet there
was the sense of a silent explosion.

"The whole story of the MacIan challenge," went on the Master,
beaming at them all with a sinister benignity, "has been found to
originate in the obsessions of a few pathological types, who are
now all fortunately in our care.  There is, for instance, a person
here of the name of Gordon, formerly the keeper of a curiosity
shop.  He is a victim of the disease called Vinculomania--the
impression that one has been bound or tied up.  We have also a
case of Fugacity (Mr. Whimpey), who imagines that he was chased
by two men."

The indignant faces of the Jew shopkeeper and the Magdalen Don
started out of the crowd in their indignation, but the speaker
continued:

"One poor woman we have with us," he said, in a compassionate
voice, "believes she was in a motor-car with two such men; this
is the well-known illusion of speed on which I need not dwell.
Another wretched woman has the simple egotistic mania that she
has caused the duel.  Madeleine Durand actually professes to have
been the subject of the fight between MacIan and his enemy, a
fight which, if it occurred at all, certainly began long before.
But it never occurred at all.  We have taken in hand every person
who professed to have seen such a thing, and proved them all to
be unbalanced.  That is why they are here."

The Master looked round the room, just showing his perfect teeth
with the perfection of artistic cruelty, exalted for a moment in
the enormous simplicity of his success, and then walked across
the hall and vanished through an inner door.  His two lieutenants,
Quayle and Hutton, were left standing at the head of the great
army of servants and keepers.

"I hope we shall have no more trouble," said Dr. Quayle
pleasantly enough, and addressing Turnbull, who was leaning
heavily upon the back of a chair.

Still looking down, Turnbull lifted the chair an inch or two from
the ground.  Then he suddenly swung it above his head and sent it
at the inquiring doctor with an awful crash which sent one of its
wooden legs loose along the floor and crammed the doctor gasping
into a corner.  MacIan gave a great shout, snatched up the loose
chair-leg, and, rushing on the other doctor, felled him with a
blow.  Twenty attendants rushed to capture the rebels; MacIan
flung back three of them and Turnbull went over on top of one,
when from behind them all came a shriek as of something quite
fresh and frightful.

Two of the three passages leading out of the hall were choked
with blue smoke.  Another instant and the hall was full of the fog
of it, and red sparks began to swarm like scarlet bees.

"The place is on fire!" cried Quayle with a scream of indecent
terror.  "Oh, who can have done it?  How can it have happened?"

A light had come into Turnbull's eyes.  "How did the French
Revolution happen?" he asked.

"Oh, how should I know!" wailed the other.

"Then I will tell you," said Turnbull; "it happened because some
people fancied that a French grocer was as respectable as he
looked."

Even as he spoke, as if by confirmation, old Mr. Durand
re-entered the smoky room quite placidly, wiping the petroleum
from his hands with a handkerchief.  He had set fire to the
building in accordance with the strict principles of the social
contract.

But MacIan had taken a stride forward and stood there shaken and
terrible.  "Now," he cried, panting, "now is the judgement of the
world.  The doctors will leave this place; the keepers will leave
this place.  They will leave us in charge of the machinery and the
machine-guns at the windows.  But we, the lunatics, will wait to
be burned alive if only we may see them go."

"How do you know we shall go?" asked Hutton, fiercely.

"You believe nothing," said MacIan, simply, "and you are
insupportably afraid of death."

"So this is suicide," sneered the doctor; "a somewhat doubtful
sign of sanity."

"Not at all--this is vengeance," answered Turnbull, quite calmly;
"a thing which is completely healthy."

"You think the doctors will go," said Hutton, savagely.

"The keepers have gone already," said Turnbull.

Even as they spoke the main doors were burst open in mere brutal
panic, and all the officers and subordinates of the asylum rushed
away across the garden pursued by the smoke.  But among the
ticketed maniacs not a man or woman moved.

"We hate dying," said Turnbull, with composure, "but we hate you
even more.  This is a successful revolution."

In the roof above their heads a panel shot back, showing a strip
of star-lit sky and a huge thing made of white metal, with the
shape and fins of a fish, swinging as if at anchor.  At the same
moment a steel ladder slid down from the opening and struck the
floor, and the cleft chin of the mysterious Master was thrust
into the opening.  "Quayle, Hutton," he said, "you will escape
with me."  And they went up the ladder like automata of lead.

Long after they had clambered into the car, the creature with the
cloven face continued to leer down upon the smoke-stung crowd
below.  Then at last he said in a silken voice and with a smile of
final satisfaction:

"By the way, I fear I am very absent minded.  There is one man
specially whom, somehow, I always forget.  I always leave him
lying about.  Once I mislaid him on the Cross of St. Paul's.  So
silly of me; and now I've forgotten him in one of those little
cells where your fire is burning.  Very unfortunate--especially
for him."  And nodding genially, he climbed into his flying ship.

MacIan stood motionless for two minutes, and then rushed down one
of the suffocating corridors till he found the flames.  Turnbull
looked once at Madeleine, and followed.

           *                    *                   *

MacIan, with singed hair, smoking garments, and smarting hands
and face, had already broken far enough through the first
barriers of burning timber to come within cry of the cells he had
once known.  It was impossible, however, to see the spot where the
old man lay dead or alive; not now through darkness, but through
scorching and aching light.  The site of the old half-wit's cell
was now the heart of a standing forest of fire--the flames as
thick and yellow as a cornfield.  Their incessant shrieking and
crackling was like a mob shouting against an orator.  Yet through
all that deafening density MacIan thought he heard a small and
separate sound.  When he heard it he rushed forward as if to
plunge into that furnace, but Turnbull arrested him by an elbow.

"Let me go!" cried Evan, in agony; "it's the poor old beggar's
voice--he's still alive, and shouting for help."

"Listen!" said Turnbull, and lifted one finger from his clenched
hand.

"Or else he is shrieking with pain," protested MacIan.  "I will
not endure it."

"Listen!" repeated Turnbull, grimly.  "Did you ever hear anyone
shout for help or shriek with pain in that voice?"

The small shrill sounds which came through the crash of the
conflagration were indeed of an odd sort, and MacIan turned a
face of puzzled inquiry to his companion.

"He is singing," said Turnbull, simply.

A remaining rampart fell, crushing the fire, and through the
diminished din of it the voice of the little old lunatic came
clearer.  In the heart of that white-hot hell he was singing like
a bird.  What he was singing it was not very easy to follow, but
it seemed to be something about playing in the golden hay.

"Good Lord!" cried Turnbull, bitterly, "there seem to be some
advantages in really being an idiot."  Then advancing to the
fringe of the fire he called out on chance to the invisible
singer: "Can you come out?  Are you cut off?"

"God help us all!" said MacIan, with a shudder; "he's laughing
now."

At whatever stage of being burned alive the invisible now found
himself, he was now shaking out peals of silvery and hilarious
laughter.  As he listened, MacIan's two eyes began to glow, as if
a strange thought had come into his head.

"Fool, come out and save yourself!" shouted Turnbull.

"No, by Heaven! that is not the way," cried Evan, suddenly.
"Father," he shouted, "come out and save us all!"

The fire, though it had dropped in one or two places, was, upon
the whole, higher and more unconquerable than ever.  Separate tall
flames shot up and spread out above them like the fiery cloisters
of some infernal cathedral, or like a grove of red tropical trees
in the garden of the devil.  Higher yet in the purple hollow of
the night the topmost flames leapt again and again fruitlessly at
the stars, like golden dragons chained but struggling.  The towers
and domes of the oppressive smoke seemed high and far enough to
drown distant planets in a London fog.  But if we exhausted all
frantic similes for that frantic scene, the main impression about
the fire would still be its ranked upstanding rigidity and a sort
of roaring stillness.  It was literally a wall of fire.

"Father," cried MacIan, once more, "come out of it and save us
all!"  Turnbull was staring at him as he cried.

The tall and steady forest of fire must have been already a
portent visible to the whole circle of land and sea.  The red
flush of it lit up the long sides of white ships far out in the
German Ocean, and picked out like piercing rubies the windows in
the villages on the distant heights.  If any villagers or sailors
were looking towards it they must have seen a strange sight as
MacIan cried out for the third time.

That forest of fire wavered, and was cloven in the centre; and
then the whole of one half of it leaned one way as a cornfield
leans all one way under the load of the wind.  Indeed, it looked
as if a great wind had sprung up and driven the great fire
aslant.  Its smoke was no longer sent up to choke the stars, but
was trailed and dragged across county after county like one
dreadful banner of defeat.

But it was not the wind; or, if it was the wind, it was two
winds blowing in opposite directions.  For while one half of the
huge fire sloped one way towards the inland heights, the other
half, at exactly the same angle, sloped out eastward towards the
sea.  So that earth and ocean could behold, where there had been a
mere fiery mass, a thing divided like a V--a cloven tongue of
flame.  But if it were a prodigy for those distant, it was
something beyond speech for those quite near.  As the echoes of
Evan's last appeal rang and died in the universal uproar, the
fiery vault over his head opened down the middle, and, reeling
back in two great golden billows, hung on each side as huge and
harmless as two sloping hills lie on each side of a valley.  Down
the centre of this trough, or chasm, a little path ran, cleared
of all but ashes, and down this little path was walking a little
old man singing as if he were alone in a wood in spring.

When James Turnbull saw this he suddenly put out a hand and
seemed to support himself on the strong shoulder of Madeleine
Durand.  Then after a moment's hesitation he put his other hand on
the shoulder of MacIan.  His blue eyes looked extraordinarily
brilliant and beautiful.  In many sceptical papers and magazines
afterwards he was sadly or sternly rebuked for having abandoned
the certainties of materialism.  All his life up to that moment he
had been most honestly certain that materialism was a fact.  But
he was unlike the writers in the magazines precisely in this--
that he preferred a fact even to materialism.

As the little singing figure came nearer and nearer, Evan fell on
his knees, and after an instant Beatrice followed; then Madeleine
fell on her knees, and after a longer instant Turnbull followed.
Then the little old man went past them singing down that corridor
of flames.  They had not looked at his face.

When he had passed they looked up.  While the first light of the
fire had shot east and west, painting the sides of ships with
fire-light or striking red sparks out of windowed houses, it had
not hitherto struck upward, for there was above it the ponderous
and rococo cavern of its own monstrous coloured smoke.  But now
the fire was turned to left and right like a woman's hair parted
in the middle, and now the shafts of its light could shoot up
into empty heavens and strike anything, either bird or cloud.  But
it struck something that was neither cloud nor bird.  Far, far
away up in those huge hollows of space something was flying
swiftly and shining brightly, something that shone too bright and
flew too fast to be any of the fowls of the air, though the red
light lit it from underneath like the breast of a bird.  Everyone
knew it was a flying ship, and everyone knew whose.

As they stared upward the little speck of light seemed slightly
tilted, and two black dots dropped from the edge of it.  All the
eager, upturned faces watched the two dots as they grew bigger
and bigger in their downward rush.  Then someone screamed, and no
one looked up any more.  For the two bodies, larger every second
flying, spread out and sprawling in the fire-light, were the dead
bodies of the two doctors whom Professor Lucifer had carried with
him--the weak and sneering Quayle, the cold and clumsy Hutton.
They went with a crash into the thick of the fire.

"They are gone!" screamed Beatrice, hiding her head.  "O God!  The
are lost!"

Evan put his arm about her, and remembered his own vision.

"No, they are not lost," he said.  "They are saved.  He has taken
away no souls with him, after all."

He looked vaguely about at the fire that was already fading, and
there among the ashes lay two shining things that had survived
the fire, his sword and Turnbull's, fallen haphazard in the
pattern of a cross.








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