THE BALL AND THE- CROSS By G-K- CHESTERTON ^ .n), [Jl. . THE BALL AND THE CROSS BY THE SAME AUTHOR HERETICS. ORTHODOXY. THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL. A Romance. Illustrated by W. Graham Robertson. ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW. THE BALL AND THE CROSS BY GILBERT K. CHESTERTON NEW YORK JOHN LANE COMPANY MCMIX Copyright, 1906, by JOSEPH \V. DARTON Entered at Stationers' Hall, London, England Copyright, 1909, by JOHN LANE COMPANY PRINTED AT THE TROW PRESS, NEW YORK, U. S. A. .UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA BARBARA CONTENTS CHAPTER I. — A Discussion Somewhat in the Air II. — The Religion of the Stipendiary Mag ISTRATE .... 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 Ir^ .... 28 49 68 91 103 126 143 15s 182 212 237 252 268 292 30s 324 349 371 38s THE BALL AND THE CROSS CHAPTER I A DISCUSSION SOMEWHAT IN THE AIR The flying ship of Professor Lucifer sang through the skies Hke a silver arrow; the bleak white steel of it, gleaming in the bleak blue empti- ness 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 pro- fessor had himself invented the flying machine, and had also invented nearly everything in it. Every sort of tool or apparatus had, in conse- quence, 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 or religion; since in the latter images and ideas remain themselves eternally, while it is the whole idea of evolution that identi- ties melt into each other as they do in a nightmare. 2 THE BALL AND THE CROSS All the tools of Professor Lucifer were the an- cient human tools gone mad, grown into un- recognisable shapes, forgetful of their origin, for- getful 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 import- ant instrument to which the corkscrew, was the key. All these things, as I say, the professor had invented ; he had invented everything in the fly- ing ship, with the exception, perhaps, of himself. This he had been born too late actually to inaugu- rate, but he believed, at least, that he had consid- erably 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 A DISCUSSION 3 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 ref- utations and exposures of certain heresies, the last professors of which had been burnt (generally by each other) precisely i,i 19 years previously. They were really very plausible and thoughtful heresies, and it was really a creditable or even glorious cir- cumstance, that the old monk had been intellectual enough to detect their fallacy; the only misfor- tune was that nobody in the modern world was intellectual enough even to understand their argu- ment. The old monk, one of whose names was Michael, and the other a name quite impossible to remember or repeat in our Western civilisation, 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 tradi- tions can be quite finally exhibited to anybody with 4 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 impe- cunious people. It is folly to talk of this or that demonstrating the rationalist philosophy. Every- thing 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 1 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 firofessor, 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 merci- ful. 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, sur^ rounded by the heavens. You know the truth, and the truth is this. The heavens are evil, the sky A DISCUSSION 5 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 sci- ence 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, un- der the roots of the grass, in the place where hell was of old. The fiery crypts, the lurid cellars of the under-world, 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 his- tory as I have been enabled to make has led me 6 THE BALL AND THE CROSS to — er — rather singular conclusion, which I find great difficulty in expressing, especially in a for- eign language." " Come, come," said the Professor, encourag- ingly, " 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 elo- quence, 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 run- ning 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 A DISCUSSION 7 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 intel- lect " " 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 cross looked like a buoy riding on a 8 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 at- mosphere 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 cycle- A DISCUSSION 9 pean 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 bor- derland was shadowy and more awful in shape and size. Professor Lucifer slapped his hand twice lipon 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 lo THE BALL AND THE CROSS Christian humbug from any symbol you Hked to give me, from any instance I came across. Here is an instance with a vengeance. What could pos- sibly 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 in- evitable. 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 irre- concilable 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 A DISCUSSION II 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 in- stant, 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 develop- ment 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 Pro- fessor 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." 12 THE BALL AND THE CROSS " Oh ! " said the monk, a wrinkle coming into his forehead, " so you think that in a rationaHs- tic scheme of symboHsm the ball should be on top of the cross ? " " It sums up my whole allegory," said the pro- fessor. " 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 re- ligion of the ball, has produced to lead or teach mankind. You would see, I think, that thing hap- pen 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 m^inotony and slowness of ar- ticulation. " He took this " A DISCUSSION 13 " 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 un- reason. 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 para- doxical. Then he began to grow fiercer and more eccentric ; he would batter the crosses by the road- side; 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 14 THE BALL AND THE CROSS by a sudden change in the eyesight that this pahng was an army of innumerable crosses Hnked to- gether 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 re- turned 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 intol- erable 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 para- ble. It is a parable of you and all your rational- ists. 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 A DISCUSSION 15 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 Pro- fessor 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 i6 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 import- ant 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 in- herit the earth." But those who see and feel the fundamental fact of the matter know that paradox is a thing that belongs not to religion only, but to all vivid and violent practical crises of human liv- ing. This kind of paradox may be clearly per- ceived 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 A DISCUSSION 17 spite of his asceticism (or because of it, for all I know), was a very healthy and happy old gentle- man. And as he swung on a bar above the sicken- ing emptiness of air, he realised^ with that sort of dead detachment which belongs to the brains of those in peril, the deathless and hopeless con- tradiction which is involved in the mere idea of courage. He was a happy and healthy old gentle- man 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 cool- ness 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 fagade, 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 contradic- tion as large and staring as the immense contra- diction of the Cross ; he remembered having often heard the words, " Whosoever shall lose his life the same shall save it." He remembered with a i8 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 readi- ness 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 dogmatise about. Frequently they produce a certain useless and joy- less activity of the mere intellect, thought not only divorced from hope but even from desire. And if it is impossible to dogmatise 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 ter- ror 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 A DISCUSSION 19 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 pres- ent. It is not faith, for faith by its very nature is fierce, and as it were at once doubtful and de- fiant; but this is simply a satisfaction. It is not knowledge, for the intellect seems to have no par- ticular 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 satis- faction which soaked through him and filled him to the brim. He felt with a sort of half-witted 20 THE BALL AND THE CROSS lucidity that the cross was there, and the "ball was there, and the dome was there, that he was going to cHmb 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 dark- ness and thunder. By the time he had reached that place of safety he almost felt (as in some impossi- ble 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 A DISCUSSION 21 astonished man, with the brown mustache 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 name- less 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 some- thing or other being after hours and against or- ders. 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 22 THE BALL AND THE CROSS sensual music of the voice of the man in buttons. He began to hsten to what he said, and even to make some attempt at answering a question v\-hich appeared to have been put several times and was now put with some excess of emphasis. Alichael realised 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 Gk)d underwent a remarkable change. From address- ing 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 to- wards 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 await- ing him downstairs. Michael followed him, how- ever, 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 A DISCUSSION 23 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 mo- tionless, great black masses of men. The tongiie 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 down- stairs; 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 24 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 sud- denly 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 hu- miliation, 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. Every- thing his eye fell on it feasted on, not aestheti- cally, 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 A DISCUSSION 25 the shop windows excited him as the young are excited by the lit stage of some promising panto- mime. He happened to see in one shop which projected with a bulging bravery on to the pave- ment 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 sud- denness 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 26 THE BALL AND THE CROSS again." Then his eyes encountered the monkish habit of Michael, and he pulled off his grey tarn 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, par- donable, 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 em- bracing like brothers and shouting like men de- livered. 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. A DISCUSSION 27 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 wan- dering 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 con- stables 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 magis- trate, whither we shall follow him in an ensuing chapter. And they took the happiest man in the world away to an asylum. CHAPTER 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 en- ergy that the Bishop of London was paid £12,000 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 28 THE STIPENDIARY MAGISTRATE 29 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 Tumbull, all this decline in public importance seemed not so much sad or even mad, but merely bewildering and un- accountable. 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 30 THE BALL AND THE CROSS smiled when told of their own death, or looked vacantly at the Day of Judgment. 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 dis- couraged Turnbull. The socialists said he was cursing priests when he should be cursing capital- ists. The artists said that the soul was most spir- itual, not when freed from religion, but when freed from morality. Year after year went by, and at last a man came by who treated Mr. Turn- bull's secularist shop with a real respect and seri- ousness. He was a young man in a grey plaid, and he smashed the window. He was a young man, born in the Bay of Aris- aig, 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 Macdon- alds ; 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 Maclan. He had been brought up in some loneliness and se- THE STIPENDIARY MAGISTRATE 31 elusion 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 prop- erly realised 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 un- derstand that their one essential historical prin- ciple, the one law truly graven on their hearts, was the great and comforting statement that Queen Anne is dead. This faith was as funda- mental as his faith, that Our Lady was alive. Any persons he had talked to since he had touched the fringe of our fashion or civilisation 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 fan- 32 THE BALL AND THE CROSS tastic 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 cloud- lets 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 child- hood 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. THE STIPENDIARY MAGISTRATE 33 His private tradition was equally wild and un- worldly. 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 hig 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 Scot- land. And Evan himself had been of one piece wjth 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 34 THE BALL AND THE CROSS shock of sentiment, when he turned that wonder- ful corner of Fleet Street and saw St. Paul's sit- ting 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 cor- responding 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 of- fice 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 High- lander 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 characteris- tic of all his school, the editor of " The Atheist " had put first in his paper and most prominently in THE STIPENDIARY MAGISTRATE 35 his window an article called " The Mesopotamian Mythology and its Effects on the Syriac Folk Lore." Mr. Evan Maclan 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 accumu- lated by the author with that tired clearness of the mind which children have on heavy summer after- noons — 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 the Mesopotamian Gods. He read how the Meso- potamians had a God named Sho (sometimes pro- nounced Ji), and that he was described as being very powerful, a striking similarity to some ex- pressions 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 36 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 un- derstand it. He read it again and then again. Then he did understand it. The glass fell in ring- ing 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 any- thing else when you plaster your own house with THE STIPENDIARY MAGISTRATE 37 that God-defying filth? Stand up and fight, I say." A great light like dawn came into Mr. Turn- bull'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 re- ward. Some one 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 him- self in the presence of the police. The policemen, after some ponderous question- ings, collared both the two enthusiasts. They were more respectful, however, to the young man who had smashed the window, than to the mis- creant who had had his window smashed. There was an air of refined mystery about Evan Maclan, 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. Maclan 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 38 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 in- comparable morning dress. He looked like a gentleman, and yet, somehow, like a stage gen- tleman. 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. Maclan, come," he said, leaning back in his chair, " do you generally enter your THE STIPENDIARY MAGISTRATE 39 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 noth- ing 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 or- dinary 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 40 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 irrev- erent. I call it irreverent, and I'm not specially orthodox either." " I see you are not," said Evan, " but I am." " We are wandering from the point," said the police magistrate, pulling himself together, " May I ask why you smashed this worthy citi- zen'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. Cum- berland Vane, rapping his knuckles angrily on the table, " I tell you, once 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. THE STIPENDIARY MAGISTRATE 41 " Eh," cried Vane, glaring through his eye- glass. " You asked me why I broke his window," said Maclan, 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 sti- pendiary, 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. 42 THE BALL AND THE CROSS " And who are you ? " exploded Vane. " Are your views necessarily the right ones? Are you necessarily in possession of the truth ? " " Yes," said Maclan. The magistrate broke into a contemptuous laugh. " Oh, you want a nurse to look after you," he said. " You must pay £io." Evan Maclan plunged his hands into his loose grey garments and drew out a queer looking leather purse. It contained exactly twelve sover- eigns. He paid down the ten, coin by coin, in silence, and equally silently returned the remain- ing two to the receptacle. Then he said, " May I say a word, your worship ? " Cumberland Vane seemed half hypnotised 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 Mac- lan, 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 THE STIPENDIARY MAGISTRATE 43 to the editor of " The Atheist," " whether it be outside this door in ten minutes from now, or twenty years hence in some distant countr}% wher- ever 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 par- doned 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 44 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 sensa- tion 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 ask- ing 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 ? " THE STIPENDIARY MAGISTRATE 45 " With Mr. Turnbull," said Vane. " Certainly not^" answered Maclan. " What has he to do with peace ? " " Do you mean to say," began the magistrate, " that you refuse to . . ." The voice of Turn- bull himself clove in for the first time. " Might I suggest," he said, " that I, your wor- ship, can settle to some extent this absurd matter myself. This rather wild gentleman promises that he will not attack me with any ordinary as- sault — 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." 46 THE BALL AND THE CROSS Mr. Cumberland Vane rolled about, laughing in a sort of relief. " You're like a breath of April air, 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 pun- ishment or suppression he would have felt as nat- ural; but the sudden juncture between the laugh- ter 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 bub- ble. 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, stem 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 THE STIPENDIARY MAGISTRATE 47 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 in the streets. Let it be yours or mine? " " But you said ..." began Maclan. " 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 Maclan, 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, 48 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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." CHAPTER III SOME OLD CURIOSITIES The evening sky, a dome of solid gold, un- flaked even by a single sunset cloud, steeped the meanest sights of London in a strange and mel- low light. It made a little greasy street off 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 acci- dent, 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 49 50 THE BALL AND THE CROSS half burnished seventeenth century swords ran like an ornate railing along the front of the win- dow ; behind was a darker glimmer of old oak and old armour; and higher up hung the most ex- traordinary looking South Sea tools or utensils, whether designed for killing enemies or merely for cooking them, no mere white man could pos- sibly 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 beau- tiful 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 ad- mirable type; a Jew with a very well sounding SOME OLD CURIOSITIES 51 name. For though there are no hard tests for separating the tares and 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 them- selves. 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 care- ful purchasers, but free-handed payers. One of them who seemed to be the principal and the au- thority (whom, indeed, Mr. Henry Gordon fan- cied 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 ag- gressively forward as if he defied any one to pull it. The other kept so much in the background in comparison that he looked almost ghostly in 52 THE BALL AND THE CROSS his grey cloak or plaid, a tall, sallow, silent young man. The two Scotchmen were interested in seven- teenth 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 pur- poses, 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. Maclan, perhaps you had better explain the situation." The tall Scotchman in grey took a step for- ward 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 be- tween Mr. Turnbull and myself on a grave and invaluable matter, which can only be atoned for SOME OLD CURIOSITIES 53 by fighting. Unfortunately, as the poHce 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 fair play, we shall feel how " The shopman recovered himself from a stun- ning 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 54 THE BALL AND THE CROSS contempt. " I will leave the religion of human- ity 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. " Maclan," said Turnbull, falling almost into the familiar tone of a business partner, " ^Maclan, 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 Maclan, whose SOME OLD CURIOSITIES 55 long, lean hands were unusually powerful, tight- ened 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 ! " Maclan 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 com- batants stuck their swords in the turf and took ofif 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 Maclan apparently standing ready. 56 THE BALL AND THE CROSS Yet Maclan 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 Maclan, drily. " Let us begin." Maclan 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 Avho wants nothing. But it was indeed the more dreadful apathy of one who wants some- thing and will care for nothing else. And this was seen suddenly ; for the instant Evan engaged SOME OLD CURIOSITIES 57 he disengaged and lunged with an infernal vio- lence. His opponent with a desperate prompti- tude 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; Maclan seemed to catch the point and throw it away from him, and was thrusting back like a thunderbolt, when a sound paralysed him; an- other sound beside their ringing weapons. Turn- bull, perhaps from an equal astonishment, per- haps from chivalry, stopped also and forbore 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 58 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 realised the actual possibility of defeat and pulled himself to- gether under a shock of the sanity of anger. He narrowed, and, so to speak, tightened his opera- tions : he fenced (as the swordman'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 net- work of steel. He turned one thrust, turned an- other, 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! SOME OLD CURIOSITIES 59 Police ! Murder ! Murder ! " The gag was bro- ken ; 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, Maclan," 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 sec- onds after he had alighted in his socks on the 6o THE BALL AND THE CROSS other side, Maclan 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 thorough- fare that they could see the vague masses of vehi- cles 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 gut- ter-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, howevjer, two wild-haired men in their shirts and socks with naked swords under their arms, he not unnaturally brought his readi- ness to a rigid stop and stared suspiciously. " You talk to him a minute," whispered Turn- bull, and stepped back into the shadow of the wall. " We want you," said Maclan 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 SOME OLD CURIOSITIES 6i like to know it was all right. Might I arst where you come from, Sir ? " A second after he spoke Maclan 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 Maclan, again assuming the most deliberate and lingering lowland Scotch in- tonation, " 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. Maclan had no glimmering notion of what he was up to, but an instinct of discipline, inherited from a hun- dred 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 drunk- 62 THE BALL AND THE CROSS ard, " 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 Tumbull 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 police- man 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. Maclan," 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 SOME OLD CURIOSITIES 63 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 consul- tation with you on our present position or future action. Our present position, Mr. Maclan, I im- agine that I am under no special necessity of de- scribing. 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 de- cided 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." Maclan 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 occu- pants of this runaway cab, are at this moment the two most important people in London, pos- sibly in Europe. I have been looking at all the streets as we went past, I have been looking at all 64 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 civilisation 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 cer- tain truth. We must fight this thing out some- where; 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 Chris- tians were hypocrites, and I felt quite mildly to- wards 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 im- morality — and yet in your heart you tolerated them entirely. Now you know that I am an hon- est 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 — SOME OLD CURIOSITIES 65 why one thirsts for his blood. Yes, you open for me a vista of thought." " Don't run into anything," said Evan, im- movably. " There's something in that view of yours, too," said Tiirnbull, 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 prompti- tude 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 aid 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 re- port 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. 66 THE BALL AND THE CROSS Towards the top of Albany Street the singular cabman again opened the trap. " Mr. Maclan," he said, " I understand that we have now definitely settled that in the conven- tional language honour is not satisfied. Our ac- tion 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. Lentil the event comes off, therefore, I should suggest that quarrelling would be inconvenient and rather in- artistic ; while the ordinary exchange of politeness between man and man would be not only elegant but uncommonly practical." " You are perfectly right," answered Maclan, with his melancholy voice, " in saying that all this has occurred to me. All duellists should be- SOME OLD CURIOSITIES 67 have 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. Maclan," 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. Maclan, 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. CHAPTER IV A DISCUSSION AT DAWN The duellists had from their own point of view escaped or conquered the chief powers of the modem 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 mon- strous 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 hap- pen unsuccessfully, should happen to the advan- tage of this party or the advantage of that party, but whose interest simply is that things should happen. It is the one great weakness of journalism as 68 A DISCUSSION AT DAWN 69 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 scaffold- ing. 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 Worth- ing, 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 70 THE BALL AND THE CROSS when the same man was brought before a magis- trate 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 pur- sued 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, pro- spectively, and were in the mood for more; everything in the matter prepared them for fur- ther outbursts of moral indignation. And when a gasping reporter rushed in in the last hours of A DISCUSSION AT DAWN 71 the evening with the announcement that the two heroes of the Police Court had Hterally been found fig-hting in a London back garden, with a shop- keeper 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 Lon- don 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 Tele- graph," 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 theologi- cal differences to themselves. The fracas, etc., etc." The "Daily News" started, "Nothing could be more inimical to the cause of true re- ligion than etc., etc." The " Times " began with something about Celtic disturbances of the equi- librium of Empire, and the " Daily Express " distinguished itself splendidly by omitting alto- gether so controversial a matter and substituting a leader about goloshes. And the morning after that, the editors and 72 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 edi- tors 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 reim- burse Mr. Gordon^ the man who had been gagged in the shop. Mr. Maclan, 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 halls. 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), A DISCUSSION AT DAWN 73 was sung to crowded houses every night. The papers developed a devouring thirst for the cap- ture 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. Tumbull unrolled a whole bundle of them for the amusement of Mr. Maclan 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 labori- ously over London. From the spot where Turn- bull and Maclan 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 bewilder- 74 THE BALL AND THE CROSS ing squares and parallelograms were compact and perfect as a Chinese puzzle; an enormous hiero- glyphic which man must decipher or die. There fell upon both of them, but upon Turnbull more than the other, because he knew 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 denounc- ing 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 doubt- ful whether it was worth doing at all. There seemed to be something greater than mere accu- racy in making such a mistake as London. And what was to be the end of it all? what was to be A DISCUSSION AT DAWN 75 the ultimate transformation of this common and incredible London man, this workman on a tram in Battersea, this clerk on an omnibus in Cheap- side? Turnbull^ as he stared drearily, murmured to himself the words of the old atheistic and revo- lutionary 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. Maclan was also gazing with his face towards the city, but there was that about his blind and mys- tical stare that told one, so to speak, that his eyes were turned inwards. When Turnbull said some- thing to him about London, they seemed to move as at a summons and come out like two house- holders coming out into their doorways. 76 THE BALL AND THE CROSS " Yes," he said^ with a sort of stupidity. " It's a very big place." There was a somewhat unmeaning silence, and then Maclan 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 shape- less 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 Maclan. Turnbull said bitterly, " In a book," and the silence fell suddenly between them again. They were sitting in a sort of litter on the hill- side; all the things they had hurriedly collected, in various places, for their flight, were strewn A DISCUSSION AT DAWN 77 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 packet 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 mod- ern 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 Maclan. 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 78 THE BALL AND THE CROSS about a wrong thing done in England than they are about a wrong thing done in France." " It is not a wrong thing," said Maclan. Tumbull laughed. " You seem unable to un- derstand 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 collect- ing our baggage." And he jumped up and began shoving tlie lug- gage into his pockets, or strapping it on to his back. As he thrust a tin of canned meat, any- how, 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 Maclan, opening his great grave blue eyes. " The papers are full of us," said Turnbull, stooping to pick up one of the swords. Maclan 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 Maclan, vio- A DISCUSSION AT DAWN 79 lently, 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. Maclan, 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 coun- try, 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 end- less 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 mob- ilise the army and navy to prevent them. For 8o THE BALL AND THE CROSS half a year or more, you and I, Mr. Maclan, will be an obstacle to every reform in the British Em^ pire. We shall prevent the Chinese being sent out of the Transvaal and the blocks being stopped in the Strand. We shall be the conversational sub- stitute when any one recommends Home Rule, or complains of sky signs. Therefore, do not im- agine, in your innocence, that we have only to melt away among those English hills as a High- land cateran might into your god-forsaken High- land mountains. We must be eternally on our guard; we must live the hunted life of two dis- tinguished criminals. We must expect to be recognised as much as if we were Napoleon es- caping from Elba. We must be prepared for our descriptions being sent to every tiny village, and for our faces being recognised by every ambitious policeman. We must often sleep under the stars as if we were in Africa. Last and most import- ant 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 iso- lation — 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 A DISCUSSION AT DAWN 8i for it, Mr. Maclan, if the British Public once catches us up, the British Pubhc will prevent the duel, if it is only by locking us both up in asylums for the rest of our days." Maclan 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 Maclan. " 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. Fortu- nately, 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 any one 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 bis- cuits and the tinned meat, and the milk. You have the chocolate, I think? And the brandy? " 82 THE BALL AND THE CROSS " Yes," said Maclan, like a soldier taking orders. " Very well, then, come on. March. We turn under Ihat third bush and so down into the val- ley." And he set off ahead at a swinging walk. Then he stopped suddenly ; for he realised that the other was not following. Evan Maclan was leaning on his sword with a lowering face, like a man suddenly smitten still with doubt. " What on earth is the matter? " asked Turn- bull, staring in some anger. Evan made no reply. " What the deuce is the matter with you? " de- manded 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, Maclan ? " " Yes," replied the Highlander, without lifting his face. " Take some brandy," cried Turnbull, walk- ing forward hurriedly towards him. " You've got it." " It's not in the body," said Maclan, in his dull, strange way. " The pain has come into my mind. A very dreadful thing has just come into my thoughts." A DISCUSSION AT DAWN 83 " What the devil are you talking about ? " asked Turnbull. Maclan 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 im- possible 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. 84 THE BALL AND THE CROSS " 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 Tumbull, 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." Tumbull's face had a sudden spasm in the sun- light, 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 pre- tending to misunderstand something that he un- derstood perfectly well. " Your affection expresses itself in an abrupt form," he began, but Maclan broke the brittle and frivolous speech to pieces with a violent voice. A DISCUSSION AT DAWN 85 " 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 sun- light, 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 Low- land way to understand this new development. My dear Mr. Maclan, what do you really mean ? " Maclan 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," an- swered 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? " Maclan bowed patiently, but with burning eyes. " You said, just now," continued Turnbull, 86 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 be- cause I had been weak, justice had not been done." " Justice," answered Tumbull, with a thought- ful smile, " but we are talking about your feelings. And what do you mean by justice, apart from your feelings? " Maclan 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? " "HI had a blow on the back of my head, I might come to think you a green elephant," answered Maclan, " 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 A DISCUSSION AT DAWN 87 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." Maclan 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 tempera- ment, which can be turned upside down by two bottles of claret or an attack of the jaundice. You 88 THE BALL AND THE CROSS ask me to trust that when it softens towards you and not to trust the thing which I beheve 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," con- tinued Turnbull, " that if even you esteem me the esteem would be wholly animal and idle? " For the first time Maclan started as if he had not ex- pected 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 A DISCUSSION AT DAWN 89 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 under- stand this and understand it thoroughly, if I loved you my love might be divine. But in that I hate you, my hatred most certainly is 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 good- ness. And if I like you ... it is because you are good." Turnbull's face wore an indecipherable ex- pression. " Well, shall we fight now ? " he said. " Yes," said Maclan, 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 awak- ened. 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 Maclan made a 90 THE BALL AND THE CROSS movement as if to thrust, and almost at the same moment Turnbull suddenly and calmly dropped his sword. Evan stared round in an unusual be- wilderment, and then realised that a large man in pale clothes and a Panama hat was strolling serenely towards them. CHAPTER 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 instan- taneously 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 move- ment 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 reposted 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 91 92 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 waist- coat, and the way in which the finely shaped nose THE PEACEMAKER 93 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 intelli- gence, seemed as it were to be brilliant with idiocy. He was a heavy, healthy working 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, start- lingly 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 faces of both combatants remained some- 94 THE BALL AND THE CROSS what 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 hu- mour. 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 out- grown 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 audi* tors, 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 con- THE PEACEMAKER 95 nected 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, hy- gienic gentleman that he always forgot the speech he had made the moment before. Without en- larging 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 Maclan, 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 with- out any romantic nonsense about honour or any- thing of that sort. Is not bloodshed a great sin ? " " No," said Maclan, speaking for the first time. " Well, really, really ! " said the peacemaker. " Murder is a sin/' said the immovable High- lander. " There is no sin of bloodshed." " Well, we won't quarrel about a word," said the other, pleasantly. 96 THE BALL AND THE CROSS " Why on earth not ? " said Maclan, with a sud- den 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 inci- dent. Bloodshed is a physical incident. A sur- geon commits bloodshed." " Ah, you're a casuist ! " said the large man, wagging his head. " Now, do you know what I always say to casuists ... ? " Maclan made a violent gesture; and TumbuU broke into open laughter. The peacemaker did THE PEACEMAKER 97 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 use- less 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 re- duced 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. Mac- Ian, shall we engage?" Maclan plucked his sword out of the grass. " I must and will stop this shocking crime," 98 THE BALL AND THE CROSS cried the Tolstoian, crimson in the face. " It is against all modern ideas. It is against the prin- ciple of love. How you, sir, who pretend to be a Christian. , ," Maclan turned upon him with a white face and bitter lip. " Sir," he said, " talk about the prin- ciple 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. Chris- tianity 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. THE PEACEMAKER 99 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 set- tling 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 Maclan. " 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 Quint- essence 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 1 " " It's a serious thing," said the philosopher, shaking his head. " I must be alone and consider loo THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 Maclan, drawing a deep breath. " Don't you believe in prayer now ? I prayed for an angel." " I am afraid I don't understand," answered Turnbull. " An hour ago," said the Highlander, in his heavy meditative voice, " I felt the devil weaken- ing 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 Maclan. " I didn't know they were as bad as that," answered Turnbull. " We know that devils sometimes quote Scrip- ture and counterfeit good," replied the mystic. ** Why should not angels sometimes come to show THE PEACEMAKER loi 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 Maclan, " 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 pro- nounced in his intonation; and I know exactly wdiat it means. On guard ! ' " The swords caught on each other with a dread- ful 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. 102 THE BALL AND THE CROSS " 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." CHAPTER 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 up- lands 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 start- ling 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 103 I04 THE BALL AND THE CROSS the empty country-side, and these two figures flee- ingf wildly from nothing. They had the look of two lunatics, possibly they were. " Are you all right? " said Turnbull, with civil- ity. " Can you keep this up ? " " Quite easily, thank you," replied Maclan. " I run very well." " Is that a qualification in a family of war- riors?" asked Turnbull. " Undoubtedly. Rapid movement is essential," answered Maclan, 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 Maclan 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 Maclan, in his literal way. THE OTHER PHILOSOPHER 105 " No, we beat them in the great military art of running- away," returned the other, " They won't catch us unless " Maclan turned his long equine face inquir- ingly. " Unless what ? " he said, for Turnbull had gone silent suddenly, and seemed to be listen- ing 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. Lis- ten." Maclan 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 Maclan, 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 io6 THE BALL AND THE CROSS go by us," he said. "The poHce 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. TurnbuU 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, some- thing 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 THE OTHER PHILOSOPHER 107 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 pas- sionate 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 deso- lation retained a tag or two of trivial ornament, io8 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 Tumbull, as he entered it, " and it will cover us up for the night." Maclan looked at him gravely for a few mo- ments. " 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 dis- tant horses grew louder and louder with incon- ceivable 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 Maclan, still staring stolidly at the other, " that you are a great chief, and it is good to go to war behind you." Tumbull 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 THE OTHER PHILOSOPHER 109 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. Tumbull looked up in the act of opening a tin and stared silently at his companion. Maclan's long, lean mouth had shut hard. " Who the devil can that be ? " said Tumbull. " God knows," said the other. " It might be God." Again the sound of the wooden stick rever- berated on the wooden door. It was a curious sound, and on consideration did not resemble the ordinary effects of knocking on a door for ad- mittance. 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 Maclan'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, Maclan," said Turnbull, no THE BALL AND THE CROSS putting him on one side. " It's only some one 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 sun- set, 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 back- wards. " With reference to your suggestion, Maclan," THE OTHER PHILOSOPHER iii said Tumbull, 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 Maclan 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, Maclan 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 indis- putable 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 pic- tures. 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. 112 THE BALL AND THE CROSS " Well," said Maclan, in his grave childish way, " what are yon, doing here ? " " I," said the man, indignantly, " I'm in my own garden." " Oh," said Maclan, simply, " I apologise." Turnbull was coolly curling his red mous- tache, and the stranger stared from one to the other, temporarily stunned by their innocent as- surance. " But, may I ask," he said at last, " what the devil you are doing in my summer-house? " " Certainly," said Maclan. " 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 sorr}% 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 re- freshment when you interrupted us . . ." The little man had a dawning expression of und'erstanding and stooped and picked up the un- used bottle of wine, eyeing it curiously. THE OTHER PHILOSOPHER 113 Turnbull continued : — " But that refreshment was preparatory to something which I fear you will find less com- prehensible, 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 es- sential 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 essen- tially 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 Chris- tian persecutions. H you like, we are attempting a mutual martyrdom. The papers have posted up every town against us. Scotland Yard has forti- fied every police station with our enemies ; we are 114 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 Maclan, " 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 THE OTHER PHILOSOPHER 115 good thing in God's world ! I've walked about these damned fields and longed to see some- body 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 Maclan suddenly with the wide-eyed curiosity of a child, " excuse me, but . . ." " Well ? " said the small fighter, brandishing his wooden weapon. " Excuse me," repeated Maclan, " 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 be- tween the borders of the kitchen garden, and in the increasing twilight he was as hard to follow ii6 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 out- side to distinguish it from other cottages, ex- cept 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 THE OTHER PHILOSOPHER 117 along the sides of the passage ; cruel Turkish swords and daggers glinted above and below them; the two were separated by ages and fallen civilisations. Yet they seemed to sympathise 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 them- selves. 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 to-night. Send up the very best wine and dinner at once. And Selim, one of these gentlemen will probably die to-morrow. Make arrangements, please." The negro bowed and withdrew. Evan Maclan 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 ii8 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 con- cerns 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 pos- ture in which they found him. He was on his knees in front of the stone idol, rigid and motion- less, 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 THE OTHER PHILOSOPHER 119 . . . 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. Maclan," said he. Then he made a gesture toward the heavy stone figure on the pedestal which had now its blank and shapeless back turned toward them. " Don't you be afraid," he added, " he can still see us." Maclan 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." I20 THE BALL AND THE CROSS " Oh ! " said Turnbull shortly. " Yes, my friends," said the Httle man, with an animated countenance, fluttering his fingers in the air, " it was no chance that led you to this gar- den; 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 Maclan made a sudden move- ment, unmeaning apparently, and then remained rigid. " But to-day, to-day," continued the small man in a shrill voice. " To-day his hour is come. To-day his will is done on earth as it is in heaven. Men, men, men will bleed before him to-day." 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 ra- tional speech. ** Perhaps I express myself a little too lyrically," THE OTHER PHILOSOPHER 121 he said with an amicable abruptness. " My phil- osophy 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 reason- able project. From Cornwall to Cape Wrath this country is one horrible, solid block of humanita- rianism. You will find men who will defend this or that war in a distant continent. They will de- fend it on the contemptible ground of commerce or the more contemptibly ground of social good. But do not fancy that you will find one other per- son 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 some- thing in a public lecture infringing the popular prejudice against those great gentlemen, the as- sassins of the Italian Renascence. 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 tem- ple of honour. Here you can fall back on that 122 THE BALL AND THE CROSS naked and awful arbitration which is the only thing that balances the stars — a still, continuous violence. Vcb 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 certain- ty. 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 hospital- ity fit for heroes. And I salute the survivor. Fallon!" The two men took their swords. Then Maclan said steadily : " Mr. Turnbull, lend me your sword a moment." Turnbull, with a questioning glance, handed him the weapon. Maclan 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 Maclan, with brows as black as thunder. THE OTHER PHILOSOPHER 123 The little man turned to Turnbull with a ges- ture, demanding judgment 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 every- thing, go in and win ! If the weak must go to the wall, go to the wall ! Fight, you rat ! Fight, of 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 Maclan 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. Turn- 124 THE BALL AND THE CROSS bull kept at his tail with savage ecstasy, still shoo- ing him like a cat. But Maclan, 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 bound- ing 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 in his trail till he came to a gap in the hedge and went across a steep meadow like the wind. The two Scotch- men, 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 worship- THE OTHER PHILOSOPHER 125 per 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 after- ward the most extraordinary grimaces were seen to distort the stiff face of Maclan, and unholy sounds came from within. He had never prac- tised laughing, and it hurt him very much. CHAPTER 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 intermit- tent laughter ended in a kind of yawn. " I'm hungry," he said shortly. " Are you ? " " I have not noticed," answered Maclan. " 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 inno- cent 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. 126 GRASSLEY-IN-THE-HOLE 127 " Excuse me," he said ; " it was ceremonial. One has to get the taste out of one's mouth." **The taste of what?" asked Maclan. " 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 Maclan also lifted his large limbs off the ground — his eyes particu- larly dreamy. " I know what you mean, Turnbull," he said, ** but ... I always thought you people agreed with all that." " Agreed with all what ? " asked the other. " 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-gray eyes stood open with a grave astonishment. " Do you really mean to say, Maclan," 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 Maclan calmly. " It seems to me your most conclusive position." 128 THE BALL AND THE CROSS " 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 " " I supposed you did," repeated Maclan 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 toward the village. " Come along," he cried. " Come down to the village. Come down to the nearest decent inhab- itable pub. This is a case for beer." " I do not quite follow you," said the High- lander. " 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 co- gency. 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 GRASSLEY-IN-THE-HOLE 129 never thought of doing yet — discover what our difference is? " " It never occurred to me before," answered Maclan with tranquilHty. " It is a good sugges- tion." 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 sign-post. 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 gray tower dominating it decisively. I30 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 an hygienic bootjack; but the unfathom- able sentimentalism of the English people insisted on 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 prin- cipal 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, devour- ing 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. " Maclan," 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. Maclan, your health ! " GRASSLEY-IN-THE-HOLE 131 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 Maclan and Turnbull had reached the really important part of their discussion. Maclan wore an expression of sad bewilder- ment not uncommon with him. " I am to un- derstand, then," he said, " that you don't believe in nature." " You may say so in a very special and em- phatic 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 be- lieve that nature can guide us. It is that I do not believe that nature exists." " Exists? " said Maclan 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 origi- nal 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 na- ture. The first wild ox began to tear up the grass and eat it; he was interfering with nature. 132 THE BALL AND THE CROSS if there is any nature. In the same way," con- tinued 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 Maclan almost dreamily, " the superhuman, the supernatural is just as natural as the nature which it de- stroys." 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 supernatu- ral is simple. The supernatural does not exist." " Quite so," said Maclan 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 every one 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 evi- dent laws of nature " " Which does not exist," put in Maclan GRASSLEY-IN-THE-HOLE 133 sleepily. Turnbull struck the table with a sud- den hand. " Good Lord in heaven! " he cried " Who does not exist," murmured Maclan. "Good Lord in heaven!" thundered Turn- bull, without regarding the interruption. " Do you really mean to sit there and say that you, like anybody else, would not recognise the dif- ference between a natural occurrence and a su- pernatural one — if there could be such a thing? If I flew up to the ceiling " " You would bump your head badly," cried Maclan, 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 ot evening and they stepped out into it : it was sud- denly and strangely cool. " Turnbull," said Maclan, " 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 under- stand 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. 134 THE BALL AND THE CROSS " 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 com- plete universe. The supernatural was not nat- ural, 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. Imean 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 Mac- Ian thoughtfully. " I was told that there was a GRASSLEY-IN-THE-HOLE 135 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 Maclan 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 Maclan 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 Maclan grimly; "that man who talked about love, for instance." Turnbull made a humorous grimace; then he 136 THE BALL AND THE CROSS said: " We seem to be talking in a kind of short- hand ; 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 ? " Maclan 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 be- tween 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 v.as more like the distinction between one ani- mal and another. But " " Well? " said Turnbull. GRASSLEY-IN-THE-HOLE 137 Maclan was silent. "Go on," repeated Turnbull; "what's the matter with you? What are you staring at? " "I am staring," said Maclan 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 Maclan, 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 Maclan with em- phasis. " 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 Maclan rose to his feet with a vague excitement. " What are you going to do ? " 138 THE BALL AND THE CROSS " I am going to ask him," cried Maclan, " 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 Maclan 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 en- lightened citizen. The first man one meets is always man. Let us catch him up." And in gigantic strides the long, lean High- lander whirled away into the gray 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 inter- minable poem, beginning with some unspecified King William, who (it appeared) lived in Lon- don 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 unrecog- GRASSLEY-IN-THE-HOLE 139 nisable 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 gray hair and a lean red face, but with that remarkable rustic physiognomy in which it seems that all the features stand out in- dependently 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 ur- banity of the slightly intoxicated. Maclan, who was vibrating with one of his silent, violent de- cisions, 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 I40 THE BALL AND THE CROSS sufficient. Maclan resumed in some encourage- ment : " 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 Maclan elaborately, " that you think that there should be some one typifying religion, a priest " " Priests! " said the old man with sudden pas- sion. " Priests ! I know 'un. What they want in England? That's what I say. What they want in England ? " " They want you," said Maclan. " Quite so," said Turnbull, " and me; but they won't get us. Maclan, your attempt on the primitive innocence does not seem very success- ful. 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 GRASSLEY-IN-THE-HOLE 141 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 Maclan, falling like a sword. " And you have kept close to something the whole world of to-day 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 Mac- Ian. Turnbull looked at him curiously. " Are you turning an agnostic ? " he asked. " Oh, you do not understand ! " cried out Mac- 142 THE BALL AND THE CROSS Ian. " We Catholics are all agnostics. We Catholics have only in that sense got as far as realising that a man is a man. But your Ibsens and your Zolas and your Shaws and your Tol- stoys have not even got so far." CHAPTER VIII AN INTERLUDE OF ARGUMENT Morning broke in bitter silver along the gray and level plain ; and almost as it did so Turnbull and Maclan 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 chang- ing. 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 Massa- cre 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 143 144 THE BALL AND THE CROSS speech from Maclan, passionately defending the practical achievements and the soHd prosperity of the Catholic tradition, that they came out upon the open land. Maclan 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 modem 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 mod- ern 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 .\N INTERLUDE OF ARGUMENT 145 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 Nes- torius, as a heretic, taught something quite oppo- site 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 Freethinkers 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 or the nature-worship- ping humanists of the Renaissance, without dis- covering that you differ from them twice as much as you differ from the Pope. You are a nine- teenth-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 be- nevolence 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 146 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 Freethinker who went before. Freethought may be suggestive, it may be in- spiriting, it may have as much as you please of the merits that come from vivacity and variety. But there is one thing Freethought can never be by any possibility — Freethought 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 furthest. Who can discuss whether Emerson was a better optimist than Schopenhauer was pessi- mist? 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 accu- mulations of authority. They may be progress- ing uphill or 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 AN INTERLUDE OF ARGUMENT 147 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 Maclan calmly. " I often fancy that your historical generalisations rest frequently on random instances ; I should not be surprised if your vague notions of the Church as the persecutor of science were a generalisation 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 mean- ing. I say that if you want an example of any- thing which has progressed in the moral world by the same method as science in the material world, by continually adding to without unset- tling what was there before, then I say that there is only one example of it. And that is Us." " With this enormous difference," said Turn- bull, " that however elaborate be the calculations of physical science, their net result can be tested. Granted that it took millions of books I never 148 THE BALL AND THE CROSS read and millions of men I never heard of to dis- cover tlie electric light. Still I can see the elec- tric 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 Maclan. " 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 be- cause we would not accept the divine despotism of Henry VUL 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 Chris- tianity 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 AN INTERLUDE OF ARGUMENT 149 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 Maclan 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 be- cause 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 an- swer," replied Turnbull good-humouredly, " but the question still remains : Why don't you con- fine yourself more to Christians if Christians are the only really good men ? " "Who talked of such folly?" asked Maclan I50 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 per- petuate 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 to-morrow 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 eigh- teenth 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 repub- lican? Only a hundred years have passed and AN INTERLUDE OF ARGUMENT 151 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 some- thing or other ; perhaps merely that he is a gentle- man when he obviously is not. Those names and notions are all honourable; but how long will they last? Empires break; industrial con- ditions 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 Turn- bull. " 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 reason- ableness 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 be- 152 THE BALL AND THE CROSS cause you are (if you will excuse me) a sophisti- cated 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 ad- mired most those of them that the modern world most sharply disputes. You complain of Ca- tholicism 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, run- ning 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 vir- ginity, from the Roman Empire which went out- wards 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 AN INTERLUDE OF ARGUMENT 153 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 hu- man experience, does it never strike you that it may be Fleet Street that is wrong? " " No," answered Tumbull ; " 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 sug- gest that we may have made in Fleet Street an at- mosphere in which a man can be so passionate as Sir Lancelot and as pure as Sir Galahad. But, after all, we have in the modem world erected many such atmospheres. We have, for instance, a new and imaginative appreciation of children." " Quite so," replied Maclan with a singular smile. " It has been very well put by one of the 154 THE BALL AND THE CROSS brightest of your young authors, who said : * Un- less you become as Httle 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 the worship of virginity ? Why should any one 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 sud- denly, " But I cannot believe in the thing." Mac- Ian answered nothing to the speech; perhaps it is unanswerable. And indeed they scarcely spoke another word to each other all that day. CHAPTER 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 Maclan 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 Maclan went on conversationally. Neither noticed that 155 156 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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, some- thing 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 toward the horizon into a glimmering high road. " Nothing will jump out of bushes here any- how," he said. " That is what I meant," said Maclan, 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. THE STRANGE LADY 157 " I beg your pardon," said Maclan, 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 com- mandment 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 hap- pens 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 ex- periment." "Very well, then," said Maclan, 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 158 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 es- tablished gambits, they opened with a thrust and parry, orthodox and even frankly ineffectual. But in Maclan'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 oppo- nent. TurnbuU 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. Maclan 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 afterward the sharp, weak cry was repeated. This time it was certain that it was human and that it was female. Maclan 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 Turn- THE STRANGE LADY 159 bull, who snatched at every chance of cheap pro- fanity. " As a matter of fact, Maclan, 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." Maclan snatched up his fallen weapon without a word, and the two raced away toward 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 tall- est grasses and the deepest rabbit holes. More- over, that great curve of the countryside which looked so slow and gentle when you glanced over it, proved to be highly precipitous when you scam- pered over it; and Turnbull was twice nearly flung on his face. Maclan, 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 re- i6o THE BALL AND THE CROSS vealed 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 vio- lence. The fourth, however, had already ad- vanced 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 THE STRANGE LADY i6i 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 knowl- edge 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 recon- dite; 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; i62 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 backward, 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 THE STRANGE LADY 163 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 clam- ber 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 fisti- cuffs. 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 Maclan 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 Maclan 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 as- tonishment, found his own stick fly up in the air as by a conjuring trick, with a turn of the swords- i64 THE BALL AND THE CROSS man's wrist. Another of the revellers picked the stick out of the ditch and ran in upon Maclan, calling to his companion to assist him. " I haven't got a stick," grumbled the dis- armed man, and looked vaguely about the ditch. " Perhaps," said Maclan, politely, " you would like this one." With the word the drunkard found his hand that had grasped the stick sud- denly twisted and empty; and the stick lay at the feet of his companion on the other side of the road. Maclan 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 en- gaged 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 talk- ing with melodious rationality. At length TurnbuU's opponent began to back before the battery of his heavy hands, still fight- ing, 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 aban- doned 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 THE STRANGE LADY 165 position from which it took him a considerable time to rise. By the time he had risen, Turnbull had come to the rescue of Maclan, 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 moon- light. Maclan plucked the struggling and aspir- ing 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 Maclan had an irra- tional 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 i66 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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, per- haps, 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 this 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 STRANGE LADY 167 The lady in the long gloves and the fur cap leapt out and ran rapidly toward them, only to be reassured by Turnbull, who (unlike many of his school) really knew a little science when he in- voked 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 Maclan, uneasily ; and that paralysing shyness which is a part of ro- mance induced him to make a backward move- ment as if leaving her to herself. But Turnbull was more rational than he, being more in- different. " 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 dis- turbance of a person who is not commonly dis- turbed. She said almost sharply and yet with evident sincerity : " Of course I am awfully grate- i68 THE BALL AND THE CROSS ful 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 Maclan, 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 Maclan 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 afterward the engine started, with a throb and leap unfa- miliar to Turnbull, who had only once been in a motor during a general election, and utterly unknown to Maclan, 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 STRANGE LADY 169 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 sym- bolised her feelings, whatever they were, by urg- ing 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 afterward 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 any one else, made some re- mark about the moonlight; but something inde- scribable made him also relapse into silence. All this time Maclan had been in a sort of monstrous delirium, like some fabulous hero snatched up into the moon. The difference be- tween 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 lyo THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 in- carnation : into the midst of new relations, wrongs and rights, with towering responsibilities and al- most 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 or 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 flut- tered a little not only the brown hair of her head THE STRANGE LADY 171 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 Serjeant of police. Three hundred yards far- ther 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 sus- picion (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 TurnbuU said : " It is certainly very odd ; you are driving quietly enough." " You are driving nobly," said Maclan, 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 172 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 some- thing to the others; but nothing else happened. Eight hundred yards farther on, Turnbull stood up suddenly in the swaying car. " My God, Maclan ! " 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." Maclan 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 Maclan, 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 STRANGE LADY 173 " The fact is," he resumed, desperately, " the fact is, we are being chased by the pohce." Then the last flattening hammer fell upon poor Evan's em- barrassment; 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 Mac- Ian, 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 Maclan, 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 the 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 Maclan saw that arrogant and uplifted profile pencilled plainly against the moonshine, he 174 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 stumbHng 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 re- ligion." Under the shadow of that arrogant face Mac- Ian 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 any one else in the world had said the words, Maclan 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 rar- ity and virtue. Like most others under the same elemental passion, his soul was at present soaked THE STRANGE LADY 175 in ethics. He could have applied moral terms to the material objects of her environment. H some one 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 peo- ple thinking different things nowadays, and they all think they are right. My uncle was a Sweden- borgian." Maclan sat with bowed head, listening hun- grily 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. 176 THE BALL AND THE CROSS " Our object," said Turnbull, shortly, " is to make an effective demonstration " ; and after that word, Maclan 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 : " Any- how, the whole thing's quite absurd." "I don't think," began Turnbull, "that you quite realise — 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 Serjeant 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 be- lieve that the gentlemen in your car are — " and he hesitated for a polite phrase. " I am Evan Maclan," said that gentleman, and stood up in a sort of gloomy pomp, not THE STRANGE LADY 177 wholly without a touch of the sulks of a school- boy. " Yes, we will get out, serjeant," said Turn- bull, 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 serjeant, al- most 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, serjeant," 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 serjeant was profoundly disquieted from 1 78 THE BALL AND THE CROSS the beginning at the mere idea of arresting any one in the company of a great lady ; to refuse one of her minor requests was quite beyond his cour- age. The poHce 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. Maclan, 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 ma- chine 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 gro- tesque and hopeless a chase. Away in the van- ishing distance they could see the Serjeant furi- ously 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 THE STRANGE LADY 179 did Maclan 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 dis- tance 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 fig- ures in a zoetrope. Now and then with a shock and rattle they went through sleeping moonlit vil- lages, 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 Maclan 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. i8o THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 gness — 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 recognise the unmistakable but quite indescribable villages of the English south. Then a white witch fire began to burn be- tween 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 THE STRANGE LADY i8i scroll, revealing splendours, as the car went roar- ing 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. CHAPTER 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 enor- mous 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 shatter- ing 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 con- fused 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 182 THE SWORDS REJOINED 183 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 Maclan. 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' cot- tage ; 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 delib- erately drove the car a few yards farther. Then she got out with an almost cruel coolness and i84 THE BALL AND THE CROSS began pulling off her long gloves and almost whistling. " You can leave me here," she said, quite casu- ally, 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 M^as 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 uni- verse. 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 THE SWORDS REJOINED 185 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 Maclan, " 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 quite as 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 i86 THE BALL AND THE CROSS whole misfortune is that I have nothing to give. I am to teach, vv^hen I believe nothing of 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," an- swered 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 Parlia- ment — " She paused a moment and added with the 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 THE SWORDS REJOINED 187 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 stumbHngly : " 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 wouldn'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 shoul- ders 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. 1 88 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 rigid- ity, 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 sepa- ration 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 de- voted — a thing now hopelessly doomed to be either a corpse or an executioner. " What is the matter with you ? " asked Turn- bull, 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, THE SWORDS REJOINED 189 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 Hke iron. I am from the Lords of the Isles and I dare not be a mere de- serter. Therefore, God has tied me by the chain of my worldly place and word, and there is noth- ing 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 meant," 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 Mac- Ian, in bitter sorrow. As he spoke, three solemn footmen came out of the lodge gate and assembled to assist the chauf- feur to his room. The mere sight of them made the two wanderers flee as from a too frightful igo THE BALL AND THE CROSS incongruity, and before they knew where they were, they were well upon the glassy 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 one 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, some- what 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." vi 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 THE SWORDS REJOINED 191 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 architect- ure. 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 gar- ment, 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," mut- tered 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 far- ther along the clifif, 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 192 THE BALL AND THE CROSS stone steps. After that, there was a rather awk- ward 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 trav- ellers 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 blos- soms detached and scattered up to heaven. Animals which Turnbull was too much of a Lon- doner and Maclan too much of a Northerner to know, slipped by among the tangle or ran pat- tering up the tree-trunks. Both the men, ac- cording to their several creeds, felt the full thunder of the psalm of life as they had never heard it before; Maclan felt God the Father, be- nignant in all His energies, and Turnbull that ul- timate anonymous energy, that Natura Naturans, THE SWORDS REJOINED 193 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. TurnbuU 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 toward a big bluff of the rocks which stood out upon their left. Maclan fol- lowed 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, sit- ting on the brown beach. " You see, I was brought up near here," he ex- plained. " I was sent from Scotland to stop with 194 THE BALL AND THE CROSS my aunt. It is highly probable that I may die here. Do you mind if I Hght a pipe? " " Of course, do whatever you like," said Mac- Ian, with a choking- voice, and he went and walked alone by himself along the wet, glistening sands. Ten minutes afterward he came back again, white with his own whirlwind of emotions ; Turn- bull was quite cheerful and was knocking out the end of his pipe. " You see, we have to do it," said Maclan. " 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 cen- tre of the great square of sand, as if they had thousands of spectators. Before saluting, Mac- Ian, 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 direc- tion 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 beat- THE SWORDS REJOINED 195 ing, 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. Imagi- native life had never so much crowded upon Mac- Ian. 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 realised 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, stop- ping an instant, for he had grown used to every movement of his extraordinary fellow-traveller's face. Maclan 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 196 THE BALL AND THE CROSS sobriety. " What view do you take of the devel- opment? " Evan threw away his weapon, and, as his cus- tom 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 point' ing. But now it points to two graves." There was a space filled with the sound of the sea, and then Maclan spoke again in a voice pa- thetically 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 surpris- ingly soft and gentle, " that there is something fine about fighting in a place where even the con- queror 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 Maclan looked at those three sides of English cliff hung with their THE SWORDS REJOINED 197 noisy load of life. He had been at a loss to un- derstand 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 g^een 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 Maclan 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 198 THE BALL AND THE CROSS staring grey eyes and a voice of distinct and vio- lent 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 cow- ard to the whole of that assembled company." Evan looked very doubtful and offered a some- what 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. Maclan parried this first lunge perfectly, the next less perfectly ; the third in all human proba- bility he would not have parried at all ; the Chris- tian champion would have been pinned like a but- terfly, 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 THE SWORDS REJOINED 199 way, he was swung round and sucked into the retreating sea, still gripping his sword. Maclan 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 for- ward with its stern in the air for just as much time as was needed to see that there was nobody 200 THE BALL AND THE CROSS in it. After a moment or two of desperate clam- bering, however, there were two people in it, Mr. Evan Maclan, 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 possibilities of rust. Maclan 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 THE SWORDS REJOINED 201 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. Maclan, more at home than his companion in this quite bar- barous 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 transcendental- ism to wind and tide. Among the implements of their first outfit the brandy alone had re- mained to him, and he gave it to his freezing companion in quantities which greatly alarmed that temperate Londoner ; but Maclan came from the cold seas and mists where a man can drink a tumbler of raw whiskey in a boat without it mak- ing 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 exer- tions. It was a sufficiently uninviting one; noth- ing so far as could be seen but a steep and shelv- ing 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 202 THE BALL AND THE CROSS line, stood up the brown skeleton of some broken fence or break-water. 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, Maclan man- aged 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 afterward they were leaning on the ragged break-water 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 se- verely, so that they were glad to lean on their swords, as if they were the staves of pilgrims. Maclan thought vagnel}' of a weird ballad of his own country which describes the soul in Purga- THE SWORDS REJOINED 203 tory 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. Tumbull 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 way- side crucifixes which are seldom seen except in Catholic countries. Maclan put up his hand to his head and found that his bonnet was not there. Turnbull gave one glance at the crucifix — a glance at once sympa- thetic 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. 204 THE BALL AND THE CROSS Then, leaving Maclan in his attitude of prayer, Turnbull began to look right and left very sharply, like one looking for something. Sud- denly, 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 some one tearing up a letter or making a spill out of a newspaper. Turnball 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 frag- ment ; " we are safe at last. We are free at last. We are somewhere better than England or Eden or Paradise. Maclan, 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 THE SWORDS REJOINED 205 really happen — Tout arrive en France. We ar- rive 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, mats oui, c'est elle qui sauvera encore le monde." "France!" repeated Maclan, 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 al- ways 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 sub- lime figure of Julian the Apostate. France, where a man said only the other day those splen- did unanswerable words " — with a superb ges- ture — " * we have extinguished in heaven those lights that men shall never light again.' " " No," said Maclan, 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, 2o6 THE BALL AND THE CROSS which shows to-day the conquering march of Catholicism, as brain after brain surrenders to it, Brunetiere, Coppee, Hauptmann, Barres, Bour- get, Lemaitre." " France ! " asserted Turnbull with a sort of rolHcking self-exaggeration, very unusual with him, " France, which is one torrent of splendid scepticism from Abelard to Anatole France." "France," said Maclan, "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." Maclan 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. THE SWORDS REJOINED 207 " 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 Maclan, " for it is Defeat." A second afterward the two bright, blood- thirsty weapons made the sig^ of the cross in horrible parody upon each other. They had not touched each other twice, how- ever, 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 Maclan, 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 2o8 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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. Be- fore 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 serjeant 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 THE SWORDS REJOINED 209 Turnbull, as if it were the most rational thing in the world. "If the French police like to inter- fere, let them interfere. But why the blue blazes should you interfere, you great blue blundering sausages? " " I'm afraid, sir," said the serjeant with re- straint, " 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 serjeant, 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 'Amp- stead 'eath." " Not France ? " repeated Turnbull, with a sort of dull incredulity. " No, sir," said the serjeant ; " 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 sud- 2IO THE BALL AND THE CROSS - denly against the serjeaiit, so as to tip him over the edge of the road with a crash into the shingle below. Then leaving Maclan 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 Maclan 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 break-water farther on upon the beach, turned sharply, and scrambled up a line of ribbed THE SWORDS REJOINED 211 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 cot- tages and even a shop had appeared along the side of the road. Then, for the first time. Turn- bull twisted round his red beard to get a glimpse of his companion, who was a foot or two behind, and remarked abruptly : " Mr, Maclan, 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 Maclan, inno- cently. " I mean," said Turnbull, with steady convic- tion, " that what we want is a little diplomacy, and I am going to buy some in a shop," CHAPTER 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 typical 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-fash- ioned; imperialistic Englishmen would really have mistaken him for the old John Bull of the caricatures. He was stout; he was quite undis- tinguished; 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. A SCANDAL IN THE VILLAGE 213 He had a genius (if one can even use so wild a word in connection with so tame a person) a genius for saying the conventional thing on every conceivable subject; or rather what we in Eng- land would call the conventional thing. For it was not convention with him, but solid and manly conviction. Convention implies cant or affecta- tion, 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 deco- rum; he would have used the stalest words, but he would have in reserve the strongest argu- ments. 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 in- dustry, 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 in- stinct. But then in England a man announcing 214 THE BALL AND THE CROSS these platitudes is generally a fool and a fright- ened 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 sed- entary 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 impos- sible to explain this monster amid the exaggera- tive 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 me- dallions. The art in his home contained nothing between the two extremes of hard, meagre de- signs 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 A SCANDAL IN THE VILLAGE 215 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 de- voted, 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 re- ligious 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 sup- posed 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 ascertain- able 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 in- terest 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. 2i6 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 ob- servation ; that is, all observation in that extraor- dinary 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 gray side whiskers, the daughter with her square face and golden fringe of hair, were both stronger than they knew ; stronger than any one knew. The father believed in civilisation, in the storied tower w^e 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 deca- dent weakness. The daughter was called a devotee. She left upon ordinary people the impression — the some- what irritating impression — produced by such a A SCANDAL IN THE VILLAGE 217 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 ac- counted 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 doubt- fully 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 in the bourgeoisie of France. One man in par- ticular 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 um- brella made him seem both shorter and older than he really was ; but whose big, bold eyes, and step 2i8 THE BALL AND THE CROSS that spurned the ground, gave him an instant character of youth. His name was Camille Bert, and he was a com- mercial traveller who had only been in the island an idle week before he began to hover in the tracks of Madeleine Durand. Since every one knows every one 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, some- times 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 fascina- tion. It was perhaps this religious regularity which eventually drew Madeleine into recogni- tion 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. A SCANDAL IN THE VILLAGE 219 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 lonel)^ 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-fash- ioned 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 wnth a sort of simplicity) to be trying to be a dandy when he was too old even to know that he was old. Yet he was decidedly a handsome figure with his curled yellow hair and lean fastidious face ; and he wore a peculiar frock-coat of bright 220 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 enthu- siastic 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 afterward 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 A SCANDAL IN THE VILLAGE 221 more startling than a devil. The incomprehensi- ble Count Gregory, with his yellow hair like flame and his face like the white ashes of the flame, was advancing bareheaded toward 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. Made- leine Durand had come to a halt at first in child- ish 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 Den- mark, and there is no nook of all of them in 222 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 sud- denly by the elbow; and she did not scream but only pulled and tugged. Yet though she had not screamed, some one astray in the woods seemed to have heard the struggle. A short but nimble figure came along the woodland path like a hum- ming bullet and had caught Count Gregory a crack across the face before his own could be rec- ognised. When it was recognised 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 re- turned 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 A SCANDAL IN THE VILLAGE 223 are just not too much of a scoundrel for a gentle- man to fight," " We are detaining the lady," said Count Greg- ory, with politeness; and, making a gesture sug- gesting 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 glow- ing and transparent blue of twilight had long been covered by the opaque and slatelike blue of night, when he handed her into the lamplit inte- rior 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 224 THE BALL AND THE CROSS were in the place. Two small landowners, who were careful, practising Catholics, willingly un- dertook to represent that strict church-goer Ca- mille Bert; while the profligate but apparently- powerful Count Gregory found friends in an en- ergetic local doctor who was ready for social pro- motion 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 after- ward. And when this was settled the whole com- munity, 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 rest- less, 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 nov- els 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 A SCANDAL IN THE VILLAGE 225 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 let- ting 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." 226 THE BALL AND THE CROSS " What did you mean ? " asked the other, look- ing broodingly at the earth. " Don't you know,'' she said, " there is only one more celebration ? I thought that as you al- ways go to church — I thought you would com- municate 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. Be- fore that incomplete gesture and frankly plead- ing 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 A SCANDAL IN THE VILLAGE 227 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 an- thropologists) is that he said it in Scotch. " There will be another mass in a matter of eight hours," said Madeleine, with a sort of busi- ness 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 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 brutal- ity which might have come from Count Gregory, his criminal opponent. He advanced upon Made- leine 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 228 THE BALL AND THE CROSS must and will say everything. You are the hap- piest and honestest thing I ever saw in this god- less universe. And I am the dirtiest and most dishonest." Madeleine looked at him doubtfully for an in- stant, 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 sud- denly plucked them off and flung them like moulted feathers in the mire. This extraordi- nary 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 A SCANDAL IN THE VILLAGE 229 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 bog- gled 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 sur- prise could never throw off its balance. " Evan Maclan said there was a God," went on the other, stubbornly, " and I say there isn't. And 1 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 Made- leine, with parted lips, " that you think " " I want you to hate me ! " cried Turnbull, irl agony. " I want you to be sick when you think of my name. I am sure there is no God." 230 THE BALL AND THE CROSS " But there is," said Madeline, 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 Turn- bull, 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. " Wh)% how silly of them," cried out Made- leine, 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 fic- titious garments of Camille Bert. But the start- A SCANDAL IN THE VILLAGE 231 led pain of his face was strong enough to obUt- erate the oddity. " You come down here," continued the lady, with that female emphasis which is so pulverising in conversation and so feeble at a public meeting, " you and your Maclan 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. Maclan 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 to-morrow with absolute certainty and safety. And then you throw off your wig and throw up your scheme and throw over your colleague, be- cause 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. 232 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 cafe. He immediately made his way rapidly toward 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 TurnbuU knew the ener- getic, apoplectic head of the serjeant 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 con- stable, upset one of the men into his own basket, and bounding toward the distinguished foreign Count, called to him clamorously : " Come on, Maclan, 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 re- lief. Then he joined the flight of Turnbull, and even as he did so, with one wrench of his power- ful hands rent and split the strange, thick stick A SCANDAL IN THE VILLAGE 233 that he carried. Inside it was a naked old-fash- ioned 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 in- habitants 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 Maclan banged into another gentleman with unmistakable sur- prise. How he knew he was another gentleman merely by banging into him, must remain a mys- tery. Maclan was a very poor and very sober Scotch gentleman. The ether was a very drunk and very wealthy English gentleman. But there was something in the staggered and openly em- barrassed 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 apologises; and in this case both apologised. " You seem to be in a hurry," said the un- known Englishman, falling back a step or two in 234 THE BALL AND THE CROSS order to laugh with an unnatural heartiness. " What's it all about, eh? " Then before Maclan could get past his sprawling and staggering fig- ure 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 Maclan, summoning a sufficiently pleasant smile, " so if you will let us pass " " ril tell you what, you fellows," said the sprawling gentleman, confidentially, while Evan's agonised 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 Maclan, and dashed past him In despair. The head of the pursuing host was just showing over the top of A SCANDAL IN THE VILLAGE 235 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, en- thusiastically running after Maclan 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 har- bour — called Gibson Girl — can't think why, old fellow, I never lent it you before." With these words the benevolent Mr. Wilkin- son fell flat on his face in the road, but continued to laugh softly, and turned toward his flying com- panion a face of peculiar peace and benignity. Evan's mind went through a crisis of instanta- neous casuistry, in which it may be that he de- cided wrongly; but about how he decided his biographer can profess no doubt. Two minutes 236 THE BALL AND THE CROSS afterward he had overtaken Turnbull and told the tale ; ten minutes afterward he and Turnbull had somehow tumbled into the yacht called the Gib- son Girl and had somehow pushed off from the Isle of St. Loup, CHAPTER XII THE DESERT ISLAND Those who happen to hold the view (and Mr. Evan Maclan, now aUve 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 Maclan had a practical knowledge of the sea in much smaller and quite different boats, while TurnbuU had an abstract knowledge of sci- ence 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, 237 238 THE BALL AND THE CROSS and Maclan, who was certainly the shrewder sail- or of the two, realised 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 morn- ing after daybreak they saw the distinct shape of a solitary island standing up against that encir- cling strip of silver which ran round the skyline and separated the gray and green of the billows from the gray and mauve of the morning clouds. " What can it be ? " cried Maclan, 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 sol- idly established." THE DESERT ISLAND 239 " 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 shell-fish 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 6f 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 cham- pagne and Mr. Wilkinson's tinned salmon and Mr. Wilkinson's tinned tongue and Mr. Wilkin- son's tinned sardines, and every sort of preserved thing that could be seen at the Army and Navy 240 THE BALL AND THE CROSS stores. Then Maclan stopped with a jar of pickles in his hand and said abruptly : " I don't know why we're doing all this ; I sup- pose we ought really to fall to and get it over." Then he added more thoughtfully : " Of course this island seems rather bare and the sur- vivor " " The question is," said Turnbull, with cheer- ful speculation, " whether the survivor will be in a proper frame of mind for potted prawns." Maclan 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 Maclan, listlessly, in the manner of an in- attentive child. " I know what you are really thinking, Mac- lan," repeated Turnbull, laughing. " I know THE DESERT ISLAND 241 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 Mac- Ian, 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 Maclan, " we might occupy a day or two in drawing up a thorough and com- plete statement of what we did and why we did it, and all about both our points of view. Then 242 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 Maclan, 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 emphasised 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 the- atre 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 afterward, 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 Mac- Ian, " when the time comes. And till the time comes this place shall be sacred." " I thought of having lunch up here," said THE DESERT ISLAND 243 Turnbull, who had a bottle of champagne in his hand. " No, no — not up here," said Maclan, 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 cease- less 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 fan- cies 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 244 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 isl- and ; for Maclan 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. Maclan 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 ex- THE DESERT ISLAND 245 hibited 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." Maclan 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. " Maclan," 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 246 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 ex- cited 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 plod- ding 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 scien- tific 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 be- tween the two had lengthened and Maclan was THE DESERT ISLAND 247 only a tall figure silhouetted for an instant upon the crest of some sand dune and then disappear- ing behind it. This rather increased the Robin- son 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 sub- consciousness he expected an alligator. The first sign of life that he did see, however, was something more extraordinary than the lar- gest alligator. It was nothing less than the noto- rious Mr. Evan Maclan 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 shell-fish, " what the deuce! Do you mean an oyster? " " No," said Maclan, 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 gasp- 248 THE BALL AND THE CROSS ing Maclan. " He put up his black head and grinned at me." Turnbull thrust his hands through his red hair hke one who gives up the world as a bad riddle. " Lord love a duck," said he, " can it be Ja- maica? " 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 is 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 Maclan bit his lip and swung his sword, and the other did not reap- pear. Finally, with a Gaelic oath, Evan started forward to the rescue, and almost at the same mo- ment the small figure of the missing man ap- peared on the ridge against the sky. Even at that distance, however, there was something odd about his attitude; so odd that THE DESERT ISLAND 249 Maclan continued to make his way in that direc- tion. 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 Maclan's face, that that ob- server of mankind fully realised that Mr. James Turnbull was roaring with laughter. " You are quite right," sobbed that wholly de- moralised journalist. " He's black, oh, there's no doubt the black's all right — as far as it goes." And he went ofif again into convulsions of his humourous ailment. " What ever is the matter with you ? " asked Maclan, 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 nig- ger'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, 250 THE BALL AND THE CROSS " 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 hyste- ria and said : " I say, old boy, I should like to see a chart of our fortnight's cruise in Wilkinson's yacht." Maclan 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 dec- larations, 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 hun- dred 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 switch- back. I have begun to understand the pulse and THE DESERT ISLAND 251 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 Maclan said nothing, and an instant after- ward Turnbull himself called out in an entirely changed voice : " Oh, this is damnable ! This is not to be borne ! " Maclan followed his eye along the sand-hills. He saw what looked like the momentary and wav- ing 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. CHAPTER XIII THE GARDEN OF PEACE Up to this instant Evan Maclan had really un- derstood nothing; but when he saw the police- man he saw everything. He saw his enemies, all the powers and princes of the earth. He was suddenly altered from a staring statue to a leap- ing 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 ad- mirable 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 bot- 352 THE GARDEN OF PEACE 253 tie 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 gray-green common figures could be seen running and closing in; and it was only when Maclan 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 under world of the black wood, that their hunters were even in- stantaneously 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 open- ing — 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 some- what similar opening. Then Maclan stood ut- terly still and listened, as animals listen, for every sound in the universe. Then he siaid : " We are quit of them." And Turnbull said : " Where shall we go now ? " Maclan looked at the silver sunset that was closing in, barred by plumy lines of purple cloud ; 254 THE BALL AND THE CROSS he looked at the high tree-tops that caught the last light and at the birds going heavily home- ward, just as if all these things were bits of writ- ten 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 every one has cleared out of it, it will be worth a handicap of two hundred yards to- morrow." 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 apol- ogy. " 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." THE GARDEN OF PEACE 255 " Are you sure? " said Turnbull, sitting up and rubbing his red eyebrows with his hand. The next moment, however, he had jumped up ahve and leaping Hke a man struck with a shock of cold water, and he was plunging after Maclan along the woodland path. The shape of their old friend the constable had appeared against the pearl and pink of the sunrise. Somehow, it al- ways 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 fugi- tives fled, almost concealed from their pursuers by the twilight, the mist and the leaping zoetrope 256 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 ad- vantages 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 sud- denly. Nothing short of a brick wall could have abruptly brought him up. Turnbull turned his head slightly and found breath to say something to Maclan. Maclan nodded. Pursuer and pursued were fixed in their dis- tance 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 THE GARDEN OF PEACE 257 hesitation. But he was pursuing his shadow or the wind; for TurnbuU 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 be- hind 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 Maclan'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 258 THE BALL AND THE CROSS come, doubling on their tracks to throw off the last pursuit. Maclan could not rid himself of the fancy of bestriding a steed ; the long, gray coping of the wall shot out in front of him, like the long, gray neck of some nightmare Rosinante. He had the quaint thought that he and Turnbull were the two knights on one steed on the old shield of the Templars. The nightmare of the stone horse was in- creased 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 crawl- ing 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 per- mitted them to see the edge of a well-clipped lawn. Though the white vapour was still a veil, THE GARDEN OF PEACE 259 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 further they saw that it was only flowers; but flowers in such in- solent mass and magnificence as can seldom be seen out of the tropics. Purple and crimson rho- dodendrons 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 some- thing of the sensational sweetness of the slow opening of the gates of Eden, Maclan, 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 realised, not without an abrupt re- a6o THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 morn- ing. He was a slim yet satisfied figure, clad in a suit of pale-gray 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 overrefined, was the face of a quite elderly man, though his stringy hair and moustache were still quite yel- low. A double eyeglass, with a broad, black rib- bon, 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 Maclan, 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 be- nevolence, but with far less surprise than might THE GARDEN OF PEACE 261 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. Maclan 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 Maclan, " 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 con- viction : " Yes, certainly ; the grounds inside the wall really belong to me, and the grounds outside the wall, too." " A large proprietor, I imagine," said Turn- bull, with a truculent eye. " Yes," answered the old gentleman, looking 262 THE BALL AND THE CROSS at him with a steady smile. " A large pro- prietor." Turnbull's eye grew even more offensive, and he began biting his red beard; but Maclan seemed to recognise 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 confi- dence : " 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? " Maclan had understood his man pretty well up to that point ; an instinct common to all men with THE GARDEN OF PEACE 263 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 or vio- lence 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 re- mained doubtful whether he would feel the earth fail under him in that earthquake instant when the Virgin is compared to a goddess of Mesopo- tamia. Even Maclan, therefore (whose tact was far from being his strong point), felt the neces- sity for some compromise in the mode of ap- proach. At last he said, and even then with hesitation : " We are fighting about God ; there can be nothing so important as that." The tilted eyeglasses 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 tele- scope. 264 THE BALL AND THE CROSS " About God ? " he queried, in a key com- pletely 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 character- istic unreasonableness) will not accept either of our proposals; the result is that we run about dodging the police and have jumped over your garden-wall into your magnificent garden to throw ourselves on your magnificent hospi- tality." The face of the old gentleman had grown red- der and redder during this address, but it was still smiling; and when he broke out it was with a kind of gufifaw. " So you really want to fight with drawn THE GARDEN OF PEACE 265 swords in my garden," he asked, " about whether there is really a God? " "Why not?" said Maclan, 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 com- posed 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 266 THE BALL AND THE CROSS have gone floundering- about in all sorts of churches and chapels and colleges and schools of philosophy looking for some evidence of the ex- istence of God. Why, there is no evidence, ex- cept 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 Maclan, " Quite so ! Quite so ! " said the man on one leg, nodding gravely. " I said this garden be- longed to me and the land outside it. So they do. So does the country beyond that and the sea be- yond 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 Maclan 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 THE GARDEN OF PEACE 267 walks and the gay flower-beds and the long rec- tangular red-brick building, which the mist had left evident beyond them. Then he looked at Maclan. Almost at the same moment another man came walking quickly round the regal clump of rhodo- dendrons. 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. CHAPTER 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 gera- niums 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 toward the group, he caught Maclan's ear in order to whisper : " This poor gentleman is mad ; he thinks he is Edward VH." At this the self- appointed Creator slightly winked. " Of course you won't trust him much ; come to me for every- thing. 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 268 A MUSEUM OF SOULS 269 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 indi- cate us as the proper seconds. Seconds — yes, sec- onds — " 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, Maclan, I think we have come to the right place!" And Maclan 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 invol- untarily took in the landscape, as they had taken in all the landscapes of their everlasting combat ; 270 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 para- dise, 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 say- ing in his ear : " Don't trust that second of yours. He's mad and not so mad, either ; for he's fright- fully 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 house- keeper 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 sud- denly to be sick on the grass; the mere healthy A MUSEUM OF SOULS 271 and heathen horror of the unclean; the mere in- humane 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 ration- alist and plain man revolted within him against bowing down for a moment in that forest of de- ception 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 Maclan and said : " Oh, I can't stand this ! " " Can't stand what? " asked his opponent, eye- ing him doubtfully. " Shall we say the atmosphere?" replied Turn- bull ; " 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 hav- ing my favours refused. Do you know who lam?" The editor of " The Atheist " turned upon him 272 THE BALL AND THE CROSS like one who has lost all patience, and exploded : "Yes, you are God, aren't you?" he said, ab- ruptly, " 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 men- acingly 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 hun- dred 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 A MUSEUM OF SOULS 273 burnt-out cigarette almost like one warding off a blow. Turnbull went on like a torrent. " A man died yesterday in Ealing. You mur- dered him. A girl had the toothache in Croy- don. 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 subordi- nates ; 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, scorn- fully, " 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 sec- ond. 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." 274 THE BALL AND THE CROSS Then after a pause in which he swallowed his passion, he said to Maclan : " 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 w^ho was in truth accus- tomed to be doubted. " I am King Edward VH," he said, with shaky arrogance. " Do you doubt my word ? " " I do not doubt it in the least," answered Mac- Ian. " 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 Maclan, 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 A MUSEUM OF SOULS 275 Turnbull, genially, " and sometimes so much so as to be hardly worth following." "I alone am loyal," insisted Maclan; "for I alone am in rebellion. I am ready at any in- stant 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 be- tween 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 Sid- ney and the monarchy of Montrose? What had your sires to do with England that they should have the foul offering of the blood of Derwent- water and the heart of Jimmy Dawson ? Where are the corpses of Culloden ? Where is the blood of Lochiel ? " Maclan advanced upon his op- ponent with a bony and pointed finger, as if indicating the exact pocket in which the blood 276 THE BALL AND THE CROSS of that Cameron was probably kept; and Ed- ward Vn 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 toward the flower-beds. " What good have you ever done, you race of German sausages ? Yards of barbarian etiquette, to throt- tle 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. Maclan strode after him still preach- ing 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 A MUSEUM OF SOULS 277 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 Hke a big forefinger. It per- formed ahnost all his gestures; it was more im- portant than the glittering eyeglasses 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 eyeglasses 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 bet- ter 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, 2 78 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 realised 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 glar- ing with all the contraction of fear and hatred that can stiffen a cat. Maclan 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 A MUSEUM OF SOULS 279 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 Maclan, wearily. " Protoplasm is not worth go- ing mad about." " At least," said Turnbull, savagely, " it was your Jesus Christ who started all this bosh about being God." For one instant Maclan 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." 28o THE BALL AND THE CROSS " 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 Maclan. " That was an extreme case of impudence," said Maclan. " Granting the man his almighty pretensions, I think he was very modest," said Maclan. " 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 know^s 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 Maclan, scorn- fully. " There are a few men here who are mad on God and a few w^ho are mad on the Bible. But I bet there are many more who are simply mad on madness." A MUSEUM OF SOULS 281 " Do you really believe it? " asked the other. " Scores of them, I should say," answered Maclan. " Fellows who have read medical books or fellows whose fathers and uncles had some- thing 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 ani- mation. " Fve been walking about the garden talking to a poor chap all the morning. He's sim- ply 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 fel- low 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 pro- gressing 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 im- prove on.' " " What can he have meant ? " said the athe- ist, with all his logic awake. " Obviously one should not trust any God that one can improve on." 282 THE BALL AND THE CROSS " It is the way he talks," said Maclan, almost indifferently ; " but he says rummier things than that. He says that a man's doctor ought to de- cide 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 judgment 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 Maclan, monoto- nously, " that he cannot see why any one 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 lit- tle 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 psychol- ogy. But he doesn't exist." " I will go and fetch him," said Maclan, A MUSEUM OF SOULS 283 calmly; " I left the poor fellow wandering about by the nasturtium bed." Maclan vanished, and in a few moments re- turned, 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 pa- tients at all. That's one of the doctors." Evan looked back at the leering head with the long-pointed beard and repeated the word in- quiringly : " 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 Maclan. After a rather restless silence Turnbull plucked Maclan by the elbow and pulled him aside. " For goodness sake," he said, " don't offend 284 THE BALL AND THE CROSS this fellow; he may be as mad as ten hatters, if you like, but he has us between his fin- ger and thumb. This is the very time he ap- pointed to talk with us about our — well, our exeat." " But what can it matter ? " asked the wonder- ing Maclan. " 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 gaol, 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." Maclan looked at the grass frowningly for a few seconds, and then said in a new, small and childish voice : " I am awfully stupid, Mr. Turn- bull ; you must be patient with me." Turnbull caught Evan's elbow again with quite another gesture. " Come," he cried, with A MUSEUM OF SOULS 285 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 Turn- bull, 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 atten- tion to some of them." " Quite so ! Quite so ! " said the doctor, hur- riedly. "If you really want to put anything be- fore 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 fur- nished 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 286 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 con- ception. The doctor sat down with a polite impatience on his professional perch; Maclan 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 organised a game across this part of the country— a sort of combi- nation of hare and hounds and hide and seek — I daresay 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 start- led 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 enthusi- A MUSEUM OF SOULS 287 asts 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 Vv^as 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 some one 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 sci- entist ; " 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 288 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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. Maclan 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 Mac- Ian. " 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 A MUSEUM OF SOULS 289 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 : " Maclan, 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 be- gan : " 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 re- ligious 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 290 THE BALL AND THE CROSS your madhouse, only because I know what I know. Let it be granted, then — Maclan is a mystic; Maclan 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 cer- tain, 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 paral- lelogram of dark-red wood. This also he unlocked on the table, and with the same unerring egotistic eye one of the com- pany saw the words, written in large letters: " Turnbull, James." Hitherto Turnbull himself had somewhat scornfully surrendered his part in the whole busi- ness ; but he was too honest and unaffected not to start at his own name. After the name, the in- scription appeared to run : " Unique case of Eleu- theromania. Parentage, as so often in such cases, prosaic and healthy. Eleutheromaniac signs oc- curred early, however, leading him to attach him- A MUSEUM OF SOULS 291 self to the individualist Bradlaugh. Recent out- break of pure anarchy " Turnbull slammed the case to, almost smash- ing it, and said with a burst of savage laughter : " Oh! come along, Maclan; 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, Maclan, 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 the 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. CHAPTER XV THE DREAM OF MACIAN The system of espionage in the asylum was so effective and complete that in practice the pa- tients 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 Maclan was in the habit of creeping out into the garden after dark — es- pecially upon moonlight nights. The moon, in- deed, was for him always a positive mag^iet 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 lit- 293 THE DREAM OF MACIAN 293 eral 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 nur- sery 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 in- fantile facts and fancies which led Evan again and again during his dehumanised 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 mo- 294 THE BALL AND THE CROSS ment 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 unmistak- able though eccentric. It was a flying ship. The vessel took one long and sweeping curve across the sky and came nearer and nearer to Maclan, 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 re- visiting his children, " you have remained here long enough, and your sword is wanted else- where." "Wanted for what?" asked the young man, accepting the monstrous event with a queer and THE DREAM OF MACIA 295 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 an- swered. But the unknown preserved an im- penetrable 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 296 THE BALL AND THE CROSS distinction than lessened beauty. His strong, well-opened eyes were very brilliant but quite col- ourless like steel. Maclan 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 re- turned." Evan did not ask for or require any explana- tion. " I suppose you can take me to the war," he said, and the silent silver figure only bowed its head again. Maclan clambered into the silver boat, and it rose upward to the stars. To say that it rose to the stars is no mere meta- phor, 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 round them as THE DREAM OF MACIAN 297 they stand. They can be orderly, but they can- not 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 supe- rior. 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, Maclan 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 con- fronting 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, over- 298 THE BALL AND THE CROSS whelmed in Lyonesse by heathen armies and dy- ing 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 re- turned." " Is the war still raging ? " asked Maclan. " 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 toward 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 moon- light was like white flame. But, however, cov- ered or painted, Evan had no difficulty in knowing THE DREAM OF MACIAN 299 the place again. He saw the great thorough- fare 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. Maclan drew in his breath, as children do at anything they think utterly beau- tiful. 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 300 THE BALL AND THE CROSS tiara over London, ringed with a triple crown of swords. As they went saiHng 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 black-coated bustle with its cockney vivacity and vulgarity had disap- peared. Groups of labourers, quietly but pic- turesquely clad, were passing up and down in suf- ficiently 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 spur 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 mo- ment'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 se- verely, across the shoulders with the flat of his sword. " The soldier had no business to do that," said Maclan, sharply, " The old man was moving as quickly as he could." " We attach great importance to discipline in THE DREAM OF MACIAN 301 the streets," said the man in white, with a sHght smile. " DiscipHne is not so important as justice," said Maclan. 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 con- tinued, 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 indi- vidual." 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 indi- vidual?" 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 Maclan. 302 THE BALL AND THE CROSS The other seemed to take no notice, but re- verted to the main topic. " In our armies up in heaven we learn to put a wholesome fear into subordinates." Maclan 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 haughti- ness 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 of- fend Apollo. The beautiful and princely must, of necessity, be impatient with the squalid and " " Why, you great fool ! " cried Maclan, 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 car- dinals; 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. THE DREAM OF MACIAN 303 But I saw on your mouth the twitch of your in- fernal sophistry; I knew that something was wrong with you and your cathedrals. Some- thing 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 Maclan, " 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 the 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 ? " 304 THE BALL AND THE CROSS Maclan 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. CHAPTER XVI THE DREAM OF TURNBULL Turn BULL was walking rather rampantly up and down the garden on a gusty evening chewing his cigar and in that mood when every man sup- presses an instinct to spit. He was not, as a rule, a man much acquainted with moods; and the storms and sunbursts of Maclan's soul passed before him as an impressive but unmeaning pano- rama, like the anarchy of Highland scenery. Turnbull was one of those men in whom a con- tinuous 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 falla- cies he had detected, the problems he had made plain, the adverse theories he had wrestled with and thrown, the grand generalisations he had 305 3o6 THE BALL AND THE CROSS justified. But even the cheerful inner Hfe 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 THE DREAM OF TURNBULL 307 off continually and floated by themselves, and for some reason the truculent eye of Tumbull 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 toward 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, be- ing burnished like a mirror, it had reflected the red-brown colours of the burning clouds. As the thing whirled like a wind-swept leaf down toward 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 3o8 THE BALL AND THE CROSS holding ground the ship swung in the red tempest Hke 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 impos- sible 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 sin- ister 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 motion- less 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 THE DREAM OF TURNBULL 309 never really had been any one else there except he since the foundation of the world. Stiffening in himself the masculine but mirth- less 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, affecta- tion, 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 mor- tality. 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-smihng and half- 3IO THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 TurnbuU. " 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 Turn- bull 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 par- ticular colour. " Excuse my not being in evening dress," said the new-comer with an urbane smile. " We sci- entific men, you know — I have to work my own engines — Electrical engineer — very hot work," " Look here," said Turnbull, sturdily clench- ing 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." THE DREAM OF TURNBULL 311 " And yet you came from the outside, too, Jim," said the stranger in a voice almost affec- tionate. *' 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, low- ering his voice and speaking with evident sincer- ity; "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 Revolu- tion." 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 312 THE BALL AND THE CROSS pausing and saying : '* I can't leave Maclan be- hind 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 him- self 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 regi- cide. 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 asy- lum in its large rectangular grounds spread be- low them in a foreshortened and infantile plan, THE DREAM OF TURNBULL 313 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 up- set, He will be upset on top of it." 314 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 toward 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 sink- ing 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 Maclan converted you ? " Tumbull sprang up as if spurning the steel car THE DREAM OF TURNBULL 315 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 sin- gle " " This CathoHcism is a curious thing," said the man of the cloven chin in uninterrupted reflect- iveness, leaning his elegant elbows over the edge of the vessel ; " it soaks and weakens men with- out 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 fly- ing 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 3i6 THE BALL AND THE CROSS could have been caught," he said ; " we counted on you as the one red-hot revokitionary left in the world. But. of course, these men like Maclan 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 Maclan ? 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 w^ar ! " repeated Turnbull, even in his dazed state a little touchy about such a dog- ma ; " how do you know it w'ill be the last? " The man laid himself back in his reposeful at- titude, and said : " It is the last w-ar, because if it does not cure the w^orld forever, it wall 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 wdien you walked outside your THE DREAM OF TURNBULL 317 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 ma- chine. 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 pas- sions, " We arrive at a happy moment," said the man steering the ship. " The insurgents are bombard- ing 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 colour- less voice. 3i8 THE BALL AND THE CROSS " Yes," replied the other. " I thought you would be glad to see your prayer answered. Of course I apologise 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 bat- tle, 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 DREAM OF TURNBULL 319 The other shrugged his shoulders. " All the instructed and class-conscious part of them with- out exception," he replied. " There were cer- tainly a few districts ; in fact, we are passing over them just now " TurnbuU looked down and saw that the pol- ished 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 noth- ing 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. De- stroy 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 docs seem absurdly simple," said the man. 320 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 driv . ellers 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 Maclan?" 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, J don't think it's my friend Maclan 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 improv- THE DREAM OF TURNBULL 321 ing 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 stran- ger 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 con- siderable 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 one 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." 322 THE BALL AND THE CROSS " 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 Maclan and his wink- ing 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 be- THE DREAM OF TURNBULL 323 lieve 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 night- mare. 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 es- caped 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 realised anything, he was lying on his elbow on the lawn of the lunatic asylum, and the last red of the sunset had not yet disap- peared. CHAPTER 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 man- ner 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 toward each other, and found the same expression on each oth- er's faces. Then, for the first time in all their ac- quaintance, 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 re- lieved 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 324 THE IDIOT 325 round to face them. His carved smile had sud- denly disappeared. " I will be plain with you gentlemen," he said, abruptly ; " )'0u 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 Maclan said :" 1 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. " Con- found your impudence! What do you mean? You imprison two perfectly sane men in a mad- house 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 voca- tion, 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." 326 THE BALL AND THE CROSS " The head of the asylum has settled it all," said Dr. Quayle, still looking down. Maclan took one of his immense strides for- ward and stood over the doctor with flaming eyes. " If the head has settled it let the head an- nounce 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 ad- vantages 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. Maclan," said Turnbull with sobriety and perfect respectful- ness, " that you had better let us see the head of the institution." Dr. Quayle got to his feet in a mixture of sud- den hysteria and clumsy presence of mind. " Oh, certainly," he said with a weak laugh. " Vou can see the head of the asylum if you par- THE IDIOT 327 ticularly 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," Maclan's breath went hissing back through his teeth into his chest. Turnbull was more im- petuous, 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 in- candescent 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 in- stant 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." 328 THE BALL AND THE CROSS Turnbull and Maclan 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 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, pin- ioned 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. THE IDIOT 329 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, Maclan 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 clang- ing 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 330 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 to- gedier, let in to the cells by pipes what was al- leged to be the freshest air. For these great sci- entific organisers 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 au- thorities insisted on their own extraordinary THE IDIOT 331 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 asphyx- iated. He had ample walking space, ample air, ample and even filling food. The only objection was that he had nothing to walk toward, nothing to feast about, and no reason whatever for draw- ing 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 332 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 to- gether 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 ex- amine outlets, and he found himself paying par- ticular attention to the row of holes which let in the air into his last house of life. He soon dis- covered that these air-holes were all the ends and mouths of long leaden tubes which doubtless car- ried 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 com- pared 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 THE IDIOT 333 " efficient," which means mechanical and calcu- lated, 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 eigh- teenth 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 dyna- mite, a spirit of stink. Thus, indeed, all that ex- cellent 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 an automatic machine. But if you did manage to steal the chocolate, the automatic machine would be much less likely to run after you. TurnbuU was not long in discovering this truth in connection with the cold and colossal machin- 334 THE BALL AND THE CROSS ery 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 san- ity 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 be- lieve in, for the objectless iron peg in the wall. THE IDIOT 335 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 cos- mos of his own creed. He knew well the ruthless and inexhaustible resources of our scientific civ- ilisation. He no more expected rescue from a medical certificate than rescue from the solar sys- tem. In many of his Robinson Crusoe moods he thought kindly of Maclan 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 Beau- champ Tower, and tried to write his blazing scep- ticism 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 hor- ror 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 car^^e their prayers or protests in the rock. Here the white and slippery walls escaped 336 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 sur- prise even to discover the faint light through the aperture in the ventilation tube. But he had for- gotten 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 aper- ture, and at last managed to make a slight further fissure in the piping. The light that came 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 gray and greasy tvviUght he was astonished to see THE Idiot 337 another human finger very long and lean come down from above toward the broken pipe and hook it up to something higher. The lighted aperture was abruptly blackened and blocked, presum- ably 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 Argyleshire accent : " I say, Turnbull, we couldn't fight through this tube, could we ? " Sentiments beyond speech surged up in Turn- bull 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 mur- der the first man I have met for ten million years." " I know w4iat 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." 33^ THE BALL AND THE CROSS But he answered, after all, in his old defiant style : " Alone with God, were you ? And I sup- pose you found his Majesty's society rather mo- notonous ? " " Oh, no," said Maclan, and his voice shud- dered ; " it was a great deal too exciting." After a very long silence the voice of Maclan 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. Per- haps 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 Maclan 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." THE IDIOT 339 " 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 afterward Maclan had managed to open up communications which made his mean- ing 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, con- ducted day after day amid constant mutual sug- gestion, 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 ven- tilation holes. Turnbull tumbled somehow into Maclan's apartment, and his first glance found 340 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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 Maclan'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 Turn- bulFs. That individual looked at it with a puz- zled face. " What is in there? " he asked. Maclan 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 some- thing horrible is half understood. " James Turnbull," said Maclan, 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 THE IDIOT 341 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 hate- ful," went on Maclan, in his low monotone voice, " and they have buried him even deeper. God knows how they did it, for he was let in by nei- ther door nor window, nor lowered through any opening above. I expect these iron handles that we both hate have been part of some damned ma- chinery 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." All Turnbull's unnatural and uncompleted feel- ings found their outlet in rushing to the aperture and looking into the unknown room. 3-42 THE BALL AND THE CROSS 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, be- cause 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 the sitting posture. In- deed, it had something of the look of a child, only that the enormous head was ringed with hair of a frosty gray. 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 gray head cocked at a particular angle of inquiry or attention which amid all that gather- ing 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 THE IDIOT 343 and a huge gray-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 o£f 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 wheth- er this buried monster spoke that Tumbull 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 ac- cent that was neither Latin nor Teutonic. 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