The Ball and the Cross

by G. K. Chesterton

  XVII. THE IDIOT

  Evan MacIan was standing a few yards off looking at him in absolutesilence.

  He had not the moral courage to ask MacIan if there had been anythingastounding in the manner of his coming there, nor did MacIan seem tohave any question to ask, or perhaps any need to ask it. The two mencame slowly towards each other, and found the same expression on eachother's faces. Then, for the first time in all their acquaintance, theyshook hands.

  Almost as if this were a kind of unconscious signal, it brought Dr.Quayle bounding out of a door and running across the lawn.

  "Oh, there you are!" he exclaimed with a relieved giggle. "Will you comeinside, please? I want to speak to you both."

  They followed him into his shiny wooden office where their damningrecord was kept. Dr. Quayle sat down on a swivel chair and swung roundto face them. His carved smile had suddenly disappeared.

  "I will be plain with you gentlemen," he said, abruptly; "you knowquite well we do our best for everybody here. Your cases have been underspecial consideration, and the Master himself has decided that you oughtto be treated specially and--er--under somewhat simpler conditions."

  "You mean treated worse, I suppose," said Turnbull, gruffly.

  The doctor did not reply, and MacIan said: "I expected this." His eyeshad begun to glow.

  The doctor answered, looking at his desk and playing with a key: "Well,in certain cases that give anxiety--it is often better----"

  "Give anxiety," said Turnbull, fiercely. "Confound your impudence! Whatdo you mean? You imprison two perfectly sane men in a madhouse becauseyou have made up a long word. They take it in good temper, walk and talkin your garden like monks who have found a vocation, are civil even toyou, you damned druggists' hack! Behave not only more sanely than any ofyour patients, but more sanely than half the sane men outside, and youhave the soul-stifling cheek to say that they give anxiety."

  "The head of the asylum has settled it all," said Dr. Quayle, stilllooking down.

  MacIan took one of his immense strides forward and stood over the doctorwith flaming eyes.

  "If the head has settled it let the head announce it," he said. "I won'ttake it from you. I believe you to be a low, gibbering degenerate. Letus 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 withfatherly interest.

  "You don't seem to appreciate the peculiar advantages of my position asa lunatic," he said. "I could kill you with my left hand before such arat as you could so much as squeak. And I wouldn't be hanged for it."

  "I certainly agree with Mr. MacIan," said Turnbull with sobriety andperfect respectfulness, "that you had better let us see the head of theinstitution."

  Dr. Quayle got to his feet in a mixture of sudden hysteria and clumsypresence of mind.

  "Oh, certainly," he said with a weak laugh. "You can see the head of theasylum if you particularly want to." He almost ran out of the room,and the two followed swiftly on his flying coat tails. He knocked at anordinary varnished door in the corridor. When a voice said, "Come in,"MacIan's breath went hissing back through his teeth into his chest.Turnbull was more impetuous, and opened the door.

  It was a neat and well-appointed room entirely lined with a medicallibrary. At the other end of it was a ponderous and polished desk withan incandescent lamp on it, the light of which was just sufficientto show a slender, well-bred figure in an ordinary medical blackfrock-coat, whose head, quite silvered with age, was bent over neatpiles of notes. This gentleman looked up for an instant as theyentered, and the lamplight fell on his glittering spectacles andlong, clean-shaven face--a face which would have been simply like anaristocrat's but that a certain lion poise of the head and long cleft inthe chin made it look more like a very handsome actor's. It was only fora flash that his face was thus lifted. Then he bent his silver head overhis notes once more, and said, without looking up again:

  "I told you, Dr. Quayle, that these men were to go to cells B and C."

  Turnbull and MacIan looked at each other, and said more than they couldever say with tongues or swords. Among other things they said thatto that particular Head of the institution it was a waste of time toappeal, and they followed Dr. Quayle out of the room.

  The instant they stepped out into the corridor four sturdy figuresstepped from four sides, pinioned them, and ran them along thegalleries. They might very likely have thrown their captors right andleft had they been inclined to resist, but for some nameless reasonthey were more inclined to laugh. A mixture of mad irony with childishcuriosity made them feel quite inclined to see what next twist wouldbe taken by their imbecile luck. They were dragged down countless coldavenues lined with glazed tiles, different only in being of differentlengths and set at different angles. They were so many and so monotonousthat to escape back by them would have been far harder than fleeing fromthe Hampton Court maze. Only the fact that windows grew fewer, comingat longer intervals, and the fact that when the windows did come theyseemed shadowed and let in less light, showed that they were windinginto the core or belly of some enormous building. After a little timethe glazed corridors began to be lit by electricity.

  At last, when they had walked nearly a mile in those white and polishedtunnels, they came with quite a shock to the futile finality of acul-de-sac. All that white and weary journey ended suddenly in an oblongspace and a blank white wall. But in the white wall there were two irondoors painted white on which were written, respectively, in neat blackcapitals B and C.

  "You go in here, sir," said the leader of the officials, quiterespectfully, "and you in here."

  But before the doors had clanged upon their dazed victims, MacIan hadbeen able to say to Turnbull with a strange drawl of significance: "Iwonder who A is."

  Turnbull made an automatic struggle before he allowed himself to bethrown 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 leastfive minutes after the echo of the clanging door had died away.

  Then, when silence had sunk deep and nothing happened for two and a halfhours, it suddenly occurred to him that this was the end of his life. Hewas hidden and sealed up in this little crack of stone until the fleshshould 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 itswidth. It was just wide enough to permit the arms to be fully extendedwith the dumb-bells, which were hung up on the left wall, very dusty. Itwas, however, long enough for a man to walk one thirty-fifth part of amile if he traversed it entirely. On the same principle a row of fixedholes, quite close together, let in to the cells by pipes what wasalleged to be the freshest air. For these great scientific organizersinsisted that a man should be healthy even if he was miserable. Theyprovided a walk long enough to give him exercise and holes large enoughto give him oxygen. There their interest in human nature suddenlyceased. It seemed never to have occurred to them that the benefitof exercise belongs partly to the benefit of liberty. They had notentertained the suggestion that the open air is only one of theadvantages of the open sky. They administered air in secret, but insufficient doses, as if it were a medicine. They suggested walking,as if no man had ever felt inclined to walk. Above all, the asylumauthorities insisted on their own extraordinary cleanliness. Everymorning, while Turnbull was still half asleep on his iron bedsteadwhich was lifted half-way up the wall and clamped to it with iron, foursluices or metal mouths opened above him at the four corners of thechamber and washed it white of any defilement. Turnbull's solitary soulsurged up against this sickening daily solemnity.

  "I am buried alive!" he cried, bitterly; "they have hidden me undermountains. I shall be here till I rot. Why the blazes should it matterto 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 cookedlentils an
d a big bowl of cocoa. He was not underfed any more than hewas underexercised or asphyxiated. He had ample walking space, ampleair, ample and even filling food. The only objection was that he hadnothing to walk towards, nothing to feast about, and no reason whateverfor drawing the breath of life.

  Even the shape of his cell especially irritated him. It was a long,narrow parallelogram, which had a flat wall at one end and ought tohave had a flat wall at the other; but that end was broken by a wedge orangle of space, like the prow of a ship. After three days of silence andcocoa, this angle at the end began to infuriate Turnbull. It maddenedhim to think that two lines came together and pointed at nothing. Afterthe fifth day he was reckless, and poked his head into the corner. Aftertwenty-five days he almost broke his head against it. Then he becamequite cool and stupid again, and began to examine it like a sort ofRobinson Crusoe.

  Almost unconsciously it was his instinct to examine outlets, and hefound himself paying particular attention to the row of holes which letin the air into his last house of life. He soon discovered that theseair-holes were all the ends and mouths of long leaden tubes whichdoubtless carried air from some remote watering-place near Margate.One evening while he was engaged in the fifth investigation he noticedsomething like twilight in one of these dumb mouths, as compared withthe darkness of the others. Thrusting his finger in as far as it wouldgo, he found a hole and flapping edge in the tube. This he rent open andinstantly saw a light behind; it was at least certain that he had strucksome other cell.

  It is a characteristic of all things now called "efficient", which meansmechanical and calculated, that if they go wrong at all they go entirelywrong. There is no power of retrieving a defeat, as in simpler and moreliving organisms. A strong gun can conquer a strong elephant, but awounded elephant can easily conquer a broken gun. Thus the Prussianmonarchy in the eighteenth century, or now, can make a strong armymerely by making the men afraid. But it does it with the permanentpossibility that the men may some day be more afraid of their enemiesthan of their officers. Thus the drainage in our cities so long as itis quite solid means a general safety, but if there is one leak it meansconcentrated poison--an explosion of deathly germs like dynamite, aspirit of stink. Thus, indeed, all that excellent machinery which is theswiftest thing on earth in saving human labour is also the slowestthing on earth in resisting human interference. It may be easier toget chocolate for nothing out of a shopkeeper than out of an automaticmachine. But if you did manage to steal the chocolate, the automaticmachine would be much less likely to run after you.

  Turnbull was not long in discovering this truth in connexion with thecold and colossal machinery of this great asylum. He had been shakenby many spiritual states since the instant when he was pitched headforemost into that private cell which was to be his private room tilldeath. He had felt a high fit of pride and poetry, which had ebbedaway and left him deadly cold. He had known a period of mere scientificcuriosity, in the course of which he examined all the tiles of his cell,with the gratifying conclusion that they were all the same shape andsize; 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, theobject of which he does not know to this day. Then he had a period ofmere madness not to be written of by decent men, but only by those fewdirty novelists hallooed on by the infernal huntsman to hunt down andhumiliate human nature. This also passed, but left behind it a feverishdistaste for many of the mere objects around him. Long after he hadreturned to sanity and such hopeless cheerfulness as a man might have ona desert island, he disliked the regular squares of the pattern of walland floor and the triangle that terminated his corridor. Above all, hehad a hatred, deep as the hell he did not believe in, for the objectlessiron peg in the wall.

  But in all his moods, sane or insane, intolerant or stoical, henever really doubted this: that the machine held him as light and ashopelessly as he had from his birth been held by the hopeless cosmos ofhis own creed. He knew well the ruthless and inexhaustible resources ofour scientific civilization. He no more expected rescue from a medicalcertificate than rescue from the solar system. In many of his RobinsonCrusoe moods he thought kindly of MacIan as of some quarrelsomeschool-fellow who had long been dead. He thought of leaving in the cellwhen he died a rigid record of his opinions, and when he began towrite them down on scraps of envelope in his pocket, he was startledto discover how much they had changed. Then he remembered the BeauchampTower, and tried to write his blazing scepticism on the wall, anddiscovered that it was all shiny tiles on which nothing could be eitherdrawn or carved. Then for an instant there hung and broke above him likea high wave the whole horror of scientific imprisonment, which managesto deny a man not only liberty, but every accidental comfort of bondage.In the old filthy dungeons men could carve their prayers or protests inthe rock. Here the white and slippery walls escaped even from bearingwitness. The old prisoners could make a pet of a mouse or a beetlestrayed out of a hole. Here the unpierceable walls were washed everymorning by an automatic sluice. There was no natural corruption andno merciful decay by which a living thing could enter in. Then JamesTurnbull looked up and saw the high invincible hatefulness of thesociety in which he lived, and saw the hatefulness of something elsealso, which he told himself again and again was not the cosmos in whichhe believed. But all the time he had never once doubted that the fivesides of his cell were for him the wall of the world henceforward, andit gave him a shock of surprise even to discover the faint light throughthe aperture in the ventilation tube. But he had forgotten how closeefficiency has to pack everything together and how easily, therefore, apipe here or there may leak.

  Turnbull thrust his first finger down the aperture, and at last managedto make a slight further fissure in the piping. The light that came upfrom beyond was very faint, and apparently indirect; it seemed to fallfrom some hole or window higher up. As he was screwing his eye to peerat this grey and greasy twilight he was astonished to see another humanfinger very long and lean come down from above towards the broken pipeand hook it up to something higher. The lighted aperture was abruptlyblackened and blocked, presumably by a face and mouth, for somethinghuman spoke down the tube, though the words were not clear.

  "Who is that?" asked Turnbull, trembling with excitement, yet wary andquite resolved not to spoil any chance.

  After a few indistinct sounds the voice came down with a strongArgyllshire accent:

  "I say, Turnbull, we couldn't fight through this tube, could we?"

  Sentiments beyond speech surged up in Turnbull and silenced him for aspace just long enough to be painful. Then he said with his old gaiety:"I vote we talk a little first; I don't want to murder the first man Ihave met for ten million years."

  "I know what you mean," answered the other. "It has been awful. For amortal month I have been alone with God."

  Turnbull started, and it was on the tip of his tongue to answer: "Alonewith God! Then you do not know what loneliness is."

  But he answered, after all, in his old defiant style: "Alone withGod, were you? And I suppose you found his Majesty's society rathermonotonous?"

  "Oh, no," said MacIan, and his voice shuddered; "it was a great deal tooexciting."

  After a very long silence the voice of MacIan said: "What do you reallyhate 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 hasno rhyme or reason. Perhaps my brain really has gone, but I detestthat iron spike in the left wall more than the damned desolation or thedamned cocoa. Have you got one in your cell?"

  "Not now," replied MacIan with serenity. "I've pulled it out."

  His fellow-prisoner could only repeat the words.

  "I pulled it out the other day when I was off my head," continued thetranquil Highland voice. "It looked so unnecessary."

  "You must be ghastly strong," said Turnbull.


  "One is, when one is mad," was the careless reply, "and it had worn alittle loose in the socket. Even now I've got it out I can't discoverwhat it was for. But I've found out something a long sight funnier."

  "What do you mean?" asked Turnbull.

  "I have found out where A is," said the other.

  Three weeks afterwards MacIan had managed to open up communicationswhich made his meaning plain. By that time the two captives had fullydiscovered and demonstrated that weakness in the very nature of modernmachinery to which we have already referred. The very fact that theywere isolated from all companions meant that they were free from allspies, and as there were no gaolers to be bribed, so there were none tobe baffled. Machinery brought them their cocoa and cleaned their cells;that machinery was as helpless as it was pitiless. A little patientviolence, conducted day after day amid constant mutual suggestion,opened an irregular hole in the wall, large enough to let in a smallman, in the exact place where there had been before the tiny ventilationholes. Turnbull tumbled somehow into MacIan's apartment, and his firstglance found out that the iron spike was indeed plucked from its socket,and left, moreover, another ragged hole into some hollow place behind.But for this MacIan's cell was the duplicate of Turnbull's--a longoblong ending in a wedge and lined with cold and lustrous tiles. Thesmall hole from which the peg had been displaced was in that shortoblique wall at the end nearest to Turnbull's. That individual looked atit with a puzzled face.

  "What is in there?" he asked.

  MacIan answered briefly: "Another cell."

  "But where can the door of it be?" said his companion, even morepuzzled; "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 feelingcrept over Turnbull's stubborn soul in spite of himself. The notion ofthe doorless room chilled him with that sense of half-witted curiositywhich one has when something horrible is half understood.

  "James Turnbull," said MacIan, in a low and shaken voice, "these peoplehate us more than Nero hated Christians, and fear us more than any manfeared Nero. They have filled England with frenzy and galloping in orderto capture us and wipe us out--in order to kill us. And they have killedus, for you and I have only made a hole in our coffins. But though thishatred that they felt for us is bigger than they felt for Bonaparte, andmore plain and practical than they would feel for Jack the Ripper, yetit 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 itwas not a pretty sort of superstition either.

  "There is another man more fearful and hateful," went on MacIan, in hislow monotone voice, "and they have buried him even deeper. God knows howthey did it, for he was let in by neither door nor window, nor loweredthrough any opening above. I expect these iron handles that we both hatehave been part of some damned machinery for walling him up. He is there.I have looked through the hole at him; but I cannot stand looking at himlong, because his face is turned away from me and he does not move."

  Al Turnbull's unnatural and uncompleted feelings found their outlet inrushing to the aperture and looking into the unknown room.

  It was a third oblong cell exactly like the other two except that it wasdoorless, and except that on one of the walls was painted a large blackA like the B and C outside their own doors. The letter in this case wasnot painted outside, because this prison had no outside.

  On the same kind of tiled floor, of which the monotonous squares hadmaddened Turnbull's eye and brain, was sitting a figure which wasstartlingly short even for a child, only that the enormous headwas ringed with hair of a frosty grey. The figure was draped, bothinsecurely and insufficiently, in what looked like the remains of abrown flannel dressing-gown; an emptied cup of cocoa stood on the floorbeside it, and the creature had his big grey head cocked at a particularangle of inquiry or attention which amid all that gathering gloom andmystery struck one as comic if not cocksure.

  After six still seconds Turnbull could stand it no longer, but calledout to the dwarfish thing--in what words heaven knows. The thing gotup with the promptitude of an animal, and turning round offered thespectacle of two owlish eyes and a huge grey-and-white beard not unlikethe plumage of an owl. This extraordinary beard covered him literally tohis feet (not that that was very far), and perhaps it was as wellthat it did, for portions of his remaining clothing seemed to fall offwhenever he moved. One talks trivially of a face like parchment, butthis old man's face was so wrinkled that it was like a parchment loadedwith hieroglyphics. The lines of his face were so deep and complex thatone could see five or ten different faces besides the real one, as onecan see them in an elaborate wall-paper. And yet while his face seemedlike 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 aninstant before been fitted into his head.

  Everything depended so obviously upon whether this buried monster spokethat Turnbull did not know or care whether he himself had spoken. Hesaid something or nothing. And then he waited for this dwarfish voicethat had been hidden under the mountains of the world. At last it didspeak, and spoke in English, with a foreign accent that was neitherLatin nor Teutonic. He suddenly stretched out a long and very dirtyforefinger, and cried in a voice of clear recognition, like a child's:"That's a hole."

  He digested the discovery for some seconds, sucking his finger, and thenhe cried, with a crow of laughter: "And that's a head come through it."

  The hilarious energy in this idiot attitude gave Turnbull another sickturn. He had grown to tolerate those dreary and mumbling madmen whotrailed themselves about the beautiful asylum gardens. But there wassomething new and subversive of the universe in the combination of somuch cheerful decision with a body without a brain.

  "Why did they put you in such a place?" he asked at last withembarrassment.

  "Good place. Yes," said the old man, nodding a great many times andbeaming like a flattered landlord. "Good shape. Long and narrow, with apoint. Like this," and he made lovingly with his hands a map of the roomin the air.

  "But that's not the best," he added, confidentially. "Squares verygood; I have a nice long holiday, and can count them. But that's not thebest."

  "What is the best?" asked Turnbull in great distress.

  "Spike is the best," said the old man, opening his blue eyes blazing;"it sticks out."

  The words Turnbull spoke broke out of him in pure pity. "Can't we doanything for you?" he said.

  "I am very happy," said the other, alphabetically. "You are a good man.Can I help you?"

  "No, I don't think you can, sir," said Turnbull with rough pathos; "I amglad you are contented at least."

  The weird old person opened his broad blue eyes and fixed Turnbull witha stare extraordinarily severe. "You are quite sure," he said, "I cannothelp you?"

  "Quite sure, thank you," said Turnbull with broken brevity. "Good day."

  Then he turned to MacIan who was standing close behind him, and whoseface, now familiar in all its moods, told him easily that Evan had heardthe whole of the strange dialogue.

  "Curse those cruel beasts!" cried Turnbull. "They've turned him to animbecile just by burying him alive. His brain's like a pin-point now."

  "You are sure he is a lunatic?" said Evan, slowly.

  "Not a lunatic," said Turnbull, "an idiot. He just points to things andsays that they stick out."

  "He had a notion that he could help us," said MacIan moodily, and beganto pace towards the other end of his cell.

  "Yes, it was a bit pathetic," assented Turnbull; "such a Thing offeringhelp, and besides---- Hallo! Hallo! What's the matter?"

  "God Almighty guide us all!" said MacIan.

  He was standing heavy and still at the other end of the room and staringquietly at the door which for thirty days had sealed them up from thesun. Turnbull, following the other's eye, stared at the doo
r likewise,and then he also uttered an exclamation. The iron door was standingabout an inch and a half open.

  "He said----" began Evan, in a trembling voice--"he offered----"

  "Come along, you fool!" shouted Turnbull with a sudden and furiousenergy. "I see it all now, and it's the best stroke of luck in theworld. You pulled out that iron handle that had screwed up his cell, andit somehow altered the machinery and opened all the doors."

  Seizing MacIan by the elbow he bundled him bodily out into the opencorridor and ran him on till they saw daylight through a half-darkenedwindow.

  "All the same," said Evan, like one answering in an ordinaryconversation, "he did ask you whether he could help you."

  All this wilderness of windowless passages was so built into the heartof that fortress of fear that it seemed more than an hour before thefugitives had any good glimpse of the outer world. They did not evenknow what hour of the day it was; and when, turning a corner, they sawthe bare tunnel of the corridor end abruptly in a shining square ofgarden, the grass burning in that strong evening sunshine which makesit burnished gold rather than green, the abrupt opening on to the earthseemed like a hole knocked in the wall of heaven. Only once or twicein life is it permitted to a man thus to see the very universe fromoutside, and feel existence itself as an adorable adventure not yetbegun. As they found this shining escape out of that hellish labyrinththey both had simultaneously the sensation of being babes unborn, ofbeing asked by God if they would like to live upon the earth. They werelooking in at one of the seven gates of Eden.

  Turnbull was the first to leap into the garden, with an earth-spurningleap like that of one who could really spread his wings and fly. MacIan,who came an instant after, was less full of mere animal gusto and fullerof a more fearful and quivering pleasure in the clear and innocentflower colours and the high and holy trees. With one bound they were inthat cool and cleared landscape, and they found just outside the doorthe black-clad gentleman with the cloven chin smilingly regarding them;and his chin seemed to grow longer and longer as he smiled.