The Ball and the Cross

by Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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

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

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

  “Oh!” said Turnbull shortly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  And he ran at Wimpey, with blazing eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “The taste of what?” asked MacIan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Good Lord in heaven!” he cried–

  “Who does not exist,” murmured MacIan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Rubbish!” said Turnbull.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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