“What can they mean?” she cried out in a kind of temper; “this car’s going like a snail.”
There was a short silence, and then Turnbull said: “It is certainly very odd, you are driving quietly enough.”
“You are driving nobly,” said MacIan, and his words (which had no meaning whatever) sounded hoarse and ungainly even in his own ears.
They passed the next mile and a half swiftly and smoothly; yet among the many things which they passed in the course of it was a clump of eager policemen standing at a cross-road. As they passed, one of the policemen shouted something to the others; but nothing else happened. Eight hundred yards farther on, Turnbull stood up suddenly in the swaying car.
“My God, MacIan!” he called out, showing his first emotion of that night. “I don’t believe it’s the pace; it couldn’t be the pace. I believe it’s us.”
MacIan sat motionless for a few moments and then turned up at his companion a face that was as white as the moon above it.
“You may be right,” he said at last; “if you are, I must tell her.”
“I will tell the lady if you like,” said Turnbull, with his unconquered good temper.
“You!” said MacIan, with a sort of sincere and instinctive astonishment. “Why should you–no, I must tell her, of course–”
And he leant forward and spoke to the lady in the fur cap.
“I am afraid, madam, that we may have got you into some trouble,” he said, and even as he said it it sounded wrong, like everything he said to this particular person in the long gloves. “The fact is,” he resumed, desperately, “the fact is, we are being chased by the police.” Then the last flattening hammer fell upon poor Evan’s embarrassment; for the fluffy brown head with the furry black cap did not turn by a section of the compass.
“We are chased by the police,” repeated MacIan, vigorously; then he added, as if beginning an explanation, “You see, I am a Catholic.”
The wind whipped back a curl of the brown hair so as to necessitate a new theory of aesthetics touching the line of the cheek-bone; but the head did not turn.
“You see,” began MacIan, again blunderingly, “this gentleman wrote in his newspaper that Our Lady was a common woman, a bad woman, and so we agreed to fight; and we were fighting quite a little time ago– but that was before we saw you.”
The young lady driving her car had half turned her face to listen; and it was not a reverent or a patient face that she showed him. Her Norman nose was tilted a trifle too high upon the slim stalk of her neck and body.
When MacIan saw that arrogant and uplifted profile pencilled plainly against the moonshine, he accepted an ultimate defeat. He had expected the angels to despise him if he were wrong, but not to despise him so much as this.
“You see,” said the stumbling spokesman, “I was angry with him when he insulted the Mother of God, and I asked him to fight a duel with me; but the police are all trying to stop it.”
Nothing seemed to waver or flicker in the fair young falcon profile; and it only opened its lips to say, after a silence: “I thought people in our time were supposed to respect each other’s religion.”
Under the shadow of that arrogant face MacIan could only fall back on the obvious answer: “But what about a man’s irreligion?” The face only answered: “Well, you ought to be more broadminded.”
If anyone else in the world had said the words, MacIan would have snorted with his equine neigh of scorn. But in this case he seemed knocked down by a superior simplicity, as if his eccentric attitude were rebuked by the innocence of a child. He could not dissociate anything that this woman said or did or wore from an idea of spiritual rarity and virtue. Like most others under the same elemental passion, his soul was at present soaked in ethics. He could have applied moral terms to the material objects of her environment. If someone had spoken of “her generous ribbon” or “her chivalrous gloves” or “her merciful shoe-buckle,” it would not have seemed to him nonsense.
He was silent, and the girl went on in a lower key as if she were momentarily softened and a little saddened also. “It won’t do, you know,” she said; “you can’t find out the truth in that way. There are such heaps of churches and people thinking different things nowadays, and they all think they are right. My uncle was a Swedenborgian.”
MacIan sat with bowed head, listening hungrily to her voice but hardly to her words, and seeing his great world drama grow smaller and smaller before his eyes till it was no bigger than a child’s toy theatre.
“The time’s gone by for all that,” she went on; “you can’t find out the real thing like that–if there is really anything to find–” and she sighed rather drearily; for, like many of the women of our wealthy class, she was old and broken in thought, though young and clean enough in her emotions.
“Our object,” said Turnbull, shortly, “is to make an effective demonstration”; and after that word, MacIan looked at his vision again and found it smaller than ever.
“It would be in the newspapers, of course,” said the girl. “People read the newspapers, but they don’t believe them, or anything else, I think.” And she sighed again.
She drove in silence a third of a mile before she added, as if completing the sentence: “Anyhow, the whole thing’s quite absurd.”
“I don’t think,” began Turnbull, “that you quite realize– Hullo! hullo–hullo–what’s this?”
The amateur chauffeur had been forced to bring the car to a staggering stoppage, for a file of fat, blue policemen made a wall across the way. A sergeant came to the side and touched his peaked cap to the lady.
“Beg your pardon, miss,” he said with some embarrassment, for he knew her for a daughter of a dominant house, “but we have reason to believe that the gentlemen in your car are–” and he hesitated for a polite phrase.
“I am Evan MacIan,” said that gentleman, and stood up in a sort of gloomy pomp, not wholly without a touch of the sulks of a schoolboy.
“Yes, we will get out, sergeant,” said Turnbull, more easily; “my name is James Turnbull. We must not incommode the lady.”
“What are you taking them up for?” asked the young woman, looking straight in front of her along the road.
“It’s under the new act,” said the sergeant, almost apologetically. “Incurable disturbers of the peace.”
“What will happen to them?” she asked, with the same frigid clearness.
“Westgate Adult Reformatory,” he replied, briefly.
“Until when?”
“Until they are cured,” said the official.
“Very well, sergeant,” said the young lady, with a sort of tired common sense. “I am sure I don’t want to protect criminals or go against the law; but I must tell you that these gentlemen have done me a considerable service; you won’t mind drawing your men a little farther off while I say good night to them. Men like that always misunderstand.”
The sergeant was profoundly disquieted from the beginning at the mere idea of arresting anyone in the company of a great lady; to refuse one of her minor requests was quite beyond his courage. The police fell back to a few yards behind the car. Turnbull took up the two swords that were their only luggage; the swords that, after so many half duels, they were now to surrender at last. MacIan, the blood thundering in his brain at the thought of that instant of farewell, bent over, fumbled at the handle and flung open the door to get out.
But he did not get out. He did not get out, because it is dangerous to jump out of a car when it is going at full speed. And the car was going at full speed, because the young lady, without turning her head or so much as saying a syllable, had driven down a handle that made the machine plunge forward like a buffalo and then fly over the landscape like a greyhound. The police made one rush to follow, and then dropped so grotesque and hopeless a chase. Away in the vanishing distance they could see the sergeant furiously making notes.
The open door, still left loose on its hinges, swung and banged quite crazily as they went whiz
zing up one road and down another. Nor did MacIan sit down; he stood up stunned and yet staring, as he would have stood up at the trumpet of the Last Day. A black dot in the distance sprang up a tall black forest, swallowed them and spat them out again at the other end. A railway bridge grew larger and larger till it leapt upon their backs bellowing, and was in its turn left behind. Avenues of poplars on both sides of the road chased each other like the figures in a zoetrope. Now and then with a shock and rattle they went through sleeping moonlit villages, which must have stirred an instant in their sleep as at the passing of a fugitive earthquake. Sometimes in an outlying house a light in one erratic, unexpected window would give them a nameless hint of the hundred human secrets which they left behind them with their dust. Sometimes even a slouching rustic would be afoot on the road and would look after them, as after a flying phantom. But still MacIan stood up staring at earth and heaven; and still the door he had flung open flapped loose like a flag. Turnbull, after a few minutes of dumb amazement, had yielded to the healthiest element in his nature and gone off into uncontrollable fits of laughter. The girl had not stirred an inch.
After another half mile that seemed a mere flash, Turnbull leant over and locked the door. Evan staggered at last into his seat and hid his throbbing head in his hands; and still the car flew on and its driver sat inflexible and silent. The moon had already gone down, and the whole darkness was faintly troubled with twilight and the first movement of beasts and fowls. It was that mysterious moment when light is coming as if it were something unknown whose nature one could not guess– a mere alteration in everything. They looked at the sky and it seemed as dark as ever; then they saw the black shape of a tower or tree against it and knew that it was already grey. Save that they were driving southward and had certainly passed the longitude of London, they knew nothing of their direction; but Turnbull, who had spent a year on the Hampshire coast in his youth, began to recognize the unmistakable but quite indescribable villages of the English south. Then a white witch fire began to burn between the black stems of the fir-trees; and, like so many things in nature, though not in books on evolution, the daybreak, when it did come, came much quicker than one would think. The gloomy heavens were ripped up and rolled away like a scroll, revealing splendours, as the car went roaring up the curve of a great hill; and above them and black against the broadening light, there stood one of those crouching and fantastic trees that are first signals of the sea.
X. THE SWORDS REJOINED
As they came over the hill and down on the other side of it, it is not too much to say that the whole universe of God opened over them and under them, like a thing unfolding to five times its size. Almost under their feet opened the enormous sea, at the bottom of a steep valley which fell down into a bay; and the sea under their feet blazed at them almost as lustrous and almost as empty as the sky. The sunrise opened above them like some cosmic explosion, shining and shattering and yet silent; as if the world were blown to pieces without a sound. Round the rays of the victorious sun swept a sort of rainbow of confused and conquered colours– brown and blue and green and flaming rose-colour; as though gold were driving before it all the colours of the world. The lines of the landscape down which they sped, were the simple, strict, yet swerving, lines of a rushing river; so that it was almost as if they were being sucked down in a huge still whirlpool. Turnbull had some such feeling, for he spoke for the first time for many hours.
“If we go down at this rate we shall be over the sea cliff,” he said.
“How glorious!” said MacIan.
When, however, they had come into the wide hollow at the bottom of that landslide, the car took a calm and graceful curve along the side of the sea, melted into the fringe of a few trees, and quietly, yet astonishingly, stopped. A belated light was burning in the broad morning in the window of a sort of lodge– or gate-keepers’ cottage; and the girl stood up in the car and turned her splendid face to the sun.
Evan seemed startled by the stillness, like one who had been born amid sound and speed. He wavered on his long legs as he stood up; he pulled himself together, and the only consequence was that he trembled from head to foot. Turnbull had already opened the door on his side and jumped out.
The moment he had done so the strange young woman had one more mad movement, and deliberately drove the car a few yards farther. Then she got out with an almost cruel coolness and began pulling off her long gloves and almost whistling.
“You can leave me here,” she said, quite casually, as if they had met five minutes before. “That is the lodge of my father’s place. Please come in, if you like–but I understood that you had some business.”
Evan looked at that lifted face and found it merely lovely; he was far too much of a fool to see that it was working with a final fatigue and that its austerity was agony. He was even fool enough to ask it a question. “Why did you save us?” he said, quite humbly.
The girl tore off one of her gloves, as if she were tearing off her hand. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, bitterly. “Now I come to think of it, I can’t imagine.”
Evan’s thoughts, that had been piled up to the morning star, abruptly let him down with a crash into the very cellars of the emotional universe. He remained in a stunned silence for a long time; and that, if he had only known, was the wisest thing that he could possibly do at the moment.
Indeed, the silence and the sunrise had their healing effect, for when the extraordinary lady spoke again, her tone was more friendly and apologetic. “I’m not really ungrateful,” she said; “it was very good of you to save me from those men.”
“But why?” repeated the obstinate and dazed MacIan, “why did you save us from the other men? I mean the policemen?”
The girl’s great brown eyes were lit up with a flash that was at once final desperation and the loosening of some private and passionate reserve.
“Oh, God knows!” she cried. “God knows that if there is a God He has turned His big back on everything. God knows I have had no pleasure in my life, though I am pretty and young and father has plenty of money. And then people come and tell me that I ought to do things and I do them and it’s all drivel. They want you to do work among the poor; which means reading Ruskin and feeling self-righteous in the best room in a poor tenement. Or to help some cause or other, which always means bundling people out of crooked houses, in which they’ve always lived, into straight houses, in which they often die. And all the time you have inside only the horrid irony of your own empty head and empty heart. I am to give to the unfortunate, when my whole misfortune is that I have nothing to give. I am to teach, when I believe nothing at all that I was taught. I am to save the children from death, and I am not even certain that I should not be better dead. I suppose if I actually saw a child drowning I should save it. But that would be from the same motive from which I have saved you, or destroyed you, whichever it is that I have done.”
“What was the motive?” asked Evan, in a low voice.
“My motive is too big for my mind,” answered the girl.
Then, after a pause, as she stared with a rising colour at the glittering sea, she said: “It can’t be described, and yet I am trying to describe it. It seems to me not only that I am unhappy, but that there is no way of being happy. Father is not happy, though he is a Member of Parliament–” She paused a moment and added with a ghost of a smile: “Nor Aunt Mabel, though a man from India has told her the secret of all creeds. But I may be wrong; there may be a way out. And for one stark, insane second, I felt that, after all, you had got the way out and that was why the world hated you. You see, if there were a way out, it would be sure to be something that looked very queer.”
Evan put his hand to his forehead and began stumblingly: “Yes, I suppose we do seem–”
“Oh, yes, you look queer enough,” she said, with ringing sincerity. “You’ll be all the better for a wash and brush up.”
“You forget our business, madam,” said Evan, in a shaking voice; “we have no conce
rn but to kill each other.”
“Well, I shouldn’t be killed looking like that if I were you,” she replied, with inhuman honesty.
Evan stood and rolled his eyes in masculine bewilderment. Then came the final change in this Proteus, and she put out both her hands for an instant and said in a low tone on which he lived for days and nights:
“Don’t you understand that I did not dare to stop you? What you are doing is so mad that it may be quite true. Somehow one can never really manage to be an atheist.”
Turnbull stood staring at the sea; but his shoulders showed that he heard, and after one minute he turned his head. But the girl had only brushed Evan’s hand with hers and had fled up the dark alley by the lodge gate.
Evan stood rooted upon the road, literally like some heavy statue hewn there in the age of the Druids. It seemed impossible that he should ever move. Turnbull grew restless with this rigidity, and at last, after calling his companion twice or thrice, went up and clapped him impatiently on one of his big shoulders. Evan winced and leapt away from him with a repulsion which was not the hate of an unclean thing nor the dread of a dangerous one, but was a spasm of awe and separation from something from which he was now sundered as by the sword of God. He did not hate the atheist; it is possible that he loved him. But Turnbull was now something more dreadful than an enemy: he was a thing sealed and devoted–a thing now hopelessly doomed to be either a corpse or an executioner.
“What is the matter with you?” asked Turnbull, with his hearty hand still in the air; and yet he knew more about it than his innocent action would allow.
“James,” said Evan, speaking like one under strong bodily pain, “I asked for God’s answer and I have got it–got it in my vitals. He knows how weak I am, and that I might forget the peril of the faith, forget the face of Our Lady–yes, even with your blow upon her cheek. But the honour of this earth has just this about it, that it can make a man’s heart like iron. I am from the Lords of the Isles and I dare not be a mere deserter. Therefore, God has tied me by the chain of my worldly place and word, and there is nothing but fighting now.”
The Ball and the Cross Page 11
