Pursuer and pursued were fixed in their distance as they fled, for some quarter of a mile, when they came to a place where two or three of the trees grew twistedly together, making a special obscurity. Past this place the pursuing policeman went thundering without thought or hesitation. But he was pursuing his shadow or the wind; for Turnbull had put one foot in a crack of the tree and gone up it as quickly and softly as a cat. Somewhat more laboriously but in equal silence the long legs of the Highlander had followed; and crouching in crucial silence in the cloud of leaves, they saw the whole posse of their pursuers go by and die into the dust and mists of the distance.
The white vapour lay, as it often does, in lean and palpable layers; and even the head of the tree was above it in the half-daylight, like a green ship swinging on a sea of foam. But higher yet behind them, and readier to catch the first coming of the sun, ran the rampart of the top of the wall, which in their excitement of escape looked at once indispensable and unattainable, like the wall of heaven. Here, however, it was MacIan’s turn to have the advantage; for, though less light-limbed and feline, he was longer and stronger in the arms. In two seconds he had tugged up his chin over the wall like a horizontal bar; the next he sat astride of it, like a horse of stone. With his assistance Turnbull vaulted to the same perch, and the two began cautiously to shift along the wall in the direction by which they had come, doubling on their tracks to throw off the last pursuit. MacIan could not rid himself of the fancy of bestriding a steed; the long, grey coping of the wall shot out in front of him, like the long, grey neck of some nightmare Rosinante. He had the quaint thought that he and Turnbull were two knights on one steed on the old shield of the Templars.
The nightmare of the stone horse was increased by the white fog, which seemed thicker inside the wall than outside. They could make nothing of the enclosure upon which they were partial trespassers, except that the green and crooked branches of a big apple-tree came crawling at them out of the mist, like the tentacles of some green cuttlefish. Anything would serve, however, that was likely to confuse their trail, so they both decided without need of words to use this tree also as a ladder–a ladder of descent. When they dropped from the lowest branch to the ground their stockinged feet felt hard gravel beneath them.
They had alighted in the middle of a very broad garden path, and the clearing mist permitted them to see the edge of a well-clipped lawn. Though the white vapour was still a veil, it was like the gauzy veil of a transformation scene in a pantomime; for through it there glowed shapeless masses of colour, masses which might be clouds of sunrise or mosaics of gold and crimson, or ladies robed in ruby and emerald draperies. As it thinned yet farther they saw that it was only flowers; but flowers in such insolent mass and magnificence as can seldom be seen out of the tropics. Purple and crimson rhododendrons rose arrogantly, like rampant heraldic animals against their burning background of laburnum gold. The roses were red hot; the clematis was, so to speak, blue hot. And yet the mere whiteness of the syringa seemed the most violent colour of all. As the golden sunlight gradually conquered the mists, it had really something of the sensational sweetness of the slow opening of the gates of Eden. MacIan, whose mind was always haunted with such seraphic or titanic parallels, made some such remark to his companion. But Turnbull only cursed and said that it was the back garden of some damnable rich man.
When the last haze had faded from the ordered paths, the open lawns, and the flaming flower-beds, the two realized, not without an abrupt re-examination of their position, that they were not alone in the garden.
Down the centre of the central garden path, preceded by a blue cloud from a cigarette, was walking a gentleman who evidently understood all the relish of a garden in the very early morning. He was a slim yet satisfied figure, clad in a suit of pale-grey tweed, so subdued that the pattern was imperceptible–a costume that was casual but not by any means careless. His face, which was reflective and somewhat over-refined, was the face of a quite elderly man, though his stringy hair and moustache were still quite yellow. A double eye-glass, with a broad, black ribbon, drooped from his aquiline nose, and he smiled, as he communed with himself, with a self-content which was rare and almost irritating. The straw panama on his head was many shades shabbier than his clothes, as if he had caught it up by accident.
It needed the full shock of the huge shadow of MacIan, falling across his sunlit path, to rouse him from his smiling reverie. When this had fallen on him he lifted his head a little and blinked at the intruders with short-sighted benevolence, but with far less surprise than might have been expected. He was a gentleman; that is, he had social presence of mind, whether for kindness or for insolence.
“Can I do anything for you?” he said, at last.
MacIan bowed. “You can extend to us your pardon,” he said, for he also came of a whole race of gentlemen–of gentlemen without shirts to their backs. “I am afraid we are trespassing. We have just come over the wall.”
“Over the wall?” repeated the smiling old gentleman, still without letting his surprise come uppermost.
“I suppose I am not wrong, sir,” continued MacIan, “in supposing that these grounds inside the wall belong to you?”
The man in the panama looked at the ground and smoked thoughtfully for a few moments, after which he said, with a sort of matured conviction:
“Yes, certainly; the grounds inside the wall really belong to me, and the grounds outside the wall, too.”
“A large proprietor, I imagine,” said Turnbull, with a truculent eye.
“Yes,” answered the old gentleman, looking at him with a steady smile. “A large proprietor.”
Turnbull’s eye grew even more offensive, and he began biting his red beard; but MacIan seemed to recognize a type with which he could deal and continued quite easily:
“I am sure that a man like you will not need to be told that one sees and does a good many things that do not get into the newspapers. Things which, on the whole, had better not get into the newspapers.”
The smile of the large proprietor broadened for a moment under his loose, light moustache, and the other continued with increased confidence:
“One sometimes wants to have it out with another man. The police won’t allow it in the streets–and then there’s the County Council– and in the fields even nothing’s allowed but posters of pills. But in a gentleman’s garden, now–”
The strange gentleman smiled again and said, easily enough: “Do you want to fight? What do you want to fight about?”
MacIan had understood his man pretty well up to that point; an instinct common to all men with the aristocratic tradition of Europe had guided him. He knew that the kind of man who in his own back garden wears good clothes and spoils them with a bad hat is not the kind of man who has an abstract horror of illegal actions of violence or the evasion of the police. But a man may understand ragging and yet be very far from understanding religious ragging. This seeming host of theirs might comprehend a quarrel of husband and lover or a difficulty at cards or even escape from a pursuing tailor; but it still remained doubtful whether he would feel the earth fail under him in that earthquake instant when the Virgin is compared to a goddess of Mesopotamia. Even MacIan, therefore (whose tact was far from being his strong point), felt the necessity for some compromise in the mode of approach. At last he said, and even then with hesitation:
“We are fighting about God; there can be nothing so important as that.”
The tilted eye-glasses of the old gentleman fell abruptly from his nose, and he thrust his aristocratic chin so far forward that his lean neck seemed to shoot out longer like a telescope.
“About God?” he queried, in a key completely new.
“Look here!” cried Turnbull, taking his turn roughly, “I’ll tell you what it’s all about. I think that there’s no God. I take it that it’s nobody’s business but mine–or God’s, if there is one. This young gentleman from the Highlands happens to think that it’s his business. In consequence, he
first takes a walking-stick and smashes my shop; then he takes the same walking-stick and tries to smash me. To this I naturally object. I suggest that if it comes to that we should both have sticks. He improves on the suggestion and proposes that we should both have steel-pointed sticks. The police (with characteristic unreasonableness) will not accept either of our proposals; the result is that we run about dodging the police and have jumped over our garden wall into your magnificent garden to throw ourselves on your magnificent hospitality.”
The face of the old gentleman had grown redder and redder during this address, but it was still smiling; and when he broke out it was with a kind of guffaw.
“So you really want to fight with drawn swords in my garden,” he asked, “about whether there is really a God?”
“Why not?” said MacIan, with his simple monstrosity of speech; “all man’s worship began when the Garden of Eden was founded.”
“Yes, by–!” said Turnbull, with an oath, “and ended when the Zoological Gardens were founded.”
“In this garden! In my presence!” cried the stranger, stamping up and down the gravel and choking with laughter, “whether there is a God!” And he went stamping up and down the garden, making it echo with his unintelligible laughter. Then he came back to them more composed and wiping his eyes.
“Why, how small the world is!” he cried at last. “I can settle the whole matter. Why, I am God!”
And he suddenly began to kick and wave his well-clad legs about the lawn.
“You are what?” repeated Turnbull, in a tone which is beyond description.
“Why, God, of course!” answered the other, thoroughly amused. “How funny it is to think that you have tumbled over a garden wall and fallen exactly on the right person! You might have gone floundering about in all sorts of churches and chapels and colleges and schools of philosophy looking for some evidence of the existence of God. Why, there is no evidence, except seeing him. And now you’ve seen him. You’ve seen him dance!”
And the obliging old gentleman instantly stood on one leg without relaxing at all the grave and cultured benignity of his expression.
“I understood that this garden–” began the bewildered MacIan.
“Quite so! Quite so!” said the man on one leg, nodding gravely. “I said this garden belonged to me and the land outside it. So they do. So does the country beyond that and the sea beyond that and all the rest of the earth. So does the moon. So do the sun and stars.” And he added, with a smile of apology: “You see, I’m God.”
Turnbull and MacIan looked at him for one moment with a sort of notion that perhaps he was not too old to be merely playing the fool. But after staring steadily for an instant Turnbull saw the hard and horrible earnestness in the man’s eyes behind all his empty animation. Then Turnbull looked very gravely at the strict gravel walls and the gay flower-beds and the long rectangular red-brick building, which the mist had left evident beyond them. Then he looked at MacIan.
Almost at the same moment another man came walking quickly round the regal clump of rhododendrons. He had the look of a prosperous banker, wore a good tall silk hat, was almost stout enough to burst the buttons of a fine frock-coat; but he was talking to himself, and one of his elbows had a singular outward jerk as he went by.
XIV. A MUSEUM OF SOULS
The man with the good hat and the jumping elbow went by very quickly; yet the man with the bad hat, who thought he was God, overtook him. He ran after him and jumped over a bed of geraniums to catch him.
“I beg your Majesty’s pardon,” he said, with mock humility, “but here is a quarrel which you ought really to judge.”
Then as he led the heavy, silk-hatted man back towards the group, he caught MacIan’s ear in order to whisper: “This poor gentleman is mad; he thinks he is Edward VII.” At this the self-appointed Creator slightly winked. “Of course you won’t trust him much; come to me for everything. But in my position one has to meet so many people. One has to be broadminded.”
The big banker in the black frock-coat and hat was standing quite grave and dignified on the lawn, save for his slight twitch of one limb, and he did not seem by any means unworthy of the part which the other promptly forced upon him.
“My dear fellow,” said the man in the straw hat, “these two gentlemen are going to fight a duel of the utmost importance. Your own royal position and my much humbler one surely indicate us as the proper seconds. Seconds–yes, seconds–” and here the speaker was once more shaken with his old malady of laughter.
“Yes, you and I are both seconds–and these two gentlemen can obviously fight in front of us. You, he-he, are the king. I am God; really, they could hardly have better supporters. They have come to the right place.”
Then Turnbull, who had been staring with a frown at the fresh turf, burst out with a rather bitter laugh and cried, throwing his red head in the air:
“Yes, by God, MacIan, I think we have come to the right place!” And MacIan answered, with an adamantine stupidity:
“Any place is the right place where they will let us do it.”
There was a long stillness, and their eyes involuntarily took in the landscape, as they had taken in all the landscapes of their everlasting combat; the bright, square garden behind the shop; the whole lift and leaning of the side of Hampstead Heath; the little garden of the decadent choked with flowers; the square of sand beside the sea at sunrise. They both felt at the same moment all the breadth and blossoming beauty of that paradise, the coloured trees, the natural and restful nooks and also the great wall of stone– more awful than the wall of China–from which no flesh could flee.
Turnbull was moodily balancing his sword in his hand as the other spoke; then he started, for a mouth whispered quite close to his ear. With a softness incredible in any cat, the huge, heavy man in the black hat and frock-coat had crept across the lawn from his own side and was saying in his ear: “Don’t trust that second of yours. He’s mad and not so mad, either; for he frightfully cunning and sharp. Don’t believe the story he tells you about why I hate him. I know the story he’ll tell; I overheard it when the housekeeper was talking to the postman. It’s too long to talk about now, and I expect we’re watched, but–”
Something in Turnbull made him want suddenly to be sick on the grass; the mere healthy and heathen horror of the unclean; the mere inhumane hatred of the inhuman state of madness. He seemed to hear all round him the hateful whispers of that place, innumerable as leaves whispering in the wind, and each of them telling eagerly some evil that had not happened or some terrific secret which was not true. All the rationalist and plain man revolted within him against bowing down for a moment in that forest of deception and egotistical darkness. He wanted to blow up that palace of delusions with dynamite; and in some wild way, which I will not defend, he tried to do it.
He looked across at MacIan and said: “Oh, I can’t stand this!”
“Can’t stand what?” asked his opponent, eyeing him doubtfully.
“Shall we say the atmosphere?” replied Turnbull; “one can’t use uncivil expressions even to a–deity. The fact is, I don’t like having God for my second.”
“Sir!” said that being in a state of great offence, “in my position I am not used to having my favours refused. Do you know who I am?”
The editor of The Atheist turned upon him like one who has lost all patience, and exploded: “Yes, you are God, aren’t you?” he said, abruptly, “why do we have two sets of teeth?”
“Teeth?” spluttered the genteel lunatic; “teeth?”
“Yes,” cried Turnbull, advancing on him swiftly and with animated gestures, “why does teething hurt? Why do growing pains hurt? Why are measles catching? Why does a rose have thorns? Why do rhinoceroses have horns? Why is the horn on the top of the nose? Why haven’t I a horn on the top of my nose, eh?” And he struck the bridge of his nose smartly with his forefinger to indicate the place of the omission and then wagged the finger menacingly at the Creator.
�
�I’ve often wanted to meet you,” he resumed, sternly, after a pause, “to hold you accountable for all the idiocy and cruelty of this muddled and meaningless world of yours. You make a hundred seeds and only one bears fruit. You make a million worlds and only one seems inhabited. What do you mean by it, eh? What do you mean by it?”
The unhappy lunatic had fallen back before this quite novel form of attack, and lifted his burnt-out cigarette almost like one warding off a blow. Turnbull went on like a torrent.
“A man died yesterday in Ealing. You murdered him. A girl had the toothache in Croydon. You gave it her. Fifty sailors were drowned off Selsey Bill. You scuttled their ship. What have you got to say for yourself, eh?”
The representative of omnipotence looked as if he had left most of these things to his subordinates; he passed a hand over his wrinkling brow and said in a voice much saner than any he had yet used:
“Well, if you dislike my assistance, of course–perhaps the other gentleman–”
“The other gentleman,” cried Turnbull, scornfully, “is a submissive and loyal and obedient gentleman. He likes the people who wear crowns, whether of diamonds or of stars. He believes in the divine right of kings, and it is appropriate enough that he should have the king for his second. But it is not appropriate to me that I should have God for my second. God is not good enough. I dislike and I deny the divine right of kings. But I dislike more and I deny more the divine right of divinity.”
Then after a pause in which he swallowed his passion, he said to MacIan: “You have got the right second, anyhow.”
The Ball and the Cross Page 16
