The Ball and the Cross

by Gilbert Keith Chesterton

  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 who was in truth accustomed to be doubted.

  “I am King Edward VII,” he said, with shaky arrogance. “Do you doubt my word?”

  “I do not doubt it in the least,” answered MacIan.

  “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 MacIan, 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 Turnbull, genially, “and sometimes so much so as to be hardly worth following.”

  “I alone am loyal,” insisted MacIan; “for I alone am in rebellion. I am ready at any instant 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 between 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 Sidney and the monarchy of Montrose? What had your sires to do with England that they should have the foul offering of the blood of Derwentwater and the heart of Jimmy Dawson? Where are the corpses of Culloden? Where is the blood of Lochiel?” MacIan advanced upon his opponent with a bony and pointed finger, as if indicating the exact pocket in which the blood of that Cameron was probably kept; and Edward VII 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 towards the flower-beds. “What good have you ever done, you race of German sausages? Yards of barbarian etiquette, to throttle 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. MacIan strode after him still preaching 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 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 like a big forefinger. It performed almost all his gestures; it was more important than the glittering eye-glasses 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 eye-glasses 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 better 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, 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 realized 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 glaring with all the contraction of fear and hatred that can stiffen a cat.

  * * *

  MacIan 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 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 MacIan, wearily. “Protoplasm is not worth going mad about.”

  “At least,” said Turnbull, savagely, “it was your Jesus Christ who started all this bosh about being God.”

  For one instant MacIan 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.”

  “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 MacIan.

  “That was an extreme case of impudence,” said Turnbull.

  “Granting the man his almighty pretensions, I think he was very modest,” said MacIan. “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 knows 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 MacIan, scornfully. “There are a few men here who are mad on God and a few who are mad on the Bible. But I bet there are many more who are simply mad on madness.”

  “Do you really believe it?” asked the other.

  “Scores of them, I should say,” answered MacIan. “Fellows who have read medical books or fellows whose fathers and uncles had something 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 animation. “I’ve been walking about the garden talking to a poor chap all the morning. He’s simply
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 fellow 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 progressing 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 improve on.’”

  “What can he have meant?” said the atheist, with all his logic awake. “Obviously one should not trust any God that one can improve on.”

  “It is the way he talks,” said MacIan, almost indifferently; “but he says rummier things than that. He says that a man’s doctor ought to decide 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 judgement 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 MacIan, monotonously, “that he cannot see why anyone 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 little 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 psychology. But he doesn’t exist.”

  “I will go and fetch him,” said MacIan, calmly; “I left the poor fellow wandering about by the nasturtium bed.”

  MacIan vanished, and in a few moments returned, 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 patients at all. That’s one of the doctors.”

  Evan looked back at the leering head with the long-pointed beard and repeated the word inquiringly: “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 MacIan.

  After a rather restless silence Turnbull plucked MacIan by the elbow and pulled him aside.

  “For goodness sake,” he said, “don’t offend this fellow; he may be as mad as ten hatters, if you like, but he has us between his finger and thumb. This is the very time he appointed to talk with us about our– well, our exeat.”

  “But what can it matter?” asked the wondering MacIan. “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 jail, 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.”

  MacIan looked at the grass frowningly for a few seconds, and then said in a new, small and childish voice: “I am awfully stupid, Mr. Turnbull; you must be patient with me.”

  Turnbull caught Evan’s elbow again with quite another gesture. “Come,” he cried, with 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 Turnbull, 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 attention to some of them.”

  “Quite so! Quite so!” said the doctor, hurriedly. “If you really want to put anything before 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 furnished 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 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 conception.

  The doctor sat down with a polite impatience on his professional perch; MacIan 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 organized a game across this part of the country–a sort of combination of hare and hounds and hide and seek–I dare say 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 startled 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 enthusiasts 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 was 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 someone 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 scientist; “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 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.

  MacIan 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 MacIan. “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?�
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  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 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: “MacIan, 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 began: “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 religious 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 your madhouse, only because I know what I know. Let it be granted, then–MacIan is a mystic; MacIan 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 certain, 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 parallelogram of dark-red wood.

  This also he unlocked on the table, and with the same unerring egotistic eye on of the company saw the words, written in large letters: “Turnbull, James.”