The Ball and the Cross

IV. A DISCUSSION AT DAWN

The duellists had from their own point of view escaped or conquered the chief powers of the modern world. They had satisfied the magistrate, they had tied the tradesman neck and heels, and they had left the police behind. As far as their own feelings went they had melted into a monstrous sea; they were but the fare and driver of one of the million hansoms that fill London streets. But they had forgotten something; they had forgotten journalism. They had forgotten that there exists in the modern world, perhaps for the first time in history, a class of people whose interest is not that things should happen well or happen badly, should happen successfully or happen unsuccessfully, should happen to the advantage of this party or the advantage of that part, but whose interest simply is that things should happen.

It is the one great weakness of journalism as a picture of our modern existence, that it must be a picture made up entirely of exceptions. We announce on flaring posters that a man has fallen off a scaffolding. We do not announce on flaring posters that a man has not fallen off a scaffolding. Yet this latter fact is fundamentally more exciting, as indicating that that moving tower of terror and mystery, a man, is still abroad upon the earth. That the man has not fallen off a scaffolding is really more sensational; and it is also some thousand times more common. But journalism cannot reasonably be expected thus to insist upon the permanent miracles. Busy editors cannot be expected to put on their posters, “Mr. Wilkinson Still Safe,” or “Mr. Jones, of Worthing, Not Dead Yet.” They cannot announce the happiness of mankind at all. They cannot describe all the forks that are not stolen, or all the marriages that are not judiciously dissolved. Hence the complete picture they give of life is of necessity fallacious; they can only represent what is unusual. However democratic they may be, they are only concerned with the minority.

The incident of the religious fanatic who broke a window on Ludgate Hill was alone enough to set them up in good copy for the night. But when the same man was brought before a magistrate and defied his enemy to mortal combat in the open court, then the columns would hardly hold the excruciating information, and the headlines were so large that there was hardly room for any of the text. The Daily Telegraph headed a column, “A Duel on Divinity,” and there was a correspondence afterwards which lasted for months, about whether police magistrates ought to mention religion. The Daily Mail in its dull, sensible way, headed the events, “Wanted to fight for the Virgin.” Mr. James Douglas, in The Star, presuming on his knowledge of philosophical and theological terms, described the Christian’s outbreak under the title of “Dualist and Duellist.” The Daily News inserted a colourless account of the matter, but was pursued and eaten up for some weeks, with letters from outlying ministers, headed “Murder and Mariolatry.” But the journalistic temperature was steadily and consistently heated by all these influences; the journalists had tasted blood, prospectively, and were in the mood for more; everything in the matter prepared them for further outbursts of moral indignation. And when a gasping reporter rushed in in the last hours of the evening with the announcement that the two heroes of the Police Court had literally been found fighting in a London back garden, with a shopkeeper bound and gagged in the front of the house, the editors and sub-editors were stricken still as men are by great beatitudes.

The next morning, five or six of the great London dailies burst out simultaneously into great blossoms of eloquent leader-writing. Towards the end all the leaders tended to be the same, but they all began differently. The Daily Telegraph, for instance began, “There will be little difference among our readers or among all truly English and law-abiding men touching the, etc. etc.” The Daily Mail said, “People must learn, in the modern world, to keep their theological differences to themselves. The fracas, etc. etc.” The Daily News started, “Nothing could be more inimical to the cause of true religion than, etc. etc.” The Times began with something about Celtic disturbances of the equilibrium of Empire, and the Daily Express distinguished itself splendidly by omitting altogether so controversial a matter and substituting a leader about goloshes.

And the morning after that, the editors and the newspapers were in such a state, that, as the phrase is, there was no holding them. Whatever secret and elvish thing it is that broods over editors and suddenly turns their brains, that thing had seized on the story of the broken glass and the duel in the garden. It became monstrous and omnipresent, as do in our time the unimportant doings of the sect of the Agapemonites, or as did at an earlier time the dreary dishonesties of the Rhodesian financiers. Questions were asked about it, and even answered, in the House of Commons. The Government was solemnly denounced in the papers for not having done something, nobody knew what, to prevent the window being broken. An enormous subscription was started to reimburse Mr. Gordon, the man who had been gagged in the shop. Mr. MacIan, one of the combatants, became for some mysterious reason, singly and hugely popular as a comic figure in the comic papers and on the stage of the music hall. He was always represented (in defiance of fact), with red whiskers, and a very red nose, and in full Highland costume. And a song, consisting of an unimaginable number of verses, in which his name was rhymed with flat iron, the British Lion, sly ‘un, dandelion, Spion (With Kop in the next line), was sung to crowded houses every night. The papers developed a devouring thirst for the capture of the fugitives; and when they had not been caught for forty-eight hours, they suddenly turned the whole matter into a detective mystery. Letters under the heading, “Where are They,” poured in to every paper, with every conceivable kind of explanation, running them to earth in the Monument, the Twopenny Tube, Epping Forest, Westminster Abbey, rolled up in carpets at Shoolbreds, locked up in safes in Chancery Lane. Yes, the papers were very interesting, and Mr. Turnbull unrolled a whole bundle of them for the amusement of Mr. MacIan as they sat on a high common to the north of London, in the coming of the white dawn.

The darkness in the east had been broken with a bar of grey; the bar of grey was split with a sword of silver and morning lifted itself laboriously over London. From the spot where Turnbull and MacIan were sitting on one of the barren steeps behind Hampstead, they could see the whole of London shaping itself vaguely and largely in the grey and growing light, until the white sun stood over it and it lay at their feet, the splendid monstrosity that it is. Its bewildering squares and parallelograms were compact and perfect as a Chinese puzzle; an enormous hieroglyphic which man must decipher or die. There fell upon both of them, but upon Turnbull more than the other, because he know more what the scene signified, that quite indescribable sense as of a sublime and passionate and heart-moving futility, which is never evoked by deserts or dead men or men neglected and barbarous, which can only be invoked by the sight of the enormous genius of man applied to anything other than the best. Turnbull, the old idealistic democrat, had so often reviled the democracy and reviled them justly for their supineness, their snobbishness, their evil reverence for idle things. He was right enough; for our democracy has only one great fault; it is not democratic. And after denouncing so justly average modern men for so many years as sophists and as slaves, he looked down from an empty slope in Hampstead and saw what gods they are. Their achievement seemed all the more heroic and divine, because it seemed doubtful whether it was worth doing at all. There seemed to be something greater than mere accuracy in making such a mistake as London. And what was to be the end of it all? what was to be the ultimate transformation of this common and incredible London man, this workman on a tram in Battersea, his clerk on an omnibus in Cheapside? Turnbull, as he stared drearily, murmured to himself the words of the old atheistic and revolutionary Swinburne who had intoxicated his youth:

Turnbull shivered slightly as if behind the earthly morning he felt the evening of the world, the sunset of so many hopes. Those words were from “Songs before Sunrise”. But Turnbull’s songs at their best were songs after sunrise, and sunrise had been no such great thing after all. Turnbull shivered again in the sharp morning air. MacIan was also gazing with his face towards the city, but there was that about his blind and mystical stare that told one, so to speak, that his eyes were turned inwards. When Turnbull said something to him about London, they seemed to move as at a summons and come out like two householders coming out into their doorways.

“Yes,” he said, with a sort of stupidity. “It’s a very big place.”

There was a somewhat unmeaning silence, and then MacIan said again:

“It’s a very big place. When I first came into it I was frightened of it. Frightened exactly as one would be frightened at the sight of a man forty feet high. I am used to big things where I come from, big mountains that seem to fill God’s infinity, and the big sea that goes to the end of the world. But then these things are all shapeless and confused things, not made in any familiar form. But to see the plain, square, human things as large as that, houses so large and streets so large, and the town itself so large, was like having screwed some devil’s magnifying glass into one’s eye. It was like seeing a porridge bowl as big as a house, or a mouse-trap made to catch elephants.”

“Like the land of the Brobdingnagians,” said Turnbull, smiling.

“Oh! Where is that?” said MacIan.

Turnbull said bitterly, “In a book,” and the silence fell suddenly between them again.

They were sitting in a sort of litter on the hillside; all the things they had hurriedly collected, in various places, for their flight, were strewn indiscriminately round them. The two swords with which they had lately sought each other’s lives were flung down on the grass at random, like two idle walking-sticks. Some provisions they had bought last night, at a low public house, in case of undefined contingencies, were tossed about like the materials of an ordinary picnic, here a basket of chocolate, and there a bottle of wine. And to add to the disorder finally, there were strewn on top of everything, the most disorderly of modern things, newspapers, and more newspapers, and yet again newspapers, the ministers of the modern anarchy. Turnbull picked up one of them drearily, and took out a pipe.

“There’s a lot about us,” he said. “Do you mind if I light up?”

“Why should I mind?” asked MacIan.

Turnbull eyed with a certain studious interest, the man who did not understand any of the verbal courtesies; he lit his pipe and blew great clouds out of it.

“Yes,” he resumed. “The matter on which you and I are engaged is at this moment really the best copy in England. I am a journalist, and I know. For the first time, perhaps, for many generations, the English are really more angry about a wrong thing done in England than they are about a wrong thing done in France.”

“It is not a wrong thing,” said MacIan.

Turnbull laughed. “You seem unable to understand the ordinary use of the human language. If I did not suspect that you were a genius, I should certainly know you were a blockhead. I fancy we had better be getting along and collecting our baggage.”

And he jumped up and began shoving the luggage into his pockets, or strapping it on to his back. As he thrust a tin of canned meat, anyhow, into his bursting side pocket, he said casually:

“I only meant that you and I are the most prominent people in the English papers.”

“Well, what did you expect?” asked MacIan, opening his great grave blue eyes.

“The papers are full of us,” said Turnbull, stooping to pick up one of the swords.

MacIan stooped and picked up the other.

“Yes,” he said, in his simple way. “I have read what they have to say. But they don’t seem to understand the point.”

“The point of what?” asked Turnbull.

“The point of the sword,” said MacIan, violently, and planted the steel point in the soil like a man planting a tree.

“That is a point,” said Turnbull, grimly, “that we will discuss later. Come along.”

Turnbull tied the last tin of biscuits desperately to himself with string; and then spoke, like a diver girt for plunging, short and sharp.

“Now, Mr. MacIan, you must listen to me. You must listen to me, not merely because I know the country, which you might learn by looking at a map, but because I know the people of the country, whom you could not know by living here thirty years. That infernal city down there is awake; and it is awake against us. All those endless rows of windows and windows are all eyes staring at us. All those forests of chimneys are fingers pointing at us, as we stand here on the hillside. This thing has caught on. For the next six mortal months they will think of nothing but us, as for six mortal months they thought of nothing but the Dreyfus case. Oh, I know it’s funny. They let starving children, who don’t want to die, drop by the score without looking round. But because two gentlemen, from private feelings of delicacy, do want to die, they will mobilize the army and navy to prevent them. For half a year or more, you and I, Mr. MacIan, will be an obstacle to every reform in the British Empire. We shall prevent the Chinese being sent out of the Transvaal and the blocks being stopped in the Strand. We shall be the conversational substitute when anyone recommends Home Rule, or complains of sky signs. Therefore, do not imagine, in your innocence, that we have only to melt away among those English hills as a Highland cateran might into your god-forsaken Highland mountains. We must be eternally on our guard; we must live the hunted life of two distinguished criminals. We must expect to be recognized as much as if we were Napoleon escaping from Elba. We must be prepared for our descriptions being sent to every tiny village, and for our faces being recognized by every ambitious policeman. We must often sleep under the stars as if we were in Africa. Last and most important we must not dream of effecting our – our final settlement, which will be a thing as famous as the Phoenix Park murders, unless we have made real and precise arrangements for our isolation – I will not say our safety. We must not, in short, fight until we have thrown them off our scent, if only for a moment. For, take my word for it, Mr. MacIan, if the British Public once catches us up, the British Public will prevent the duel, if it is only by locking us both up in asylums for the rest of our days.”

MacIan was looking at the horizon with a rather misty look.

“I am not at all surprised,” he said, “at the world being against us. It makes me feel I was right to – ”

“Yes?” said Turnbull.

“To smash your window,” said MacIan. “I have woken up the world.”

“Very well, then,” said Turnbull, stolidly. “Let us look at a few final facts. Beyond that hill there is comparatively clear country. Fortunately, I know the part well, and if you will follow me exactly, and, when necessary, on your stomach, we may be able to get ten miles out of London, literally without meeting anyone at all, which will be the best possible beginning, at any rate. We have provisions for at least two days and two nights, three days if we do it carefully. We may be able to get fifty or sixty miles away without even walking into an inn door. I have the biscuits and the tinned meat, and the milk. You have the chocolate, I think? And the brandy?”

“Yes,” said MacIan, like a soldier taking orders.

“Very well, then, come on. March. We turn under that third bush and so down into the valley.” And he set off ahead at a swinging walk.

Then he stopped suddenly; for he realized that the other was not following. Evan MacIan was leaning on his sword with a lowering face, like a man suddenly smitten still with doubt.

“What on earth is the matter?” asked Turnbull, staring in some anger.

Evan made no reply.

“What the deuce is the matter with you?” demanded the leader, again, his face slowly growing as red as his beard; then he said, suddenly, and in a more human voice, “Are you in pain, MacIan?”

“Yes,” replied the Highlander, without lifting his face.

“Take some brandy,” cried Turnbull, walking forward hurriedly towards him. “You’ve got it.”

“It’s not in the body,” said MacIan, in his dull, strange way. “The pain has come into my mind. A very dreadful thing has just come into my thoughts.”

“What the devil are you talking about?” asked Turnbull.

MacIan broke out with a queer and living voice.

“We must fight now, Turnbull. We must fight now. A frightful thing has come upon me, and I know it must be now and here. I must kill you here,” he cried, with a sort of tearful rage impossible to describe. “Here, here, upon this blessed grass.”

“Why, you idiot,” began Turnbull.

“The hour has come – the black hour God meant for it. Quick, it will soon be gone. Quick!”

And he flung the scabbard from him furiously, and stood with the sunlight sparkling along his sword.

“You confounded fool,” repeated Turnbull. “Put that thing up again, you ass; people will come out of that house at the first clash of the steel.”

“One of us will be dead before they come,” said the other, hoarsely, “for this is the hour God meant.”

“Well, I never thought much of God,” said the editor of The Atheist, losing all patience. “And I think less now. Never mind what God meant. Kindly enlighten my pagan darkness as to what the devil you mean.”

“The hour will soon be gone. In a moment it will be gone,” said the madman. “It is now, now, now that I must nail your blaspheming body to the earth – now, now that I must avenge Our Lady on her vile slanderer. Now or never. For the dreadful thought is in my mind.”

“And what thought,” asked Turnbull, with frantic composure, “occupies what you call your mind?”

“I must kill you now,” said the fanatic, “because – ”

“Well, because,” said Turnbull, patiently.

“Because I have begun to like you.”

Turnbull’s face had a sudden spasm in the sunlight, a change so instantaneous that it left no trace behind it; and his features seemed still carved into a cold stare. But when he spoke again he seemed like a man who was placidly pretending to misunderstand something that he understood perfectly well.

“Your affection expresses itself in an abrupt form,” he began, but MacIan broke the brittle and frivolous speech to pieces with a violent voice. “Do not trouble to talk like that,” he said. “You know what I mean as well as I know it. Come on and fight, I say. Perhaps you are feeling just as I do.”

Turnbull’s face flinched again in the fierce sunlight, but his attitude kept its contemptuous ease.

“Your Celtic mind really goes too fast for me,” he said; “let me be permitted in my heavy Lowland way to understand this new development. My dear Mr. MacIan, what do you really mean?”

MacIan still kept the shining sword-point towards the other’s breast.

“You know what I mean. You mean the same yourself. We must fight now or else – ”

“Or else?” repeated Turnbull, staring at him with an almost blinding gravity.

“Or else we may not want to fight at all,” answered Evan, and the end of his speech was like a despairing cry.

Turnbull took out his own sword suddenly as if to engage; then planting it point downwards for a moment, he said, “Before we begin, may I ask you a question?”

MacIan bowed patiently, but with burning eyes.

“You said, just now,” continued Turnbull, presently, “that if we did not fight now, we might not want to fight at all. How would you feel about the matter if we came not to want to fight at all?”

“I should feel,” answered the other, “just as I should feel if you had drawn your sword, and I had run away from it. I should feel that because I had been weak, justice had not been done.”

“Justice,” answered Turnbull, with a thoughtful smile, “but we are talking about your feelings. And what do you mean by justice, apart from your feelings?”

MacIan made a gesture of weary recognition! “Oh, Nominalism,” he said, with a sort of sigh, “we had all that out in the twelfth century.”

“I wish we could have it out now,” replied the other, firmly. “Do you really mean that if you came to think me right, you would be certainly wrong?”

“If I had a blow on the back of my head, I might come to think you a green elephant,” answered MacIan, “but have I not the right to say now, that if I thought that I should think wrong?”

“Then you are quite certain that it would be wrong to like me?” asked Turnbull, with a slight smile.

“No,” said Evan, thoughtfully, “I do not say that. It may not be the devil, it may be some part of God I am not meant to know. But I had a work to do, and it is making the work difficult.”

“And I suppose,” said the atheist, quite gently, “that you and I know all about which part of God we ought to know.”

MacIan burst out like a man driven back and explaining everything.

“The Church is not a thing like the Athenaeum Club,” he cried. “If the Athenaeum Club lost all its members, the Athenaeum Club would dissolve and cease to exist. But when we belong to the Church we belong to something which is outside all of us; which is outside everything you talk about, outside the Cardinals and the Pope. They belong to it, but it does not belong to them. If we all fell dead suddenly, the Church would still somehow exist in God. Confound it all, don’t you see that I am more sure of its existence than I am of my own existence? And yet you ask me to trust my temperament, my own temperament, which can be turned upside down by two bottles of claret or an attack of the jaundice. You ask me to trust that when it softens towards you and not to trust the thing which I believe to be outside myself and more real than the blood in my body.”

“Stop a moment,” said Turnbull, in the same easy tone, “Even in the very act of saying that you believe this or that, you imply that there is a part of yourself that you trust even if there are many parts which you mistrust. If it is only you that like me, surely, also, it is only you that believe in the Catholic Church.”

Evan remained in an unmoved and grave attitude. “There is a part of me which is divine,” he answered, “a part that can be trusted, but there are also affections which are entirely animal and idle.”

“And you are quite certain, I suppose,” continued Turnbull, “that if even you esteem me the esteem would be wholly animal and idle?” For the first time MacIan started as if he had not expected the thing that was said to him. At last he said:

“Whatever in earth or heaven it is that has joined us two together, it seems to be something which makes it impossible to lie. No, I do not think that the movement in me towards you was…was that surface sort of thing. It may have been something deeper…something strange. I cannot understand the thing at all. But understand this and understand it thoroughly, if I loved you my love might be divine. No, it is not some trifle that we are fighting about. It is not some superstition or some symbol. When you wrote those words about Our Lady, you were in that act a wicked man doing a wicked thing. If I hate you it is because you have hated goodness. And if I like you…it is because you are good.”