The Ball and the Cross
The Ball and the CrossI. A DISCUSSION SOMEWHAT IN THE AIRII. THE RELIGION OF THE STIPENDIARY MAGISTRATEIII. SOME OLD CURIOSITIESIV. A DISCUSSION AT DAWNV. THE PEACEMAKERVI. THE OTHER PHILOSOPHERVII. THE VILLAGE OF GRASSLEY-IN-THE-HOLEVIII. AN INTERLUDE OF ARGUMENTIX. THE STRANGE LADYX. THE SWORDS REJOINEDXI. A SCANDAL IN THE VILLAGEXII. THE DESERT ISLANDXIII. THE GARDEN OF PEACEXIV. A MUSEUM OF SOULSXV. THE DREAM OF MACIANXVI. THE DREAM OF TURNBULLXVII. THE IDIOTXVIII. A RIDDLE OF FACESXIX. THE LAST PARLEYXX. DIES IRAECopyright
The Ball and the Cross
G.K. Chesterton
I. A DISCUSSION SOMEWHAT IN THE AIR
The flying ship of Professor Lucifer sang through the skies like a
silver arrow; the bleak white steel of it, gleaming in the bleak
blue emptiness of the evening. That it was far above the earth was
no expression for it; to the two men in it, it seemed to be far
above the stars. The professor had himself invented the flying
machine, and had also invented nearly everything in it. Every sort
of tool or apparatus had, in consequence, to the full, that
fantastic and distorted look which belongs to the miracles of
science. For the world of science and evolution is far more
nameless and elusive and like a dream than the world of poetry and
religion; since in the latter images and ideas remain themselves
eternally, while it is the whole idea of evolution that identities
melt into each other as they do in a nightmare.
All the tools of Professor Lucifer were the ancient human tools
gone mad, grown into unrecognizable shapes, forgetful of their
origin, forgetful of their names. That thing which looked like an
enormous key with three wheels was really a patent and very deadly
revolver. That object which seemed to be created by the
entanglement of two corkscrews was really the key. The thing which
might have been mistaken for a tricycle turned upside-down was the
inexpressibly important instrument to which the corkscrew was the
key. All these things, as I say, the professor had invented; he had
invented everything in the flying ship, with the exception,
perhaps, of himself. This he had been born too late actually to
inaugurate, but he believed at least, that he had considerably
improved it.
There was, however, another man on board, so to speak, at the time.
Him, also, by a curious coincidence, the professor had not
invented, and him he had not even very greatly improved, though he
had fished him up with a lasso out of his own back garden, in
Western Bulgaria, with the pure object of improving him. He was an
exceedingly holy man, almost entirely covered with white hair. You
could see nothing but his eyes, and he seemed to talk with them. A
monk of immense learning and acute intellect he had made himself
happy in a little stone hut and a little stony garden in the
Balkans, chiefly by writing the most crushing refutations of
exposures of certain heresies, the last professors of which had
been burnt (generally by each other) precisely 1,119 years
previously. They were really very plausible and thoughtful
heresies, and it was really a creditable or even glorious
circumstance, that the old monk had been intellectual enough to
detect their fallacy; the only misfortune was that nobody in the
modern world was intellectual enough even to understand their
argument. The old monk, one of whose names was Michael, and the
other a name quite impossible to remember or repeat in our Western
civilization, had, however, as I have said, made himself quite
happy while he was in a mountain hermitage in the society of wild
animals. And now that his luck had lifted him above all the
mountains in the society of a wild physicist, he made himself happy
still.
"I have no intention, my good Michael," said Professor Lucifer, "of
endeavouring to convert you by argument. The imbecility of your
traditions can be quite finally exhibited to anybody with mere
ordinary knowledge of the world, the same kind of knowledge which
teaches us not to sit in draughts or not to encourage friendliness
in impecunious people. It is folly to talk of this or that
demonstrating the rationalist philosophy. Everything demonstrates
it. Rubbing shoulders with men of all kinds——"
"You will forgive me," said the monk, meekly from under loads of
white beard, "but I fear I do not understand; was it in order that
I might rub my shoulder against men of all kinds that you put me
inside this thing?"
"An entertaining retort, in the narrow and deductive manner of the
Middle Ages," replied the Professor, calmly, "but even upon your
own basis I will illustrate my point. We are up in the sky. In your
religion and all the religions, as far as I know (and I know
everything), the sky is made the symbol of everything that is
sacred and merciful. Well, now you are in the sky, you know better.
Phrase it how you like, twist it how you like, you know that you
know better. You know what are a man's real feelings about the
heavens, when he finds himself alone in the heavens, surrounded by
the heavens. You know the truth, and the truth is this. The heavens
are evil, the sky is evil, the stars are evil. This mere space,
this mere quantity, terrifies a man more than tigers or the
terrible plague. You know that since our science has spoken, the
bottom has fallen out of the Universe. Now, heaven is the hopeless
thing, more hopeless than any hell. Now, if there be any comfort
for all your miserable progeny of morbid apes, it must be in the
earth, underneath you, under the roots of the grass, in the place
where hell was of old. The fiery crypts, the lurid cellars of the
underworld, to which you once condemned the wicked, are hideous
enough, but at least they are more homely than the heaven in which
we ride. And the time will come when you will all hide in them, to
escape the horror of the stars."
"I hope you will excuse my interrupting you," said Michael, with a
slight cough, "but I have always noticed——"
"Go on, pray go on," said Professor Lucifer, radiantly, "I really
like to draw out your simple ideas."
"Well, the fact is," said the other, "that much as I admire your
rhetoric and the rhetoric of your school, from a purely verbal
point of view, such little study of you and your school in human
history as I have been enabled to make has led me to—er—rather
singular conclusion, which I find great difficulty in expressing,
especially in a foreign language."
"Come, come," said the Professor, encouragingly, "I'll help you
out. How did my view strike you?"
"Well, the truth is, I know I don't express it properly, but
somehow it seemed to me that you always convey ideas of that kind
with most eloquence, when—er—when——"
"Oh! get on," cried Lucifer, boisterously.
"Well, in point of fact when your flying ship is just going to run
into something. I thought you wouldn't mind my mentioning it, but
it's running into something now."
Lucifer exploded with an oath and leapt erect, leaning hard upon
the handle that acted as a helm to the vessel. For the last ten
minutes they had been shooting downwards into great cracks and
caverns of cloud. Now, through a sort of purple haze, could be seen
comparatively near to them what seemed to be the upper part of a
huge, dark orb or sphere, islanded in a sea of cloud. The
Professor's eyes were blazing like a maniac's.
"It is a new world," he cried, with a dreadful mirth. "It is a new
planet and it shall bear my name. This star and not that other
vulgar one shall be 'Lucifer, sun of the morning.' Here we will
have no chartered lunacies, here we will have no gods. Here man
shall be as innocent as the daisies, as innocent and as cruel—here
the intellect——"
"There seems," said Michael, timidly, "to be something sticking up
in the middle of it."
"So there is," said the Professor, leaning over the side of the
ship, his spectacles shining with intellectual excitement. "What
can it be? It might of course be merely a——"
Then a shriek indescribable broke out of him of a sudden, and he
flung up his arms like a lost spirit. The monk took the helm in a
tired way; he did not seem much astonished for he came from an
ignorant part of the world in which it is not uncommon for lost
spirits to shriek when they see the curious shape which the
Professor had just seen on the top of the mysterious ball, but he
took the helm only just in time, and by driving it hard to the left
he prevented the flying ship from smashing into St. Paul's
Cathedral.
A plain of sad-coloured cloud lay along the level of the top of the
Cathedral dome, so that the ball and the cross looked like a buoy
riding on a leaden sea. As the flying ship swept towards it, this
plain of cloud looked as dry and definite and rocky as any grey
desert. Hence it gave to the mind and body a sharp and unearthly
sensation when the ship cut and sank into the cloud as into any
common mist, a thing without resistance. There was, as it were, a
deadly shock in the fact that there was no shock. It was as if they
had cloven into ancient cliffs like so much butter. But sensations
awaited them which were much stranger than those of sinking through
the solid earth. For a moment their eyes and nostrils were stopped
with darkness and opaque cloud; then the darkness warmed into a
kind of brown fog. And far, far below them the brown fog fell until
it warmed into fire. Through the dense London atmosphere they could
see below them the flaming London lights; lights which lay beneath
them in squares and oblongs of fire. The fog and fire were mixed in
a passionate vapour; you might say that the fog was drowning the
flames; or you might say that the flames had set the fog on fire.
Beside the ship and beneath it (for it swung just under the ball),
the immeasurable dome itself shot out and down into the dark like a
combination of voiceless cataracts. Or it was like some cyclopean
sea-beast sitting above London and letting down its tentacles
bewilderingly on every side, a monstrosity in that starless heaven.
For the clouds that belonged to London had closed over the heads of
the voyagers sealing up the entrance of the upper air. They had
broken through a roof and come into a temple of twilight.
They were so near to the ball that Lucifer leaned his hand against
it, holding the vessel away, as men push a boat off from a bank.
Above it the cross already draped in the dark mists of the
borderland was shadowy and more awful in shape and size.
Professor Lucifer slapped his hand twice upon the surface of the
great orb as if he were caressing some enormous animal. "This is
the fellow," he said, "this is the one for my money."
"May I with all respect inquire," asked the old monk, "what on
earth you are talking about?"
"Why this," cried Lucifer, smiting the ball again, "here is the
only symbol, my boy. So fat. So satisfied. Not like that scraggy
individual, stretching his arms in stark weariness." And he pointed
up to the cross, his face dark with a grin. "I was telling you just
now, Michael, that I can prove the best part of the rationalist
case and the Christian humbug from any symbol you liked to give me,
from any instance I came across. Here is an instance with a
vengeance. What could possibly express your philosophy and my
philosophy better than the shape of that cross and the shape of
this ball? This globe is reasonable; that cross is unreasonable. It
is a four-legged animal, with one leg longer than the others. The
globe is inevitable. The cross is arbitrary. Above all the globe is
at unity with itself; the cross is primarily and above all things
at enmity with itself. The cross is the conflict of two hostile
lines, of irreconcilable direction. That silent thing up there is
essentially a collision, a crash, a struggle in stone. Pah! that
sacred symbol of yours has actually given its name to a description
of desperation and muddle. When we speak of men at once ignorant of
each other and frustrated by each other, we say they are at
cross-purposes. Away with the thing! The very shape of it is a
contradiction in terms."
"What you say is perfectly true," said Michael, with serenity. "But
we like contradictions in terms. Man is a contradiction in terms;
he is a beast whose superiority to other beasts consists in having
fallen. That cross is, as you say, an eternal collision; so am I.
That is a struggle in stone. Every form of life is a struggle in
flesh. The shape of the cross is irrational, just as the shape of
the human animal is irrational. You say the cross is a quadruped
with one limb longer than the rest. I say man is a quadruped who
only uses two of his legs."
The Professor frowned thoughtfully for an instant, and said: "Of
course everything is relative, and I would not deny that the
element of struggle and self-contradiction, represented by that
cross, has a necessary place at a certain evolutionary stage. But
surely the cross is the lower development and the sphere the
higher. After all it is easy enough to see what is really wrong
with Wren's architectural arrangement."
"And what is that, pray?" inquired Michael, meekly.
"The cross is on top of the ball," said Professor Lucifer, simply.
"That is surely wrong. The ball should be on top of the cross. The
cross is a mere barbaric prop; the ball is perfection. The cross at
its best is but the bitter tree of man's history; the ball is the
rounded, the ripe and final fruit. And the fruit should be at the
top of the tree, not at the bottom of it."
"Oh!" said the monk, a wrinkle coming into his forehead, "so you
think that in a rationalistic scheme of symbolism the ball should
be on top of the cross?"
"It sums up my whole allegory," said the professor.
"Well, that is really very interesting," resumed Michael slowly,
"because I think in that case you would see a most singular effect,
an effect that has generally been achieved by all those able and
powerful systems which rationalism, or the religion of the ball,
has produced to lead or teach mankind. You would see, I think, that
thing happen which is always the ultimate embodiment and logical
outcome of your logical scheme."
"What are you talking about?" asked Lucifer. "What would
happen?"
"I mean it would fall down," said the monk, looking wistfully into
the void.
Lucifer made an angry movement and opened his mouth to speak, but
Michael, with all his air of deliberation, was proceeding before he
could bring out a word.
"I once knew a man like you, Lucifer," he said, with a maddening
monotony and slowness of articulation. "He took this——"
"There is no man like me," cried Lucifer, with a violence that
shook the ship.
"As I was observing," continued Michael, "this man also took the
view that the symbol of Christianity was a symbol of savagery and
all unreason. His history is rather amusing. It is also a perfect
allegory of what happens to rationalists like yourself. He began,
of course, by refusing to allow a crucifix in his house, or round
his wife's neck, or even in a picture. He said, as you say, that it
was an arbitrary and fantastic shape, that it was a monstrosity,
loved because it was paradoxical. Then he began to grow fiercer and
more eccentric; he would batter the crosses by the roadside; for he
lived in a Roman Catholic country. Finally in a height of frenzy he
climbed the steeple of the Parish Church and tore down the cross,
waving it in the air, and uttering wild soliloquies up there under
the stars. Then one still summer evening as he was wending his way
homewards, along a lane, the devil of his madness came upon him
with a violence and transfiguration which changes the world. He was
standing smoking, for a moment, in the front of an interminable
line of palings, when his eyes were opened. Not a light shifted,
not a leaf stirred, but he saw as if by a sudden change in the
eyesight that this paling was an army of innumerable crosses linked
together over hill and dale. And he whirled up his heavy stick and
went at it as if at an army. Mile after mile along his homeward
path he broke it down and tore it up. For he hated the cross and
every paling is a wall of crosses. When he returned to his house he
was a literal madman. He sat upon a chair and then started up from
it for the cross-bars of the carpentry repeated the intolerable
image. He flung himself upon a bed only to remember that this, too,
like all workmanlike things, was constructed on the accursed plan.
He broke his furniture because it was made of crosses. He burnt his
house because it was made of crosses. He was found in the
river."
Lucifer was looking at him with a bitten lip.
"Is that story really true?" he asked.
"Oh, no," said Michael, airily. "It is a parable. It is a parable
of you and all your rationalists. You begin by breaking up the
Cross; but you end by breaking up the habitable world. We leave you
saying that nobody ought to join the Church against his will. When
we meet you again you are saying that no one has any will to join
it with. We leave you saying that there is no such place as Eden.
We find you saying that there is no such place as Ireland. You
start by hating the irrational and you come to hate everything, for
everything is irrational and so——"
Lucifer leapt upon him with a cry like a wild beast's. "Ah," he
screamed, "to every man his madness. You are mad on the cross. Let
it save you."
And with a herculean energy he forced the monk backwards out of the
reeling car on to the upper part of the stone ball. Michael, with
as abrupt an agility, caught one of the beams of the cross and
saved himself from falling. At the same instant Lucifer drove down
a lever and the ship shot up with him in it alone.
"Ha! ha!" he yelled, "what sort of a support do you find it, old
fellow?"
"For practical purposes of support," replied Michael grimly, "it is
at any rate a great deal better than the ball. May I ask if you are
going to leave me here?"
"Yes, yes. I mount! I mount!" cried the professor in ungovernable
excitement. "Altiora peto. My path is upward."
"How often have you told me, Professor, that there is really no up
or down in space?" said the monk. "I shall mount up as much as you
will."
"Indeed," said Lucifer, leering over the side of the flying ship.
"May I ask what you are going to do?"
The monk pointed downward at Ludgate Hill. "I am going," he said,
"to climb up into a star."
Those who look at the matter most superficially regard paradox as
something which belongs to jesting and light journalism. Paradox of
this kind is to be found in the saying of the dandy, in the
decadent comedy, "Life is much too important to be taken
seriously." Those who look at the matter a little more deeply or
delicately see that paradox is a thing which especially belongs to
all religions. Paradox of this kind is to be found in such a saying
as "The meek shall inherit the earth." But those who see and feel
the fundamental fact of the matter know that paradox is a thing
which belongs not to religion only, but to all vivid and violent
practical crises of human living. This kind of paradox may be
clearly perceived by anybody who happens to be hanging in
mid-space, clinging to one arm of the Cross of St. Paul's.
Father Michael in spite of his years, and in spite of his
asceticism (or because of it, for all I know), was a very healthy
and happy old gentleman. And as he swung on a bar above the
sickening emptiness of air, he realized, with that sort of dead
detachment which belongs to the brains of those in peril, the
deathless and hopeless contradiction which is involved in the mere
idea of courage. He was a happy and healthy old gentleman and
therefore he was quite careless about it. And he felt as every man
feels in the taut moment of such terror that his chief danger was
terror itself; his only possible strength would be a coolness
amounting to carelessness, a carelessness amounting almost to a
suicidal swagger. His one wild chance of coming out safely would be
in not too desperately desiring to be safe. There might be
footholds down that awful facade, if only he could not care whether
they were footholds or no. If he were foolhardy he might escape; if
he were wise he would stop where he was till he dropped from the
cross like a stone. And this antinomy kept on repeating itself in
his mind, a contradiction as large and staring as the immense
contradiction of the Cross; he remembered having often heard the
words, "Whosoever shall lose his life the same shall save it." He
remembered with a sort of strange pity that this had always been
made to mean that whoever lost his physical life should save his
spiritual life. Now he knew the truth that is known to all
fighters, and hunters, and climbers of cliffs. He knew that even
his animal life could only be saved by a considerable readiness to
lose it.
Some will think it improbable that a human soul swinging
desperately in mid-air should think about philosophical
inconsistencies. But such extreme states are dangerous things to
dogmatize about. Frequently they produce a certain useless and
joyless activity of the mere intellect, thought not only divorced
from hope but even from desire. And if it is impossible to
dogmatize about such states, it is still more impossible to
describe them. To this spasm of sanity and clarity in Michael's
mind succeeded a spasm of the elemental terror; the terror of the
animal in us which regards the whole universe as its enemy; which,
when it is victorious, has no pity, and so, when it is defeated has
no imaginable hope. Of that ten minutes of terror it is not
possible to speak in human words. But then again in that damnable
darkness there began to grow a strange dawn as of grey and pale
silver. And of this ultimate resignation or certainty it is even
less possible to write; it is something stranger than hell itself;
it is perhaps the last of the secrets of God. At the highest crisis
of some incurable anguish there will suddenly fall upon the man the
stillness of an insane contentment. It is not hope, for hope is
broken and romantic and concerned with the future; this is complete
and of the present. It is not faith, for faith by its very nature
is fierce, and as it were at once doubtful and defiant; but this is
simply a satisfaction. It is not knowledge, for the intellect seems
to have no particular part in it. Nor is it (as the modern idiots
would certainly say it is) a mere numbness or negative paralysis of
the powers of grief. It is not negative in the least; it is as
positive as good news. In some sense, indeed, it is good news. It
seems almost as if there were some equality among things, some
balance in all possible contingencies which we are not permitted to
know lest we should learn indifference to good and evil, but which
is sometimes shown to us for an instant as a last aid in our last
agony.
Michael certainly could not have given any sort of rational account
of this vast unmeaning satisfaction which soaked through him and
filled him to the brim. He felt with a sort of half-witted lucidity
that the cross was there, and the ball was there, and the dome was
there, that he was going to climb down from them, and that he did
not mind in the least whether he was killed or not. This mysterious
mood lasted long enough to start him on his dreadful descent and to
force him to continue it. But six times before he reached the
highest of the outer galleries terror had returned on him like a
flying storm of darkness and thunder. By the time he had reached
that place of safety he almost felt (as in some impossible fit of
drunkenness) that he had two heads; one was calm, careless, and
efficient; the other saw the danger like a deadly map, was wise,
careful, and useless. He had fancied that he would have to let
himself vertically down the face of the whole building. When he
dropped into the upper gallery he still felt as far from the
terrestrial globe as if he had only dropped from the sun to the
moon. He paused a little, panting in the gallery under the ball,
and idly kicked his heels, moving a few yards along it. And as he
did so a thunderbolt struck his soul. A man, a heavy, ordinary man,
with a composed indifferent face, and a prosaic sort of uniform,
with a row of buttons, blocked his way. Michael had no mind to
wonder whether this solid astonished man, with the brown moustache
and the nickel buttons, had also come on a flying ship. He merely
let his mind float in an endless felicity about the man. He thought
how nice it would be if he had to live up in that gallery with that
one man for ever. He thought how he would luxuriate in the nameless
shades of this man's soul and then hear with an endless excitement
about the nameless shades of the souls of all his aunts and uncles.
A moment before he had been dying alone. Now he was living in the
same world with a man; an inexhaustible ecstasy. In the gallery
below the ball Father Michael had found that man who is the noblest
and most divine and most lovable of all men, better than all the
saints, greater than all the heroes—man Friday.
In the confused colour and music of his new paradise, Michael heard
only in a faint and distant fashion some remarks that this
beautiful solid man seemed to be making to him; remarks about
something or other being after hours and against orders. He also
seemed to be asking how Michael "got up" there. This beautiful man
evidently felt as Michael did that the earth was a star and was set
in heaven.
At length Michael sated himself with the mere sensual music of the
voice of the man in buttons. He began to listen to what he said,
and even to make some attempt at answering a question which
appeared to have been put several times and was now put with some
excess of emphasis. Michael realized that the image of God in
nickel buttons was asking him how he had come there. He said that
he had come in Lucifer's ship. On his giving this answer the
demeanour of the image of God underwent a remarkable change. From
addressing Michael gruffly, as if he were a malefactor, he began
suddenly to speak to him with a sort of eager and feverish
amiability as if he were a child. He seemed particularly anxious to
coax him away from the balustrade. He led him by the arm towards a
door leading into the building itself, soothing him all the time.
He gave what even Michael (slight as was his knowledge of the
world) felt to be an improbable account of the sumptuous pleasures
and varied advantages awaiting him downstairs. Michael followed
him, however, if only out of politeness, down an apparently
interminable spiral of staircase. At one point a door opened.
Michael stepped through it, and the unaccountable man in buttons
leapt after him and pinioned him where he stood. But he only wished
to stand; to stand and stare. He had stepped as it were into
another infinity, out under the dome of another heaven. But this
was a dome of heaven made by man. The gold and green and crimson of
its sunset were not in the shapeless clouds but in shapes of
cherubim and seraphim, awful human shapes with a passionate
plumage. Its stars were not above but far below, like fallen stars
still in unbroken constellations; the dome itself was full of
darkness. And far below, lower even than the lights, could be seen
creeping or motionless, great black masses of men. The tongue of a
terrible organ seemed to shake the very air in the whole void; and
through it there came up to Michael the sound of a tongue more
terrible; the dreadful everlasting voice of man, calling to his
gods from the beginning to the end of the world. Michael felt
almost as if he were a god, and all the voices were hurled at
him.
"No, the pretty things aren't here," said the demi-god in buttons,
caressingly. "The pretty things are downstairs. You come along with
me. There's something that will surprise you downstairs; something
you want very much to see."
Evidently the man in buttons did not feel like a god, so Michael
made no attempt to explain his feelings to him, but followed him
meekly enough down the trail of the serpentine staircase. He had no
notion where or at what level he was. He was still full of the cold
splendour of space, and of what a French writer has brilliantly
named the "vertigo of the infinite," when another door opened, and
with a shock indescribable he found himself on the familiar level,
in a street full of faces, with the houses and even the lamp-posts
above his head. He felt suddenly happy and suddenly indescribably
small. He fancied he had been changed into a child again; his eyes
sought the pavement seriously as children's do, as if it were a
thing with which something satisfactory could be done. He felt the
full warmth of that pleasure from which the proud shut themselves
out; the pleasure which not only goes with humiliation, but which
almost is humiliation. Men who have escaped death by a hair have
it, and men whose love is returned by a woman unexpectedly, and men
whose sins are forgiven them. Everything his eye fell on it feasted
on, not aesthetically, but with a plain, jolly appetite as of a boy
eating buns. He relished the squareness of the houses; he liked
their clean angles as if he had just cut them with a knife. The lit
squares of the shop windows excited him as the young are excited by
the lit stage of some promising pantomime. He happened to see in
one shop which projected with a bulging bravery on to the pavement
some square tins of potted meat, and it seemed like a hint of a
hundred hilarious high teas in a hundred streets of the world. He
was, perhaps, the happiest of all the children of men. For in that
unendurable instant when he hung, half slipping, to the ball of St.
Paul's, the whole universe had been destroyed and re-created.
Suddenly through all the din of the dark streets came a crash of
glass. With that mysterious suddenness of the Cockney mob, a rush
was made in the right direction, a dingy office, next to the shop
of the potted meat. The pane of glass was lying in splinters about
the pavement. And the police already had their hands on a very tall
young man, with dark, lank hair and dark, dazed eyes, with a grey
plaid over his shoulder, who had just smashed the shop window with
a single blow of his stick.
"I'd do it again," said the young man, with a furious white face.
"Anybody would have done it. Did you see what it said? I swear I'd
do it again." Then his eyes encountered the monkish habit of
Michael, and he pulled off his grey tam-o'-shanter with the gesture
of a Catholic.
"Father, did you see what they said?" he cried, trembling. "Did you
see what they dared to say? I didn't understand it at first. I read
it half through before I broke the window."
Michael felt he knew not how. The whole peace of the world was pent
up painfully in his heart. The new and childlike world which he had
seen so suddenly, men had not seen at all. Here they were still at
their old bewildering, pardonable, useless quarrels, with so much
to be said on both sides, and so little that need be said at all. A
fierce inspiration fell on him suddenly; he would strike them where
they stood with the love of God. They should not move till they saw
their own sweet and startling existence. They should not go from
that place till they went home embracing like brothers and shouting
like men delivered. From the Cross from which he had fallen fell
the shadow of its fantastic mercy; and the first three words he
spoke in a voice like a silver trumpet, held men as still as
stones. Perhaps if he had spoken there for an hour in his
illumination he might have founded a religion on Ludgate Hill. But
the heavy hand of his guide fell suddenly on his shoulder.
"This poor fellow is dotty," he said good-humouredly to the crowd.
"I found him wandering in the Cathedral. Says he came in a flying
ship. Is there a constable to spare to take care of him?"
There was a constable to spare. Two other constables attended to
the tall young man in grey; a fourth concerned himself with the
owner of the shop, who showed some tendency to be turbulent. They
took the tall young man away to a magistrate, whither we shall
follow him in an ensuing chapter. And they took the happiest man in
the world away to an asylum.
II. THE RELIGION OF THE STIPENDIARY MAGISTRATE
The editorial office of The Atheist had for some years
past become less and less prominently interesting as a feature of
Ludgate Hill. The paper was unsuited to the atmosphere. It showed
an interest in the Bible unknown in the district, and a knowledge
of that volume to which nobody else on Ludgate Hill could make any
conspicuous claim. It was in vain that the editor of The
Atheistfilled his front window with fierce and final demands as to
what Noah in the Ark did with the neck of the giraffe. It was in
vain that he asked violently, as for the last time, how the
statement "God is Spirit" could be reconciled with the statement
"The earth is His footstool." It was in vain that he cried with an
accusing energy that the Bishop of London was paid L12,000 a year
for pretending to believe that the whale swallowed Jonah. It was in
vain that he hung in conspicuous places the most thrilling
scientific calculations about the width of the throat of a whale.
Was it nothing to them all they that passed by? Did his sudden and
splendid and truly sincere indignation never stir any of the people
pouring down Ludgate Hill? Never. The little man who
edited The Atheist would rush from his shop on starlit
evenings and shake his fist at St. Paul's in the passion of his
holy war upon the holy place. He might have spared his emotion. The
cross at the top of St. Paul's and The Atheistshop at the foot
of it were alike remote from the world. The shop and the Cross were
equally uplifted and alone in the empty heavens.
To the little man who edited The Atheist, a fiery little
Scotchman, with fiery, red hair and beard, going by the name of
Turnbull, all this decline in public importance seemed not so much
sad or even mad, but merely bewildering and unaccountable. He had
said the worst thing that could be said; and it seemed accepted and
ignored like the ordinary second best of the politicians. Every day
his blasphemies looked more glaring, and every day the dust lay
thicker upon them. It made him feel as if he were moving in a world
of idiots. He seemed among a race of men who smiled when told of
their own death, or looked vacantly at the Day of Judgement. Year
after year went by, and year after year the death of God in a shop
in Ludgate became a less and less important occurrence. All the
forward men of his age discouraged Turnbull. The socialists said he
was cursing priests when he should be cursing capitalists. The
artists said that the soul was most spiritual, not when freed from
religion, but when freed from morality. Year after year went by,
and at least a man came by who treated Mr. Turnbull's secularist
shop with a real respect and seriousness. He was a young man in a
grey plaid, and he smashed the window.
He was a young man, born in the Bay of Arisaig, opposite Rum and
the Isle of Skye. His high, hawklike features and snaky black hair
bore the mark of that unknown historic thing which is crudely
called Celtic, but which is probably far older than the Celts,
whoever they were. He was in name and stock a Highlander of the
Macdonalds; but his family took, as was common in such cases, the
name of a subordinate sept as a surname, and for all the purposes
which could be answered in London, he called himself Evan MacIan.
He had been brought up in some loneliness and seclusion as a strict
Roman Catholic, in the midst of that little wedge of Roman
Catholics which is driven into the Western Highlands. And he had
found his way as far as Fleet Street, seeking some half-promised
employment, without having properly realized that there were in the
world any people who were not Roman Catholics. He had uncovered
himself for a few moments before the statue of Queen Anne, in front
of St. Paul's Cathedral, under the firm impression that it was a
figure of the Virgin Mary. He was somewhat surprised at the lack of
deference shown to the figure by the people bustling by. He did not
understand that their one essential historical principle, the one
law truly graven on their hearts, was the great and comforting
statement that Queen Anne is dead. This faith was as fundamental as
his faith, that Our Lady was alive. Any persons he had talked to
since he had touched the fringe of our fashion or civilization had
been by a coincidence, sympathetic or hypocritical. Or if they had
spoken some established blasphemies, he had been unable to
understand them merely owing to the preoccupied satisfaction of his
mind.
On that fantastic fringe of the Gaelic land where he walked as a
boy, the cliffs were as fantastic as the clouds. Heaven seemed to
humble itself and come closer to the earth. The common paths of his
little village began to climb quite suddenly and seemed resolved to
go to heaven. The sky seemed to fall down towards the hills; the
hills took hold upon the sky. In the sumptuous sunset of gold and
purple and peacock green cloudlets and islets were the same. Evan
lived like a man walking on a borderland, the borderland between
this world and another. Like so many men and nations who grow up
with nature and the common things, he understood the supernatural
before he understood the natural. He had looked at dim angels
standing knee-deep in the grass before he had looked at the grass.
He knew that Our Lady's robes were blue before he knew the wild
roses round her feet were red. The deeper his memory plunged into
the dark house of childhood the nearer and nearer he came to the
things that cannot be named. All through his life he thought of the
daylight world as a sort of divine debris, the broken remainder of
his first vision. The skies and mountains were the splendid
off-scourings of another place. The stars were lost jewels of the
Queen. Our Lady had gone and left the stars by accident.
His private tradition was equally wild and unworldly. His
great-grandfather had been cut down at Culloden, certain in his
last instant that God would restore the King. His grandfather, then
a boy of ten, had taken the terrible claymore from the hand of the
dead and hung it up in his house, burnishing it and sharpening it
for sixty years, to be ready for the next rebellion. His father,
the youngest son and the last left alive, had refused to attend on
Queen Victoria in Scotland. And Evan himself had been of one piece
with his progenitors; and was not dead with them, but alive in the
twentieth century. He was not in the least the pathetic Jacobite of
whom we read, left behind by a final advance of all things. He was,
in his own fancy, a conspirator, fierce and up to date. In the
long, dark afternoons of the Highland winter, he plotted and fumed
in the dark. He drew plans of the capture of London on the desolate
sand of Arisaig.
When he came up to capture London, it was not with an army of white
cockades, but with a stick and a satchel. London overawed him a
little, not because he thought it grand or even terrible, but
because it bewildered him; it was not the Golden City or even hell;
it was Limbo. He had one shock of sentiment, when he turned that
wonderful corner of Fleet Street and saw St. Paul's sitting in the
sky.
"Ah," he said, after a long pause, "that sort of thing was built
under the Stuarts!" Then with a sour grin he asked himself what was
the corresponding monument of the Brunswicks and the Protestant
Constitution. After some warning, he selected a sky-sign of some
pill.
Half an hour afterwards his emotions left him with an emptied mind
on the same spot. And it was in a mood of mere idle investigation
that he happened to come to a standstill opposite the office ofThe
Atheist. He did not see the word "atheist", or if he did, it is
quite possible that he did not know the meaning of the word. Even
as it was, the document would not have shocked even the innocent
Highlander, but for the troublesome and quite unforeseen fact that
the innocent Highlander read it stolidly to the end; a thing
unknown among the most enthusiastic subscribers to the paper, and
calculated in any case to create a new situation.
With a smart journalistic instinct characteristic of all his
school, the editor of The Atheist had put first in his
paper and most prominently in his window an article called "The
Mesopotamian Mythology and its Effects on Syriac Folk Lore." Mr.
Evan MacIan began to read this quite idly, as he would have read a
public statement beginning with a young girl dying in Brighton and
ending with Bile Beans. He received the very considerable amount of
information accumulated by the author with that tired clearness of
the mind which children have on heavy summer afternoons—that tired
clearness which leads them to go on asking questions long after
they have lost interest in the subject and are as bored as their
nurse. The streets were full of people and empty of adventures. He
might as well know about the gods of Mesopotamia as not; so he
flattened his long, lean face against the dim bleak pane of the
window and read all there was to read about Mesopotamian gods. He
read how the Mesopotamians had a god named Sho (sometimes
pronounced Ji), and that he was described as being very powerful, a
striking similarity to some expressions about Jahveh, who is also
described as having power. Evan had never heard of Jahveh in his
life, and imagining him to be some other Mesopotamian idol, read on
with a dull curiosity. He learnt that the name Sho, under its third
form of Psa, occurs in an early legend which describes how the
deity, after the manner of Jupiter on so many occasions, seduced a
Virgin and begat a hero. This hero, whose name is not essential to
our existence, was, it was said, the chief hero and Saviour of the
Mesopotamian ethical scheme. Then followed a paragraph giving other
examples of such heroes and Saviours being born of some profligate
intercourse between God and mortal. Then followed a paragraph—but
Evan did not understand it. He read it again and then again. Then
he did understand it. The glass fell in ringing fragments on to the
pavement, and Evan sprang over the barrier into the shop,
brandishing his stick.
"What is this?" cried little Mr. Turnbull, starting up with hair
aflame. "How dare you break my window?"
"Because it was the quickest cut to you," cried Evan, stamping.
"Stand up and fight, you crapulous coward. You dirty lunatic, stand
up, will you? Have you any weapons here?"
"Are you mad?" asked Turnbull, glaring.
"Are you?" cried Evan. "Can you be anything else when you plaster
your own house with that God-defying filth? Stand up and fight, I
say."
A great light like dawn came into Mr. Turnbull's face. Behind his
red hair and beard he turned deadly pale with pleasure. Here, after
twenty lone years of useless toil, he had his reward. Someone was
angry with the paper. He bounded to his feet like a boy; he saw a
new youth opening before him. And as not unfrequently happens to
middle-aged gentlemen when they see a new youth opening before
them, he found himself in the presence of the police.
The policemen, after some ponderous questionings, collared both the
two enthusiasts. They were more respectful, however, to the young
man who had smashed the window, than to the miscreant who had had
his window smashed. There was an air of refined mystery about Evan
MacIan, which did not exist in the irate little shopkeeper, an air
of refined mystery which appealed to the policemen, for policemen,
like most other English types, are at once snobs and poets. MacIan
might possibly be a gentleman, they felt; the editor manifestly was
not. And the editor's fine rational republican appeals to his
respect for law, and his ardour to be tried by his fellow citizens,
seemed to the police quite as much gibberish as Evan's mysticism
could have done. The police were not used to hearing principles,
even the principles of their own existence.