I. A DISCUSSION SOMEWHAT IN THE AIR
II. THE RELIGION OF THE STIPENDIARY MAGISTRATE
III. SOME OLD CURIOSITIES
IV. A DISCUSSION AT DAWN
V. THE PEACEMAKER
VI. THE OTHER PHILOSOPHER
VII. THE VILLAGE OF GRASSLEY-IN-THE-HOLE
VIII. AN INTERLUDE OF ARGUMENT
IX. THE STRANGE LADY
X. THE SWORDS REJOINED
XI. A SCANDAL IN THE VILLAGE
XII. THE DESERT ISLAND
XIII. THE GARDEN OF PEACE
XIV. A MUSEUM OF SOULS
XV. THE DREAM OF MACIAN
XVI. THE DREAM OF TURNBULL
XVII. THE IDIOT
XVIII. A RIDDLE OF FACES
XIX. THE LAST PARLEY
XX. DIES IRAE
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.