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 Atheist filled 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 Atheist shop 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 of The 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.
The police magistrate, before
whom they were hurried and tried, was a Mr. Cumberland Vane, a
cheerful, middle-aged gentleman, honourably celebrated for the
lightness of his sentences and the lightness of his
conversation. He occasionally worked himself up into a sort of
theoretic rage about certain particular offenders, such as the men
who took pokers to their wives, talked in a loose, sentimental way
about the desirability of flogging them, and was hopelessly
bewildered by the fact that the wives seemed even more angry with
him than with their husbands. He was a tall, spruce man, with a
twist of black moustache and incomparable morning dress. He
looked like a gentleman, and yet, somehow, like a stage
gentleman.
He had often treated serious
crimes against mere order or property with a humane flippancy.
Hence, about the mere breaking of an editor's window, he was almost
uproarious.
"Come, Mr. MacIan, come," he
said, leaning back in his chair, "do you generally enter you
friends' houses by walking through the glass?" (Laughter.)
"He is not my friend," said Evan,
with the stolidity of a dull child.
"Not your friend, eh?" said the
magistrate, sparkling. "Is he your brother-in-law?" (Loud and
prolonged laughter.)
"He is my enemy," said Evan,
simply; "he is the enemy of God."
Mr. Vane shifted sharply in his
seat, dropping the eye-glass out of his eye in a momentary and not
unmanly embarrassment.
"You mustn't talk like that
here," he said, roughly, and in a kind of hurry, "that has nothing
to do with us."
Evan opened his great, blue eyes;
"God," he began.
"Be quiet," said the magistrate,
angrily, "it is most undesirable that things of that sort should be
spoken about--a--in public, and in an ordinary Court of
Justice.
Religion is--a--too personal a
matter to be mentioned in such a place."
"Is it?" answered the Highlander,
"then what did those policemen swear by just now?"
"That is no parallel," answered
Vane, rather irritably; "of course there is a form of
oath--to be taken
reverently--reverently, and there's an end of it. But to talk in a
public place about one's most sacred and private sentiments--well,
I call it bad taste. (Slight applause.) I call it irreverent. I
call it irreverent, and I'm not specially orthodox either."
"I see you are not," said Evan,
"but I am."
"We are wondering from the
point," said the police magistrate, pulling himself together.
"May I ask why you smashed this
worthy citizen's window?"
Evan turned a little pale at the
mere memory, but he answered with the same cold and deadly
literalism that he showed throughout.
"Because he blasphemed Our
Lady."
"I tell you once and for all,"
cried Mr. Cumberland Vane, rapping his knuckles angrily on the
table, "I tell you, once and for all, my man, that I will not have
you turning on any religious rant or cant here. Don't imagine that
it will impress me. The most religious people are not those who
talk about it. (Applause.) You answer the questions and do nothing
else."
"I did nothing else," said Evan,
with a slight smile. "Eh," cried Vane, glaring through his
eye-glass.
"You asked me why I broke his
window," said MacIan, with a face of wood. "I answered, 'Because he
blasphemed Our Lady.' I had no other reason. So I have no other
answer." Vane continued to gaze at him with a sternness not
habitual to him.
"You are not going the right way
to work, Sir," he said, with severity. "You are not going the right
way to work to--a--have your case treated with special
consideration. If you had simply expressed regret for what you had
done, I should have been strongly inclined to dismiss the matter as
an outbreak of temper. Even now, if you say that you are sorry I
shall only
"
"But I am not in the least
sorry," said Evan, "I am very pleased."
"I really believe you are
insane," said the stipendiary, indignantly, for he had really
been doing his best as a good-natured man, to compose the dispute.
"What conceivable right have you to break other people's windows
because their
opinions do not agree with yours?
This man only gave expression to his sincere belief."
"So did I," said the
Highlander.
"And who are you?" exploded Vane.
"Are your views necessarily the right ones? Are you necessarily in
possession of the truth?"
"Yes," said MacIan.
The magistrate broke into a
contemptuous laugh.
"Oh, you want a nurse to look
after you," he said. "You must pay L10."
Evan MacIan plunged his hands
into his loose grey garment and drew out a queer looking leather
purse. It contained exactly twelve sovereigns. He paid down the
ten, coin by coin, in silence, and equally silently returned the
remaining two to the receptacle. Then he said, "May I say a word,
your worship?"
Cumberland Vane seemed half
hypnotized with the silence and automatic movements of the
stranger; he made a movement with his head which might have been
either "yes" or "no". "I only wished to say, your worship," said
MacIan, putting back the purse in his trouser pocket, "that
smashing that shop window was, I confess, a useless and rather
irregular business. It may be excused, however, as a mere
preliminary to further proceedings, a sort of preface.
Wherever and whenever I meet that
man," and he pointed to the editor of The Atheist, "whether it be
outside this door in ten minutes from now, or twenty years hence in
some distant country, wherever and whenever I meet that man, I will
fight him. Do not be afraid. I will not rush at him like a bully,
or bear him down with any brute superiority. I will fight him like
a gentleman; I will fight him as our fathers fought. He shall
choose how, sword or pistol, horse or foot. But if he refuses, I
will write his cowardice on every wall in the world. If he had said
of my mother what he said of the Mother of God, there is not a club
of clean men in Europe that would deny my right to call him out. If
he had said it of my wife, you English would yourselves have
pardoned me for beating him like a dog in the market place. Your
worship, I have no mother; I have no wife. I have only that which
the poor have equally with the rich; which the lonely have equally
with the man of many friends. To me this whole strange world is
homely, because in the heart of it there is a home; to me this
cruel world is kindly, because higher than the heavens there is
something more human than humanity. If a man must not fight for
this, may he fight for anything? I would fight for my friend, but
if I lost my friend, I should still be there. I would fight for my
country, but if I lost my country, I should still exist. But if
what that devil dreams were true, I should not
be--I should burst like a bubble
and be gone. I could not live in that imbecile universe. Shall I
not fight for my own existence?"
The magistrate recovered his
voice and his presence of mind. The first part of the speech, the
bombastic and brutally practical challenge, stunned him with
surprise; but the rest of Evan's remarks, branching off as they did
into theoretic phrases, gave his vague and very English mind (full
of memories of the hedging and compromise in English public
speaking) an indistinct sensation of relief, as if the man, though
mad, were not so dangerous as he had thought. He went into a sort
of weary laughter.
"For Heaven's sake, man," he
said, "don't talk so much. Let other people have a chance
(laughter). I trust all that you said about asking Mr. Turnbull
to fight, may be regarded as rubbish. In case of accidents,
however, I must bind you over to keep the peace."
"To keep the peace," repeated
Evan, "with whom?" "With Mr. Turnbull," said Vane.
"Certainly not," answered MacIan.
"What has he to do with peace?"
"Do you mean to say," began the
magistrate, "that you refuse to..." The voice of Turnbull himself
clove in for the first time.