 Chapter 1. The Ball and the Cross This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. According by Matthew Heckel, St. Louis, MattHeckel at blogspot.com. The Ball and the Cross by G. K. Chesterton. Chapter 1. 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 and 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 a 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, an acute intellect, he had made himself happy in a little stone hut, in 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 endeavoring to convert you by argument. The imbecility of your traditions, which can be quite finely exhibited, to anyone with mere ordinary knowledge of the world, the same kind of knowledge which teaches us not to sit in drafts, 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 kind you will forgive me, said the monk, meekly from under the loads of white beard, but I fear I do not understand. Was it an 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. Is 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. 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 with a 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 may 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 the 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 and human history, as I have been and able to make, has led me to a rather singular conclusion, that 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 left 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 dreadful mirth. It is a new planet, and it shall bear my name. This star, not that other vulgar one, shall be Lucifer, son 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 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 colored 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 great 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 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, which lay beneath them in squares and oblongs of fire. The fog and fire were mixed in a passionate vapor. 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 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, said 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 like to give me, from any instance I came across, here is an instance with 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. 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 that 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. The 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 instance, 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 Meekley. 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, the final fruit. And the fruit should be at the top of the tree, not 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. Resume 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 the 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 the 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 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 crossbars of the carpentry repeated the intolerable image. He flung himself upon a bed, only to remember that this, too, like all workmen-like 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 Ehrle. It is a parable. It is a parable of you and all your rationalists. You begin by breaking up the cross. 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 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. Oh, everything is irrational, and so Lucifer left upon him with a cry like a wild beast. 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 onto 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. He yelled, what sort of a support do you find it, old fellow? For practical purposes of support, replied Michael Grimley. 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, an ungovernable excitement. Altiora petto, 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 suggesting in 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 meat 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 mounting to carelessness, a carelessness mounting 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 antimony kept on repeating itself in his mind, the contradiction is 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, though 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 a gray 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 natural force 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 point 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 mustache and the nickel buttons had also come on the flying ship. He merely let his mind float at an endless felicity about the man. He thought how nice it would be if he had to live up in that gallery with the one man forever. 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 exhaustible ecstasy. In the gallery below the ball, Father Michael had found that man who was 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 color and music of his new paradise, Michael heard only a faint and distant fashion some remarks that his 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 seated 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 on Lucifer's ship. On his giving this answer, the demeanor 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 fervorous 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 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 air and 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 demigod and buttons caressingly. The pretty things are downstairs. You come along with me. There's something that will surprise you downstairs, something you will want to see very much. Evidently the man and 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 splendor 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, and a street full of faces, with the houses and even the lampposts above his head. He felt suddenly happy, and suddenly indescribably small. He fancied that 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 fell to 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 onto the pavement some square tins of potted meat, and it seemed like a hint of a hundred hilarious high teas on 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 recreated. Suddenly, through all the den of the dark streets came a crash of glass, with all 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. A 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 gray 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 gray tamo-shanter with a 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 piece of the world was pent up painfully in his art. 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, pardoning, 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 a 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 found it a religion on Ludgate Hill. But the heavy hand of his guide fell suddenly on his shoulder. This poor fellow was dotty, he said good humanly 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 gray. 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, whether we shall follow him in an ensuing chapter. And they took the happiest man in the world away to an asylum. End of Chapter 1 Chapter 2 of The Ball and the Cross This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Matthew Heckel The Ball and the Cross by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 2 The Religion of the Stipendiary Magistrate The editorial office of the atheist had for some years passed 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 in Ludgate Hill could make any conspicuous claim. It was in vain 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 £12,000 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 and 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. 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, and 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 judgment. 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 socialist said he was cursing priests when he should be cursing capitalists. The artist said that the soul was most spiritual, not when freed from religion, that when freed from morality. Year after year went by, and at least a man came by who treated Turnbull's secular shop with a real respect and seriousness. He was a young man in a gray plaid, and he smashed the window. He was a young man born in the bay of Arrasag, opposite Rum and the Isle of Skye. His high hawk-like 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 McDonald's. 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 Mickean. 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 historic 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 a lie. 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 sensuous sunset of golden purple and peacock green, cloudlets and islets were the same. Heaven lived like a man walking on a borderland, the borderland between this world and another. Like so many men and nations who grew 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 rose were blue, before he knew the wild roses round her feet were red. The deeper his memory plunged into the dark house of childhood, nearer and near he came 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 in his house, burnishing it and sharpening it for sixty years to be ready for the next rebellion. His father, the youngest son and last left alive, had refused to attend on Queen Victoria in Scotland and evened 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 which 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 Arrasag. 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 stewards. Then with a sour grin he asked himself what was the corresponding monument of the Brunswick's 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 empty 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 folklore. Mr. Evan McKeon 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 a 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 that God's of Mesopotamia is not. So he flattened his long, lean face against the dim, bleak pain of the window and read all there was to read about Mesopotamian gods. He read how the Mesopotamians had a god-named show, sometimes pronounced ye, and that he was described as being very powerful, a striking similarity to some expressions about Yahweh, who was also described as having power. Evan had never heard of Yahweh in his life, and imagining him to be some other Mesopotamian idol, read on with a dull curiosity. He learned that the name show, under its third form of saw, 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 savior of the Mesopotamian ethical scheme. Then followed a paragraph giving other examples of such heroes and saviors, 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, and ringing fragments on the pavement, and Evan sprang over the barrier into the shop, brandishing his stick. What is this? cried 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 crappulous 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 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 McKeon, which did not exist in the irate little shopkeeper. An air of refined mystery, which appealed to policemen, for policemen, like most other English types, are at once snobs and poets. McKeon might possibly be a gentleman, they felt. The editor manifestly was not. And the editors find rational republic appeals to his respect for law and his ardor, to be tried by his fellow citizens, seem 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, honorably 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 mustache 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. McKee, and come, he said, leaning back in his chair, to you generally and to your friends' houses by walking through the glass. Laughter. He is not my friend, said Evan, with the solidity 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 eyeglass 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. Thus 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 in public, and in an ordinary court of justice. Religion is 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 is 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 wandering from the point, said the polite 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, wrapping 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 can't hear. Don't imagine 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. Cried Vane, glaring through his eyeglass. You asked me why I broke his window, said McKeon, 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 you are sorry, I shall but I am not in the least sorry, said Evan, I am very pleased. I really believe you are insane, cried 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 McKeehan. The magistrate broke into a contemptuous laugh. Oh, you want a nurse to look after you, he said. You must pay ten pounds. Evan McKeehan plunged his hand into his loose gray 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 wish to say, your worship, said McKeehan, putting back the purse in his trouser pocket. The 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-wood yourselves have pardoned me for beating him like a dog in the marketplace. You're worshiped. I have no mother. I have no wife. I have only that which the poor have equally in common 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 Evans 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. Ha! Ha! 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 Evans, with whom? With Mr. Turnbull, said Vane, certainly not, answered McKeon. 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? Might I suggest, he said, that I, your worship, can settle to some extent this absurd matter myself? This rather wild gentleman promises he will not attack me with an ordinary assault, and if he does, you may be sure the police shall hear of it, but he says he will not. He says he will challenge me to a duel, and I cannot say anything stronger about his mental state than to say that I think that it is highly probable he will. Laughter. But it takes two to make a duel, your worship, renewed laughter. I do not in the least mind being described on every wall in the world as the coward who would not fight a man in Fleet Street, about whether the Virgin Mary had a parallel and Mesopotamian mythology. No, your worship, you need not trouble to bind him over to keep the peace. I bind myself over to keep the peace, and you may rest quite satisfied that there will be no duel with me in it. Mr. Cumberland Vane rolled about, laughing in a sort of relief. Ha! Ha! Ha! You're like a breath of April, sir! he cried. You're her o' zone after that, fellow. You're perfectly right. Perhaps I have taken the thing too seriously. I should love to see him sending challenges, and to see you smiling well, well. Evan went out of the Court of Justice free, but strangely shaken, like a sick man. In the punishment of suppression, he would have felt as natural, but the sudden juncture between the laughter of his judge and the laughter of the man he had wronged made him feel suddenly small, or at least defeated. It was really true. The whole modern world regarded his world as a bubble. No cruelty could have shown it, but their kindness showed it with a ghastly clearness. As he was brooding, he suddenly became cautious of a small stern figure, fronting him in silence. Its eyes were gray and awful, and its beard red. It was turnbull. Well, sir, said the editor of the atheist, where is the fight to be? Name the field, sir. Evan stood thunderstruck. He stammered out something. He knew not what. He only guessed it by the answer of the other. Do I want to fight? Do I want to fight? cried the furious free thinker. Why, you moon-struck scarecrow of superstition! Do you think your dirty saints are the only people who can die? Haven't you hung atheists, and burned them, and boiled them? And did they ever deny their faith? Do you think we don't want to fight? Night and day, I have prayed. I have longed for an atheist revolution. I have longed to see your blood and ours on the streets. Let it be yours or mine. But you said, began McKee, and I know, said turnbull, scornfully. And what did you say? You damned fool! You said things that might have got us locked up for a year, and shadowed by coppers for half a decade. If you wanted to fight, why did you tell that ass you wanted to? I got you out to fight if you want to. Now, fight if you dare. I swear to you, then, said McKee, and after a pause. I swear to you that nothing shall come between us. I swear to you that nothing shall be in my heart or in my head till our swords clash together. I swear it by the God you have denied, by the blessed lady you have blasphemed. I swear it by the seven swords in her art. I swear it by the holy island where my fathers are, by the honor of my mother, by the secret of my people, and by the chalice of the blood of God. The atheist drew up his head, and I, he said, give my word. End of Chapter 2, Recorded by Matthew Heckel, St. Louis, 2008. Matt Heckel at Blogspot.com by G.K. Chesterton. Chapter 3, Some Old Curiosities The evening sky, a dome of solid gold, unflaked even by a single sunset cloud, steeped the meanest sights of London in a strange and mental light, and made a little greasy street of St. Martin's Lane look as if it were paid with gold. It made the pawnbrokers, half-way down it, shine as if it were really that mountain of piety that the French poetic instinct has named it. It made the mean pseudo-French bookshop, next but one to it, a shop packed with dreary indecency, show for a moment a kind of Parisian color. And the shop that stood between the pawnshop and the shop of dreary indecency showed with quite a blaze of old world beauty, for it was, by accident, a shop not unbeautiful in itself. The front window had a glimmer of bronze and blue steel, lit, as by a few stars, by the sparks of what were alleged to be jewels, for it was, in brief, a shop of brickabrack and old curiosities. A row of half-burnished, 17th-century swords ran like an ornate railing along the front of the window. Behind was a darker glimmer of old oak and old armor, and higher up hung the most extraordinary looking South Sea tools or utensils, whether designed for killing enemies or merely for cooking them, no mere white man could possibly conjecture. But the romance of the eye, which really on this rich evening clung about the shop, had its main source in the accident of two doors standing open, the front door that opened on the street, and a back door that opened on an odd green square of garden, that the sun turned to a square of gold. There is nothing more beautiful than thus to look as it were through the archway of a house, as if the open sky were an interior chamber, and the sun a secret lamp of the place. I have suggested that the sunset light made everything lovely. To say that it made the keeper of the curiosity shop lovely would be a tribute to it perhaps to extreme. It would easily have made him beautiful if he had been merely squalid, if he had been a Jew of the Fagin type, but he was a Jew of another, and much less admirable type, a Jew with a very well sounding name. For though there are no hard tests for separating the tares and the wheat of any people, one rude but efficient guide is that the nice Jew is called Moses Solomon, and the nasty Jew is called Thornton Piercy. The keeper of the curiosity shop was of the Thornton Piercy branch of the chosen people. He belonged to those lost ten tribes whose industrious object is to lose themselves. He was a man still young, but already corpulent, with sleek dark hair, heavy handsome clothes, and a full, fat, permanent smile, which looked at the first glance kindly, and at the second cowardly. The name over his shop was Henry Gordon, but two Scotchmen who were in his shop that evening could come upon no trace of a Scotch accent. These two Scotchmen in this shop were careful purchasers, but freehand payers. One of them who seemed to be the principal and the authority, whom indeed Mr. Henry Gordon fancied he had seen somewhere before, was a small, sturdy fellow with fine gray eyes, a square red tie, and a square red beard that he carried aggressively forward as if he defied anyone to pull it. The other kept so much in the background in comparison that he looked almost ghostly in his gray cloak or plaid, a tall, sallow, silent young man. The two Scotchmen were interested in 17th century swords. They were fastidious about them. They had a whole armory of these weapons brought out and rode clattering about the counter until they found two of precisely the same length. Presumably they desired the exact symmetry for some decorative trophy. Even then they felt the points, poised the swords for balance, and bent them in a circle to see that they sprang straight again, which for decorative purposes seems carrying realism rather far. These will do, said the strange person with the red beard, and perhaps I had better pay for them at once, and as you were the challenger, Mr. McKeehan, perhaps you had better explain the situation. The tall Scotchmen in gray took a step forward and spoke in a voice quite clear and bold, and yet somehow lifeless like a man going through an ancient formality. The fact is, Mr. Gordon, we have to place our honor in your hands. Words have passed between Mr. Turnbull and myself on a gray and invaluable matter, which can only be atoned for by fighting. Unfortunately, as the police are in some sense pursuing us, we are hurried, and must fight now, and without seconds. But if you will be so kind as to take us into your little garden, and see fair play, we shall feel how the shopman recovered himself from a stunning surprise and burst out. Gentlemen, are you drunk? A duel? A duel in my garden? Go home, gentlemen. Go home. Why, what did you quarrel about? We quarreled, said Evan, in the same dead voice, about religion. The fat shopkeeper rolled about in his chair with enjoyment. Well, this is a funny game, he said. So, you want to commit murder on behalf of religion? Well, my religion is a little respect for humanity, and excuse me, cut in Turnbull, suddenly and fiercely, pointing toward the pawnbrokers next door, don't you own that shop? Why, uh, yes, said Gordon. And don't you own that shop, repeated the secularist, pointing backward to the pornographic bookseller? What if I do? Why then, cried Turnbull, with grating contempt, I will leave the religion of humanity confidently in your hands. But I am sorry I troubled you about such a thing as honor. Look here, my man. I do believe in humanity. I do believe in liberty. My father died for it under the swords of the yeomanry. I am going to die for it, if need be, under that sword on your counter. But if there is one sight that makes me doubt, it is your foul, fat face. It is hard to believe you were not meant to be ruled like a dog, or killed like a cockroach. Don't try your slave's philosophy on me. We are going to fight, and we are going to fight in your garden with swords. Be still. Raise your voice above a whisper, and I'll run you through the body. Turnbull put the bright point of the sword against the gay waistcoat of the dealer, who stood choking with rage and fear, and an astonishment so crushing as to be greater than either. Mekian, said Turnbull, falling almost into the familiar tone of a business partner. Mekian, tie up this fellow and put a gag in his mouth. Be still, I say, or I'll kill you where you stand. The man was too frightened to scream, but he struggled wildly, while Evan Mekian, whose long-leaning hands were unusually powerful, tightened some old curtain cords around him, strapped a rogue gag in his mouth, and rolled him on his back on the floor. There's nothing very strong here, said Evan, looking about him. I'm afraid he'll work through the gag in half an hour or so. Yes, said Turnbull, but one of us will be killed by that time. Well, let's hope so, said the Highlander, glancing doubtfully at the squirming thing on the floor. And now, said Turnbull, twirling his fiery mustache and fingering his sword, let us go into the garden. What an exquisite summer evening! Mekian said nothing, but lifting his sword from the counter went out into the sun. The brilliant light ran along the blades, filling the channels of them with white fire. The combatants stuck their swords in the turf and took off their hats, coats, waistcoats, and boots. Evan said a short Latin prayer to himself, during which Turnbull made something of a parade with lighting a cigarette which he flung away the instant after, when he saw Mekian apparently standing ready. Yet Mekian was not exactly ready. He stood staring like a man, stricken with a trance. What are you staring at, asked Turnbull? Do you see the bobbies? I see Jerusalem, said Evan, all covered with the shields and standards of the Saracens. Jerusalem, said Turnbull, laughing. Well, we've taken the only inhabitant into captivity. And he picked up his sword and made it whistle like a boy's wand. I beg your pardon, said Mekian dryly, let us begin. Mekian made a military salute with his weapon, which Turnbull copied or parodied with an impatient contempt. And in the stillness of the garden, the swords came together with a clear sound like a bell. The instant the blades touched, each felt them tingle to their very points with a personal vitality, as if they were two naked nerves of steel. Evan had worn throughout an air of apathy, which might have been the stale apathy of one who wants nothing, but it was indeed the more dreadful apathy of one who wants something and will care for nothing else. And this was seen suddenly, for the instant Evan engaged. He disengaged and lunged with an infernal violence. His opponent, with a desperate promptitude, parried and riposted. The parry only just succeeded. The riposte failed. Something big and unbearable seemed to have broken finally out of Evan and that first murderous lunge, leaving him lighter and cooler and quicker upon his feet. He fell to again, fiercely still, but now with a fierce caution. The next moment Turnbull lunged. McKee and now seemed to catch the point and throw it away from him, and was thrusting back like a thunderbolt when a sound paralyzed him, another sound beside the ringing weapons. Turnbull, perhaps from an equal establishment, perhaps from chivalry, stopped also, and forbore to send his sword through his exposed enemy. What is that? asked Evan Horsley. A heavy scraping sound, as of a trunk being dragged along a littered floor, came from the dark shop behind him. The old Jew has broken one of his strings, and he's crawling about. So Turnbull, be quick. He must finish before he gets his gag out. Yes, yes, quick, on guard, cried the Highlander. The blades crossed again with the same sound like song, and the man went to work again with the same white and watchful faces. Evan and his impatience went back a little to his wildness. He made windmills, as the French duelists say, and though he was probably a shade-better fencer of the two, he found the other's point past his face, twice so close as almost to Grace's cheek. The second time, he realized the actual possibility of defeat, and pulled himself together under a shock of the sanity of anger. He narrowed and, so to speak, tightened his operations. He fenced, as the swordsman's boast goes, in a wedding ring. He turned to Turnbull's thrusts, with a maddening and almost mechanical click like that of a machine. Whenever Turnbull's sword sought to go over, that other mere white streak had seemed to be caught in a complex network of steel. He turned to one thrust, turned another, turned another. Then suddenly, he went forward at the lunge with his whole living weight. Turnbull leaped back, but Evan lunged, and lunged, and lunged again like a devilous piston rod, or battering ram. And high above all, the sound of the struggle, there broke into the silent evening, a bellowing human voice, nasal, raucous, at the highest pitch of pain. Help! Help! Police! Murder! Murder! The gag was broken, and the tongue of tear was loose. Keep on! gasped Turnbull. One may be killed before they come. The voice of the screaming shopkeeper was loud enough to drown not only the noise of the swords, but all other noises around it. But even through its rending din, there seemed to be some other stir or scurry. And Evan, in the very act of thrusting at Turnbull, saw something in his eyes that made him drop his sword. The atheist, with his gray eyes at their widest and wildest, was staring straight over his shoulder at the little archway of shop that opened onto the street beyond. And he saw the archway blocked and blackened with strange figures. We must bolt, Mackean, he said abruptly, and there isn't a damned second to lose either. Do as I do. With a bound he was beside the little cluster of his clothes and boots that lay on the lawn. He snatched them up without waiting to put any of them on. And tucking his sword under his other arm went wildly at the wall at the bottom of the garden and swung himself over it. Three seconds after he had alighted in his socks on the other side, Mackean alighted beside him, also in his socks, and also carrying clothes and sword in a desperate bundle. They were in a by street, very lean and lonely itself, but so close to a crowded thoroughfare that they could see the vague masses of vehicles going by, and could even see an individual handsome cab passing the corner at the instant. Turnbull put his fingers to his mouth like a gutter snipe and whistle twice. Even as he did so, he could hear the loud voice of the neighbors and the police coming down the garden. The handsome swung sharply and came tearing down the little lane at his call. When the cabin saw his fares, however, too wild-haired men in their shirts and socks would naked swords under their arms. He nodded naturally, brought his readiness to a rigid stop and stared suspiciously. You talk to him a minute, whispered Turnbull, and stepped back into the shadow of the wall. We want you, said Mackean to the cabin, with the superb scotch draw of indifference and assurance, to drive us to St. Pancras station very quick. Very sorry, sir, said the cabin, but I'd like to know if it was all right. Might I arsed where you came from, sir? A second after he spoke, Mackean heard a heavy voice on the other side of the wall, saying, I suppose I'd better get over and look for them. Give me a back. Cabbie, said Mackean, again assuming the most deliberate and lingering lowland-scotch intonation. If you're really very anxious to can where I come from, I'll tell you, has a very great secret. I come from Scotland, and I'm again to St. Pancras station. Open the doors, Cabbie. The cabin stared, but laughed. The heavy voice behind the wall said, Now then, I'll better back this time, Mr. Price. And from the shadow of the wall, Turnbull crept out. He had struggled wildly into his coat, leaving his waistcoat on the pavement, and he was with a fierce pale face climbing up the cab behind the cabin. Mackean had no glimmering notion of what he was up to, but an instinctive discipline inherited from a hundred men of war made him quick to his own part and trust the other man. Open the doors, Cabbie, he repeated, or something of the obstinate solemnity of a drunkard. Open the doors. Did you know, hear me say, St. Pancras station? The top of a policeman's helmet appeared above the garden wall. The cabin did not see it, but he was still suspicious and began. Very sorry, sir, but, and with that, the cat-like Turnbull tore him out of his seat and hurled him into the street below, where he lay suddenly stunned. Give me his hat, cried Turnbull, in a silver voice that the other obeyed like a bugle. Get inside with the swords. And just as the red and raging face of a policeman appeared above the wall, Turnbull struck the horse with a terrible cut of the whip, and the two went whirling away like a boomerang. They had spun through seven streets and three or four squares before anything further happened. Then, in the neighborhood of Mater Vale, the driver opened the trap and talked through it in a manner, not wholly common in conversations through that aperture. Mr. McKeehan, he said shortly, in civilly. Mr. Turnbull replied his motionless fare. Under circumstances such as those in which we were both recently placed, there was no time for anything but very abrupt action. I trust, therefore, that you have no cause to complain of me if I have deferred and tell this moment a consultation with you on our present position and future action. Our present position, Mr. McKeehan, I imagine that I am under no special necessity of describing. We have broken the law and are fleeing from its officers. Our future action is a thing which I myself entertain sufficiently strong views about, but I have no right to assume or anticipate yours. Though I may have formed a decided conception of your character and a decided notion of what they will probably be. Still, by very principle of intellectual justice, I am bound to ask you now and seriously whether you wish to continue our interrupted relations. McKeehan leaned his white and rather weary face back upon the cushions in order to speak through the open door. Mr. Turnbull, he said, I have nothing to add to what I have said before. It is strongly borne in upon me that you and I, the sole occupants of this runaway cab, are at this moment the two most important people in London, possibly in Europe. I have been looking at all the streets as we went past. I have been looking at all the shops as we went past. I have been looking at all the churches as we went past. At first, I felt a little dazed at the vastness of it all. I could not understand what it all meant, but now I know exactly what it all means. It means us. This whole civilization is only a dream. You and I are the realities. Religious symbolism, said Mr. Turnbull through the trap, does not, as you are probably aware, appeal ordinarily to thinkers of the school to which I belong. But in symbolism, as you use it in this instance, I must, I think, concede a certain truth. We must fight this thing out somewhere, because, as you truly say, we have found each other's reality. We must kill each other or convert each other. I used to think all Christians were hypocrites, and I felt quite mildly towards them, really. But I know you are sincere, and my soul is mad against you, in the same way you use, I suppose, to think that all atheists thought atheism would leave them free for immorality. And yet, in your heart, you tolerated them entirely. Now you know that I am an honest man, and you are mad against me, as I am against you. Yes, that's it. You can't be angry with a bad man, but a good man in the wrong, by one thirst for his blood. Yes, you open for me a vista of thought. Don't run into anything, said Evan immovably. There's something in that view of yours too, said Turnbull, and shut down the trap. They sped on through shining streets that shot by them like arrows. Mr. Turnbull had evidently a great deal of unused practical talent, which was unrolling itself in this ridiculous adventure. They had got away with such stunning promptitude that the police chase had an old probability, not even properly begun. But, in case it had, the amateur cabinet chose his dizzy course through London with a strange dexterity. He did not do what would have first occurred to any ordinary outsider desiring to destroy his tracks. He did not cut into byways or twist his way through mean streets. His amateur common sense told him that it was precisely the poor street, the side street, that would be likely to remember and report the passing of a handsome cap. Like the passing of a royal procession, he kept chiefly to the great roads, so full of handsoms that a wilder pair than they might easily have passed in the press. In one of the quieter streets, Evan put on his boots. Towards the top of Albany Street, the singular cabinet again opened the trap. Mr. McKeehan, he said, I understand that we have now definitely settled that in the conventional language, honor is not yet satisfied. Our action must at least go further than it has gone under recent interrupted conditions. That, I believe, is understood. Perfectly, replied the other with his bootlace in his teeth. Under those conditions continued Turnbull, his voice coming through the hole with a slight note of trepidation, very unusual with him. I have a suggestion to make. If that can be called a suggestion, which has probably occurred to you as readily as to me. Until the actual event comes off, we are practically in the position, if not of comrades, at least of business partners. Until the event comes off, therefore, I should suggest that quarreling would be inconvenient and rather inartistic, while the ordinary exchange of politeness between man and man would be not only elegant but uncommonly practical. You are perfectly right, answered McKeehan with his melancholy voice, and saying that all this has occurred to me. All dualists should behave like gentlemen to each other, but we, by the queerness of our position, are something much more than either dualists or gentlemen. We are, in the oddest and most exact sense of the term, brothers in arms. Mr. McKeehan, replied Turnbull calmly, no more need be said, and he closed the trap once more. They had reached Finchley Road before he opened it again. Then he said, Mr. McKeehan, may I offer you a cigar? It will be a touch of realism. Thank you, answered Evan. You are very kind, and he began to smoke in the cab. End of Chapter 3. Read by Matthew Heckel, St. Louis, August 2008, Matt Heckel at blogspot.com