 CHAPTER 9 The Strange Lady Moonrise with a great and growing moon opened over all those flats, making them seem flatter and larger than they were, turning them to a lake of blue light. The two companions trudged across the moonlit plain for half an hour in full silence. Fenmekean stopped suddenly and planted his sword-point in the ground, like one who plants his tent pole for the night. Leaving it standing there, he clutched his black-haired skull with his great claws of hands, as was his custom when forcing the pace of his brain. Then his hands dropped again and he spoke. I'm sure you're thinking the same as I am, he said. How long are we to be on this damned seesaw? The other did not answer, but his silence seemed somehow solid as a scent. And McKean went on conversationally, neither noticed that both had instinctively stood still before the sign of the fixed and standing sword. It is hard to guess what God means in this business, but he means something, or the other thing, or both. Whenever we have tried to fight each other, something has stopped us. Whenever we have tried to be reconciled to each other, something has stopped us again. By the run of our luck, we have never had time to be either friends or enemies. Something always jumped out of the bushes. Turnbull nodded gravely and glanced round at the huge and hedgeless meadow which fell away towards the horizon into a glimmering high road. Nothing will jump out of bushes here anyhow, he said. That is what I meant, said McKean, and stared steadily at the heavy hilt of his standing sword which in the slight wind swayed on its tempered steel like some huge thistle on its stalk. That is what I meant. We are quite alone here. I have not heard a horse hoof or a footstep or the hoot of a train for miles, so I think we might stop here and ask for a miracle. Oh, might we? said the atheistic editor with a sort of gusto of disgust. I beg your pardon, said McKean meekly. I forgot your prejudices. He eyed the wind swung sword hilt in sad meditation and resumed. What I mean is we might find out in this quiet place whether there really is any fate or any commandment against our enterprise. I will engage on my side, like Elijah, to accept a test from heaven. Turnbull, let us draw swords here in this moonlight and this monstrous solitude. And if here in this moonlight and solitude there happens anything to interrupt us, if it be lightning striking our sword blades or a rabbit running under our legs, I will take it as a sign from God, and we shall shake hands forever. Turnbull's mouth twitched in angry humor under his red mustache. He said, I will wait for signs from God until I have any signs of his existence. But God, or fate, forbid that a man of scientific culture should refuse any kind of experiment. Very well, then, said McKean, shortly, we are more quiet here than anywhere else. Let us engage. And he plucked his sword-point out of the turf. Turnbull regarded him for a second and a half with a baffling visage almost black against the moonrise. Then his hand made a sharp movement to his hip and his sword shone in the moon. As old chess players opened every game with established gambits, they opened with a thrust and parry, orthodox and even frankly ineffectual. But in McKean's soul more formless storms were gathering, and he made a lunge or two so savage as first to surprise and then to enrage his opponent. Turnbull ground his teeth, kept his temper, and waiting for the third lunge and the worst, had almost spitted the lunge or when a shrill small cry came from behind him, a cry such as is not made by any of the beasts that perish. Turnbull must have been more superstitious than he knew, for he stopped in the act of going forward. McKean was brazenly superstitious, and he dropped his sword. After all, he had challenged the universe to send an interruption, and this wasn't interruption whatever else it was. An instant afterwards, the sharp weak cry was repeated. This time it was certain that it was human and that it was female. McKean stood rolling those great blue Gaelic eyes that contrasted with his dark hair. It is the voice of God, he said again and again. God hasn't got much of a voice, said Turnbull, who snatched at every chance of cheap profanity. As a matter of fact, McKean, it isn't the voice of God, but it's something a jolly sight more important. It is the voice of man, or rather of woman, so I think we'd better scoot in its direction. McKean snatched up his fallen weapon without a word, and the two raced away towards that part of the distant road from which the cry was now constantly renewed. They had to run over a curve of country that looked smooth but was very rough, a neglected field which they soon found to be full of the tallest grasses and the deepest rabbit holes. Moreover, that great curve of the countryside which looked so low and gentle when you glanced over it proved to be highly precipitous when you scampered over it, and Turnbull was twice nearly flung on his face. McKean, though much heavier, avoided such an overthrow only by having the quick and incalculable feet of the mountaineer, but both of them may be said to have left off a low cliff when they leapt into the road. The moonlight lay on the white road with a more naked and electric flair than on the gray-green upland, and though the scene which it revealed was complicated, it was not difficult to get its first features at a glance. A small but very neat black and yellow motor car was standing stolidly, slightly to the left of the road. A somewhat larger, light-green motor car was tipped halfway into a ditch on the same side, and four flushed and staggering men-in-evening dress were tipped out of it. Three of them were standing about the road giving their opinions to the moon with vague but echoing violence. The fourth, however, had already advanced on the chauffeur of the black and yellow car and was threatening him with a stick. The chauffeur had risen to defend himself by his side, said a young lady. She was sitting bolt upright, a slender and rigid figure gripping the sides of her seat, and her first few cries had ceased. She was clad in close-fitting dark costume. A mass of warm brown hair went out in two wings or waves on each side of her forehead, and even at that distance it could be seen that her profile was of the aquiline and eager sort, like a young falcon hardly free of the nest. Turnbull had concealed in him somewhere a fund of common sense and knowledge of the world of which he himself and his best friends were hardly aware. He was one of those who take in much of the shows of things absentmindedly and in an irrelevant reverie. As he stood at the door of his editorial shop on Ludgate Hill and meditated on the non-existence of God, he silently absorbed a good deal of varied knowledge about the existence of men. He had come to no types by instinct and dilemmas with a glance. He saw the crux of the situation in the road and what he saw made him redouble his pace. He knew that the men were rich, he knew that they were drunk, and he knew what was worst of all that they were fundamentally frightened. And he knew this also that no common Ruffian, such as attacks ladies in novels, is ever so savage and ruthless as a coarse kind of gentleman when he is really alarmed. The reason is not recondite. It is simply because the police court is not such a menacing novelty to the poor Ruffian as it is to the rich. When they came with inhale and heard the voices, they confirmed all turnbulls anticipations. The man in the middle of the road was shouting in a hoarse and groggy voice that the chauffeur had smashed their car on purpose, that they must get to the creed that evening, and that he would jolly well have to take them there. The chauffeur had mildly objected that he was driving a lady. Oh, we'll take care of the lady, said the red-faced young man, and went off into gurgling an almost zenile laughter. By the time the two champions came up, things had grown more serious. The intoxication of the man talking to the chauffeur had taken one of its perverse and cat-like jumps into mere screaming spite and rage. He lifted his stick and struck at the chauffeur, who caught hold of it, and the drunkard fell backwards, dragging him out of his seat on the car. Another of the rowdies rushed forward, booing in idiotic excitement, fell over the chauffeur, and, either by accident or design, kicked him as he lay. The drunkard got to his feet again, but the chauffeur did not. The man who had kicked kept a kind of half-witted conscience or cowardice, for he stood staring at the senseless body and murmuring words of inconsequent self-justification, making gestures with his hands as if he were arguing with somebody. But the other three, with a mere whoop and howl of victory, were boarding the car on three sides at once. It was exactly at this moment that Turnbull fell among them like one fallen from the sky. He tore one of the climbers backward by the collar, and with a hearty push, sent him staggering over into the ditch upon his nose. One of the remaining two, who was too far gone to notice anything, continued to clamor ineffectually over the high back of the car, kicking and pouring forth a rivulet of soliloquy. But the other dropped at the interruption, turned upon Turnbull, and began a battering bout of fisticuffs. At the same moment, the man crawled out of the ditch in a masquerade of mud and rushed at his old enemy from behind. The whole had not taken a second, and an instant after, McKeon was in the midst of them. Turnbull had tossed away his sheathed sword, greatly preferring his hands, except in the avowed etiquette of the duel, for he had learned to use his hands in the old street battles of Bradlock. But to McKeon the sword even sheathed was a more natural weapon, and he laid about him on all sides with it as with a stick. The man who had the walking stick found his blows parried with promptitude, and a second after, to his great astonishment, found his own stick fly up in the air as by a conjuring trick, with a turn of the swordsman's wrist. Another of the revelers picked the stick out of the ditch, and ran in upon McKeon, calling to his companion to assist him. I haven't got a stick, grumbled the disarmed man, and looked vaguely about the ditch. Perhaps, said McKeon politely, you would like this one. With the word the drunkard found his hand that had grasped the stick suddenly twisted and empty, and the stick lay at the feet of his companion on the other side of the road. McKeon felt a faint stir behind him. The girl had risen to her feet, and was leaning forward to stare at the fighters. Turnbull was still engaged in countering and pommeling with the third young man. The fourth young man was still engaged with himself, kicking his legs in helpless rotation on the back of the car, and talking with melodious rationality. At length Turnbull's opponent began to back before the battery of his heavy hands, still fighting, for he was the soberest and boldest of the four. If these are annals of military glory, it is due to him to say that he need not have abandoned the conflict, only that as he backed to the edge of the ditch his foot caught in a loop of grass, and he went over in a flat and comfortable position from which it took him a considerable time to rise. By the time he had risen, Turnbull had come to the rescue of McKeon, who was at bay but belaboring his two enemies handsomely. The sight of the liberated reserve was to them like that of Blucher at Waterloo. The two set off at a sullen trot down the road, leaving even the walking stick lying behind them in the moonlight. McKeon plucked the struggling and aspiring idiot off the back of the car like a stray cat, and left him swaying unsteadily in the moon. Then he approached the front part of the car in a somewhat embarrassed manner and pulled off his cap. For some solid seconds the lady and he merely looked at each other, and McKeon had an irrational feeling of being in a picture hung on a wall. That is, he was motionless, even lifeless, and yet steeringly significant like a picture. The white moonlight on the road, when he was not looking at it, gave him a vision of the road being white with snow. The motor-car, when he was not looking at it, gave him a rude impression of a captured coach in the old days of highwaymen. And he whose whole soul was with the swords and stately manners of the eighteenth century, he who was a Jacobite risen from the dead, had an overwhelming sense of being once more in the picture, when he had so long been out of the picture. In that short and strong silence he absorbed the lady from head to foot. He had never really looked at a human being before in his life. He saw her face and hair first, then that she had long suede gloves, then that there was a fur cap at the back of her brown hair. He might perhaps be excused for this hungry attention. He had prayed that some sign might come from heaven, and after an almost savage scrutiny he came to the conclusion that this one did. The lady's instantaneous arrest of speech might need more explaining, but she may well have been stunned with the squalid attack and the abrupt rescue. Yet it was she who remembered herself first and suddenly called out with self-accusing horror. Oh, that poor, poor man! They both swung round abruptly and saw that Turnbull with his recovered sword under his armpit was already lifting the fallen chauffeur into the car. He was only stunned and was slowly awakening, feebly waving his left arm. The lady in long gloves and the fur cap leapt out and ran rapidly towards them, only to be assured by Turnbull, who, unlike many of his school, really knew a little science when he invoked it to redeem the world. He's all right, said he. He's quite safe, but I'm afraid he won't be able to drive the car for half an hour or so. I can drive the car, said the young woman in the fur cap with stony practicability. Oh, in that case, began Mackeon uneasily, and that paralyzing shyness which is a part of romance induced him to make a backward movement as if leaving her to herself. But Turnbull was more rational than he, being more indifferent. I don't think you ought to drive home alone, ma'am, he said, gruffly. There seem to be a lot of rowdy parties along this road, and the man will be no use for an hour. If you will tell us where you are going, we will see you safely there and say good night. The young lady exhibited all the abrupt disturbance of a person who was not commonly disturbed. She said almost sharply and yet with evident sincerity, Of course I am awfully grateful to you for all you've done, and there's plenty of room if you'll come in. Turnbull, with the complete innocence of an absolutely sound motive, immediately jumped into the car. But the girl cast an eye at Mackeon, who stood in the road for an instant as if rooted like a tree. Then he also tumbled his long legs into the tonneau, having that sense of degradedly diving into heaven which so many have known in so many human houses when they consented to stop for tea or were allowed to stop to supper. The slowly reviving chauffeur was set in the back seat. Turnbull and Mackeon had fallen into the middle one. The lady with the steely coolness had taken the driver's seat and all the handles of that headlong machine. A moment afterwards the engine started with a throb and leap unfamiliar to Turnbull, who had only once been in a motor during a general election and utterly unknown to Mackeon, who in his present mood thought it was the end of the world. Almost at the same instant that the car plucked itself out of the mud and whipped away up the road, the man who had been flung into the ditch rose waveringly to his feet. When he saw the car escaping, he ran after it and shouted something which, owing to the increasing distance, could not be heard. It is awful to reflect that, if his remark was valuable, it is quite lost to the world. The car shot on up and down the shining moonlit lanes, and there was no sound in it except the occasional click or catch of its machinery, for through some cause or other no soul inside it could think of a word to say. The lady symbolized her feelings, whatever they were, by urging the machine faster and faster until scattered woodlands went by them in one black blotch and heavy hills and valleys seemed to ripple under the wheels like mere waves. A little while afterwards this mood seemed to slacken and she fell into a more ordinary pace, but still she did not speak. Turnbull, who kept a more common and sensible view of the case than anyone else, made some remark about the moonlight, but something indescribable made him also relapse into silence. All this time McKeehan had been in a sort of monstrous delirium, like some fabulous hero snatched up into the moon. The difference between this experience and common experiences was analogous to that between waking life and a dream. Yet he did not feel in the least as if he were dreaming, rather the other way, as waking was more actual than dreaming, so this seemed by another degree more actual than waking itself. But it was another life altogether like a cosmos with a new dimension. He felt he had been hurled into some new incarnation, into the midst of new relations, wrongs and rites, with towering responsibilities and almost tragic joys which he had as yet had no time to examine. Heaven had not merely sent him a message, Heaven itself had opened around him and given him an hour of its own ancient and star-shattering energy. He had never felt so much alive before, and yet he was like a man in a trance. And if you had asked him on what his throbbing happiness hung, he could only have told you that it hung on four or five visible facts as a curtain hangs on four or five fixed nails. The fact that the lady had a little fur at her throat, the fact that the curve of her cheek was a low and lean curve and that the moonlight caught the height of her cheekbone, the fact that her hands were small but heavily gloved as they gripped the steering wheel, the fact that a white witch-light was on the road, the fact that the brisk breeze of their passage stirred and fluttered a little, not only the brown hair of her head, but the black fur on her cap. All these facts were to him certain and incredible like sacraments. When they had driven half a mile farther, a big shadow was flung across the path, followed by its bulky owner, who eyed the car critically but let it pass. The silver moonlight picked out a piece or two of pewter ornament on his blue uniform, and as they went by they knew it was a sergeant of police. Three hundred yards farther on another policeman stepped out into the road as if to stop them, then seemed to doubt his own authority and stepped back again. The girl was a daughter of the rich, and this police suspicion, under which all the poor lived day and night, stung her for the first time into speech. What can they mean? she cried out in a kind of temper. This car is going like a snail. There was a short silence, and then Turnbull said, It is certainly very odd, you are driving quietly enough. You are driving nobly, said McKeon, and his words, which had no meaning whatever, sounded hoarse and ungainly even in his own ears. They passed the next mile and a half swiftly and smoothly, yet among the many things which they passed in the course of it was a clump of eager policemen standing at a crossroad. As they passed one of the policemen shouted something to the others, but nothing else happened. Eight hundred yards farther on, Turnbull stood up suddenly in the swaying car. My God, McKeon! he called out, showing his first emotion of that night. I don't believe it's the pace. It couldn't be the pace. I believe it's us. McKeon sat motionless for a few moments and then turned up at his companion a face that was as white as the moon above it. You may be right, he said at last, if you are I must tell her. I will tell the lady if you like, said Turnbull, with his unconquered good temper. You, said McKeon, with a sort of sincere and instinctive astonishment, why should you know I must tell her, of course? And he leaned forward and spoke to the lady in the fur cap. I am afraid, madame, that we may have got you into some trouble, he said, and even as he said it it sounded wrong, like everything he said to this particular person in the long gloves. The fact is, he resumed desperately, the fact is we are being chased by the police. Then the last flattening hammer fell upon poor Evan's embarrassment, for the fluffy brown head with the furry black cap did not turn by a section of the compass. We are chased by the police, repeated McKeon vigorously, then he added, as if beginning an explanation, you see I am a Catholic. The wind whipped back a curl of the brown hair, so as to necessitate a new theory of aesthetics touching the line of the cheekbone, but the head did not turn. You see, began McKeon again blunderingly, this gentleman wrote in his newspaper that our lady was a common woman, a bad woman, and so we agreed to fight, and we were fighting quite a little time ago, but that was before we saw you. The young lady driving her car had half turned her face to listen, and it was not a reverent or a patient face that she showed him. Her Norman nose was tilted a trifle too high upon the slim stock of her neck and body. When McKeon saw that arrogant and uplifted profile penciled plainly against the moonshine, he accepted an ultimate defeat. He had expected the angels to despise him if he were wrong, but not to despise him so much as this. You see, said the stumbling spokesman, I was angry with him when he insulted the mother of God, and I asked him to fight a duel with me, but the police are all trying to stop it. Nothing seemed to waver or flicker in the fair young falcon profile, and it only opened its lips to say, after a silence, I thought people in our time were supposed to respect each other's religion. Under the shadow of that arrogant face, McKeon could only fall back on the obvious answer. But what about a man's irreligion? The face only answered, Well, you ought to be more broad-minded. If anyone else in the world had said the words, McKeon would have snorted with his equine naïve scorn. But in this case he seemed knocked down by a superior simplicity, as if his eccentric attitude were rebuked by the innocence of a child. He could not dissociate anything that this woman said or did or wore from an idea of spiritual rarity and virtue. Like most others under the same elemental passion, his soul was at present soaked in ethics. He could have applied moral terms to the material objects of her environment. If someone had spoken of her generous ribbon, or her chivalrous gloves, or her merciful shoe buckle, it would not have seemed to him nonsense. He was silent and the girl went on in a lower key, as if she were momentarily softened and a little saddened too. It won't do, you know, she said. You can't find out the truth in that way. There are such heaps of churches and people thinking different things nowadays, and they all think they are right. My uncle was a Swedenborgian. McKeon sat with bowed head, listening hungrily to her voice, but hardly to her words, and seeing his great world drama grow smaller and smaller before his eyes, until it was no bigger than a child's toy theater. The time's gone by for all that. She went on, You can't find out the real thing like that, if there is really anything to find. And she sighed rather drearily. For, like many of the women of our wealthy class, she was old and broken in thought, though young and clean enough in her emotions. Our object, said Turnbull shortly, is to make an effective demonstration. And after that word, McKeon looked at his vision again and found it smaller than ever. It would be in the newspapers, of course, said the girl. People read the newspapers, but they don't believe them or anything else, I think, and she sighed again. She drove in silence a third of a mile before she added, as if completing the sentence. Anyhow, the whole thing's quite absurd. I don't think, began Turnbull, that you quite realize, hello, hello, hello, what's this? The amateur chauffeur had been forced to bring the car to a staggering stoppage for a file of fat blue policemen made a wall across the way. A sergeant came to the side and touched his peaked cap to the lady. Beg your pardon, miss, he said with some embarrassment, for he knew her for a daughter of a dominant house. But we have reason to believe that the gentlemen in your car are, and he hesitated for a polite phrase. I am Evan McKeehan, said that gentleman, and stood up in a sort of gloomy pomp, not wholly without a touch of the sulks of a schoolboy. Yes, we will get out, sergeant, said Turnbull more easily. My name is James Turnbull. We must not incommode the lady. What are you taking them up for? asked the young woman, looking straight in front of her along the road. It's under the new act, said the sergeant almost apologetically, incurable disturbors of the peace. What will happen to them? she asked with the same frigid clearness. Westgate adult reformatory, he replied briefly. Until when? Until they are cured, said the official. Very well, sergeant, said the young lady with a sort of tired common sense. I am sure I don't want to protect criminals or go against the law, but I must tell you that these gentlemen have done me a considerable service. You won't mind drawing your men a little farther off, while I say good night to them. Men like that always misunderstand. The sergeant was profoundly disquieted from the beginning at the mere idea of arresting anyone in the company of a great lady. To refuse one of her minor requests was quite beyond his courage. The police fell back to a few yards behind the car. Turnbull took up the two swords that were their only luggage, the swords that, after so many half-duels, they were now to surrender at last. McKeon, the blood thundering in his brain at the thought of that instant of farewell, bent over, fumbled at the handle, and flung open the door to get out. But he did not get out. He did not get out because it is dangerous to jump out of a car when it is going at full speed. And the car was going at full speed because the young lady, without turning her head or so much as saying a syllable, had driven down a handle that made the engine plunge forward like a buffalo, and then fly over the landscape like a grey hound. The police made one rush to follow, and then dropped so grotesque and hopeless a chase. Away in the vanishing distance they could see the sergeant furiously making notes. The open door still left loose on its hinges, swung and banged quite crazily as they went whizzing up one road and down another. Nor did McKeon sit down. He stood up stunned and yet staring, as he would have stood up at the trumpet on the last day. A black dot in the distance, spraying up a tall black forest, swallowed them and spat them out again at the other end. A railway bridge grew larger and larger till it left upon their backs bellowing, and it was in turn left behind. Avenues of poplars on both sides of the road chased each other like the figures in a Zoe trope. Now and then with a shock and rattle they went through sleeping moonlit villages, which must have stirred an instant in their sleep as at the passing of a fugitive earthquake. Sometimes in an outlying house a light in one erratic unexpected window would give them a nameless hint of the hundred human secrets which they left behind them with their dust. Sometimes even a slouching rustic would be a foot on the road and would look after them as after a flying phantom. But still McKeon stood up staring at earth and heaven, and still the door he had flung open flapped loose like a flag. Turnbull, after a few minutes of dumb amazement, had yielded to the healthiest element in his nature and gone off into uncontrollable fits of laughter. The girl had not stirred an inch. After another half mile that seemed a mere flash, Turnbull leaned over and locked the door. Avenues staggered at last into his seat and hid his throbbing head in his hands. And still the car flew on and its driver sat inflexible and silent. The moon had already gone down and the whole darkness was faintly troubled with twilight and the first movement of beasts and fowls. It was that mysterious moment when light is coming as if it were something unknown whose nature one could not guess, a mere alteration in everything. They looked at the sky and it seemed as dark as ever. Then they saw the black shape of a tower or tree against it and knew that it was already gray. Saved that they were driving southward and had certainly passed the longitude of London, they knew nothing of their direction. But Turnbull, who had spent a year on the Hampshire coast in his youth, began to recognize the unmistakable but quite indescribable villages of the English South. Then a white witch fire began to burn between the black stems of the fir trees, and like so many things in nature, though not in books on evolution, the daybreak when it did come came much quicker than one would think. The gloomy heavens were ripped up and rolled away like a scroll, revealing splendors as the car went roaring up the curve of a great hill. And above them and black against the broadening light, there stood one of those crouching and fantastic trees that are the first signals of the sea. End of Chapter 9, Recording by Tricia G. Chapter 10 of The Ball and the Cross The sliverbox recording is in the public domain. The Ball and the Cross by G. K. Chesterton. Chapter 10 The Swords Rejoined As they came over the hill and down on the other side of it, it is not too much to say that the whole universe of God opened over them and under them, like a thing unfolding to five times its size. Almost under their feet opened the enormous sea, at the bottom of a steep valley which fell down into a bay, and the sea under their feet blazed at them almost as lustrous and almost as empty as the sky. The sunrise opened above them like some cosmic explosion, shining and shattering and yet silent, as if the world were blown to pieces without a sound. Round the rays of the victorious sun swept a sort of rainbow of confused and conquered colors, brown and blue and green, and flaming rose color, as though gold were driving before it all the colors of the world. The lines of the landscape down which they sped were the simple, strict, yet swerving lines of a rushing river, so that it was almost as if they were being sucked down in a huge still whirlpool. Turnbull had some such feeling, for he spoke for the first time for many hours. If we go down at this rate we shall be over the sea-cliff, he said. How glorious, said Mackean. When, however, they had come into the wide hollow at the bottom of that landslide, the car took a calm and graceful curve along the side of the sea, melted into the fringe of a few trees, and quietly, yet astonishingly, stopped. A belated light was burning in the broad morning in the window of a sort of lodge, or gatekeeper's cottage, and the girl stood up in the car and turned her splendid face to the sun. Evan seemed startled by the stillness, like one who had been born amid sound and speed. He wavered on his long legs as he stood up, he pulled himself together, and the only consequence was that he trembled from head to foot. Turnbull had already opened the door on his side and jumped out. The moment he had done so, the strange young woman had one more mad movement, and deliberately drove the car a few yards farther. Then she got out with an almost cruel coolness, and began pulling off her long gloves and almost whistling. You can leave me here, she said quite casually, as if they had met five minutes before. That is the lodge of my father's place. Please come in if you like, but I understand that you had some business. Evan looked at that lifted face and found it merely lovely. He was far too much of a fool to see that it was working with a final fatigue, and that its austerity was agony. He was even full enough to ask it a question. Why did you save us? he said quite humbly. The girl tore off one of her gloves as if she were tearing off her hand. Oh, I don't know, she said bitterly. Now I come to think of it, I can't imagine. Evan's thoughts that had been piled up to the morning star abruptly let him down with a crash into the very cellars of the emotional universe. He remained in a stunned silence for a long time, and that, if he had only known, was the wisest thing that he could possibly do at the moment. Indeed, the silence and the sunrise had their healing effect, for when the extraordinary lady spoke again, her tone was more friendly and apologetic. I'm not really ungrateful, she said. It was very good of you to save me from those men. But why, repeated the obstinate and dazed McKeehan, why did you save us from the other men? I mean the policemen. The girl's great brown eyes were lit up with a flash that was at once final desperation and the loosening of some private and passionate reserve. Oh, God knows, she cried. God knows that if there is a God, he had turned his big back on everything. God knows I have had no pleasure in my life, though I am pretty and young and Father has plenty of money. And then people come and tell me that I ought to do things and I do them and it's all drivel. They want you to do work among the poor, which means reading Ruskin and feeling self-righteous in the best room in a poor tenement or to help some cause or other, which always means bundling people out of crooked houses in which they've always lived into straight houses in which they often die. And all the time you have inside only the horrid irony of your own empty head and empty heart. I am to give to the unfortunate when my home misfortune is that I have nothing to give. I am to teach when I believe nothing at all that I was taught. I am to save the children from death, and I am not even certain that I should not be better dead. I suppose if I actually saw a child drowning, I should save it. But that would be from the same motive from which I have saved you or destroyed you, whichever it is that I have done. What was the motive? asked Devin in a low voice. My motive is too big for my mind, answered the girl. Then after a pause, as she stared with a rising color at the glittering sea, she said, It can't be described, and yet I am trying to describe it. It seems to me not only that I am unhappy, but that there is no way of being happy. Father is not happy, though he is a member of Parliament. She paused a moment and added with a ghost of a smile. Nor Aunt Mabel, though a man from India has told her the secret of all creeds. But I may be wrong, there may be a way out. And for one stark and sane second, I felt that, after all, you had got the way out and that was why the world hated you. You see, if there were a way out, it would be sure to be something that looked very queer. Devin put his hand to his forehead and began stumblingly. Yes, I suppose we do seem. Oh yes, you look queer enough, she said with ringing sincerity. You'll be all the better for a wash and brush up. You forget our business, madame, said Devin in a shaking voice. We have no concern but to kill each other. Well, I shouldn't be killed looking like that if I were you, she replied within human honesty. Evan stood and rolled his eyes in masculine bewilderment. Then came the final change in this proteus, and she put out both her hands for an instant and set in a low tone on which he lived for days and nights. Don't you understand that I did not dare to stop you? What you are doing is so mad that it may be quite true. Somehow one can never really manage to be an atheist. Turnbull stood staring at the sea, but his shoulders showed that he heard, and after one minute he turned his head. But the girl had only brushed Evan's hand with hers and had fled up the dark alley by the lodge gate. Evan stood rooted upon the road, literally like some heavy statue hewn there in the age of the druids. It seemed impossible that he should ever move. Turnbull grew restless with this rigidity, and at last, after calling his companion twice or thrice, went up and clapped him impatiently on one of his big shoulders. Evan winced and leapt away from him with a repulsion, which was not the hate of an unclean thing nor the dread of a dangerous one, but was a spasm of awe and separation from something from which he was now sundered as by the sword of God. He did not hate the atheist. It is possible that he loved him, but Turnbull was now something more dreadful than an enemy. He was a thing sealed and devoted, a thing now hopelessly doomed to be either a corpse or an executioner. What is the matter with you? asked Turnbull, with his hearty hand still in the air, and yet he knew more about it than his innocent action would allow. James, said Evan, speaking like one under strong bodily pain, I asked for God's answer, and I have got it, got it in my vitals. He knows how weak I am, and that I might forget the peril of the faith, forget the face of our lady. Yes, even with your blow upon her cheek. But the honor of this earth has just this about it, that it can make a man's heart like iron. I am from the lords of the Isles, and I dare not be a mere deserter. Therefore God has tied me by the chain of my worldly place and word, and there is nothing but fighting now. I think I understand you, said Turnbull, but you say everything tale for most. She wants us to do it, said Evan, in a voice crushed with passion. She has hurt herself so that we might do it. She has left her good name and her good sleep, and all her habits and dignity flung away on the other side of England in the hope that she may hear of us, and that we have broken some hole into heaven. I thought I knew what you mean, said Turnbull, biting his beard. It does seem as if we ought to do something after all she has done this night. I never liked you so much before, said McKee and inviter Sorrow. As he spoke, three solemn footmen came out of the lodge gate and assembled to assist the chauffeur to his room. The mere sight of them made the two wanderers flee as from a too frightful incongruity, and before they knew where they were, they were well upon the grassy ledge of England that overlooks the channel. Evan said suddenly, Will they let me see her in heaven once in a thousand ages? And addressed the remark to the editor of the atheist, as on which he would be likely or qualified to answer. But no answer came, a silence sank between the two. Turnbull strode sturdily to the edge of the cliff and looked out, his companion following, somewhat more shaken by his recent agitation. If that's the view you take, said Turnbull, and I don't say you are wrong, I think I know where we shall be best off for the business. As it happens, I know this part of the south coast pretty well, and unless I am mistaken, there's a way down the cliff just here, which will land us on a stretch of firm sand, where no one is likely to follow us. The Highlander made a gesture of ascent and came also almost to the edge of the precipice. The sunrise, which was broadening over sea and shore, was one of those rare and splendid ones in which there seems to be no mist or doubt, and nothing but a universal clarification more and more complete. All the colors were transparent. It seemed like a triumphant prophecy of some perfect world, where everything being innocent will be intelligible. A world where even our bodies, so to speak, may be as of burning glass. Such a world is faintly, though fiercely figured, in the colored windows of Christian architecture. The sea that lay before them was like a pavement of emerald bright and almost brittle. The sky against which its strict horizon hung was almost absolutely white, except that close to the skyline, like scarlet braids on the hem of a garment, lay strings of flaky cloud of so gleaming and gorgeous a red that they seemed cut out of some strange blood-red celestial metal, of which the mere gold of this earth is but a drab yellow imitation. The hand of heaven is still pointing, muttered the man of superstition to himself, and now it is a blood-red hand. The cool voice of his companion cutting upon his monologue, calling to him from a little farther along the cliff, to tell him that he had found the ladder of descent. It began as a steep and somewhat greasy path, which then tumbled down twenty or thirty feet in the form of a fall of rough stone steps. After that there was a rather awkward drop onto a ledge of stone, and then the journey was undertaken easily and even elegantly by the remains of an ornamental staircase, such as might have belonged to some long-disused watering place. All the time that the two travelers sank from stage to stage of this downward journey, they're closed over their heads living bridges and caverns of the most varied foliage, all of which grew greener, redder, or more golden in the growing sunlight of the morning. Life, too, of the more moving sort rose at the sun on every side of them. Birds were then fluttered in the undergrowth as if imprisoned in green cages. Other birds were shaken up in great clouds from the treetops, as if they were blossoms detached and scattered up to heaven. Animals which Turnbull was too much of a Londoner, and McKee and too much of a Northerner to know, slipped by among the tangle or ran pattering up the tree trunks. Both the men, according to their several creeds, felt the full thunder of the Psalm of life as they had never heard it before. McKee and felt God the Father benignant in all his energies, and Turnbull that ultimate anonymous energy, that Natura Naturans, which is the whole theme of Lucretius. It was down this clamorous ladder of life that they went down to die. They broke out upon a brown semi-circle of sand, so free from human imprint as to justify Turnbull's profession. They strode out upon it, stuck their swords in the sand, and had a pause too important for speech. Turnbull eyed the coast curiously for a moment, like one awakening memories of childhood. Then he said abruptly, like a man remembering somebody's name. But, of course, we shall be better off still round the corner of Cragness Point. Nobody ever comes there at all. And picking up his sword again, he began striding towards a big bluff of the rocks which stood out upon their left. McKee and followed him round the corner, and found himself in what was certainly an even finer fencing court of flat, firm sand enclosed on three sides by white walls of rock, and on the fourth by the green wall of the advancing sea. We are quite safe here, said Turnbull, and, to the other's surprise, flung himself down, sitting on the brown beach. You see, I was brought up near here, he explained. I was sent from Scotland to stop with my aunt. It is highly probable that I may die here. Do you mind if I light a pipe? Of course, do whatever you like, said McKee in with a choking voice, and he went and walked alone by himself along the wet, glistening sands. Ten minutes afterwards he came back again, white with his own whirlwind of emotions. Turnbull was quite cheerful and was knocking out the end of his pipe. You see, we have to do it, said McKee in. She tied us to it. Of course, my dear fellow, said the other, and leapt up as lightly as a monkey. They took their places gravely in the very center of the great square of sand, as if they had thousands of spectators. Before saluting, McKee in, who, being a mystic, was one inch nearer to nature, cast his eye round the huge framework of their heroic folly. The three walls of rock all leaned a little outward, though at various angles. But this impression was exaggerated in the direction of the incredible, by the heavy load of living trees and thickets, which each wall wore on its top like a huge shock of hair. On all that luxurious crest of life, the risen and victorious sun was beating, burnishing in all like gold, and every bird that rose with that sunrise caught a light like a star upon it, like the dove of the Holy Spirit. Imaginative life had never so much crowded upon McKee in. He felt that he could write whole books about the feelings of a single bird. He felt that for two centuries he would not tire of being a rabbit. He was in the palace of life, of which the very tapestries and curtains were alive. Then he recovered himself and remembered his affairs. Both men saluted, and iron rang upon iron. It was exactly at the same moment that he realized that his enemies left ankle was encircled with a ring of salt water that had crept up to his feet. What is the matter? said Turnbull, stopping an instant, for he had grown used to every movement of his extraordinary fellow-traveler's face. McKee and glanced again at that silver anklet of seawater, and then looked beyond at the next promontory round which a deep sea was boiling and leaping. Then he turned and looked back, and saw heavy foam being shaken up to heaven about the base of Cragness Point. The sea has cut us off, he said curtly. I have noticed it, said Turnbull with equal sobriety. What view do you take of the development? Evan threw away his weapon, and, as his custom was, imprisoned his big head in his hands. Then he let them fall and said, Yes, I know what it means, and I think it is the fairest thing. It is the finger of God, read as blood, still pointing. But now it points to two graves. There was a space filled with the sound of the sea, and then McKee and spoke again in a voice pathetically reasonable. You see, we both saved her, and she told us both to fight, and it would not be just that either should fail and fall alone while the other. You mean, said Turnbull, in a voice surprisingly soft and gentle, that there is something fine about fighting in a place where even the conqueror must die? Oh, you have got it right! You have got it right! cried out Evan in an extraordinary childish ecstasy. Oh, I am sure that you really believe in God! Turnbull answered not a word, but only took up his fallen sword. For the third time, Evan McKee and looked at those three sides of English cliff hung with their noisy load of life. He had been at a loss to understand the almost ironical magnificence of all those teeming creatures and tropical colors and smells that smoked happily to heaven. But now he knew that he was in the closed court of death, and that all the gates were sealed. He drank in the last green and the last red and the last gold, those unique and indescribable things of God, as a man drains good wine at the bottom of his glass. Then he turned and saluted his enemy once more, and the two stood up and fought till the foam flowed over their knees. Then McKee and stepped backward suddenly with a splash and held up his hand. Turnbull, he cried, I can't help it. Fair fighting is more even than promises, and this is not fair fighting. What the deuce do you mean? cried the other, staring. I've only just thought of it, cried Evan brokenly. We're very well matched. It may go on a good time. The tide is coming up fast, and I'm a foot and a half taller. You'll be washed away like seaweed before it's above my breeches. I'll not fight foul for all the girls and angels in the universe. Will you oblige me, said Turnbull, with staring gray eyes and a voice of distinct and violent politeness? Will you oblige me by jolly well minding your own business? Just you stand up and fight, and we'll see who will be washed away like seaweed. You wanted to finish this fight, and you shall finish it, or I'll denounce you as a coward to the whole of that assembled company. Evan looked very doubtful and offered a somewhat wavering weapon, but he was quickly brought back to his senses by his opponent's sword-point, which shot past him, shaving his shoulder by a hair. By this time the waves were well up Turnbull's thigh, and what was worse, they were beginning to roll and break heavily around them. McKeean parried this first lunge perfectly, the next less perfectly, the third in all human probability he would not have parried at all. The Christian champion would have been pinned like a butterfly, and the atheistic champion left to drown like a rat, with such consolation as his view of the cosmos afforded him. But just as Turnbull launched his heaviest stroke, the sea in which he stood up to his hips launched a yet heavier one. A wave breaking beyond the others smote him heavily like a hammer of water. One leg gave way, he was swung round and sucked into the retreating sea, still gripping his sword. McKeean put his sword between his teeth and plunged after his disappearing enemy. He had the sense of having the whole universe on top of him, as crest after crest struck him down. It seemed to him quite a cosmic collapse, as if all the seven heavens were falling on him one after the other. But he got hold of the atheists' left leg, and he did not let go. After some ten minutes of foam and frenzy, in which all the senses at once seemed blasted by the sea, Evan found himself laboriously swimming on a low green swell, with the sword still in his teeth, and the editor of the atheist still under his arm. What he was going to do, he had not even the most glimmering idea, so he merely kept his grip and swam somehow with one hand. He ducked instinctively as there bulked above him a big black wave, much higher than any that he had seen. Then he saw that it was hardly the shape of any possible wave. Then he saw that it was a fisherman's boat, and, leaping upward, caught hold of the bow. The boat pitched forward with its stern in the air for just as much time as was needed to see that there was nobody in it. After a moment or two of desperate clambering, however, there were two people in it, Mr. Evan McKeehan, panting and sweating, and Mr. James Turnbull, uncommonly close to being drowned. After ten minutes aimless tossing in the empty fishing boat, he recovered, however, stirred, stretched himself, and looked round on the rolling waters. Then, while taking no notice of the streams of saltwater that were pouring from his hair, beard, coat, boots, and trousers, he carefully wiped the wet off his sword-blade to preserve it from the possibilities of rust. McKeehan found two oars in the bottom of the deserted boat, and began somewhat drearily to row. A rainy twilight was clearing to cold silver over the moaning sea, when the battered boat that had rolled and drifted almost aimlessly all night came within sight of land, though of land which looked almost as lost and savage as the waves. All night there had been but little lifting in the leaden sea, only now and then the boat had been heaved up as on a huge shoulder which slipped from under it. Such occasional sea-quakes came probably from the swell of some steamer that had passed it in the dark, otherwise the waves were harmless though restless. But it was piercingly cold, and there was, from time to time, a splutter of rain like the splutter of the spray, which seemed almost to freeze as it fell. McKeehan, more at home than his companion in this quite barbarous and elemental sort of adventure, had rowed toilsomely with the heavy oars whenever he saw anything that looked like land, but for the most part had trusted with grim transcendentalism to wind and tide. Among the implements of their first outfit the brandy alone had remained to him, and he gave it to his freezing companion in quantities which greatly alarmed that temperate Londoner. But McKeehan came from the cold seas and mists where a man can drink a tumbler of raw whiskey in a boat without it making him wink. When the Highlander began to pull really hard upon the oars, Turnbull creamed his dripping red head out of the boat to see the goal of his exertions. It was a sufficiently uninviting one, nothing so far as could be seen but a steep and shelving bank of shingle made of loose little pebbles such as children like, but slanting up higher than a house. On the top of the mound against the skyline stood up the brown skeleton of some broken fence or breakwater. With the gray and watery dawn crawling up behind it, the fence really seemed to say to our philosophic adventurers that they had come at last to the other end of nowhere. Bent by necessity to his labor, McKeehan managed the heavy boat with real power and skill, and when at length he ran it up on a smoother part of the slope, it caught and held so that they could clamber out, not sinking farther than their knees into the water and the shingle. A foot or two farther up their feet found the beach firmer, and a few moments afterwards they were leaning on the ragged breakwater and looking back at the sea they had escaped. They had a dreary walk across wastes of gray shingle in the gray dawn before they began to come with inhale of human fields or roads, nor had they any notion of what fields or roads they would be. Their boots were beginning to break up and the confusion of stones tried them severely so that they were glad to lean on their swords as if they were the staves of pilgrims. McKeehan thought vaguely of a weird ballad of his own country, which described the soul in purgatory as walking on a plain full of sharp stones and only saved by its own charities upon earth. If thou gavest Hosan and Shun every night and all, sit thee down and put them on, and Christ receive thy soul. Turnbull had no such lyrical meditations, but he was in an even worse temper. At length they came to a pale ribbon of road, edged by a shelf of rough and almost colorless turf, and a few feet up the slope there stood gray and weather-stained, one of those big wayside crucifixes which are seldom seen except in Catholic countries. McKeehan put his hand to his head and found that his bonnet was not there. Turnbull gave one glance at the crucifix, a glance at one sympathetic and bitter, in which was concentrated the whole of Swinburne's poem on the same occasion. O hidden face of man, whereover the years have woven a viewless veil, if thou wert barely man's lover, what did thy love or blood avail? Thy blood the priests mix poison of, and in gold shekels coin they love. Then, leaving McKeehan in his attitude of prayer, Turnbull began to look right and left very sharply, like one looking for something. Suddenly, with a little cry, he saw it and ran forward. A few yards from them, along the road, a lean and starved sort of hedge came pitifully to an end. Caught upon its prickly angle, however, there was a very small and very dirty scrap of paper that might have hung there for months since it escaped from someone tearing up a letter or making a spill out of a newspaper. Turnbull snatched at it and found that it was the corner of a printed page, very coarsely printed, like a cheap novelette, and just large enough to contain the words, at Seh Eleki. Hurrah! cried Turnbull, waving his fragment. We are safe at last. We are free at last. We are somewhere better than England or Eden or Paradise. McKeehan, we are in the land of the dual. Where do you say? said the other, looking at him heavily and with knitted brows, like one almost dazed with the gray doubts of desolate twilight and drifting sea. We are in France, cried Turnbull, with a voice like a trumpet, in the land where things really happen. Tout arrive in France. We arrive in France. Look at this little message, and he held out the scrap of paper. There is an omen for you superstitious hill folk. Seh Eleki, my we, my we, Seh Eleki, sa vera encore le monde. France, repeated McKeehan, and his eyes awoke again in his head, like large lamps lighted. Yes, France, said Turnbull, and all the rhetorical part of him came to the top, his face growing as red as his hair. France, that has always been in rebellion for liberty and reason. France, that has always assailed superstition with the club of Ravallet or the rapier of Voltaire. France, at whose first council table sits the sublime figure of Julian the Apostate. France, where a man said only the other day, though splendid unanswerable words, with a superb gesture, we have extinguished in heaven those lights that men shall never light again. No, said McKeehan, with a voice that shook with controlled passion. But France, which was taught by Saint Bernard and led to war by Joan of Arc. France, that made the crusades. France, that saved the church and scattered the heresies by the mouths of Bosse and Massillon. France, which shows today the conquering march of Catholicism, as brain after brain surrenders to it. Brunetier, Coppe, Hauptmann, Barret, Bougé, Le Matier. France, asserted Turnbull with a sort of rollicking self-exaggeration, very unusual with him. France, which is one torrent of splendid skepticism, from Abelard to Anatole, France. France, said McKeehan, which is one cataract of clear faith from Saint Louis to our Lady of Lourdes. France, at least, cried Turnbull, throwing up his sword in schoolboy triumph, in which these things are thought about and fought about. France, where reason and religion clash in one continual tournament. France, above all, where men understand the pride and passion which have plucked our blades from their scabbards. Here, at least, we shall not be chased and spied on by sickly Parsons and greasy policemen, because we wish to put our lives on the game. Courage, my friend, we have come to the country of honor. McKeehan did not even notice the incongruous phrase, my friend, but nodding again and again drew his sword and flung the scabbard far behind him in the road. Yes, he cried in a voice of thunder, we shall fight here and he shall look on at it. Turnbull glanced at the crucifix with a sort of scowling good humor and then said, he may look and see his cross defeated. The cross cannot be defeated, said McKeehan, for it is defeat. A second afterwards, the two bright, bloodthirsty weapons made the sign of the cross in horrible parody upon each other. They had not touched each other twice, however, when upon the hill above the crucifix there appeared another horrible parody of its shape, the figure of a man who appeared for an instant waving his outspread arms. He had vanished in an instant, but McKeehan, whose fighting face was set that way, had seen the shape momentarily but quite photographically. And while it was like a comic repetition of the cross, it was also, in that place an hour, something more incredible. It had been only instantaneously on the retina of his eye, but unless his eye and mind were going mad together, the figure was that of an ordinary London policeman. He tried to concentrate his senses on the sword play, but one half of his brain was wrestling with the puzzle, the apocalyptic and almost seraphic apparition of a stout constable out of Clapham on top of a dreary and deserted hill in France. He did not, however, have to puzzle long. Before the dualists had exchanged half a dozen passes, the big blue policeman appeared once more on the top of the hill, a palpable monstrosity in the eye of heaven. He was waving only one arm now and seemed to be shouting directions. At the same moment, a mass of blue blocked the corner of the road behind the small smart figure of Turnbull, and a small company of policemen in the English uniform came up at a kind of half military double. Turnbull saw the stare of consternation in his enemy's face and swung round to share its cause. When he saw it, cool as he was, he staggered back. What the devil are you doing here? he cried out in a high, shrill voice of authority, like one who finds a tramp in his own larder. Well, sir, said the sergeant in command, with that sort of heavy civility shown only to the evidently guilty, seems to me we might ask what you are doing here. We are having an affair of honor, said Turnbull, as if it were the most rational thing in the world. If the French police like to interfere, let them interfere. But why the blue blazes should you interfere, you great blue blundering sausages? I am afraid, sir, said the sergeant with restraint. I am afraid I don't quite follow you. I mean, why don't the French police take this up if it's got to be taken up? I always heard that they were spry enough in their own way. Well, sir, said the sergeant reflectively. You see, sir, the French police don't take this up. Well, because you see, sir, this ain't France. This is his Majesty's dominions, same as Amp Steady's. Not France, repeated Turnbull with a sort of dull incredulity. No, sir, said the sergeant, though most of the people talk French, this is the island called Saint Loupe, sir, an island in the Channel. We've been sent down specially from London, as you are such specially distinguished criminals, if you'll allow me to say so, which reminds me to warn you that anything you say may be used against you at your trial. Quite so, said Turnbull, and lurched suddenly against the sergeant, so as to tip him over the edge of the road with a crash into the shingle below. Then, leaving Mackeon and the policemen equally and instantaneously nailed to the road, he ran a little way along it, leapt off onto a part of the beach, which he had found in his journey to be firmer, and went across it with a clatter of pebbles. His sudden calculation was successful. The police, unacquainted with the various levels of the loose beach, tried to overtake him by the shorter cut, and found themselves being heavy men, almost up to their knees in shoals of slippery shingle. Two who had been slower with their bodies were quicker with their minds, and seeing Turnbull's trick, ran along the edge of the road after him. Then Mackeon finally awoke, and leaving half his sleeve in the grip of the only man who tried to hold him, took the two policemen in the small of their backs with the impetus of a cannonball, and, sending them also flat among the stones, went tearing after his twin defyre of the law. As they were both good runners, the start they had gained was decisive. They dropped over a high breakwater farther on upon the beach, turned sharply, and scrambled up a line of ribbed rocks, crowned with a thicket, crawled through it, scratching their hands and faces, and dropped into another road, and there found that they could slacken their speed into a steady trot. In all this desperate dart and scramble, they still kept hold of their drawn swords, which now, indeed, in the vigorous frays of Bunyan seemed almost to grow out of their hands. They had run another half mile or so when it became apparent that they were entering a sort of scattered village. One or two whitewashed cottages, and even a shop, had appeared along the side of the road. Then, for the first time, Turnbull twisted round his red head to get a glimpse of his companion, who was a foot or two behind, and remarked abruptly, Mr. McKeehan, we've been going the wrong way to work all along. We're traced everywhere, because everybody knows about us. It's as if one went about with Kruger's beard on mafficking night. What do you mean? said McKeehan innocently. I mean, said Turnbull, with steady conviction, that what we want is a little diplomacy, and I'm going to buy some in a shop. End of Chapter 10, Recording by Tricia G. Chapter 11 of The Ball and the Cross The slipper-box recording is in the public domain. The Ball and the Cross by G. K. Chesterton. Chapter 11 A Scandal in the Village In the little hamlet of Heroc in the Isle of St. Luke, there lived a man who, though living under the English flag, was absolutely untypical of the French tradition. He was quite unnoticeable, but that was exactly where he was quite himself. He was not even extraordinarily French, but then it is against the French tradition to be extraordinarily French. Ordinary Frenchmen would only have thought him a little old-fashioned. Imperialistic Englishmen would really have mistaken him for the old John Bull of the caricatures. He was stout. He was quite undistinguished. He had side whiskers worn just a little longer than John Bulls. He was by name Pierre Durand. He was by trade a wine merchant. He was by politics a conservative Republican. He had been brought up a Catholic, had always thought and acted as an agnostic, and was very mildly returning to the church in his later years. He had a genius, if one can even use so wild a word in connection with so tame a person, a genius for saying the conventional thing on every conceivable subject, or rather what we in England would call the conventional thing. For it was not convention with him, but solid and manly conviction. Convention implies can't or affection, and he had not the faintest smell of either. He was simply an ordinary citizen with ordinary views, and if you had told him so, he would have taken it as an ordinary compliment. If you had asked him about women, he would have said that one must preserve their domesticity and decorum. He would have used the staleest words, but he would have in reserve the strongest arguments. If you had asked him about government, he would have said that all citizens are free and equal, but he would have meant what he said. If you had asked him about education, he would have said that the young must be trained up in the habits of industry and of respect for their parents. Still, he would have set them the example of industry, and he would have been one of the parents whom they could respect. A state of mind so hopelessly central is depressing to the English instinct. But then in England, a man announcing these platitudes is generally a fool, and a frightened fool, announcing them out of mere social servility. But Durand was anything but a fool. He had read all the eighteenth century, and could have defended his platitudes round every angle of eighteenth-century argument. And certainly he was anything but a coward. Swollen and sedentary as he was, he could have hit any man back who touched him with the instant violence of an automatic machine, and dying in a uniform would have seemed to him only the sort of thing that sometimes happens. I am afraid it is impossible to explain this monster amid the exaggerative sex and the eccentric clubs of my country. He was merely a man. He lived in a little villa which was furnished well with comfortable chairs and tables, and highly uncomfortable classical pictures and medallions. The yard in his home contained nothing between the two extremes of hard, meager designs of Greek heads and Roman togas, and on the other side a few very vulgar Catholic images in the crudest colors. These were mostly in his daughter's room. He had recently lost his wife, whom he had loved heartily and rather heavily in complete silence, and upon whose grave he was constantly in the habit of placing hideous little reeds made out of a sort of black and white beads. To his only daughter he was equally devoted, though he restricted her a good deal under a sort of theoretic alarm about her innocence, an alarm which was peculiarly unnecessary, first because she was an exceptionally reticent and religious girl, and secondly because there was hardly anybody else in the place. Madeline Durand was physically a sleepy young woman, and might easily have been supposed to be morally a lazy one. It is, however, certain that the work of her house was done somehow, and it is even more rapidly ascertainable that nobody else did it. The logician is, therefore, driven back upon the assumption that she did it, and that lends a sort of mysterious interest to her personality at the beginning. She had very broad, low, and level brows, which seemed even lower because her warm yellow hair clustered down to her eyebrows, and she had a face just plump enough not to look as powerful as it was. Anything that was heavy in all this was abruptly lightened by two large, light China blue eyes, lightened all of a sudden as if it had been lifted into the air by two big blue butterflies. The rest of her was less than middle-sized, and was of a casual and comfortable sort, and she had this difference from such girls as the girl in the motor car, that one did not inclined to take in her figure at all, but only her broad and leonine and innocent head. Both the father and the daughter were of the sort that would normally have avoided all observation, that is, all observation in that extraordinary modern world which calls out everything except strength. Both of them had strength below the surface. They were like quiet peasants owning enormous and uncorried minds. The father with his square face and gray side whiskers, the daughter with her square face and golden fringe of hair, were both stronger than they know, stronger than anyone knew. The father believed in civilization in the storied tower we have erected to a front nature, that is, the father believed in man, the daughter believed in God and was even stronger. They neither of them believed in themselves, for that is a decadent weakness. The daughter was called a devotee. She left upon ordinary people the impression, the somewhat irritating impression, produced by such a person. It can only be described as the sense of strong water being perpetually poured into some abyss. She did her housework easily. She achieved her social relations sweetly. She was never neglectful and never unkind. This accounted for all that was soft in her, but not for all that was hard. She trod firmly as if going somewhere. She flung her face back as if defying something. She hardly spoke a cross word, yet there was often battle in her eyes. The modern man asked doubtfully where all this silent energy went to. He would have stared still more doubtfully if he had been told that it all went into her prayers. The conventions of the Isle of St. Luke were necessarily a compromise or confusion between those of France and England, and it was vaguely possible for a respectable young lady to have half-attached lovers in a way that would be impossible to the bourgeoisie of France. One man in particular had made himself an unmistakable figure in the track of this girl as she went to church. He was a short, prosperous-looking man whose long, bushy-black beard and clumsy black umbrella made him seem both shorter and older than he really was, but whose big, bold eyes and steps that spurned the ground gave him an instant character of youth. His name was Camille Baire, and he was a commercial traveller who had only been in the island an idle week before he began to hover in the tracks of Madeline Durand. Since everyone knows everyone in so small a place, Madeline certainly knew him to speak to, but it was not very evident that she ever spoke. He haunted her, however, especially at church, which was indeed one of the few certain places for finding her. In her home she had a habit of being invisible, sometimes through insatiable domesticity, sometimes through an equally insatiable solitude. Monsieur Baire did not give the impression of a pious man, though he did give, especially with his eyes, the impression of an honest one. But he went to mass with a simple exactitude that could not be mistaken for a pose or even for a vulgar fascination. It was perhaps this religious regularity which eventually drew Madeline into recognition of him. At least it is certain that she spoke twice to him with her square and open smile in the porch of the church, and there was human nature enough in the hamlet to turn even that into gossip. But the real interest arose suddenly as a squalorizes with the extraordinary affair that occurred about five days after. There was, about a third of a mile beyond the village of Heroc, a large but lonely hotel upon the London or Paris model, but commonly almost entirely empty. Among the accidental group of guests who had come to it at this season was a man whose nationality no one could fix and who bore the non-committal name of Count Gregory. He treated everybody with complete civility and almost in complete silence. On the few occasions when he spoke, he spoke either French, English, or once to the priest, Latin, and the general opinion was that he spoke them all wrong. He was a large lean man with a stoop of an aged eagle and even the eagles' nose to complete it. He had old-fashioned military whiskers and mustache dyed with a garish and highly incredible yellow. He had a dress of a showy gentleman and the manners of a decayed gentleman. He seemed, as with a sort of simplicity, to be trying to be a dandy when he was too old even to know that he was old. Yet he was decidedly a handsome figure with his curled yellow hair and lean fastidious face, and he wore a peculiar frock coat of bright turquoise blue with an unknown order pinned to it, and he carried a large and heavy cane. Despite his silence and his dandified dress and whiskers, the island might never have heard of him but for the extraordinary event of which I have spoken, which fell about in the following way. In such casual atmospheres only the enthusiastic go to benediction, and as the warm blue twilight closed over the little candle-lit church and village, the line of worshipers who went home from the former to the latter thinned out until it broke. On one such evening, at least, no one was in church except the quiet, unconquerable Madeline, four old women, one fisherman, and, of course, the irrepressible Monsieur Camille Bairre. The others seemed to melt away afterwards into the peacock colors of the dim green grass and the dark blue sky. Even Durand was invisible instead of being merely reverentially remote, and Madeline set forth through the patch of black forest alone. She was not in the least afraid of loneliness, because she was not afraid of devils. I think they were afraid of her. In a clearing of the wood, however, which was lit up with the last patch of the perishing sunlight, there advanced upon her suddenly one who was more startling than a devil, the incomprehensible Count Gregory, with his yellow hair-like flame and his face like the white ashes of the flame, was advancing bare-headed towards her, flinging out his arms and his long fingers with a frantic gesture. We are alone here, he cried, and you would be at my mercy, only that I am at yours. Then his frantic hands fell by his sides and he looked up under his brows with an expression that went well with his hard breathing. Madeline Durand had come to a halt at first in childish wonder, and now, with more than masculine self-control, I fancy I know your face, sir, she said, as if to gain time. I know I shall not forget yours, said the other, and extended once more his ungainly arms in an unnatural gesture. Then of a sudden there came out of him a spout of wild and yet pompous phrases. It is as well that you should know the worst and the best. I am a man who knows no limit. I am the most callous of criminals, the most unrepentant of sinners. There is no man in my dominions so vile as I. But my dominions stretch from the olives of Italy to the fur woods of Denmark, and there is no nook of all of them in which I have not done a sin. But when I bear you away I shall be doing my first sacrilege and also my first act of virtue. He seized her suddenly by the elbow, and she did not scream but only pulled and tugged. Yet though she had not screamed, someone astray in the woods seemed to have heard the struggle. A short but nimble figure came along the woodland path like a humming bullet, and had caught Count Gregory a crack across the face before his own could be recognized. When it was recognized it was that of Camille with the black elderly beard and the young ardent eyes. Up to the moment when Camille had hit the Count, Madeline had entertained no doubt that the Count was merely a madman. Now she was startled with a new sanity, for the tall man in the yellow whiskers and yellow mustache first returned the blow of bear as if it were a sort of duty, and then stepped back with a slight bow and an easy smile. This need go no further here, Monsieur Bear, he said. I need not remind you how far it should go elsewhere. Certainly you need remind me of nothing, answered Camille stolidly. I am glad you are just not too much of a scoundrel for a gentleman to fight. We are detaining the lady, said Count Gregory with politeness, and making a gesture suggesting that he would have taken off his hat if he had had one, he strode away up the avenue of trees and eventually disappeared. He was so complete an aristocrat that he could offer his back to them all the way up that avenue, and his back never once looked uncomfortable. You must allow me to see you home, said Bear to the girl in a gruff and almost stifled voice. I think we have only a little way to go. Only a little way, she said, and smiled once more that night in spite of fatigue and fear and the world and the flesh and the devil. The glowing and transparent blue of twilight had long been covered by the opaque and slate-like blue of night when he handed her to the lamp-lit interior of her home. He went out himself into the darkness walking sturdily but tearing at his black beard. All the French or semi-French gentry of the district considered this a case in which a duel was natural and inevitable, and neither party had any difficulty in finding seconds strangers as they were in the place. Two small landowners, who were careful practicing Catholics, willingly undertook to represent that strict churchgoer, Camille Bear. While the profligate but apparently powerful Count Gregory found friends in an energetic local doctor who was ready for social promotion and an accidental Californian tourist who was ready for anything. As no particular purpose could be served by delay, it was arranged that the affair should fall out three days afterwards, and when this was settled the whole community, as it were, turned over again in bed and thought no more about the matter. At least there was only one member of it who seemed to be restless, and that was she who was commonly most restful. On the next night Madeline Durand went to church as usual, and as usual the stricken Camille was there also. What was not so usual was that when they were a bow shot from the church, Madeline turned round and walked back to him. Sir, she began, It is not wrong of me to speak to you. And the very words gave him a jar of unexpected truth, for in all the novels he had ever read she would have begun. It is wrong of me to speak to you. She went on with wide and serious eyes like in animals. It is not wrong of me to speak to you, because your soul or anybody's soul matters so much more than what the world says about anybody. I want to talk to you about what you are going to do. Bear saw in front of him the inevitable heroine of the novels trying to prevent bloodshed, and his pale, firm face became implacable. I would do anything but that for you, he said, but no man can be called less than a man. She looked to him for a moment with a face openly puzzled, and then broke into an odd and beautiful half-smile. Oh, I don't mean that, she said. I don't talk about what I don't understand. No one has ever hit me, and if they had, I should not feel as a man may. I am sure it is not the best thing to fight. It would be better to forgive, if one could really forgive. But when people dine with my father and say that fighting a duel is mere murder, of course I can see that is not just. It's all so different having a reason and letting the other man know and using the same guns and things and doing it in front of your friends. I'm awfully stupid, but I know that men like you aren't murderers. But it wasn't that that I meant. What did you mean? asked the other, looking broodingly at the earth. Don't you know, she said, there is only one more celebration. I thought that as you always go to church, I thought you would communicate this morning. Bear stepped backward with a sort of action she had never seen in him before. It seemed to alter his whole body. You may be right or wrong to risk dying, said the girl simply. The poor women in our village risk it whenever they have a baby. You men are the other half of the world. I know nothing about when you ought to die. But surely if you are daring to try and find God beyond the grave and appeal to him, you ought to let him find you when he comes and stands there every morning in our little church. And Placid as she was, she made a little gesture of argument of which the pathos rung the heart. Monsieur Camille Bear was by no means Placid. Before that incomplete gesture and frankly pleading face, he retreated as if from the jaws of a dragon. His dark black hair and beard looked utterly unnatural against the startling pallor of his face. When at last he said something it was, oh God, I can't stand this. He did not say it in French, nor did he strictly speaking say it in English. The truth, interesting only to anthropologists, is that he said it in Scotch. There will be another mass in a matter of eight hours, said Madeleine with a sort of business eagerness and energy. And you can do it then before the fighting. You must forgive me, but I was so frightened that you would not do it at all. Bear seemed to crush his teeth together until they broke and managed to stay between them. And why should you suppose that I shouldn't do as you say? I mean not to do it at all. You always go to mass, answered the girl, opening her wide blue eyes, and the mass is very long and tiresome unless one loves God. Then it was that Bear exploded with a brutality which might have come from Count Gregory, his criminal opponent. He advanced upon Madeleine with flaming eyes and almost took her by the two shoulders. I do not love God, he cried, speaking French with the broadest Scotch accent. I do not want to find him. I do not think he is there to be found. I must burst up the show. I must and will say everything. You are the happiest and honestest thing I ever saw in this godless universe, and I am the dirtiest and most dishonest. Madeleine looked at him doubtfully for an instant, and then said with a sudden simplicity and cheerfulness, Oh, but if you are really sorry, it is all right. If you are horribly sorry, it is all the better. You have only to go and tell the priest so, and he will give you God out of his own hands. I hate your priest and I deny your God, cried the man, and I tell you, God is a lie and a fable and a mask. And for the first time in my life I do not feel superior to God. What can it all mean? said Madeleine in massive wonder. Because I am a fable also and a mask, said the man. He had been plucking fiercely at his black beard and hair all the time. Now he suddenly plucked them off and flung them like molted feathers in the mire. This extraordinary spoliation left in the sunlight the same face, but a much younger head, a head with close chestnut curls and a short chestnut beard. Now you know the truth, he answered with hard eyes. I am a cad who has played a crooked trick on a quiet village and a decent woman for a private reason of his own. I might have played it successfully on any other woman. I have hit the one woman on whom it cannot be played. It is just like my damned luck. The plain truth is. And here when he came to the plain truth, he boggled and blundered as Evan had done in telling it to the girl in the motor car. The plain truth is, he said at last, that I am James Turnbull the atheist. The police are after me, not for atheism, but for being ready to fight for it. I saw something about you in the newspaper, said the girl, with a simplicity which even surprise could never throw off its balance. Evan McKean said there was a god, went on the other stubbornly, and I say there isn't, and I have come to fight for the fact that there is no god. It is for that that I have seen this cursed island and your blessed face. You want me really to believe, said Madeline, with parted lips, that you think, I want you to hate me, cried Turnbull in agony. I want you to be sick when you think of my name. I am sure there is no god. But there is, said Madeline, quite quietly, and rather with the air of one telling children about an elephant. Why, I touched his body only this morning. You touched a bit of bread, said Turnbull, biting his knuckles. Oh, I will say anything that can madden you. You think it is only a bit of bread, said the girl, and her lips tightened ever so little. I know it is only a bit of bread, said Turnbull, with violence. She flung back her open face and smiled. Then why did you refuse to eat it, she said. James Turnbull made a little step backward, and for the first time in his life there seemed to break out and blaze in his head thoughts that were not his own. Why, how silly of them, cried out Madeline with quite a schoolgirl gaiety. Why, how silly of them to call you a blasphemer. Why, you have wrecked your whole little business, because you would not commit blasphemy. The man stood, a somewhat comic figure in his tragic bewilderment, with the honest red head of James Turnbull sticking out of the rich and fictitious garments of Camille Baer. But the startled pain of his face was strong enough to obliterate the oddity. You come down here, continued the lady, with that female emphasis which is so pulverizing in conversation, and so feeble at a public meeting. You and your Mackean come down here and put on false beards or noses in order to fight. You pretend to be a Catholic commercial traveler from France. Poor Mr. Mackean has to pretend to be a disillute nobleman from nowhere. Your scheme succeeds. You pick a quite convincing quarrel. You arrange a quite respectable duel. The duel you have planned so long will come off tomorrow with absolute certainty and safety. And then you throw off your wig and throw up your scheme and throw over your colleague, because I ask you to go into a building and eat a bit of bread. And then you dare to tell me that you are sure there is nothing watching us. Then you say you know there is nothing on the very altar you run away from. You know, I only know, said Turnbull, that I must run away from you. This has got beyond any talking. And he plunged along into the village, leaving his black wig and beard lying behind him on the road. As the marketplace opened before him, he saw Count Gregory, that distinguished foreigner, standing and smoking an elegant meditation at the corner of the local café. He immediately made his way rapidly towards him, considering that a consultation was urgent. But he had hardly crossed half of that stony quadrangle when a window burst open above him and a head was thrust out shouting. The man was in his woolen undershirt, but Turnbull knew the energetic, apologetic head of the sergeant of police. He pointed furiously at Turnbull and shouted his name. A policeman ran excitedly from under an archway and tried to collar him. Two men selling vegetables dropped their baskets and joined in the chase. Turnbull dodged the constable, upset one of the men into his own basket, and bounding towards the distinguished foreign count, called to him clamorously. Come on, Mackean, the hunt is up again. The prompt reply of Count Gregory was to pull off his large yellow whiskers and scatter them on the breeze with an air of considerable relief. Then he joined the flight of Turnbull, and even as he did so, with one wrench of his powerful hands, Brent and split the strange, thick stick that he carried. Inside it was a naked, old-fashioned rapier. The two got a good start up the road before the whole town was awakened behind them, and halfway up it a similar transformation was seen to take place in Mr. Turnbull's singular umbrella. The two had a long race for the harbor, but the English police were heavy and the French inhabitants were indifferent. In any case, they got used to the notion of the road being clear. And just as they had come to the cliffs, Mackean banged into another gentleman with unmistakable surprise. How he knew he was another gentleman merely by banging into him must remain a mystery. Mackean was a very poor and very sober Scotch gentleman. The other was a very drunk and very wealthy English gentleman. But there was something in the staggered and openly embarrassed apologies that made them understand each other as readily and as quickly and as much as two men talking French in the middle of China. The nearest expression of the type is that it either hits or apologizes, and in this case both apologized. You seem to be in a hurry, said the unknown Englishman, falling back a step or two in order to laugh with an unnatural heartiness. What's it all about, eh? Then before Mackean could get past his sprawling and staggering figure, he ran forward again and said with a sort of shouting and ear-shattering whisper, I say, my name is Wilkinson. You know, Wilkinson's entire was my grandfather. Can't drink beer myself, liver. And he shook his head with extraordinary sagacity. We really are in a hurry, as you say, said Mackean, summoning a sufficiently pleasant smile. So if you will let us pass. I'll tell you what, you fellows, said the sprawling gentleman, confidentially, while Evan's agonized ears heard behind him the first paces of the pursuit. If you really are, as you say, in a hurry, I know what it is to be in a hurry. Lord, what a hurry I was in when we all came out of Cartwright's rooms. If you really are in a hurry. And he seemed to steady his voice into a sort of solemnity. If you are in a hurry, there's nothing like a good yacht for a man in a hurry. No doubt you're right, said Mackean, and dashed past him in despair. The head of the pursuing host was just showing over the top of the hill behind him. Turnbull had already ducked under the intoxicated gentleman's elbow and fled far in front. No, but look here, said Mr. Wilkinson, enthusiastically running after Mackean, and catching him by the sleeve of his coat. If you want to hurry, you should take a yacht, and if, he said with a burst of rationality, like one leaping to a further point in logic, if you want a yacht, you can have mine. Evan pulled up abruptly and looked back at him. We are really in the devil of a hurry, he said, and if you really have a yacht, the truth is that we would give our ears for it. You'll find it in the harbor, said Wilkinson, struggling with his speech. Left side of harbor, called Gibson Girl, can't think why, old fellow, I never lent it to you before. With these words, the benevolent Mr. Wilkinson fell flat on his face in the road, but continued to laugh softly, and turned towards his flying companion, a face of peculiar peace and benignity. Evan's mind went through a crisis of instantaneous causistry, in which it may be that he decided wrongly. But about how he decided, his biographer can profess no doubt. Two minutes afterwards, he had overtaken Turnbull and told the tale. Ten minutes afterwards, he and Turnbull had somehow tumbled into the yacht called the Gibson Girl, and had somehow pushed off from the island of St. Loop.