The Ball and the Cross - A Museum of Souls - (1)

The man with the good hat and the jumping elbow went by very quickly; yet the man with the bad hat, who thought he was God, overtook him. He ran after him and jumped over a bed of geraniums to catch him.
    “I beg your Majesty's pardon,” he said, with mock humility, “but here is a quarrel which you ought really to judge.”
    Then as he led the heavy, silk-hatted man back towards the group, he caught MacIan's ear in order to whisper: “This poor gentleman is mad; he thinks he is Edward VII.” At this the self-appointed Creator slightly winked. “Of course you won't trust him much; come to me for everything. But in my position one has to meet so many people. One has to be broadminded.”
    The big banker in the black frock-coat and hat was standing quite grave and dignified on the lawn, save for his slight twitch of one limb, and he did not seem by any means unworthy of the part which the other promptly forced upon him.
    “My dear fellow,” said the man in the straw hat, “these two gentlemen are going to fight a duel of the utmost importance. Your own royal position and my much humbler one surely indicate us as the proper seconds. Seconds--yes, seconds----” and here the speaker was once more shaken with his old malady of laughter.
    “Yes, you and I are both seconds--and these two gentlemen can obviously fight in front of us. You, he-he, are the king. I am God; really, they could hardly have better supporters. They have come to the right place.”
    Then Turnbull, who had been staring with a frown at the fresh turf, burst out with a rather bitter laugh and cried, throwing his red head in the air:
    “Yes, by God, MacIan, I think we have come to the right place!” And MacIan answered, with an adamantine stupidity:
    “Any place is the right place where they will let us do it.”
    There was a long stillness, and their eyes involuntarily took in the landscape, as they had taken in all the landscapes of their everlasting combat; the bright, square garden behind the shop; the whole lift and leaning of the side of Hampstead Heath; the little garden of the decadent choked with flowers; the square of sand beside the sea at sunrise. They both felt at the same moment all the breadth and blossoming beauty of that paradise, the coloured trees, the natural and restful nooks and also the great wall of stone--more awful than the wall of China--from which no flesh could flee.
    Turnbull was moodily balancing his sword in his hand as the other spoke; then he started, for a mouth whispered quite close to his ear. With a softness incredible in any cat, the huge, heavy man in the black hat and frock-coat had crept across the lawn from his own side and was saying in his ear: “Don't trust that second of yours. He's mad and not so mad, either; for he frightfully cunning and sharp. Don't believe the story he tells you about why I hate him. I know the story he'll tell; I overheard it when the housekeeper was talking to the postman. It's too long to talk about now, and I expect we're watched, but----”
    Something in Turnbull made him want suddenly to be sick on the grass; the mere healthy and heathen horror of the unclean; the mere inhumane hatred of the inhuman state of madness. He seemed to hear all round him the hateful whispers of that place, innumerable as leaves whispering in the wind, and each of them telling eagerly some evil that had not happened or some terrific secret which was not true. All the rationalist and plain man revolted within him against bowing down for a moment in that forest of deception and egotistical darkness. He wanted to blow up that palace of delusions with dynamite; and in some wild way, which I will not defend, he tried to do it.
    He looked across at MacIan and said: “Oh, I can't stand this!”
    “Can't stand what?” asked his opponent, eyeing him doubtfully.
    “Shall we say the atmosphere?” replied Turnbull; “one can't use uncivil expressions even to a--deity. The fact is, I don't like having God for my second.”
    “Sir!” said that being in a state of great offence, “in my position I am not used to having my favours refused. Do you know who I am?”
    The editor of The Atheist turned upon him like one who has lost all patience, and exploded: “Yes, you are God, aren't you?” he said, abruptly, “why do we have two sets of teeth?”
    “Teeth?” spluttered the genteel lunatic; “teeth?”
    “Yes,” cried Turnbull, advancing on him swiftly and with animated gestures, “why does teething hurt? Why do growing pains hurt? Why are measles catching? Why does a rose have thorns? Why do rhinoceroses have horns? Why is the horn on the top of the nose? Why haven't I a horn on the top of my nose, eh?” And he struck the bridge of his nose smartly with his forefinger to indicate the place of the omission and then wagged the finger menacingly at the Creator.
    “I've often wanted to meet you,” he resumed, sternly, after a pause, “to hold you accountable for all the idiocy and cruelty of this muddled and meaningless world of yours. You make a hundred seeds and only one bears fruit. You make a million worlds and only one seems inhabited. What do you mean by it, eh? What do you mean by it?”
    The unhappy lunatic had fallen back before this quite novel form of attack, and lifted his burnt-out cigarette almost like one warding off a blow. Turnbull went on like a torrent.
    “A man died yesterday in Ealing. You murdered him. A girl had the toothache in Croydon. You gave it her. Fifty sailors were drowned off Selsey Bill. You scuttled their ship. What have you got to say for yourself, eh?”
    The representative of omnipotence looked as if he had left most of these things to his subordinates; he passed a hand over his wrinkling brow and said in a voice much saner than any he had yet used:
    “Well, if you dislike my assistance, of course--perhaps the other gentleman----”
    “The other gentleman,” cried Turnbull, scornfully, “is a submissive and loyal and obedient gentleman. He likes the people who wear crowns, whether of diamonds or of stars. He believes in the divine right of kings, and it is appropriate enough that he should have the king for his second. But it is not appropriate to me that I should have God for my second. God is not good enough. I dislike and I deny the divine right of kings. But I dislike more and I deny more the divine right of divinity.”
    Then after a pause in which he swallowed his passion, he said to MacIan: “You have got the right second, anyhow.”
    The Highlander did not answer, but stood as if thunderstruck with one long and heavy thought. Then at last he turned abruptly to his second in the silk hat and said: “Who are you?”
    The man in the silk hat blinked and bridled in affected surprise, like one who was in truth accustomed to be doubted.
    “I am King Edward VII,” he said, with shaky arrogance. “Do you doubt my word?”
    “I do not doubt it in the least,” answered MacIan.
    “Then, why,” said the large man in the silk hat, trembling from head to foot, “why do you wear your hat before the king?”
    “Why should I take it off,” retorted MacIan, with equal heat, “before a usurper?”
    Turnbull swung round on his heel. “Well, really,” he said, “I thought at least you were a loyal subject.”
    “I am the only loyal subject,” answered the Gael. “For nearly thirty years I have walked these islands and have not found another.”
    “You are always hard to follow,” remarked Turnbull, genially, “and sometimes so much so as to be hardly worth following.”
    “I alone am loyal,” insisted MacIan; “for I alone am in rebellion. I am ready at any instant to restore the Stuarts. I am ready at any instant to defy the Hanoverian brood--and I defy it now even when face to face with the actual ruler of the enormous British Empire!”
    And folding his arms and throwing back his lean, hawklike face, he haughtily confronted the man with the formal frock-coat and the eccentric elbow.
    “What right had you stunted German squires,” he cried, “to interfere in a quarrel between Scotch and English and Irish gentlemen? Who made you, whose fathers could not splutter English while they walked in Whitehall, who made you the judge between the republic of Sidney and the monarchy of Montrose? What had your sires to do with England that they should have the foul offering of the blood of Derwentwater and the heart of Jimmy Dawson? Where are the corpses of Culloden? Where is the blood of Lochiel?” MacIan advanced upon his opponent with a bony and pointed finger, as if indicating the exact pocket in which the blood of that Cameron was probably kept; and Edward VII fell back a few paces in considerable confusion.
    “What good have you ever done to us?” he continued in harsher and harsher accents, forcing the other back towards the flower-beds. “What good have you ever done, you race of German sausages? Yards of barbarian etiquette, to throttle the freedom of aristocracy! Gas of northern metaphysics to blow up Broad Church bishops like balloons. Bad pictures and bad manners and pantheism and the Albert Memorial. Go back to Hanover, you humbug? Go to----”
    Before the end of this tirade the arrogance of the monarch had entirely given way; he had fairly turned tail and was trundling away down the path. MacIan strode after him still preaching and flourishing his large, lean hands. The other two remained in the centre of the lawn--Turnbull in convulsions of laughter, the lunatic in convulsions of disgust. Almost at the same moment a third figure came stepping swiftly across the lawn.
    The advancing figure walked with a stoop, and yet somehow flung his forked and narrow beard forward. That carefully cut and pointed yellow beard was, indeed, the most emphatic thing about him. When he clasped his hands behind him, under the tails of his coat, he would wag his beard at a man like a big forefinger. It performed almost all his gestures; it was more important than the glittering eye-glasses through which he looked or the beautiful bleating voice in which he spoke. His face and neck were of a lusty red, but lean and stringy; he always wore his expensive gold-rim eye-glasses slightly askew upon his aquiline nose; and he always showed two gleaming foreteeth under his moustache, in a smile so perpetual as to earn the reputation of a sneer. But for the crooked glasses his dress was always exquisite; and but for the smile he was perfectly and perennially depressed.
    “Don't you think,” said the new-comer, with a sort of supercilious entreaty, “that we had better all come into breakfast? It is such a mistake to wait for breakfast. It spoils one's temper so much.”
    “Quite so,” replied Turnbull, seriously.
    “There seems almost to have been a little quarrelling here,” said the man with the goatish beard.
    “It is rather a long story,” said Turnbull, smiling. “Originally, it might be called a phase in the quarrel between science and religion.”
    The new-comer started slightly, and Turnbull replied to the question on his face.
    “Oh, yes,” he said, “I am science!”
    “I congratulate you heartily,” answered the other, “I am Doctor Quayle.”
    Turnbull's eyes did not move, but he realized that the man in the panama hat had lost all his ease of a landed proprietor and had withdrawn to a distance of thirty yards, where he stood glaring with all the contraction of fear and hatred that can stiffen a cat.
    *                    *                   *
    MacIan was sitting somewhat disconsolately on a stump of tree, his large black head half buried in his large brown hands, when Turnbull strode up to him chewing a cigarette. He did not look up, but his comrade and enemy addressed him like one who must free himself of his feelings.
    “Well, I hope, at any rate,” he said, “that you like your precious religion now. I hope you like the society of this poor devil whom your damned tracts and hymns and priests have driven out of his wits. Five men in this place, they tell me, five men in this place who might have been fathers of families, and every one of them thinks he is God the Father. Oh! you may talk about the ugliness of science, but there is no one here who thinks he is Protoplasm.”
    “They naturally prefer a bright part,” said MacIan, wearily. “Protoplasm is not worth going mad about.”
    “At least,” said Turnbull, savagely, “it was your Jesus Christ who started all this bosh about being God.”
    For one instant MacIan opened the eyes of battle; then his tightened lips took a crooked smile and he said, quite calmly:
    “No, the idea is older; it was Satan who first said that he was God.”
    “Then, what,” asked Turnbull, very slowly, as he softly picked a flower, “what is the difference between Christ and Satan?”
    “It is quite simple,” replied the Highlander. “Christ descended into hell; Satan fell into it.”
    “Does it make much odds?” asked the free-thinker.
    “It makes all the odds,” said the other. “One of them wanted to go up and went down; the other wanted to go down and went up. A god can be humble, a devil can only be humbled.”
    “Why are you always wanting to humble a man?” asked Turnbull, knitting his brows. “It affects me as ungenerous.”