The Ball and the Cross - The Idiot - (2)

Turnbull thrust his first finger down the aperture, and at last managed to make a slight further fissure in the piping. The light that came up from beyond was very faint, and apparently indirect; it seemed to fall from some hole or window higher up. As he was screwing his eye to peer at this grey and greasy twilight he was astonished to see another human finger very long and lean come down from above towards the broken pipe and hook it up to something higher. The lighted aperture was abruptly blackened and blocked, presumably by a face and mouth, for something human spoke down the tube, though the words were not clear.
    “Who is that?” asked Turnbull, trembling with excitement, yet wary and quite resolved not to spoil any chance.
    After a few indistinct sounds the voice came down with a strong Argyllshire accent:
    “I say, Turnbull, we couldn't fight through this tube, could we?”
    Sentiments beyond speech surged up in Turnbull and silenced him for a space just long enough to be painful. Then he said with his old gaiety: “I vote we talk a little first; I don't want to murder the first man I have met for ten million years.”
    “I know what you mean,” answered the other. “It has been awful. For a mortal month I have been alone with God.”
    Turnbull started, and it was on the tip of his tongue to answer: “Alone with God! Then you do not know what loneliness is.”
    But he answered, after all, in his old defiant style: “Alone with God, were you? And I suppose you found his Majesty's society rather monotonous?”
    “Oh, no,” said MacIan, and his voice shuddered; “it was a great deal too exciting.”
    After a very long silence the voice of MacIan said: “What do you really hate most in your place?”
    “You'd think I was really mad if I told you,” answered Turnbull, bitterly.
    “Then I expect it's the same as mine,” said the other voice.
    “I am sure it's not the same as anybody's,” said Turnbull, “for it has no rhyme or reason. Perhaps my brain really has gone, but I detest that iron spike in the left wall more than the damned desolation or the damned cocoa. Have you got one in your cell?”
    “Not now,” replied MacIan with serenity. “I've pulled it out.”
    His fellow-prisoner could only repeat the words.
    “I pulled it out the other day when I was off my head,” continued the tranquil Highland voice. “It looked so unnecessary.”
    “You must be ghastly strong,” said Turnbull.
    “One is, when one is mad,” was the careless reply, “and it had worn a little loose in the socket. Even now I've got it out I can't discover what it was for. But I've found out something a long sight funnier.”
    “What do you mean?” asked Turnbull.
    “I have found out where A is,” said the other.
    Three weeks afterwards MacIan had managed to open up communications which made his meaning plain. By that time the two captives had fully discovered and demonstrated that weakness in the very nature of modern machinery to which we have already referred. The very fact that they were isolated from all companions meant that they were free from all spies, and as there were no gaolers to be bribed, so there were none to be baffled. Machinery brought them their cocoa and cleaned their cells; that machinery was as helpless as it was pitiless. A little patient violence, conducted day after day amid constant mutual suggestion, opened an irregular hole in the wall, large enough to let in a small man, in the exact place where there had been before the tiny ventilation holes. Turnbull tumbled somehow into MacIan's apartment, and his first glance found out that the iron spike was indeed plucked from its socket, and left, moreover, another ragged hole into some hollow place behind. But for this MacIan's cell was the duplicate of Turnbull's--a long oblong ending in a wedge and lined with cold and lustrous tiles. The small hole from which the peg had been displaced was in that short oblique wall at the end nearest to Turnbull's. That individual looked at it with a puzzled face.
    “What is in there?” he asked.
    MacIan answered briefly: “Another cell.”
    “But where can the door of it be?” said his companion, even more puzzled; “the doors of our cells are at the other end.”
    “It has no door,” said Evan.
    In the pause of perplexity that followed, an eerie and sinister feeling crept over Turnbull's stubborn soul in spite of himself. The notion of the doorless room chilled him with that sense of half-witted curiosity which one has when something horrible is half understood.
    “James Turnbull,” said MacIan, in a low and shaken voice, “these people hate us more than Nero hated Christians, and fear us more than any man feared Nero. They have filled England with frenzy and galloping in order to capture us and wipe us out--in order to kill us. And they have killed us, for you and I have only made a hole in our coffins. But though this hatred that they felt for us is bigger than they felt for Bonaparte, and more plain and practical than they would feel for Jack the Ripper, yet it is not we whom the people of this place hate most.”
    A cold and quivering impatience continued to crawl up Turnbull's spine; he had never felt so near to superstition and supernaturalism, and it was not a pretty sort of superstition either.
    “There is another man more fearful and hateful,” went on MacIan, in his low monotone voice, “and they have buried him even deeper. God knows how they did it, for he was let in by neither door nor window, nor lowered through any opening above. I expect these iron handles that we both hate have been part of some damned machinery for walling him up. He is there. I have looked through the hole at him; but I cannot stand looking at him long, because his face is turned away from me and he does not move.”
    All Turnbull's unnatural and uncompleted feelings found their outlet in rushing to the aperture and looking into the unknown room.
    It was a third oblong cell exactly like the other two except that it was doorless, and except that on one of the walls was painted a large black A like the B and C outside their own doors. The letter in this case was not painted outside, because this prison had no outside.
    On the same kind of tiled floor, of which the monotonous squares had maddened Turnbull's eye and brain, was sitting a figure which was startlingly short even for a child, only that the enormous head was ringed with hair of a frosty grey. The figure was draped, both insecurely and insufficiently, in what looked like the remains of a brown flannel dressing-gown; an emptied cup of cocoa stood on the floor beside it, and the creature had his big grey head cocked at a particular angle of inquiry or attention which amid all that gathering gloom and mystery struck one as comic if not cocksure.
    After six still seconds Turnbull could stand it no longer, but called out to the dwarfish thing--in what words heaven knows. The thing got up with the promptitude of an animal, and turning round offered the spectacle of two owlish eyes and a huge grey-and-white beard not unlike the plumage of an owl. This extraordinary beard covered him literally to his feet (not that that was very far), and perhaps it was as well that it did, for portions of his remaining clothing seemed to fall off whenever he moved. One talks trivially of a face like parchment, but this old man's face was so wrinkled that it was like a parchment loaded with hieroglyphics. The lines of his face were so deep and complex that one could see five or ten different faces besides the real one, as one can see them in an elaborate wall-paper. And yet while his face seemed like a scripture older than the gods, his eyes were quite bright, blue, and startled like those of a baby. They looked as if they had only an instant before been fitted into his head.
    Everything depended so obviously upon whether this buried monster spoke that Turnbull did not know or care whether he himself had spoken. He said something or nothing. And then he waited for this dwarfish voice that had been hidden under the mountains of the world. At last it did speak, and spoke in English, with a foreign accent that was neither Latin nor Teutonic. He suddenly stretched out a long and very dirty forefinger, and cried in a voice of clear recognition, like a child's: “That's a hole.”
    He digested the discovery for some seconds, sucking his finger, and then he cried, with a crow of laughter: “And that's a head come through it.”
    The hilarious energy in this idiot attitude gave Turnbull another sick turn. He had grown to tolerate those dreary and mumbling madmen who trailed themselves about the beautiful asylum gardens. But there was something new and subversive of the universe in the combination of so much cheerful decision with a body without a brain.
    “Why did they put you in such a place?” he asked at last with embarrassment.
    “Good place. Yes,” said the old man, nodding a great many times and beaming like a flattered landlord. “Good shape. Long and narrow, with a point. Like this,” and he made lovingly with his hands a map of the room in the air.
    “But that's not the best,” he added, confidentially. “Squares very good; I have a nice long holiday, and can count them. But that's not the best.”
    “What is the best?” asked Turnbull in great distress.
    “Spike is the best,” said the old man, opening his blue eyes blazing; “it sticks out.”
    The words Turnbull spoke broke out of him in pure pity. “Can't we do anything for you?” he said.
    “I am very happy,” said the other, alphabetically. “You are a good man. Can I help you?”
    “No, I don't think you can, sir,” said Turnbull with rough pathos; “I am glad you are contented at least.”
    The weird old person opened his broad blue eyes and fixed Turnbull with a stare extraordinarily severe. “You are quite sure,” he said, “I cannot help you?”
    “Quite sure, thank you,” said Turnbull with broken brevity. “Good day.”
    Then he turned to MacIan who was standing close behind him, and whose face, now familiar in all its moods, told him easily that Evan had heard the whole of the strange dialogue.
    “Curse those cruel beasts!” cried Turnbull. “They've turned him to an imbecile just by burying him alive. His brain's like a pin-point now.”
    “You are sure he is a lunatic?” said Evan, slowly.
    “Not a lunatic,” said Turnbull, “an idiot. He just points to things and says that they stick out.”
    “He had a notion that he could help us,” said MacIan moodily, and began to pace towards the other end of his cell.
    “Yes, it was a bit pathetic,” assented Turnbull; “such a Thing offering help, and besides---- Hallo! Hallo! What's the matter?”
    “God Almighty guide us all!” said MacIan.
    He was standing heavy and still at the other end of the room and staring quietly at the door which for thirty days had sealed them up from the sun. Turnbull, following the other's eye, stared at the door likewise, and then he also uttered an exclamation. The iron door was standing about an inch and a half open.
    “He said----” began Evan, in a trembling voice--“he offered----”
    “Come along, you fool!” shouted Turnbull with a sudden and furious energy. “I see it all now, and it's the best stroke of luck in the world. You pulled out that iron handle that had screwed up his cell, and it somehow altered the machinery and opened all the doors.”
    Seizing MacIan by the elbow he bundled him bodily out into the open corridor and ran him on till they saw daylight through a half-darkened window.
    “All the same,” said Evan, like one answering in an ordinary conversation, “he did ask you whether he could help you.”
    All this wilderness of windowless passages was so built into the heart of that fortress of fear that it seemed more than an hour before the fugitives had any good glimpse of the outer world. They did not even know what hour of the day it was; and when, turning a corner, they saw the bare tunnel of the corridor end abruptly in a shining square of garden, the grass burning in that strong evening sunshine which makes it burnished gold rather than green, the abrupt opening on to the earth seemed like a hole knocked in the wall of heaven. Only once or twice in life is it permitted to a man thus to see the very universe from outside, and feel existence itself as an adorable adventure not yet begun. As they found this shining escape out of that hellish labyrinth they both had simultaneously the sensation of being babes unborn, of being asked by God if they would like to live upon the earth. They were looking in at one of the seven gates of Eden.
    Turnbull was the first to leap into the garden, with an earth-spurning leap like that of one who could really spread his wings and fly. MacIan, who came an instant after, was less full of mere animal gusto and fuller of a more fearful and quivering pleasure in the clear and innocent flower colours and the high and holy trees. With one bound they were in that cool and cleared landscape, and they found just outside the door the black-clad gentleman with the cloven chin smilingly regarding them; and his chin seemed to grow longer and longer as he smiled.