XIII. THE GARDEN OF PEACE
Up to this instant Evan MacIan had really understood nothing; but whenhe saw the policeman he saw everything. He saw his enemies, all thepowers and princes of the earth. He suddenly altered from a staringstatue to a leaping man of the mountains.
"We must break away from him here," he cried, briefly, and went likea whirlwind over the sand ridge in a straight line and at a particularangle. When the policeman had finished his admirable railway curve, hefound a wall of failing sand between him and the pursued. By the timehe had scaled it thrice, slid down twice, and crested it in the thirdeffort, the two flying figures were far in front. They found the sandharder farther on; it began to be crusted with scraps of turf and ina few moments they were flying easily over an open common of ranksea-grass. They had no easy business, however; for the bottle which theyhad so innocently sent into the chief gate of Thanet had called to lifethe police of half a county on their trail. From every side across thegrey-green common figures could be seen running and closing in; and itwas only when MacIan with his big body broke down the tangled barrier ofa little wood, as men break down a door with the shoulder; it was onlywhen they vanished crashing into the underworld of the black wood, thattheir hunters were even instantaneously thrown off the scent.
At the risk of struggling a little longer like flies in that black webof twigs and trunks, Evan (who had an instinct of the hunter or thehunted) took an incalculable course through the forest, which let themout at last by a forest opening--quite forgotten by the leaders of thechase. They ran a mile or two farther along the edge of the wood untilthey reached another and somewhat similar opening. Then MacIan stoodutterly still and listened, as animals listen, for every sound in theuniverse. Then he said: "We are quit of them." And Turnbull said: "Whereshall we go now?"
MacIan looked at the silver sunset that was closing in, barred by plumylines of purple cloud; he looked at the high tree-tops that caught thelast light and at the birds going heavily homeward, just as if all thesethings were bits of written advice that he could read.
Then he said: "The best place we can go to is to bed. If we can get somesleep in this wood, now everyone has cleared out of it, it will be wortha handicap of two hundred yards tomorrow."
Turnbull, who was exceptionally lively and laughing in his demeanour,kicked his legs about like a schoolboy and said he did not want to goto sleep. He walked incessantly and talked very brilliantly. And whenat last he lay down on the hard earth, sleep struck him senseless like ahammer.
Indeed, he needed the strongest sleep he could get; for the earthwas still full of darkness and a kind of morning fog when hisfellow-fugitive shook him awake.
"No more sleep, I'm afraid," said Evan, in a heavy, almost submissive,voice of apology. "They've gone on past us right enough for a goodthirty miles; but now they've found out their mistake, and they'recoming back."
"Are you sure?" said Turnbull, sitting up and rubbing his red eyebrowswith his hand.
The next moment, however, he had jumped up alive and leaping like aman struck with a shock of cold water, and he was plunging after MacIanalong the woodland path. The shape of their old friend the constable hadappeared against the pearl and pink of the sunrise. Somehow, it alwayslooked a very funny shape when seen against the sunrise.
* * *
A wash of weary daylight was breaking over the country-side, and thefields and roads were full of white mist--the kind of white mist thatclings in corners like cotton wool. The empty road, along which thechase had taken its turn, was overshadowed on one side by a veryhigh discoloured wall, stained, and streaked green, as withseaweed--evidently the high-shouldered sentinel of some greatgentleman's estate. A yard or two from the wall ran parallel to it alinked and tangled line of lime-trees, forming a kind of cloister alongthe side of the road. It was under this branching colonnade that the twofugitives fled, almost concealed from their pursuers by the twilight,the mist and the leaping zoetrope of shadows. Their feet, though beatingthe ground furiously, made but a faint noise; for they had kicked awaytheir boots in the wood; their long, antiquated weapons made no jingleor clatter, for they had strapped them across their backs like guitars.They had all the advantages that invisibility and silence can add tospeed.
A hundred and fifty yards behind them down the centre of the emptyroad the first of their pursuers came pounding and panting--a fat butpowerful policeman who had distanced all the rest. He came on at asplendid pace for so portly a figure; but, like all heavy bodies inmotion, he gave the impression that it would be easier for him toincrease his pace than to slacken it suddenly. Nothing short of abrick wall could have abruptly brought him up. Turnbull turned his headslightly and found breath to say something to MacIan. MacIan nodded.
Pursuer and pursued were fixed in their distance as they fled, for somequarter of a mile, when they came to a place where two or three of thetrees grew twistedly together, making a special obscurity. Pastthis place the pursuing policeman went thundering without thought orhesitation. But he was pursuing his shadow or the wind; for Turnbull hadput one foot in a crack of the tree and gone up it as quickly and softlyas a cat. Somewhat more laboriously but in equal silence the long legsof the Highlander had followed; and crouching in crucial silence in thecloud of leaves, they saw the whole posse of their pursuers go by anddie into the dust and mists of the distance.
The white vapour lay, as it often does, in lean and palpable layers;and even the head of the tree was above it in the half-daylight, likea green ship swinging on a sea of foam. But higher yet behind them, andreadier to catch the first coming of the sun, ran the rampart of thetop of the wall, which in their excitement of escape looked at onceindispensable and unattainable, like the wall of heaven. Here,however, it was MacIan's turn to have the advantage; for, though lesslight-limbed and feline, he was longer and stronger in the arms. In twoseconds he had tugged up his chin over the wall like a horizontalbar; the next he sat astride of it, like a horse of stone. With hisassistance Turnbull vaulted to the same perch, and the two begancautiously to shift along the wall in the direction by which they hadcome, doubling on their tracks to throw off the last pursuit. MacIancould not rid himself of the fancy of bestriding a steed; the long, greycoping of the wall shot out in front of him, like the long, grey neck ofsome nightmare Rosinante. He had the quaint thought that he and Turnbullwere two knights on one steed on the old shield of the Templars.
The nightmare of the stone horse was increased by the white fog, whichseemed thicker inside the wall than outside. They could make nothing ofthe enclosure upon which they were partial trespassers, except that thegreen and crooked branches of a big apple-tree came crawling at them outof the mist, like the tentacles of some green cuttlefish. Anything wouldserve, however, that was likely to confuse their trail, so they bothdecided without need of words to use this tree also as a ladder--aladder of descent. When they dropped from the lowest branch to theground their stockinged feet felt hard gravel beneath them.
They had alighted in the middle of a very broad garden path, and theclearing mist permitted them to see the edge of a well-clipped lawn.Though the white vapour was still a veil, it was like the gauzy veilof a transformation scene in a pantomime; for through it there glowedshapeless masses of colour, masses which might be clouds of sunriseor mosaics of gold and crimson, or ladies robed in ruby and emeralddraperies. As it thinned yet farther they saw that it was only flowers;but flowers in such insolent mass and magnificence as can seldom be seenout of the tropics. Purple and crimson rhododendrons rose arrogantly,like rampant heraldic animals against their burning background oflaburnum gold. The roses were red hot; the clematis was, so to speak,blue hot. And yet the mere whiteness of the syringa seemed the mostviolent colour of all. As the golden sunlight gradually conquered themists, it had really something of the sensational sweetness of the slowopening of the gates of Eden. MacIan, whose mind was always hauntedwith such seraphic or titanic parallels, made some such remark to hiscompan
ion. But Turnbull only cursed and said that it was the back gardenof some damnable rich man.
When the last haze had faded from the ordered paths, the open lawns,and the flaming flower-beds, the two realized, not without an abruptre-examination of their position, that they were not alone in thegarden.
Down the centre of the central garden path, preceded by a blue cloudfrom a cigarette, was walking a gentleman who evidently understood allthe relish of a garden in the very early morning. He was a slim yetsatisfied figure, clad in a suit of pale-grey tweed, so subdued thatthe pattern was imperceptible--a costume that was casual but not byany means careless. His face, which was reflective and somewhatover-refined, was the face of a quite elderly man, though his stringyhair and moustache were still quite yellow. A double eye-glass, with abroad, black ribbon, drooped from his aquiline nose, and he smiled, ashe communed with himself, with a self-content which was rare and almostirritating. The straw panama on his head was many shades shabbier thanhis clothes, as if he had caught it up by accident.
It needed the full shock of the huge shadow of MacIan, falling acrosshis sunlit path, to rouse him from his smiling reverie. When this hadfallen on him he lifted his head a little and blinked at the intruderswith short-sighted benevolence, but with far less surprise than mighthave been expected. He was a gentleman; that is, he had social presenceof mind, whether for kindness or for insolence.
"Can I do anything for you?" he said, at last.
MacIan bowed. "You can extend to us your pardon," he said, for he alsocame of a whole race of gentlemen--of gentlemen without shirts to theirbacks. "I am afraid we are trespassing. We have just come over thewall."
"Over the wall?" repeated the smiling old gentleman, still withoutletting his surprise come uppermost.
"I suppose I am not wrong, sir," continued MacIan, "in supposing thatthese grounds inside the wall belong to you?"
The man in the panama looked at the ground and smoked thoughtfully for afew moments, after which he said, with a sort of matured conviction:
"Yes, certainly; the grounds inside the wall really belong to me, andthe grounds outside the wall, too."
"A large proprietor, I imagine," said Turnbull, with a truculent eye.
"Yes," answered the old gentleman, looking at him with a steady smile."A large proprietor."
Turnbull's eye grew even more offensive, and he began biting his redbeard; but MacIan seemed to recognize a type with which he could dealand continued quite easily:
"I am sure that a man like you will not need to be told that one seesand does a good many things that do not get into the newspapers. Thingswhich, on the whole, had better not get into the newspapers."
The smile of the large proprietor broadened for a moment underhis loose, light moustache, and the other continued with increasedconfidence:
"One sometimes wants to have it out with another man. The police won'tallow it in the streets--and then there's the County Council--and in thefields even nothing's allowed but posters of pills. But in a gentleman'sgarden, now----"
The strange gentleman smiled again and said, easily enough: "Do you wantto fight? What do you want to fight about?"
MacIan had understood his man pretty well up to that point; an instinctcommon to all men with the aristocratic tradition of Europe had guidedhim. He knew that the kind of man who in his own back garden wears goodclothes and spoils them with a bad hat is not the kind of man who hasan abstract horror of illegal actions of violence or the evasion ofthe police. But a man may understand ragging and yet be very far fromunderstanding religious ragging. This seeming host of theirs mightcomprehend a quarrel of husband and lover or a difficulty at cardsor even escape from a pursuing tailor; but it still remained doubtfulwhether he would feel the earth fail under him in that earthquakeinstant when the Virgin is compared to a goddess of Mesopotamia. EvenMacIan, therefore (whose tact was far from being his strong point), feltthe necessity for some compromise in the mode of approach. At last hesaid, and even then with hesitation:
"We are fighting about God; there can be nothing so important as that."
The tilted eye-glasses of the old gentleman fell abruptly from his nose,and he thrust his aristocratic chin so far forward that his lean neckseemed to shoot out longer like a telescope.
"About God?" he queried, in a key completely new.
"Look here!" cried Turnbull, taking his turn roughly, "I'll tell youwhat it's all about. I think that there's no God. I take it that it'snobody's business but mine--or God's, if there is one. This younggentleman from the Highlands happens to think that it's his business. Inconsequence, he first takes a walking-stick and smashes my shop; then hetakes the same walking-stick and tries to smash me. To this I naturallyobject. I suggest that if it comes to that we should both have sticks.He improves on the suggestion and proposes that we should both havesteel-pointed sticks. The police (with characteristic unreasonableness)will not accept either of our proposals; the result is that we runabout dodging the police and have jumped over our garden wall into yourmagnificent garden to throw ourselves on your magnificent hospitality."
The face of the old gentleman had grown redder and redder during thisaddress, but it was still smiling; and when he broke out it was with akind of guffaw.
"So you really want to fight with drawn swords in my garden," he asked,"about whether there is really a God?"
"Why not?" said MacIan, with his simple monstrosity of speech; "allman's worship began when the Garden of Eden was founded."
"Yes, by----!" said Turnbull, with an oath, "and ended when theZoological Gardens were founded."
"In this garden! In my presence!" cried the stranger, stamping up anddown the gravel and choking with laughter, "whether there is a God!"And he went stamping up and down the garden, making it echo with hisunintelligible laughter. Then he came back to them more composed andwiping his eyes.
"Why, how small the world is!" he cried at last. "I can settle the wholematter. Why, I am God!"
And he suddenly began to kick and wave his well-clad legs about thelawn.
"You are what?" repeated Turnbull, in a tone which is beyonddescription.
"Why, God, of course!" answered the other, thoroughly amused. "Howfunny it is to think that you have tumbled over a garden wall and fallenexactly on the right person! You might have gone floundering about inall sorts of churches and chapels and colleges and schools of philosophylooking for some evidence of the existence of God. Why, there is noevidence, except seeing him. And now you've seen him. You've seen himdance!"
And the obliging old gentleman instantly stood on one leg withoutrelaxing at all the grave and cultured benignity of his expression.
"I understood that this garden----" began the bewildered MacIan.
"Quite so! Quite so!" said the man on one leg, nodding gravely. "I saidthis garden belonged to me and the land outside it. So they do. So doesthe country beyond that and the sea beyond that and all the rest of theearth. So does the moon. So do the sun and stars." And he added, with asmile of apology: "You see, I'm God."
Turnbull and MacIan looked at him for one moment with a sort of notionthat perhaps he was not too old to be merely playing the fool. Butafter staring steadily for an instant Turnbull saw the hard and horribleearnestness in the man's eyes behind all his empty animation. ThenTurnbull looked very gravely at the strict gravel walls and the gayflower-beds and the long rectangular red-brick building, which the misthad left evident beyond them. Then he looked at MacIan.
Almost at the same moment another man came walking quickly round theregal clump of rhododendrons. He had the look of a prosperous banker,wore a good tall silk hat, was almost stout enough to burst the buttonsof a fine frock-coat; but he was talking to himself, and one of hiselbows had a singular outward jerk as he went by.
The Ball and the Cross Page 13