“I am dying,” answered the other quite calmly. “I am in the quite literal sense of the words dying to know something. I want to know what all this can possibly mean.”
MacIan did not answer, and he continued with asperity: “You are still thinking about that girl, but I tell you the whole thing is incredible. She’s not the only person here. I’ve met the fellow Wilkinson, whose yacht we lost. I’ve met the very magistrate you were hauled up to when you broke my window. What can it mean–meeting all these old people again? One never meets such old friends again except in a dream.”
Then after a silence he cried with a rending sincerity: “Are you really there, Evan? Have you ever been really there? Am I simply dreaming?”
MacIan had been listening with a living silence to every word, and now his face flamed with one of his rare revelations of life.
“No, you good atheist,” he cried; “no, you clean, courteous, reverent, pious old blasphemer. No, you are not dreaming–you are waking up.”
“What do you mean?”
“There are two states where one meets so many old friends,” said MacIan; “one is a dream, the other is the end of the world.”
“And you say–”
“I say this is not a dream,” said Evan in a ringing voice.
“You really mean to suggest–” began Turnbull.
“Be silent! or I shall say it all wrong,” said MacIan, breathing hard. “It’s hard to explain, anyhow. An apocalypse is the opposite of a dream. A dream is falser than the outer life. But the end of the world is more actual than the world it ends. I don’t say this is really the end of the world, but it’s something like that–it’s the end of something. All the people are crowding into one corner. Everything is coming to a point.”
“What is the point?” asked Turnbull.
“I can’t see it,” said Evan; “it is too large and plain.”
Then after a silence he said: “I can’t see it–and yet I will try to describe it. Turnbull, three days ago I saw quite suddenly that our duel was not right after all.”
“Three days ago!” repeated Turnbull. “When and why did this illumination occur?”
“I knew I was not quite right,” answered Evan, “the moment I saw the round eyes of that old man in the cell.”
“Old man in the cell!” repeated his wondering companion. “Do you mean the poor old idiot who likes spikes to stick out?”
“Yes,” said MacIan, after a slight pause, “I mean the poor old idiot who likes spikes to stick out. When I saw his eyes and heard his old croaking accent, I knew that it would not really have been right to kill you. It would have been a venial sin.”
“I am much obliged,” said Turnbull, gruffly.
“You must give me time,” said MacIan, quite patiently, “for I am trying to tell the whole truth. I am trying to tell more of it than I know.”
“So you see I confess”–he went on with laborious distinctness– “I confess that all the people who called our duel mad were right in a way. I would confess it to old Cumberland Vane and his eye-glass. I would confess it even to that old ass in brown flannel who talked to us about Love. Yes, they are right in a way. I am a little mad.”
He stopped and wiped his brow as if he were literally doing heavy labour. Then he went on:
“I am a little mad; but, after all, it is only a little madness. When hundreds of high-minded men had fought duesl about a jostle with the elbow or the ace of spades, the whole world need not have gone wild over my one little wildness. Plenty of other people have killed themselves between then and now. But all England has gone into captivity in order to take us captive. All England has turned into a lunatic asylum in order to prove us lunatics. Compared with the general public, I might positively be called sane.”
He stopped again, and went on with the same air of travailing with the truth:
“When I saw that, I saw everything; I saw the Church and the world. The Church in its earthly action has really touched morbid things– tortures and bleeding visions and blasts of extermination. The Church has had her madnesses, and I am one of them. I am the massacre of St. Bartholomew. I am the Inquisition of Spain. I do not say that we have never gone mad, but I say that we are fit to act as keepers to our enemies. Massacre is wicked even with a provocation, as in the Bartholomew. But your modern Nietzsche will tell you that massacre would be glorious without a provocation. Torture should be violently stopped, though the Church is doing it. But your modern Tolstoy will tell you that it ought not to be violently stopped whoever is doing it. In the long run, which is most mad– the Church or the world? Which is madder, the Spanish priest who permitted tyranny, or the Prussian sophist who admired it? Which is madder, the Russian priest who discourages righteous rebellion, or the Russian novelist who forbids it? That is the final and blasting test. The world left to itself grows wilder than any creed. A few days ago you and I were the maddest people in England. Now, by God! I believe we are the sanest. That is the only real question–whether the Church is really madder than the world. Let the rationalists run their own race, and let us see where they end. If the world has some healthy balance other than God, let the world find it. Does the world find it? Cut the world loose,” he cried with a savage gesture. “Does the world stand on its own end? Does it stand, or does it stagger?”
Turnbull remained silent, and MacIan said to him, looking once more at the earth: “It staggers, Turnbull. It cannot stand by itself; you know it cannot. It has been the sorrow of your life. Turnbull, this garden is not a dream, but an apocalyptic fulfilment. This garden is the world gone mad.”
Turnbull did not move his head, and he had been listening all the time; yet, somehow, the other knew that for the first time he was listening seriously.
“The world has gone mad,” said MacIan, “and it has gone mad about Us. The world takes the trouble to make a big mistake about every little mistake made by the Church. That is why they have turned ten counties to a madhouse; that is why crowds of kindly people are poured into this filthy melting-pot. Now is the judgement of this world. The Prince of this World is judged, and he is judged exactly because he is judging. There is at last one simple solution to the quarrel between the ball and the cross–”
Turnbull for the first time started.
“The ball and–” he repeated.
“What is the matter with you?” asked MacIan.
“I had a dream,” said Turnbull, thickly and obscurely, “in which I saw the cross struck crooked and the ball secure–”
“I had a dream,” said MacIan, “in which I saw the cross erect and the ball invisible. They were both dreams from hell. There must be some round earth to plant the cross upon. But here is the awful difference–that the round world will not consent even to continue round. The astronomers are always telling us that it is shaped like an orange, or like an egg, or like a German sausage. They beat the old world about like a bladder and thump it into a thousand shapeless shapes. Turnbull, we cannot trust the ball to be always a ball; we cannot trust reason to be reasonable. In the end the great terrestrial globe will go quite lop-sided, and only the cross will stand upright.”
There was a long silence, and then Turnbull said, hesitatingly: “Has it occurred to you that since–since those two dreams, or whatever they were–”
“Well?” murmured MacIan.
“Since then,” went on Turnbull, in the same low voice, “since then we have never even looked for our swords.”
“You are right,” answered Evan almost inaudibly. “We have found something which we both hate more than we ever hated each other, and I think I know its name.”
Turnbull seemed to frown and flinch for a moment. “It does not much matter what you call it,” he said, “so long as you keep out of its way.”
The bushes broke and snapped abruptly behind them, and a very tall figure towered above Turnbull with an arrogant stoop and a projecting chin, a chin of which the shape showed queerly even in its shadow upon the path.
; “You see that is not so easy,” said MacIan between his teeth.
They looked up into the eyes of the Master, but looked only for a moment. The eyes were full of a frozen and icy wrath, a kind of utterly heartless hatred. His voice was for the first time devoid of irony. There was no more sarcasm in it than there is in an iron club.
“You will be inside the building in three minutes,” he said, with pulverizing precision, “or you will be fired on by the artillery at all the windows. There is too much talking in this garden; we intend to close it. You will be accommodated indoors.”
“Ah!” said MacIan, with a long and satisfied sigh, “then I was right.”
And he turned his back and walked obediently towards the building. Turnbull seemed to canvass for a few minutes the notion of knocking the Master down, and then fell under the same almost fairy fatalism as his companion. In some strange way it did seem that the more smoothly they yielded, the more swiftly would events sweep on to some great collision.
XX. DIES IRAE
As they advanced towards the asylum they looked up at its rows on rows of windows, and understood the Master’s material threat. By means of that complex but concealed machinery which ran like a network of nerves over the whole fabric, there had been shot out under every window-ledge rows and rows of polished-steel cylinders, the cold miracles of modern gunnery. They commanded the whole garden and the whole country-side, and could have blown to pieces an army corps.
This silent declaration of war had evidently had its complete effect. As MacIan and Turnbull walked steadily but slowly towards the entrance hall of the institution, they could see that most, or at least many, of the patients had already gathered there as well as the staff of doctors and the whole regiment of keepers and assistants. But when they entered the lamp-lit hall, and the high iron door was clashed to and locked behind them, yet a new amazement leapt into their eyes, and the stalwart Turnbull almost fell. For he saw a sight which was indeed, as MacIan had said– either the Day of Judgement or a dream.
Within a few feet of him at one corner of the square of standing people stood the girl he had known in Jersey, Madeleine Durand. She looked straight at him with a steady smile which lit up the scene of darkness and unreason like the light of some honest fireside. Her square face and throat were thrown back, as her habit was, and there was something almost sleepy in the geniality of her eyes. He saw her first, and for a few seconds saw her only; then the outer edge of his eyesight took in all the other staring faces, and he saw all the faces he had ever seen for weeks and months past. There was the Tolstoyan in Jaeger flannel, with the yellow beard that went backward and the foolish nose and eyes that went forward, with the curiosity of a crank. He was talking eagerly to Mr. Gordon, the corpulent Jew shopkeeper whom they had once gagged in his own shop. There was the tipsy old Hertfordshire rustic; he was talking energetically to himself. There was not only Mr. Vane the magistrate, but the clerk of Mr. Vane, the magistrate. There was not only Miss Drake of the motor-car, but also Miss Drake’s chauffeur. Nothing wild or unfamiliar could have produced upon Turnbull such a nightmare impression as that ring of familiar faces. Yet he had one intellectual shock which was greater than all the others. He stepped impulsively forward towards Madeleine, and then wavered with a kind of wild humility. As he did so he caught sight of another square face behind Madeleine’s, a face with long grey whiskers and an austere stare. It was old Durand, the girls’ father; and when Turnbull saw him he saw the last and worst marvel of that monstrous night. He remembered Durand; he remembered his monotonous, everlasting lucidity, his stupefyingly sensible views of everything, his colossal contentment with truisms merely because they were true. “Confound it all!” cried Turnbull to himself, “if he is in the asylum, there can’t be anyone outside.” He drew nearer to Madeleine, but still doubtfully and all the more so because she still smiled at him. MacIan had already gone across to Beatrice with an air of fright.
Then all these bewildered but partly amicable recognitions were cloven by a cruel voice which always made all human blood turn bitter. The Master was standing in the middle of the room surveying the scene like a great artist looking at a completed picture. Handsome as he looked, they had never seen so clearly what was really hateful in his face; and even then they could only express it by saying that the arched brows and the long emphatic chin gave it always a look of being lit from below, like the face of some infernal actor.
“This is indeed a cosy party,” he said, with glittering eyes.
The Master evidently meant to say more, but before he could say anything M. Durand had stepped right up to him and was speaking.
He was speaking exactly as a French bourgeois speaks to the manager of a restaurant. That is, he spoke with rattling and breathless rapidity, but with no incoherence, and therefore with no emotion. It was a steady, monotonous vivacity, which came not seemingly from passion, but merely from the reason having been sent off at a gallop. He was saying something like this:
“You refuse me my half-bottle of Medoc, the drink the most wholesome and the most customary. You refuse me the company and obedience of my daughter, which Nature herself indicates. You refuse me the beef and mutton, without pretence that it is a fast of the Church. You now forbid me the promenade, a thing necessary to a person of my age. It is useless to tell me that you do all this by law. Law rests upon the social contract. If the citizen finds himself despoiled of such pleasures and powers as he would have had even in the savage state, the social contract is annulled.”
“It’s no good chattering away, Monsieur,” said Hutton, for the Master was silent. “The place is covered with machine-guns. We’ve got to obey our orders, and so have you.”
“The machinery is of the most perfect,” assented Durand, somewhat irrelevantly; “worked by petroleum, I believe. I only ask you to admit that if such things fall below the comfort of barbarism, the social contract is annulled. It is a pretty little point of theory.”
“Oh! I dare say,” said Hutton.
Durand bowed quite civilly and withdrew.
“A cosy party,” resumed the Master, scornfully, “and yet I believe some of you are in doubt about how we all came together. I will explain it, ladies and gentlemen; I will explain everything. To whom shall I specially address myself? To Mr. James Turnbull. He has a scientific mind.”
Turnbull seemed to choke with sudden protest. The Master seemed only to cough out of pure politeness and proceeded: “Mr. Turnbull will agree with me,” he said, “when I say that we long felt in scientific circles that great harm was done by such a legend as that of the Crucifixion.”
Turnbull growled something which was presumably assent.
The Master went on smoothly: “It was in vain for us to urge that the incident was irrelevant; that there were many such fanatics, many such executions. We were forced to take the thing thoroughly in hand, to investigate it in the spirit of scientific history, and with the assistance of Mr. Turnbull and others we were happy in being able to announce that this alleged Crucifixion never occurred at all.”
MacIan lifted his head and looked at the Master steadily, but Turnbull did not look up.
“This, we found, was the only way with all superstitions,” continued the speaker; “it was necessary to deny them historically, and we have done it with great success in the case of miracles and such things. Now within our own time there arose an unfortunate fuss which threatened (as Mr. Turnbull would say) to galvanize the corpse of Christianity into a fictitious life–the alleged case of a Highland eccentric who wanted to fight for the Virgin.”
MacIan, quite white, made a step forward, but the speaker did not alter his easy attitude or his flow of words. “Again we urged that this duel was not to be admired, that it was a mere brawl, but the people were ignorant and romantic. There were signs of treating this alleged Highlander and his alleged opponent as heroes. We tried all other means of arresting this reactionary hero worship. Working men who betted on the duel were imprisoned for gambling. Wor
king men who drank the health of a duellist were imprisoned for drunkenness. But the popular excitement about the alleged duel continued, and we had to fall back on our old historical method. We investigated, on scientific principles, the story of MacIan’s challenge, and we are happy to be able to inform you that the whole story of the attempted duel is a fable. There never was any challenge. There never was any man named MacIan. It is a melodramatic myth, like Calvary.”
Not a soul moved save Turnbull, who lifted his head; yet there was the sense of a silent explosion.
“The whole story of the MacIan challenge,” went on the Master, beaming at them all with a sinister benignity, “has been found to originate in the obsessions of a few pathological types, who are now all fortunately in our care. There is, for instance, a person here of the name of Gordon, formerly the keeper of a curiosity shop. He is a victim of the disease called Vinculomania– the impression that one has been bound or tied up. We have also a case of Fugacity (Mr. Whimpey), who imagines that he was chased by two men.”
The indignant faces of the Jew shopkeeper and the Magdalen Don started out of the crowd in their indignation, but the speaker continued:
“One poor woman we have with us,” he said, in a compassionate voice, “believes she was in a motor-car with two such men; this is the well-known illusion of speed on which I need not dwell. Another wretched woman has the simple egotistic mania that she has caused the duel. Madeleine Durand actually professes to have been the subject of the fight between MacIan and his enemy, a fight which, if it occurred at all, certainly began long before. But it never occurred at all. We have taken in hand every person who professed to have seen such a thing, and proved them all to be unbalanced. That is why they are here.”
The Master looked round the room, just showing his perfect teeth with the perfection of artistic cruelty, exalted for a moment in the enormous simplicity of his success, and then walked across the hall and vanished through an inner door. His two lieutenants, Quayle and Hutton, were left standing at the head of the great army of servants and keepers.
The Ball and the Cross Page 23