The flying ship of Professor Lucifer sang through the skies like a
silver arrow; the bleak white steel of it, gleaming in the bleak
blue emptiness of the evening. That it was far above the earth was no
expression for it; to the two men in it, it seemed to be far above the
stars. The professor had himself invented the flying machine, and had
also invented nearly everything in it. Every sort of tool or apparatus
had, in consequence, to the full, that fantastic and distorted look
which belongs to the miracles of science. For the world of science and
evolution is far more nameless and elusive and like a dream than the
world of poetry and religion; since in the latter images and ideas
remain themselves eternally, while it is the whole idea of evolution
that identities melt into each other as they do in a nightmare.
All the tools of Professor Lucifer were the ancient human tools gone
mad, grown into unrecognizable shapes, forgetful of their origin,
forgetful of their names. That thing which looked like an enormous key
with three wheels was really a patent and very deadly revolver. That
object which seemed to be created by the entanglement of two corkscrews
was really the key. The thing which might have been mistaken for a
tricycle turned upside-down was the inexpressibly important instrument
to which the corkscrew was the key. All these things, as I say, the
professor had invented; he had invented everything in the flying ship,
with the exception, perhaps, of himself. This he had been born too
late actually to inaugurate, but he believed at least, that he had
considerably improved it.
There was, however, another man on board, so to speak, at the time. Him,
also, by a curious coincidence, the professor had not invented, and him
he had not even very greatly improved, though he had fished him up with
a lasso out of his own back garden, in Western Bulgaria, with the pure
object of improving him. He was an exceedingly holy man, almost entirely
covered with white hair. You could see nothing but his eyes, and he
seemed to talk with them. A monk of immense learning and acute intellect
he had made himself happy in a little stone hut and a little stony
garden in the Balkans, chiefly by writing the most crushing refutations
of exposures of certain heresies, the last professors of which had been
burnt (generally by each other) precisely 1,119 years previously. They
were really very plausible and thoughtful heresies, and it was really
a creditable or even glorious circumstance, that the old monk had been
intellectual enough to detect their fallacy; the only misfortune
was that nobody in the modern world was intellectual enough even to
understand their argument. The old monk, one of whose names was Michael,
and the other a name quite impossible to remember or repeat in our
Western civilization, had, however, as I have said, made himself quite
happy while he was in a mountain hermitage in the society of wild
animals. And now that his luck had lifted him above all the mountains in
the society of a wild physicist, he made himself happy still.
“I have no intention, my good Michael,” said Professor Lucifer,
“of endeavouring to convert you by argument. The imbecility of your
traditions can be quite finally exhibited to anybody with mere ordinary
knowledge of the world, the same kind of knowledge which teaches us
not to sit in draughts or not to encourage friendliness in impecunious
people. It is folly to talk of this or that demonstrating the
rationalist philosophy. Everything demonstrates it. Rubbing shoulders
with men of all kinds----”
“You will forgive me,” said the monk, meekly from under loads of white
beard, “but I fear I do not understand; was it in order that I might rub
my shoulder against men of all kinds that you put me inside this thing?”
“An entertaining retort, in the narrow and deductive manner of the
Middle Ages,” replied the Professor, calmly, “but even upon your own
basis I will illustrate my point. We are up in the sky. In your religion
and all the religions, as far as I know (and I know everything), the sky
is made the symbol of everything that is sacred and merciful. Well, now
you are in the sky, you know better. Phrase it how you like, twist it
how you like, you know that you know better. You know what are a man's
real feelings about the heavens, when he finds himself alone in the
heavens, surrounded by the heavens. You know the truth, and the truth
is this. The heavens are evil, the sky is evil, the stars are evil. This
mere space, this mere quantity, terrifies a man more than tigers or the
terrible plague. You know that since our science has spoken, the bottom
has fallen out of the Universe. Now, heaven is the hopeless thing,
more hopeless than any hell. Now, if there be any comfort for all your
miserable progeny of morbid apes, it must be in the earth, underneath
you, under the roots of the grass, in the place where hell was of old.
The fiery crypts, the lurid cellars of the underworld, to which you once
condemned the wicked, are hideous enough, but at least they are more
homely than the heaven in which we ride. And the time will come when you
will all hide in them, to escape the horror of the stars.”
“I hope you will excuse my interrupting you,” said Michael, with a
slight cough, “but I have always noticed----”
“Go on, pray go on,” said Professor Lucifer, radiantly, “I really like
to draw out your simple ideas.”
“Well, the fact is,” said the other, “that much as I admire your
rhetoric and the rhetoric of your school, from a purely verbal point
of view, such little study of you and your school in human history as I
have been enabled to make has led me to--er--rather singular conclusion,
which I find great difficulty in expressing, especially in a foreign
language.”
“Come, come,” said the Professor, encouragingly, “I'll help you out. How
did my view strike you?”
“Well, the truth is, I know I don't express it properly, but somehow
it seemed to me that you always convey ideas of that kind with most
eloquence, when--er--when----”
“Oh! get on,” cried Lucifer, boisterously.
“Well, in point of fact when your flying ship is just going to run
into something. I thought you wouldn't mind my mentioning it, but it's
running into something now.”
Lucifer exploded with an oath and leapt erect, leaning hard upon the
handle that acted as a helm to the vessel. For the last ten minutes they
had been shooting downwards into great cracks and caverns of cloud. Now,
through a sort of purple haze, could be seen comparatively near to them
what seemed to be the upper part of a huge, dark orb or sphere, islanded
in a sea of cloud. The Professor's eyes were blazing like a maniac's.
“It is a new world,” he cried, with a dreadful mirth. “It is a new
planet and it shall bear my name. This star and not that other vulgar
one shall be 'Lucifer, sun of the morning.' Here we will have no
chartered lunacies, here we will have no gods. Here man shall be
as innocent as the daisies, as innocent and as cruel--here the
intellect----”
“There seems,” said Michael, timidly, “to be something sticking up in
the middle of it.”
“So there is,” said the Professor, leaning over the side of the ship,
his spectacles shining with intellectual excitement. “What can it be? It
might of course be merely a----”
Then a shriek indescribable broke out of him of a sudden, and he flung
up his arms like a lost spirit. The monk took the helm in a tired way;
he did not seem much astonished for he came from an ignorant part of the
world in which it is not uncommon for lost spirits to shriek when they
see the curious shape which the Professor had just seen on the top of
the mysterious ball, but he took the helm only just in time, and by
driving it hard to the left he prevented the flying ship from smashing
into St. Paul's Cathedral.
A plain of sad-coloured cloud lay along the level of the top of the
Cathedral dome, so that the ball and the cross looked like a buoy riding
on a leaden sea. As the flying ship swept towards it, this plain of
cloud looked as dry and definite and rocky as any grey desert. Hence it
gave to the mind and body a sharp and unearthly sensation when the ship
cut and sank into the cloud as into any common mist, a thing without
resistance. There was, as it were, a deadly shock in the fact that there
was no shock. It was as if they had cloven into ancient cliffs like so
much butter. But sensations awaited them which were much stranger than
those of sinking through the solid earth. For a moment their eyes and
nostrils were stopped with darkness and opaque cloud; then the darkness
warmed into a kind of brown fog. And far, far below them the brown fog
fell until it warmed into fire. Through the dense London atmosphere they
could see below them the flaming London lights; lights which lay beneath
them in squares and oblongs of fire. The fog and fire were mixed in a
passionate vapour; you might say that the fog was drowning the flames;
or you might say that the flames had set the fog on fire. Beside the
ship and beneath it (for it swung just under the ball), the immeasurable
dome itself shot out and down into the dark like a combination of
voiceless cataracts. Or it was like some cyclopean sea-beast sitting
above London and letting down its tentacles bewilderingly on every side,
a monstrosity in that starless heaven. For the clouds that belonged to
London had closed over the heads of the voyagers sealing up the entrance
of the upper air. They had broken through a roof and come into a temple
of twilight.
They were so near to the ball that Lucifer leaned his hand against it,
holding the vessel away, as men push a boat off from a bank. Above it
the cross already draped in the dark mists of the borderland was shadowy
and more awful in shape and size.
Professor Lucifer slapped his hand twice upon the surface of the great
orb as if he were caressing some enormous animal. “This is the fellow,”
he said, “this is the one for my money.”
“May I with all respect inquire,” asked the old monk, “what on earth you
are talking about?”
“Why this,” cried Lucifer, smiting the ball again, “here is the only
symbol, my boy. So fat. So satisfied. Not like that scraggy individual,
stretching his arms in stark weariness.” And he pointed up to the cross,
his face dark with a grin. “I was telling you just now, Michael, that I
can prove the best part of the rationalist case and the Christian humbug
from any symbol you liked to give me, from any instance I came across.
Here is an instance with a vengeance. What could possibly express your
philosophy and my philosophy better than the shape of that cross and
the shape of this ball? This globe is reasonable; that cross is
unreasonable. It is a four-legged animal, with one leg longer than the
others. The globe is inevitable. The cross is arbitrary. Above all the
globe is at unity with itself; the cross is primarily and above all
things at enmity with itself. The cross is the conflict of two hostile
lines, of irreconcilable direction. That silent thing up there is
essentially a collision, a crash, a struggle in stone. Pah! that
sacred symbol of yours has actually given its name to a description of
desperation and muddle. When we speak of men at once ignorant of each
other and frustrated by each other, we say they are at cross-purposes.
Away with the thing! The very shape of it is a contradiction in terms.”
“What you say is perfectly true,” said Michael, with serenity. “But we
like contradictions in terms. Man is a contradiction in terms; he is a
beast whose superiority to other beasts consists in having fallen. That
cross is, as you say, an eternal collision; so am I. That is a struggle
in stone. Every form of life is a struggle in flesh. The shape of
the cross is irrational, just as the shape of the human animal is
irrational. You say the cross is a quadruped with one limb longer than
the rest. I say man is a quadruped who only uses two of his legs.”
The Professor frowned thoughtfully for an instant, and said: “Of
course everything is relative, and I would not deny that the element
of struggle and self-contradiction, represented by that cross, has a
necessary place at a certain evolutionary stage. But surely the cross
is the lower development and the sphere the higher. After all it is
easy enough to see what is really wrong with Wren's architectural
arrangement.”
“And what is that, pray?” inquired Michael, meekly.
“The cross is on top of the ball,” said Professor Lucifer, simply. “That
is surely wrong. The ball should be on top of the cross. The cross is a
mere barbaric prop; the ball is perfection. The cross at its best is but
the bitter tree of man's history; the ball is the rounded, the ripe and
final fruit. And the fruit should be at the top of the tree, not at the
bottom of it.”
“Oh!” said the monk, a wrinkle coming into his forehead, “so you think
that in a rationalistic scheme of symbolism the ball should be on top of
the cross?”
“It sums up my whole allegory,” said the professor.
“Well, that is really very interesting,” resumed Michael slowly,
“because I think in that case you would see a most singular effect, an
effect that has generally been achieved by all those able and powerful
systems which rationalism, or the religion of the ball, has produced to
lead or teach mankind. You would see, I think, that thing happen which
is always the ultimate embodiment and logical outcome of your logical
scheme.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Lucifer. “What would happen?”
“I mean it would fall down,” said the monk, looking wistfully into the
void.
Lucifer made an angry movement and opened his mouth to speak, but
Michael, with all his air of deliberation, was proceeding before he
could bring out a word.
“I once knew a man like you, Lucifer,” he said, with a maddening
monotony and slowness of articulation. “He took this----”
“There is no man like me,” cried Lucifer, with a violence that shook the
ship.
“As I was observing,” continued Michael, “this man also took the
view that the symbol of Christianity was a symbol of savagery and all
unreason. His history is rather amusing. It is also a perfect allegory
of what happens to rationalists like yourself. He began, of course, by
refusing to allow a crucifix in his house, or round his wife's neck,
or even in a picture. He said, as you say, that it was an arbitrary
and fantastic shape, that it was a monstrosity, loved because it was
paradoxical. Then he began to grow fiercer and more eccentric; he would
batter the crosses by the roadside; for he lived in a Roman Catholic
country. Finally in a height of frenzy he climbed the steeple of
the Parish Church and tore down the cross, waving it in the air, and
uttering wild soliloquies up there under the stars. Then one still
summer evening as he was wending his way homewards, along a lane, the
devil of his madness came upon him with a violence and transfiguration
which changes the world. He was standing smoking, for a moment, in the
front of an interminable line of palings, when his eyes were opened. Not
a light shifted, not a leaf stirred, but he saw as if by a sudden change
in the eyesight that this paling was an army of innumerable crosses
linked together over hill and dale. And he whirled up his heavy stick
and went at it as if at an army. Mile after mile along his homeward path
he broke it down and tore it up. For he hated the cross and every paling
is a wall of crosses. When he returned to his house he was a literal
madman. He sat upon a chair and then started up from it for the
cross-bars of the carpentry repeated the intolerable image. He flung
himself upon a bed only to remember that this, too, like all workmanlike
things, was constructed on the accursed plan. He broke his furniture
because it was made of crosses. He burnt his house because it was made
of crosses. He was found in the river.”
Lucifer was looking at him with a bitten lip.
“Is that story really true?” he asked.
“Oh, no,” said Michael, airily. “It is a parable. It is a parable of you
and all your rationalists. You begin by breaking up the Cross; but you
end by breaking up the habitable world. We leave you saying that nobody
ought to join the Church against his will. When we meet you again you
are saying that no one has any will to join it with. We leave you saying
that there is no such place as Eden. We find you saying that there is no
such place as Ireland. You start by hating the irrational and you come
to hate everything, for everything is irrational and so----”
Lucifer leapt upon him with a cry like a wild beast's. “Ah,” he
screamed, “to every man his madness. You are mad on the cross. Let it
save you.”
And with a herculean energy he forced the monk backwards out of the
reeling car on to the upper part of the stone ball. Michael, with
as abrupt an agility, caught one of the beams of the cross and saved
himself from falling. At the same instant Lucifer drove down a lever and
the ship shot up with him in it alone.
“Ha! ha!” he yelled, “what sort of a support do you find it, old
fellow?”
“For practical purposes of support,” replied Michael grimly, “it is at
any rate a great deal better than the ball. May I ask if you are going
to leave me here?”
“Yes, yes. I mount! I mount!” cried the professor in ungovernable
excitement. “_Altiora peto_. My path is upward.”
“How often have you told me, Professor, that there is really no up or
down in space?” said the monk. “I shall mount up as much as you will.”
“Indeed,” said Lucifer, leering over the side of the flying ship. “May I
ask what you are going to do?”
The monk pointed downward at Ludgate Hill. “I am going,” he said, “to
climb up into a star.”
Those who look at the matter most superficially regard paradox as
something which belongs to jesting and light journalism. Paradox of this
kind is to be found in the saying of the dandy, in the decadent comedy,
“Life is much too important to be taken seriously.” Those who look at
the matter a little more deeply or delicately see that paradox is a
thing which especially belongs to all religions. Paradox of this kind is
to be found in such a saying as “The meek shall inherit the earth.”
But those who see and feel the fundamental fact of the matter know that
paradox is a thing which belongs not to religion only, but to all vivid
and violent practical crises of human living. This kind of paradox may
be clearly perceived by anybody who happens to be hanging in mid-space,
clinging to one arm of the Cross of St. Paul's.
Father Michael in spite of his years, and in spite of his asceticism
(or because of it, for all I know), was a very healthy and happy old
gentleman. And as he swung on a bar above the sickening emptiness of
air, he realized, with that sort of dead detachment which belongs to the
brains of those in peril, the deathless and hopeless contradiction which
is involved in the mere idea of courage. He was a happy and healthy old
gentleman and therefore he was quite careless about it. And he felt as
every man feels in the taut moment of such terror that his chief danger
was terror itself; his only possible strength would be a coolness
amounting to carelessness, a carelessness amounting almost to a suicidal
swagger. His one wild chance of coming out safely would be in not too
desperately desiring to be safe. There might be footholds down that
awful facade, if only he could not care whether they were footholds or
no. If he were foolhardy he might escape; if he were wise he would
stop where he was till he dropped from the cross like a stone. And this
antinomy kept on repeating itself in his mind, a contradiction as large
and staring as the immense contradiction of the Cross; he remembered
having often heard the words, “Whosoever shall lose his life the same
shall save it.” He remembered with a sort of strange pity that this had
always been made to mean that whoever lost his physical life should save
his spiritual life. Now he knew the truth that is known to all fighters,
and hunters, and climbers of cliffs. He knew that even his animal life
could only be saved by a considerable readiness to lose it.
Some will think it improbable that a human soul swinging desperately
in mid-air should think about philosophical inconsistencies. But such
extreme states are dangerous things to dogmatize about. Frequently they
produce a certain useless and joyless activity of the mere intellect,
thought not only divorced from hope but even from desire. And if it is
impossible to dogmatize about such states, it is still more impossible
to describe them. To this spasm of sanity and clarity in Michael's mind
succeeded a spasm of the elemental terror; the terror of the animal
in us which regards the whole universe as its enemy; which, when it is
victorious, has no pity, and so, when it is defeated has no imaginable
hope. Of that ten minutes of terror it is not possible to speak in human
words. But then again in that damnable darkness there began to grow
a strange dawn as of grey and pale silver. And of this ultimate
resignation or certainty it is even less possible to write; it is
something stranger than hell itself; it is perhaps the last of the
secrets of God. At the highest crisis of some incurable anguish there
will suddenly fall upon the man the stillness of an insane contentment.
It is not hope, for hope is broken and romantic and concerned with the
future; this is complete and of the present. It is not faith, for
faith by its very nature is fierce, and as it were at once doubtful and
defiant; but this is simply a satisfaction. It is not knowledge, for
the intellect seems to have no particular part in it. Nor is it (as the
modern idiots would certainly say it is) a mere numbness or negative
paralysis of the powers of grief. It is not negative in the least; it
is as positive as good news. In some sense, indeed, it is good news. It
seems almost as if there were some equality among things, some balance
in all possible contingencies which we are not permitted to know lest we
should learn indifference to good and evil, but which is sometimes shown
to us for an instant as a last aid in our last agony.
Michael certainly could not have given any sort of rational account of
this vast unmeaning satisfaction which soaked through him and filled him
to the brim. He felt with a sort of half-witted lucidity that the cross
was there, and the ball was there, and the dome was there, that he was
going to climb down from them, and that he did not mind in the least
whether he was killed or not. This mysterious mood lasted long enough to
start him on his dreadful descent and to force him to continue it. But
six times before he reached the highest of the outer galleries terror
had returned on him like a flying storm of darkness and thunder. By
the time he had reached that place of safety he almost felt (as in some
impossible fit of drunkenness) that he had two heads; one was calm,
careless, and efficient; the other saw the danger like a deadly map,
was wise, careful, and useless. He had fancied that he would have to let
himself vertically down the face of the whole building. When he dropped
into the upper gallery he still felt as far from the terrestrial globe
as if he had only dropped from the sun to the moon. He paused a little,
panting in the gallery under the ball, and idly kicked his heels, moving
a few yards along it. And as he did so a thunderbolt struck his soul.
A man, a heavy, ordinary man, with a composed indifferent face, and a
prosaic sort of uniform, with a row of buttons, blocked his way. Michael
had no mind to wonder whether this solid astonished man, with the brown
moustache and the nickel buttons, had also come on a flying ship. He
merely let his mind float in an endless felicity about the man. He
thought how nice it would be if he had to live up in that gallery with
that one man for ever. He thought how he would luxuriate in the nameless
shades of this man's soul and then hear with an endless excitement about
the nameless shades of the souls of all his aunts and uncles. A moment
before he had been dying alone. Now he was living in the same world with
a man; an inexhaustible ecstasy. In the gallery below the ball Father
Michael had found that man who is the noblest and most divine and most
lovable of all men, better than all the saints, greater than all the
heroes--man Friday.
In the confused colour and music of his new paradise, Michael heard only
in a faint and distant fashion some remarks that this beautiful solid
man seemed to be making to him; remarks about something or other being
after hours and against orders. He also seemed to be asking how Michael
“got up” there. This beautiful man evidently felt as Michael did that
the earth was a star and was set in heaven.
At length Michael sated himself with the mere sensual music of the voice
of the man in buttons. He began to listen to what he said, and even to
make some attempt at answering a question which appeared to have been
put several times and was now put with some excess of emphasis. Michael
realized that the image of God in nickel buttons was asking him how
he had come there. He said that he had come in Lucifer's ship. On
his giving this answer the demeanour of the image of God underwent a
remarkable change. From addressing Michael gruffly, as if he were a
malefactor, he began suddenly to speak to him with a sort of eager
and feverish amiability as if he were a child. He seemed particularly
anxious to coax him away from the balustrade. He led him by the arm
towards a door leading into the building itself, soothing him all the
time. He gave what even Michael (slight as was his knowledge of the
world) felt to be an improbable account of the sumptuous pleasures
and varied advantages awaiting him downstairs. Michael followed him,
however, if only out of politeness, down an apparently interminable
spiral of staircase. At one point a door opened. Michael stepped through
it, and the unaccountable man in buttons leapt after him and pinioned
him where he stood. But he only wished to stand; to stand and stare.
He had stepped as it were into another infinity, out under the dome of
another heaven. But this was a dome of heaven made by man. The gold and
green and crimson of its sunset were not in the shapeless clouds but in
shapes of cherubim and seraphim, awful human shapes with a passionate
plumage. Its stars were not above but far below, like fallen stars still
in unbroken constellations; the dome itself was full of darkness.
And far below, lower even than the lights, could be seen creeping or
motionless, great black masses of men. The tongue of a terrible organ
seemed to shake the very air in the whole void; and through it there
came up to Michael the sound of a tongue more terrible; the dreadful
everlasting voice of man, calling to his gods from the beginning to the
end of the world. Michael felt almost as if he were a god, and all the
voices were hurled at him.
“No, the pretty things aren't here,” said the demi-god in buttons,
caressingly. “The pretty things are downstairs. You come along with me.
There's something that will surprise you downstairs; something you want
very much to see.”
Evidently the man in buttons did not feel like a god, so Michael made no
attempt to explain his feelings to him, but followed him meekly enough
down the trail of the serpentine staircase. He had no notion where or at
what level he was. He was still full of the cold splendour of space,
and of what a French writer has brilliantly named the “vertigo of the
infinite,” when another door opened, and with a shock indescribable he
found himself on the familiar level, in a street full of faces, with the
houses and even the lamp-posts above his head. He felt suddenly happy
and suddenly indescribably small. He fancied he had been changed into a
child again; his eyes sought the pavement seriously as children's do, as
if it were a thing with which something satisfactory could be done.
He felt the full warmth of that pleasure from which the proud shut
themselves out; the pleasure which not only goes with humiliation, but
which almost is humiliation. Men who have escaped death by a hair have
it, and men whose love is returned by a woman unexpectedly, and men
whose sins are forgiven them. Everything his eye fell on it feasted on,
not aesthetically, but with a plain, jolly appetite as of a boy eating
buns. He relished the squareness of the houses; he liked their clean
angles as if he had just cut them with a knife. The lit squares of the
shop windows excited him as the young are excited by the lit stage of
some promising pantomime. He happened to see in one shop which projected
with a bulging bravery on to the pavement some square tins of potted
meat, and it seemed like a hint of a hundred hilarious high teas in a
hundred streets of the world. He was, perhaps, the happiest of all the
children of men. For in that unendurable instant when he hung, half
slipping, to the ball of St. Paul's, the whole universe had been
destroyed and re-created.
Suddenly through all the din of the dark streets came a crash of glass.
With that mysterious suddenness of the Cockney mob, a rush was made
in the right direction, a dingy office, next to the shop of the potted
meat. The pane of glass was lying in splinters about the pavement. And
the police already had their hands on a very tall young man, with dark,
lank hair and dark, dazed eyes, with a grey plaid over his shoulder, who
had just smashed the shop window with a single blow of his stick.
“I'd do it again,” said the young man, with a furious white face.
“Anybody would have done it. Did you see what it said? I swear I'd do it
again.” Then his eyes encountered the monkish habit of Michael, and he
pulled off his grey tam-o'-shanter with the gesture of a Catholic.
“Father, did you see what they said?” he cried, trembling. “Did you see
what they dared to say? I didn't understand it at first. I read it half
through before I broke the window.”
Michael felt he knew not how. The whole peace of the world was pent up
painfully in his heart. The new and childlike world which he had seen
so suddenly, men had not seen at all. Here they were still at their old
bewildering, pardonable, useless quarrels, with so much to be said on
both sides, and so little that need be said at all. A fierce inspiration
fell on him suddenly; he would strike them where they stood with the
love of God. They should not move till they saw their own sweet and
startling existence. They should not go from that place till they went
home embracing like brothers and shouting like men delivered. From the
Cross from which he had fallen fell the shadow of its fantastic mercy;
and the first three words he spoke in a voice like a silver trumpet,
held men as still as stones. Perhaps if he had spoken there for an hour
in his illumination he might have founded a religion on Ludgate Hill.
But the heavy hand of his guide fell suddenly on his shoulder.
“This poor fellow is dotty,” he said good-humouredly to the crowd. “I
found him wandering in the Cathedral. Says he came in a flying ship. Is
there a constable to spare to take care of him?”
There was a constable to spare. Two other constables attended to the
tall young man in grey; a fourth concerned himself with the owner of the
shop, who showed some tendency to be turbulent. They took the tall young
man away to a magistrate, whither we shall follow him in an ensuing
chapter. And they took the happiest man in the world away to an asylum.