Moonrise with a great and growing moon opened over all those flats,
making them seem flatter and larger than they were, turning them to a
lake of blue light. The two companions trudged across the moonlit plain
for half an hour in full silence. Then MacIan stopped suddenly and
planted his sword-point in the ground like one who plants his tent-pole
for the night. Leaving it standing there, he clutched his black-haired
skull with his great claws of hands, as was his custom when forcing the
pace of his brain. Then his hands dropped again and he spoke.
“I'm sure you're thinking the same as I am,” he said; “how long are we
to be on this damned seesaw?”
The other did not answer, but his silence seemed somehow solid as
assent; and MacIan went on conversationally. Neither noticed that both
had instinctively stood still before the sign of the fixed and standing
sword.
“It is hard to guess what God means in this business. But he means
something--or the other thing, or both. Whenever we have tried to
fight each other something has stopped us. Whenever we have tried to be
reconciled to each other, something has stopped us again. By the run
of our luck we have never had time to be either friends or enemies.
Something always jumped out of the bushes.”
Turnbull nodded gravely and glanced round at the huge and hedgeless
meadow which fell away towards the horizon into a glimmering high road.
“Nothing will jump out of bushes here anyhow,” he said.
“That is what I meant,” said MacIan, and stared steadily at the heavy
hilt of his standing sword, which in the slight wind swayed on its
tempered steel like some huge thistle on its stalk.
“That is what I meant; we are quite alone here. I have not heard a
horse-hoof or a footstep or the hoot of a train for miles. So I think we
might stop here and ask for a miracle.”
“Oh! might we?” said the atheistic editor with a sort of gusto of
disgust.
“I beg your pardon,” said MacIan, meekly. “I forgot your prejudices.”
He eyed the wind-swung sword-hilt in sad meditation and resumed: “What
I mean is, we might find out in this quiet place whether there really is
any fate or any commandment against our enterprise. I will engage on my
side, like Elijah, to accept a test from heaven. Turnbull, let us draw
swords here in this moonlight and this monstrous solitude. And if here
in this moonlight and solitude there happens anything to interrupt
us--if it be lightning striking our sword-blades or a rabbit running
under our legs--I will take it as a sign from God and we will shake
hands for ever.”
Turnbull's mouth twitched in angry humour under his red moustache. He
said: “I will wait for signs from God until I have any signs of His
existence; but God--or Fate--forbid that a man of scientific culture
should refuse any kind of experiment.”
“Very well, then,” said MacIan, shortly. “We are more quiet here than
anywhere else; let us engage.” And he plucked his sword-point out of the
turf.
Turnbull regarded him for a second and a half with a baffling visage
almost black against the moonrise; then his hand made a sharp movement
to his hip and his sword shone in the moon.
As old chess-players open every game with established gambits, they
opened with a thrust and parry, orthodox and even frankly ineffectual.
But in MacIan's soul more formless storms were gathering, and he made
a lunge or two so savage as first to surprise and then to enrage his
opponent. Turnbull ground his teeth, kept his temper, and waiting for
the third lunge, and the worst, had almost spitted the lunger when a
shrill, small cry came from behind him, a cry such as is not made by any
of the beasts that perish.
Turnbull must have been more superstitious than he knew, for he stopped
in the act of going forward. MacIan was brazenly superstitious, and he
dropped his sword. After all, he had challenged the universe to send
an interruption; and this was an interruption, whatever else it was. An
instant afterwards the sharp, weak cry was repeated. This time it was
certain that it was human and that it was female.
MacIan stood rolling those great blue Gaelic eyes that contrasted with
his dark hair. “It is the voice of God,” he said again and again.
“God hasn't got much of a voice,” said Turnbull, who snatched at every
chance of cheap profanity. “As a matter of fact, MacIan, it isn't the
voice of God, but it's something a jolly sight more important--it is the
voice of man--or rather of woman. So I think we'd better scoot in its
direction.”
MacIan snatched up his fallen weapon without a word, and the two raced
away towards that part of the distant road from which the cry was now
constantly renewed.
They had to run over a curve of country that looked smooth but was very
rough; a neglected field which they soon found to be full of the tallest
grasses and the deepest rabbit-holes. Moreover, that great curve of the
countryside which looked so slow and gentle when you glanced over it,
proved to be highly precipitous when you scampered over it; and Turnbull
was twice nearly flung on his face. MacIan, though much heavier, avoided
such an overthrow only by having the quick and incalculable feet of the
mountaineer; but both of them may be said to have leapt off a low cliff
when they leapt into the road.
The moonlight lay on the white road with a more naked and electric glare
than on the grey-green upland, and though the scene which it revealed
was complicated, it was not difficult to get its first features at a
glance.
A small but very neat black-and-yellow motor-car was standing stolidly,
slightly to the left of the road. A somewhat larger light-green
motor-car was tipped half-way into a ditch on the same side, and four
flushed and staggering men in evening dress were tipped out of it. Three
of them were standing about the road, giving their opinions to the
moon with vague but echoing violence. The fourth, however, had
already advanced on the chauffeur of the black-and-yellow car, and was
threatening him with a stick. The chauffeur had risen to defend himself.
By his side sat a young lady.
She was sitting bolt upright, a slender and rigid figure gripping the
sides of her seat, and her first few cries had ceased. She was clad in
close-fitting dark costume, a mass of warm brown hair went out in two
wings or waves on each side of her forehead; and even at that distance
it could be seen that her profile was of the aquiline and eager sort,
like a young falcon hardly free of the nest.
Turnbull had concealed in him somewhere a fund of common sense and
knowledge of the world of which he himself and his best friends were
hardly aware. He was one of those who take in much of the shows of
things absent-mindedly, and in an irrelevant reverie. As he stood at
the door of his editorial shop on Ludgate Hill and meditated on the
non-existence of God, he silently absorbed a good deal of varied
knowledge about the existence of men. He had come to know types by
instinct and dilemmas with a glance; he saw the crux of the situation in
the road, and what he saw made him redouble his pace.
He knew that the men were rich; he knew that they were drunk; and he
knew, what was worst of all, that they were fundamentally frightened.
And he knew this also, that no common ruffian (such as attacks ladies
in novels) is ever so savage and ruthless as a coarse kind of gentleman
when he is really alarmed. The reason is not recondite; it is simply
because the police-court is not such a menacing novelty to the poor
ruffian as it is to the rich. When they came within hail and heard the
voices, they confirmed all Turnbull's anticipations. The man in the
middle of the road was shouting in a hoarse and groggy voice that the
chauffeur had smashed their car on purpose; that they must get to the
Cri that evening, and that he would jolly well have to take them there.
The chauffeur had mildly objected that he was driving a lady. “Oh! we'll
take care of the lady,” said the red-faced young man, and went off into
gurgling and almost senile laughter.
By the time the two champions came up, things had grown more serious.
The intoxication of the man talking to the chauffeur had taken one of
its perverse and catlike jumps into mere screaming spite and rage. He
lifted his stick and struck at the chauffeur, who caught hold of it, and
the drunkard fell backwards, dragging him out of his seat on the car.
Another of the rowdies rushed forward booing in idiot excitement, fell
over the chauffeur, and, either by accident or design, kicked him as he
lay. The drunkard got to his feet again; but the chauffeur did not.
The man who had kicked kept a kind of half-witted conscience or
cowardice, for he stood staring at the senseless body and murmuring
words of inconsequent self-justification, making gestures with his hands
as if he were arguing with somebody. But the other three, with a mere
whoop and howl of victory, were boarding the car on three sides at once.
It was exactly at this moment that Turnbull fell among them like one
fallen from the sky. He tore one of the climbers backward by the collar,
and with a hearty push sent him staggering over into the ditch upon his
nose. One of the remaining two, who was too far gone to notice anything,
continued to clamber ineffectually over the high back of the car,
kicking and pouring forth a rivulet of soliloquy. But the other dropped
at the interruption, turned upon Turnbull and began a battering bout
of fisticuffs. At the same moment the man crawled out of the ditch in a
masquerade of mud and rushed at his old enemy from behind. The whole
had not taken a second; and an instant after MacIan was in the midst of
them.
Turnbull had tossed away his sheathed sword, greatly preferring his
hands, except in the avowed etiquette of the duel; for he had learnt to
use his hands in the old street-battles of Bradlaugh. But to MacIan the
sword even sheathed was a more natural weapon, and he laid about him
on all sides with it as with a stick. The man who had the walking-stick
found his blows parried with promptitude; and a second after, to his
great astonishment, found his own stick fly up in the air as by a
conjuring trick, with a turn of the swordsman's wrist. Another of the
revellers picked the stick out of the ditch and ran in upon MacIan,
calling to his companion to assist him.
“I haven't got a stick,” grumbled the disarmed man, and looked vaguely
about the ditch.
“Perhaps,” said MacIan, politely, “you would like this one.” With the
word the drunkard found his hand that had grasped the stick suddenly
twisted and empty; and the stick lay at the feet of his companion on the
other side of the road. MacIan felt a faint stir behind him; the girl
had risen to her feet and was leaning forward to stare at the fighters.
Turnbull was still engaged in countering and pommelling with the third
young man. The fourth young man was still engaged with himself, kicking
his legs in helpless rotation on the back of the car and talking with
melodious rationality.
At length Turnbull's opponent began to back before the battery of his
heavy hands, still fighting, for he was the soberest and boldest of the
four. If these are annals of military glory, it is due to him to say
that he need not have abandoned the conflict; only that as he backed
to the edge of the ditch his foot caught in a loop of grass and he
went over in a flat and comfortable position from which it took him a
considerable time to rise. By the time he had risen, Turnbull had come
to the rescue of MacIan, who was at bay but belabouring his two enemies
handsomely. The sight of the liberated reserve was to them like that
of Blucher at Waterloo; the two set off at a sullen trot down the road,
leaving even the walking-stick lying behind them in the moonlight.
MacIan plucked the struggling and aspiring idiot off the back of the car
like a stray cat, and left him swaying unsteadily in the moon. Then he
approached the front part of the car in a somewhat embarrassed manner
and pulled off his cap.
For some solid seconds the lady and he merely looked at each other, and
MacIan had an irrational feeling of being in a picture hung on a
wall. That is, he was motionless, even lifeless, and yet staringly
significant, like a picture. The white moonlight on the road, when he
was not looking at it, gave him a vision of the road being white with
snow. The motor-car, when he was not looking at it, gave him a rude
impression of a captured coach in the old days of highwaymen. And
he whose whole soul was with the swords and stately manners of the
eighteenth century, he who was a Jacobite risen from the dead, had an
overwhelming sense of being once more in the picture, when he had so
long been out of the picture.
In that short and strong silence he absorbed the lady from head to foot.
He had never really looked at a human being before in his life. He saw
her face and hair first, then that she had long suede gloves; then that
there was a fur cap at the back of her brown hair. He might, perhaps,
be excused for this hungry attention. He had prayed that some sign might
come from heaven; and after an almost savage scrutiny he came to the
conclusion that his one did. The lady's instantaneous arrest of speech
might need more explaining; but she may well have been stunned with
the squalid attack and the abrupt rescue. Yet it was she who remembered
herself first and suddenly called out with self-accusing horror:
“Oh, that poor, poor man!”
They both swung round abruptly and saw that Turnbull, with his recovered
sword under his arm-pit, was already lifting the fallen chauffeur into
the car. He was only stunned and was slowly awakening, feebly waving his
left arm.
The lady in long gloves and the fur cap leapt out and ran rapidly
towards them, only to be reassured by Turnbull, who (unlike many of his
school) really knew a little science when he invoked it to redeem the
world. “He's all right,” said he; “he's quite safe. But I'm afraid he
won't be able to drive the car for half an hour or so.”
“I can drive the car,” said the young woman in the fur cap with stony
practicability.
“Oh, in that case,” began MacIan, uneasily; and that paralysing shyness
which is a part of romance induced him to make a backward movement as
if leaving her to herself. But Turnbull was more rational than he, being
more indifferent.
“I don't think you ought to drive home alone, ma'am,” he said, gruffly.
“There seem to be a lot of rowdy parties along this road, and the man
will be no use for an hour. If you will tell us where you are going, we
will see you safely there and say good night.”
The young lady exhibited all the abrupt disturbance of a person who is
not commonly disturbed. She said almost sharply and yet with evident
sincerity: “Of course I am awfully grateful to you for all you've
done--and there's plenty of room if you'll come in.”
Turnbull, with the complete innocence of an absolutely sound motive,
immediately jumped into the car; but the girl cast an eye at MacIan, who
stood in the road for an instant as if rooted like a tree. Then he also
tumbled his long legs into the tonneau, having that sense of degradedly
diving into heaven which so many have known in so many human houses when
they consented to stop to tea or were allowed to stop to supper. The
slowly reviving chauffeur was set in the back seat; Turnbull and MacIan
had fallen into the middle one; the lady with a steely coolness had
taken the driver's seat and all the handles of that headlong machine. A
moment afterwards the engine started, with a throb and leap unfamiliar
to Turnbull, who had only once been in a motor during a general
election, and utterly unknown to MacIan, who in his present mood thought
it was the end of the world. Almost at the same instant that the car
plucked itself out of the mud and whipped away up the road, the man who
had been flung into the ditch rose waveringly to his feet. When he saw
the car escaping he ran after it and shouted something which, owing
to the increasing distance, could not be heard. It is awful to reflect
that, if his remark was valuable, it is quite lost to the world.
The car shot on up and down the shining moonlit lanes, and there was no
sound in it except the occasional click or catch of its machinery; for
through some cause or other no soul inside it could think of a word to
say. The lady symbolized her feelings, whatever they were, by urging the
machine faster and faster until scattered woodlands went by them in
one black blotch and heavy hills and valleys seemed to ripple under the
wheels like mere waves. A little while afterwards this mood seemed to
slacken and she fell into a more ordinary pace; but still she did not
speak. Turnbull, who kept a more common and sensible view of the case
than anyone else, made some remark about the moonlight; but something
indescribable made him also relapse into silence.
All this time MacIan had been in a sort of monstrous delirium, like some
fabulous hero snatched up into the moon. The difference between this
experience and common experiences was analogous to that between waking
life and a dream. Yet he did not feel in the least as if he were
dreaming; rather the other way; as waking was more actual than dreaming,
so this seemed by another degree more actual than waking itself. But it
was another life altogether, like a cosmos with a new dimension.
He felt he had been hurled into some new incarnation: into the midst
of new relations, wrongs and rights, with towering responsibilities and
almost tragic joys which he had as yet had no time to examine. Heaven
had not merely sent him a message; Heaven itself had opened around him
and given him an hour of its own ancient and star-shattering energy.
He had never felt so much alive before; and yet he was like a man in a
trance. And if you had asked him on what his throbbing happiness hung,
he could only have told you that it hung on four or five visible facts,
as a curtain hangs on four of five fixed nails. The fact that the lady
had a little fur at her throat; the fact that the curve of her cheek
was a low and lean curve and that the moonlight caught the height of
her cheek-bone; the fact that her hands were small but heavily gloved as
they gripped the steering-wheel; the fact that a white witch light was
on the road; the fact that the brisk breeze of their passage stirred and
fluttered a little not only the brown hair of her head but the black
fur on her cap. All these facts were to him certain and incredible, like
sacraments.
When they had driven half a mile farther, a big shadow was flung across
the path, followed by its bulky owner, who eyed the car critically but
let it pass. The silver moonlight picked out a piece or two of pewter
ornament on his blue uniform; and as they went by they knew it was a
sergeant of police. Three hundred yards farther on another policeman
stepped out into the road as if to stop them, then seemed to doubt his
own authority and stepped back again. The girl was a daughter of the
rich; and this police suspicion (under which all the poor live day and
night) stung her for the first time into speech.
“What can they mean?” she cried out in a kind of temper; “this car's
going like a snail.”
There was a short silence, and then Turnbull said: “It is certainly very
odd, you are driving quietly enough.”
“You are driving nobly,” said MacIan, and his words (which had no
meaning whatever) sounded hoarse and ungainly even in his own ears.
They passed the next mile and a half swiftly and smoothly; yet among the
many things which they passed in the course of it was a clump of eager
policemen standing at a cross-road. As they passed, one of the policemen
shouted something to the others; but nothing else happened. Eight
hundred yards farther on, Turnbull stood up suddenly in the swaying car.
“My God, MacIan!” he called out, showing his first emotion of that
night. “I don't believe it's the pace; it couldn't be the pace. I
believe it's us.”
MacIan sat motionless for a few moments and then turned up at his
companion a face that was as white as the moon above it.
“You may be right,” he said at last; “if you are, I must tell her.”
“I will tell the lady if you like,” said Turnbull, with his unconquered
good temper.
“You!” said MacIan, with a sort of sincere and instinctive astonishment.
“Why should you--no, I must tell her, of course----”
And he leant forward and spoke to the lady in the fur cap.
“I am afraid, madam, that we may have got you into some trouble,” he
said, and even as he said it it sounded wrong, like everything he said
to this particular person in the long gloves. “The fact is,” he resumed,
desperately, “the fact is, we are being chased by the police.” Then
the last flattening hammer fell upon poor Evan's embarrassment; for the
fluffy brown head with the furry black cap did not turn by a section of
the compass.
“We are chased by the police,” repeated MacIan, vigorously; then he
added, as if beginning an explanation, “You see, I am a Catholic.”
The wind whipped back a curl of the brown hair so as to necessitate a
new theory of aesthetics touching the line of the cheek-bone; but the
head did not turn.
“You see,” began MacIan, again blunderingly, “this gentleman wrote in
his newspaper that Our Lady was a common woman, a bad woman, and so we
agreed to fight; and we were fighting quite a little time ago--but that
was before we saw you.”
The young lady driving her car had half turned her face to listen; and
it was not a reverent or a patient face that she showed him. Her Norman
nose was tilted a trifle too high upon the slim stalk of her neck and
body.
When MacIan saw that arrogant and uplifted profile pencilled plainly
against the moonshine, he accepted an ultimate defeat. He had expected
the angels to despise him if he were wrong, but not to despise him so
much as this.
“You see,” said the stumbling spokesman, “I was angry with him when he
insulted the Mother of God, and I asked him to fight a duel with me; but
the police are all trying to stop it.”
Nothing seemed to waver or flicker in the fair young falcon profile; and
it only opened its lips to say, after a silence: “I thought people in
our time were supposed to respect each other's religion.”
Under the shadow of that arrogant face MacIan could only fall back on
the obvious answer: “But what about a man's irreligion?” The face only
answered: “Well, you ought to be more broadminded.”
If anyone else in the world had said the words, MacIan would have
snorted with his equine neigh of scorn. But in this case he seemed
knocked down by a superior simplicity, as if his eccentric attitude were
rebuked by the innocence of a child. He could not dissociate anything
that this woman said or did or wore from an idea of spiritual rarity and
virtue. Like most others under the same elemental passion, his soul was
at present soaked in ethics. He could have applied moral terms to the
material objects of her environment. If someone had spoken of
“her generous ribbon” or “her chivalrous gloves” or “her merciful
shoe-buckle,” it would not have seemed to him nonsense.
He was silent, and the girl went on in a lower key as if she were
momentarily softened and a little saddened also. “It won't do, you
know,” she said; “you can't find out the truth in that way. There are
such heaps of churches and people thinking different things nowadays,
and they all think they are right. My uncle was a Swedenborgian.”
MacIan sat with bowed head, listening hungrily to her voice but hardly
to her words, and seeing his great world drama grow smaller and smaller
before his eyes till it was no bigger than a child's toy theatre.
“The time's gone by for all that,” she went on; “you can't find out the
real thing like that--if there is really anything to find----” and
she sighed rather drearily; for, like many of the women of our wealthy
class, she was old and broken in thought, though young and clean enough
in her emotions.
“Our object,” said Turnbull, shortly, “is to make an effective
demonstration”; and after that word, MacIan looked at his vision again
and found it smaller than ever.
“It would be in the newspapers, of course,” said the girl. “People read
the newspapers, but they don't believe them, or anything else, I think.”
And she sighed again.
She drove in silence a third of a mile before she added, as if
completing the sentence: “Anyhow, the whole thing's quite absurd.”
“I don't think,” began Turnbull, “that you quite realize----Hullo!
hullo--hullo--what's this?”
The amateur chauffeur had been forced to bring the car to a staggering
stoppage, for a file of fat, blue policemen made a wall across the way.
A sergeant came to the side and touched his peaked cap to the lady.
“Beg your pardon, miss,” he said with some embarrassment, for he knew
her for a daughter of a dominant house, “but we have reason to believe
that the gentlemen in your car are----” and he hesitated for a polite
phrase.
“I am Evan MacIan,” said that gentleman, and stood up in a sort of
gloomy pomp, not wholly without a touch of the sulks of a schoolboy.
“Yes, we will get out, sergeant,” said Turnbull, more easily; “my name
is James Turnbull. We must not incommode the lady.”
“What are you taking them up for?” asked the young woman, looking
straight in front of her along the road.
“It's under the new act,” said the sergeant, almost apologetically.
“Incurable disturbers of the peace.”
“What will happen to them?” she asked, with the same frigid clearness.
“Westgate Adult Reformatory,” he replied, briefly.
“Until when?”
“Until they are cured,” said the official.
“Very well, sergeant,” said the young lady, with a sort of tired common
sense. “I am sure I don't want to protect criminals or go against
the law; but I must tell you that these gentlemen have done me a
considerable service; you won't mind drawing your men a little farther
off while I say good night to them. Men like that always misunderstand.”
The sergeant was profoundly disquieted from the beginning at the mere
idea of arresting anyone in the company of a great lady; to refuse one
of her minor requests was quite beyond his courage. The police fell back
to a few yards behind the car. Turnbull took up the two swords that were
their only luggage; the swords that, after so many half duels, they were
now to surrender at last. MacIan, the blood thundering in his brain
at the thought of that instant of farewell, bent over, fumbled at the
handle and flung open the door to get out.
But he did not get out. He did not get out, because it is dangerous to
jump out of a car when it is going at full speed. And the car was going
at full speed, because the young lady, without turning her head or
so much as saying a syllable, had driven down a handle that made the
machine plunge forward like a buffalo and then fly over the landscape
like a greyhound. The police made one rush to follow, and then dropped
so grotesque and hopeless a chase. Away in the vanishing distance they
could see the sergeant furiously making notes.
The open door, still left loose on its hinges, swung and banged quite
crazily as they went whizzing up one road and down another. Nor did
MacIan sit down; he stood up stunned and yet staring, as he would have
stood up at the trumpet of the Last Day. A black dot in the distance
sprang up a tall black forest, swallowed them and spat them out again
at the other end. A railway bridge grew larger and larger till it leapt
upon their backs bellowing, and was in its turn left behind. Avenues of
poplars on both sides of the road chased each other like the figures
in a zoetrope. Now and then with a shock and rattle they went through
sleeping moonlit villages, which must have stirred an instant in their
sleep as at the passing of a fugitive earthquake. Sometimes in an
outlying house a light in one erratic, unexpected window would give them
a nameless hint of the hundred human secrets which they left behind them
with their dust. Sometimes even a slouching rustic would be afoot on
the road and would look after them, as after a flying phantom. But still
MacIan stood up staring at earth and heaven; and still the door he had
flung open flapped loose like a flag. Turnbull, after a few minutes of
dumb amazement, had yielded to the healthiest element in his nature and
gone off into uncontrollable fits of laughter. The girl had not stirred
an inch.
After another half mile that seemed a mere flash, Turnbull leant over
and locked the door. Evan staggered at last into his seat and hid his
throbbing head in his hands; and still the car flew on and its driver
sat inflexible and silent. The moon had already gone down, and the whole
darkness was faintly troubled with twilight and the first movement of
beasts and fowls. It was that mysterious moment when light is coming as
if it were something unknown whose nature one could not guess--a mere
alteration in everything. They looked at the sky and it seemed as dark
as ever; then they saw the black shape of a tower or tree against it and
knew that it was already grey. Save that they were driving southward and
had certainly passed the longitude of London, they knew nothing of their
direction; but Turnbull, who had spent a year on the Hampshire coast in
his youth, began to recognize the unmistakable but quite indescribable
villages of the English south. Then a white witch fire began to burn
between the black stems of the fir-trees; and, like so many things in
nature, though not in books on evolution, the daybreak, when it did
come, came much quicker than one would think. The gloomy heavens were
ripped up and rolled away like a scroll, revealing splendours, as the
car went roaring up the curve of a great hill; and above them and black
against the broadening light, there stood one of those crouching and
fantastic trees that are first signals of the sea.