The system of espionage in the asylum was so effective and complete that
in practice the patients could often enjoy a sense of almost complete
solitude. They could stray up so near to the wall in an apparently
unwatched garden as to find it easy to jump over it. They would only
have found the error of their calculations if they had tried to jump.
Under this insulting liberty, in this artificial loneliness, Evan MacIan
was in the habit of creeping out into the garden after dark--especially
upon moonlight nights. The moon, indeed, was for him always a positive
magnet in a manner somewhat hard to explain to those of a robuster
attitude. Evidently, Apollo is to the full as poetical as Diana; but it
is not a question of poetry in the matured and intellectual sense of the
word. It is a question of a certain solid and childish fancy. The sun is
in the strict and literal sense invisible; that is to say, that by our
bodily eyes it cannot properly be seen. But the moon is a much simpler
thing; a naked and nursery sort of thing. It hangs in the sky quite
solid and quite silver and quite useless; it is one huge celestial
snowball. It was at least some such infantile facts and fancies which
led Evan again and again during his dehumanized imprisonment to go out
as if to shoot the moon.
He was out in the garden on one such luminous and ghostly night, when
the steady moonshine toned down all the colours of the garden until
almost the strongest tints to be seen were the strong soft blue of the
sky and the large lemon moon. He was walking with his face turned up to
it in that rather half-witted fashion which might have excused the error
of his keepers; and as he gazed he became aware of something little and
lustrous flying close to the lustrous orb, like a bright chip knocked
off the moon. At first he thought it was a mere sparkle or refraction
in his own eyesight; he blinked and cleared his eyes. Then he thought
it was a falling star; only it did not fall. It jerked awkwardly up and
down in a way unknown among meteors and strangely reminiscent of the
works of man. The next moment the thing drove right across the moon,
and from being silver upon blue, suddenly became black upon silver;
then although it passed the field of light in a flash its outline was
unmistakable though eccentric. It was a flying ship.
The vessel took one long and sweeping curve across the sky and came
nearer and nearer to MacIan, like a steam-engine coming round a bend. It
was of pure white steel, and in the moon it gleamed like the armour of
Sir Galahad. The simile of such virginity is not inappropriate; for, as
it grew larger and larger and lower and lower, Evan saw that the only
figure in it was robed in white from head to foot and crowned with
snow-white hair, on which the moonshine lay like a benediction. The
figure stood so still that he could easily have supposed it to be a
statue. Indeed, he thought it was until it spoke.
“Evan,” said the voice, and it spoke with the simple authority of some
forgotten father revisiting his children, “you have remained here long
enough, and your sword is wanted elsewhere.”
“Wanted for what?” asked the young man, accepting the monstrous event
with a queer and clumsy naturalness; “what is my sword wanted for?”
“For all that you hold dear,” said the man standing in the moonlight;
“for the thrones of authority and for all ancient loyalty to law.”
Evan looked up at the lunar orb again as if in irrational appeal--a moon
calf bleating to his mother the moon. But the face of Luna seemed as
witless as his own; there is no help in nature against the supernatural;
and he looked again at the tall marble figure that might have been made
out of solid moonlight.
Then he said in a loud voice: “Who are you?” and the next moment was
seized by a sort of choking terror lest his question should be answered.
But the unknown preserved an impenetrable silence for a long space and
then only answered: “I must not say who I am until the end of the world;
but I may say what I am. I am the law.”
And he lifted his head so that the moon smote full upon his beautiful
and ancient face.
The face was the face of a Greek god grown old, but not grown either
weak or ugly; there was nothing to break its regularity except a rather
long chin with a cleft in it, and this rather added distinction than
lessened beauty. His strong, well-opened eyes were very brilliant but
quite colourless like steel.
MacIan was one of those to whom a reverence and self-submission in
ritual come quite easy, and are ordinary things. It was not artificial
in him to bend slightly to this solemn apparition or to lower his voice
when he said: “Do you bring me some message?”
“I do bring you a message,” answered the man of moon and marble. “The
king has returned.”
Evan did not ask for or require any explanation. “I suppose you can take
me to the war,” he said, and the silent silver figure only bowed its
head again. MacIan clambered into the silver boat, and it rose upward to
the stars.
To say that it rose to the stars is no mere metaphor, for the sky had
cleared to that occasional and astonishing transparency in which one can
see plainly both stars and moon.
As the white-robed figure went upward in his white chariot, he said
quite quietly to Evan: “There is an answer to all the folly talked about
equality. Some stars are big and some small; some stand still and some
circle around them as they stand. They can be orderly, but they cannot
be equal.”
“They are all very beautiful,” said Evan, as if in doubt.
“They are all beautiful,” answered the other, “because each is in his
place and owns his superior. And now England will be beautiful after the
same fashion. The earth will be as beautiful as the heavens, because our
kings have come back to us.”
“The Stuart----” began Evan, earnestly.
“Yes,” answered the old man, “that which has returned is Stuart and yet
older than Stuart. It is Capet and Plantagenet and Pendragon. It is all
that good old time of which proverbs tell, that golden reign of Saturn
against which gods and men were rebels. It is all that was ever lost
by insolence and overwhelmed in rebellion. It is your own forefather,
MacIan with the broken sword, bleeding without hope at Culloden. It is
Charles refusing to answer the questions of the rebel court. It is Mary
of the magic face confronting the gloomy and grasping peers and the
boorish moralities of Knox. It is Richard, the last Plantagenet,
giving his crown to Bolingbroke as to a common brigand. It is Arthur,
overwhelmed in Lyonesse by heathen armies and dying in the mist,
doubtful if ever he shall return.”
“But now----” said Evan, in a low voice.
“But now!” said the old man; “he has returned.”
“Is the war still raging?” asked MacIan.
“It rages like the pit itself beyond the sea whither I am taking you,”
answered the other. “But in England the king enjoys his own again.
The people are once more taught and ruled as is best; they are happy
knights, happy squires, happy servants, happy serfs, if you will; but
free at last of that load of vexation and lonely vanity which was called
being a citizen.”
“Is England, indeed, so secure?” asked Evan.
“Look out and see,” said the guide. “I fancy you have seen this place
before.”
They were driving through the air towards one region of the sky where
the hollow of night seemed darkest and which was quite without stars.
But against this black background there sprang up, picked out in
glittering silver, a dome and a cross. It seemed that it was really
newly covered with silver, which in the strong moonlight was like
white flame. But, however, covered or painted, Evan had no difficult
in knowing the place again. He saw the great thoroughfare that sloped
upward to the base of its huge pedestal of steps. And he wondered
whether the little shop was still by the side of it and whether its
window had been mended.
As the flying ship swept round the dome he observed other alterations.
The dome had been redecorated so as to give it a more solemn and
somewhat more ecclesiastical note; the ball was draped or destroyed,
and round the gallery, under the cross, ran what looked like a ring of
silver statues, like the little leaden images that stood round the hat
of Louis XI. Round the second gallery, at the base of the dome, ran a
second rank of such images, and Evan thought there was another round
the steps below. When they came closer he saw that they were figures
in complete armour of steel or silver, each with a naked sword, point
upward; and then he saw one of the swords move. These were not statues
but an armed order of chivalry thrown in three circles round the cross.
MacIan drew in his breath, as children do at anything they think utterly
beautiful. For he could imagine nothing that so echoed his own visions
of pontifical or chivalric art as this white dome sitting like a vast
silver tiara over London, ringed with a triple crown of swords.
As they went sailing down Ludgate Hill, Evan saw that the state of the
streets fully answered his companion's claim about the reintroduction
of order. All the old blackcoated bustle with its cockney vivacity
and vulgarity had disappeared. Groups of labourers, quietly but
picturesquely clad, were passing up and down in sufficiently large
numbers; but it required but a few mounted men to keep the streets in
order. The mounted men were not common policemen, but knights with spurs
and plume whose smooth and splendid armour glittered like diamond rather
than steel. Only in one place--at the corner of Bouverie Street--did
there appear to be a moment's confusion, and that was due to hurry
rather than resistance. But one old grumbling man did not get out of
the way quick enough, and the man on horseback struck him, not severely,
across the shoulders with the flat of his sword.
“The soldier had no business to do that,” said MacIan, sharply. “The old
man was moving as quickly as he could.”
“We attach great importance to discipline in the streets,” said the man
in white, with a slight smile.
“Discipline is not so important as justice,” said MacIan.
The other did not answer.
Then after a swift silence that took them out across St. James's Park,
he said: “The people must be taught to obey; they must learn their own
ignorance. And I am not sure,” he continued, turning his back on Evan
and looking out of the prow of the ship into the darkness, “I am not
sure that I agree with your little maxim about justice. Discipline
for the whole society is surely more important than justice to an
individual.”
Evan, who was also leaning over the edge, swung round with startling
suddenness and stared at the other's back.
“Discipline for society----” he repeated, very staccato, “more
important--justice to individual?”
Then after a long silence he called out: “Who and what are you?”
“I am an angel,” said the white-robed figure, without turning round.
“You are not a Catholic,” said MacIan.
The other seemed to take no notice, but reverted to the main topic.
“In our armies up in heaven we learn to put a wholesome fear into
subordinates.”
MacIan sat craning his neck forward with an extraordinary and
unaccountable eagerness.
“Go on!” he cried, twisting and untwisting his long, bony fingers, “go
on!”
“Besides,” continued he, in the prow, “you must allow for a certain high
spirit and haughtiness in the superior type.”
“Go on!” said Evan, with burning eyes.
“Just as the sight of sin offends God,” said the unknown, “so does the
sight of ugliness offend Apollo. The beautiful and princely must, of
necessity, be impatient with the squalid and----”
“Why, you great fool!” cried MacIan, rising to the top of his tremendous
stature, “did you think I would have doubted only for that rap with a
sword? I know that noble orders have bad knights, that good knights have
bad tempers, that the Church has rough priests and coarse cardinals;
I have known it ever since I was born. You fool! you had only to say,
'Yes, it is rather a shame,' and I should have forgotten the affair. But
I saw on your mouth the twitch of your infernal sophistry; I knew that
something was wrong with you and your cathedrals. Something is wrong;
everything is wrong. You are not an angel. That is not a church. It is
not the rightful king who has come home.”
“That is unfortunate,” said the other, in a quiet but hard voice,
“because you are going to see his Majesty.”
“No,” said MacIan, “I am going to jump over the side.”
“Do you desire death?”
“No,” said Evan, quite composedly, “I desire a miracle.”
“From whom do you ask it? To whom do you appeal?” said his companion,
sternly. “You have betrayed the king, renounced his cross on the
cathedral, and insulted an archangel.”
“I appeal to God,” said Evan, and sprang up and stood upon the edge of
the swaying ship.
The being in the prow turned slowly round; he looked at Evan with eyes
which were like two suns, and put his hand to his mouth just too late to
hide an awful smile.
“And how do you know,” he said, “how do you know that I am not God?”
MacIan screamed. “Ah!” he cried. “Now I know who you really are. You are
not God. You are not one of God's angels. But you were once.”
The being's hand dropped from his mouth and Evan dropped out of the car.