The man in the panama looked at the ground and smoked thoughtfully for a few moments, after which he said, with a sort of matured conviction:
"Yes, certainly; the grounds inside the wall really belong to me, and the grounds outside the wall, too."
"A large proprietor, I imagine," said Turnbull, with a truculent eye.
"Yes," answered the old gentleman, looking at him with a steady smile.
"A large proprietor."
Turnbull"s eye grew even more offensive, and he began biting his red beard; but MacIan seemed to recognize a type with which he could deal and continued quite easily:
"I am sure that a man like you will not need to be told that one sees and does a good many things that do not get into the newspapers. Things which, on the whole, had better not get into the newspapers."
The smile of the large proprietor broadened for a moment under his loose, light moustache, and the other continued with increased confidence:
"One sometimes wants to have it out with another man. The police won"t allow it in the streets--and then there"s the County Council--and in the fields even nothing"s allowed but posters of pills. But in a gentleman"s garden, now----"
The strange gentleman smiled again and said, easily enough: "Do you want to fight? What do you want to fight about?"
MacIan had understood his man pretty well up to that point; an instinct common to all men with the aristocratic tradition of Europe had guided him. He knew that the kind of man who in his own back garden wears good clothes and spoils them with a bad hat is not the kind of man who has an abstract horror of illegal actions of violence or the evasion of the police. But a man may understand ragging and yet be very far from understanding religious ragging. This seeming host of theirs might comprehend a quarrel of husband and lover or a difficulty at cards or even escape from a pursuing tailor; but it still remained doubtful whether he would feel the earth fail under him in that earthquake instant when the Virgin is compared to a G.o.ddess of Mesopotamia. Even MacIan, therefore (whose tact was far from being his strong point), felt the necessity for some compromise in the mode of approach. At last he said, and even then with hesitation:
"We are fighting about G.o.d; there can be nothing so important as that."
The tilted eye-gla.s.ses of the old gentleman fell abruptly from his nose, and he thrust his aristocratic chin so far forward that his lean neck seemed to shoot out longer like a telescope.
"About G.o.d?" he queried, in a key completely new.
"Look here!" cried Turnbull, taking his turn roughly, "I"ll tell you what it"s all about. I think that there"s no G.o.d. I take it that it"s n.o.body"s business but mine--or G.o.d"s, if there is one. This young gentleman from the Highlands happens to think that it"s his business. In consequence, he first takes a walking-stick and smashes my shop; then he takes the same walking-stick and tries to smash me. To this I naturally object. I suggest that if it comes to that we should both have sticks.
He improves on the suggestion and proposes that we should both have steel-pointed sticks. The police (with characteristic unreasonableness) will not accept either of our proposals; the result is that we run about dodging the police and have jumped over our garden wall into your magnificent garden to throw ourselves on your magnificent hospitality."
The face of the old gentleman had grown redder and redder during this address, but it was still smiling; and when he broke out it was with a kind of guffaw.
"So you really want to fight with drawn swords in my garden," he asked, "about whether there is really a G.o.d?"
"Why not?" said MacIan, with his simple monstrosity of speech; "all man"s worship began when the Garden of Eden was founded."
"Yes, by----!" said Turnbull, with an oath, "and ended when the Zoological Gardens were founded."
"In this garden! In my presence!" cried the stranger, stamping up and down the gravel and choking with laughter, "whether there is a G.o.d!"
And he went stamping up and down the garden, making it echo with his unintelligible laughter. Then he came back to them more composed and wiping his eyes.
"Why, how small the world is!" he cried at last. "I can settle the whole matter. Why, I am G.o.d!"
And he suddenly began to kick and wave his well-clad legs about the lawn.
"You are what?" repeated Turnbull, in a tone which is beyond description.
"Why, G.o.d, of course!" answered the other, thoroughly amused. "How funny it is to think that you have tumbled over a garden wall and fallen exactly on the right person! You might have gone floundering about in all sorts of churches and chapels and colleges and schools of philosophy looking for some evidence of the existence of G.o.d. Why, there is no evidence, except seeing him. And now you"ve seen him. You"ve seen him dance!"
And the obliging old gentleman instantly stood on one leg without relaxing at all the grave and cultured benignity of his expression.
"I understood that this garden----" began the bewildered MacIan.
"Quite so! Quite so!" said the man on one leg, nodding gravely. "I said this garden belonged to me and the land outside it. So they do. So does the country beyond that and the sea beyond that and all the rest of the earth. So does the moon. So do the sun and stars." And he added, with a smile of apology: "You see, I"m G.o.d."
Turnbull and MacIan looked at him for one moment with a sort of notion that perhaps he was not too old to be merely playing the fool. But after staring steadily for an instant Turnbull saw the hard and horrible earnestness in the man"s eyes behind all his empty animation. Then Turnbull looked very gravely at the strict gravel walls and the gay flower-beds and the long rectangular red-brick building, which the mist had left evident beyond them. Then he looked at MacIan.
Almost at the same moment another man came walking quickly round the regal clump of rhododendrons. He had the look of a prosperous banker, wore a good tall silk hat, was almost stout enough to burst the b.u.t.tons of a fine frock-coat; but he was talking to himself, and one of his elbows had a singular outward jerk as he went by.
XIV. A MUSEUM OF SOULS
The man with the good hat and the jumping elbow went by very quickly; yet the man with the bad hat, who thought he was G.o.d, overtook him. He ran after him and jumped over a bed of geraniums to catch him.
"I beg your Majesty"s pardon," he said, with mock humility, "but here is a quarrel which you ought really to judge."
Then as he led the heavy, silk-hatted man back towards the group, he caught MacIan"s ear in order to whisper: "This poor gentleman is mad; he thinks he is Edward VII." At this the self-appointed Creator slightly winked. "Of course you won"t trust him much; come to me for everything.
But in my position one has to meet so many people. One has to be broadminded."
The big banker in the black frock-coat and hat was standing quite grave and dignified on the lawn, save for his slight twitch of one limb, and he did not seem by any means unworthy of the part which the other promptly forced upon him.
"My dear fellow," said the man in the straw hat, "these two gentlemen are going to fight a duel of the utmost importance. Your own royal position and my much humbler one surely indicate us as the proper seconds. Seconds--yes, seconds----" and here the speaker was once more shaken with his old malady of laughter.
"Yes, you and I are both seconds--and these two gentlemen can obviously fight in front of us. You, he-he, are the king. I am G.o.d; really, they could hardly have better supporters. They have come to the right place."
Then Turnbull, who had been staring with a frown at the fresh turf, burst out with a rather bitter laugh and cried, throwing his red head in the air:
"Yes, by G.o.d, MacIan, I think we have come to the right place!" And MacIan answered, with an adamantine stupidity:
"Any place is the right place where they will let us do it."
There was a long stillness, and their eyes involuntarily took in the landscape, as they had taken in all the landscapes of their everlasting combat; the bright, square garden behind the shop; the whole lift and leaning of the side of Hampstead Heath; the little garden of the decadent choked with flowers; the square of sand beside the sea at sunrise. They both felt at the same moment all the breadth and blossoming beauty of that paradise, the coloured trees, the natural and restful nooks and also the great wall of stone--more awful than the wall of China--from which no flesh could flee.
Turnbull was moodily balancing his sword in his hand as the other spoke; then he started, for a mouth whispered quite close to his ear. With a softness incredible in any cat, the huge, heavy man in the black hat and frock-coat had crept across the lawn from his own side and was saying in his ear: "Don"t trust that second of yours. He"s mad and not so mad, either; for he frightfully cunning and sharp. Don"t believe the story he tells you about why I hate him. I know the story he"ll tell; I overheard it when the housekeeper was talking to the postman. It"s too long to talk about now, and I expect we"re watched, but----"
Something in Turnbull made him want suddenly to be sick on the gra.s.s; the mere healthy and heathen horror of the unclean; the mere inhumane hatred of the inhuman state of madness. He seemed to hear all round him the hateful whispers of that place, innumerable as leaves whispering in the wind, and each of them telling eagerly some evil that had not happened or some terrific secret which was not true. All the rationalist and plain man revolted within him against bowing down for a moment in that forest of deception and egotistical darkness. He wanted to blow up that palace of delusions with dynamite; and in some wild way, which I will not defend, he tried to do it.
He looked across at MacIan and said: "Oh, I can"t stand this!"
"Can"t stand what?" asked his opponent, eyeing him doubtfully.
"Shall we say the atmosphere?" replied Turnbull; "one can"t use uncivil expressions even to a--deity. The fact is, I don"t like having G.o.d for my second."
"Sir!" said that being in a state of great offence, "in my position I am not used to having my favours refused. Do you know who I am?"
The editor of _The Atheist_ turned upon him like one who has lost all patience, and exploded: "Yes, you are G.o.d, aren"t you?" he said, abruptly, "why do we have two sets of teeth?"