The Ball and The Cross

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. Leav

e as I am," he said; "how long ar

t; and MacIan went on conversationally. Neither noticed that both had i

to fight each other something has stopped us. Whenever we have tried to be reconciled to each other, something has stopped us a

he huge and hedgeless meadow which fell away t

out of bushes her

e heavy hilt of his standing sword, which in the slight wind s

heard a horse-hoof or a footstep or the hoot of a train for

atheistic editor with a

ny 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

ll wait for signs from God until I have any signs of His existence; but God-or Fa

more quiet here than anywhere else; let us engage

visage almost black against the moonrise; then his hand made

s 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

, and he dropped his sword. After all, he had challenged the universe to send an interruption; and this was an interruption, whatever

eyes that contrasted with his dark hair. "It

"As a matter of fact, MacIan, it isn't the voice of God, but it's something a jolly sight more i

and the two raced away towards that part of the dista

t 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,

than on the grey-green upland, and though the scene which it revealed was

e, 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

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

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

on 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 chauf

ing 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 rowdie

s 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, kicki

n 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,

bled the disarmed man, and lo

ompanion 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 counteri

rass 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 a

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.

p 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

t poor,

ord under his arm-pit, was already lifting the fallen chauffeur into the ca

l, who (unlike many of his school) really knew a little science when he invoked it to redeem the world. "He's a

the young woman in the fur c

is a part of romance induced him to make a backward movement as if leaving h

be a lot of rowdy parties along this road, and the man will be no use for an hour. If

isturbed. She said almost sharply and yet with evident sincerity: "Of course I am awf

r. 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 th

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

n 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

e 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 th

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 seem

ed out in a kind of temper; "

Turnbull said: "It is certainly very

s words (which had no meaning whatever) soun

f it was a clump of eager policemen standing at a cross-road. As they passed, one of the policemen shouted something t

emotion of that night. "I don't believe it's the

and then turned up at his companion a fa

said at last; "if you

like," said Turnbull, with

re and instinctive astonishment. "Why sh

d and spoke to the

is 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

an, vigorously; then he added, as if beginni

to necessitate a new theory of aesthetics touching

paper that Our Lady was a common woman, a bad woman, and so we agreed to fight

t was not a reverent or a patient face that she showed him. Her Norman n

st the moonshine, he accepted an ultimate defeat. He had expected the ange

im when he insulted the Mother of God, and I asked him to fi

e; and it only opened its lips to say, after a silence: "I thought

ck on the obvious answer: "But what about a man's irreligion?" T

ocence 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

o. "It won't do, you know," she said; "you can't find out the truth in that way. There are such heaps of churche

y to her words, and seeing his great world drama grow smaller and sma

ere is really anything to find--" and she sighed rather drearily; for, like many of the women of o

fective demonstration"; and after that word, MacIan loo

rl. "People read the newspapers, but they don't believe

re she added, as if completing the sentence

l, "that you quite realize--Hu

stoppage, for a file of fat, blue policemen made a wall across the wa

r for a daughter of a dominant house, "but we have reason to believe tha

stood up in a sort of gloomy pomp, not wholly

urnbull, more easily; "my name is James

asked the young woman, looking stra

sergeant, almost apologetically.

em?" she asked, with th

Reformatory," he

il w

e cured," said

riminals or go against the law; but I must tell you that these gentlemen have done me a considerable service; you w

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

y, 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 gr

d 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 lef

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