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 God, overtook him. Heran 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 isa quarrel which you ought really to judge."
Then as he led the heavy, silk-hatted man back towards the group, hecaught MacIan's ear in order to whisper: "This poor gentleman is mad;he thinks he is Edward VII." At this the self-appointed Creator slightlywinked. "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 bebroadminded."
The big banker in the black frock-coat and hat was standing quite graveand 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 otherpromptly forced upon him.
"My dear fellow," said the man in the straw hat, "these two gentlemenare going to fight a duel of the utmost importance. Your own royalposition and my much humbler one surely indicate us as the properseconds. Seconds--yes, seconds----" and here the speaker was once moreshaken with his old malady of laughter.
"Yes, you and I are both seconds--and these two gentlemen can obviouslyfight in front of us. You, he-he, are the king. I am God; really, theycould 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 inthe air:
"Yes, by God, MacIan, I think we have come to the right place!" AndMacIan 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 thelandscape, as they had taken in all the landscapes of their everlastingcombat; the bright, square garden behind the shop; the whole liftand leaning of the side of Hampstead Heath; the little garden of thedecadent choked with flowers; the square of sand beside the seaat sunrise. They both felt at the same moment all the breadth andblossoming beauty of that paradise, the coloured trees, the natural andrestful nooks and also the great wall of stone--more awful than the wallof 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 asoftness incredible in any cat, the huge, heavy man in the black hat andfrock-coat had crept across the lawn from his own side and was sayingin 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 hetells you about why I hate him. I know the story he'll tell; I overheardit when the housekeeper was talking to the postman. It's too long totalk about now, and I expect we're watched, but----"
Something in Turnbull made him want suddenly to be sick on the grass;the mere healthy and heathen horror of the unclean; the mere inhumanehatred of the inhuman state of madness. He seemed to hear all round himthe hateful whispers of that place, innumerable as leaves whisperingin the wind, and each of them telling eagerly some evil that had nothappened or some terrific secret which was not true. All the rationalistand plain man revolted within him against bowing down for a moment inthat forest of deception and egotistical darkness. He wanted to blow upthat palace of delusions with dynamite; and in some wild way, which Iwill 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 uncivilexpressions even to a--deity. The fact is, I don't like having God formy second."
"Sir!" said that being in a state of great offence, "in my position I amnot used to having my favours refused. Do you know who I am?"
The editor of _The Atheist_ turned upon him like one who has lostall patience, and exploded: "Yes, you are God, aren't you?" he said,abruptly, "why do we have two sets of teeth?"
"Teeth?" spluttered the genteel lunatic; "teeth?"
"Yes," cried Turnbull, advancing on him swiftly and with animatedgestures, "why does teething hurt? Why do growing pains hurt? Why aremeasles catching? Why does a rose have thorns? Why do rhinoceroses havehorns? Why is the horn on the top of the nose? Why haven't I a horn onthe top of my nose, eh?" And he struck the bridge of his nose smartlywith his forefinger to indicate the place of the omission and thenwagged the finger menacingly at the Creator.
"I've often wanted to meet you," he resumed, sternly, after a pause, "tohold you accountable for all the idiocy and cruelty of this muddled andmeaningless world of yours. You make a hundred seeds and only one bearsfruit. You make a million worlds and only one seems inhabited. What doyou mean by it, eh? What do you mean by it?"
The unhappy lunatic had fallen back before this quite novel form ofattack, and lifted his burnt-out cigarette almost like one warding off ablow. Turnbull went on like a torrent.
"A man died yesterday in Ealing. You murdered him. A girl had thetoothache in Croydon. You gave it her. Fifty sailors were drowned offSelsey Bill. You scuttled their ship. What have you got to say foryourself, eh?"
The representative of omnipotence looked as if he had left most of thesethings to his subordinates; he passed a hand over his wrinkling brow andsaid in a voice much saner than any he had yet used:
"Well, if you dislike my assistance, of course--perhaps the othergentleman----"
"The other gentleman," cried Turnbull, scornfully, "is a submissiveand loyal and obedient gentleman. He likes the people who wear crowns,whether of diamonds or of stars. He believes in the divine right ofkings, and it is appropriate enough that he should have the king for hissecond. But it is not appropriate to me that I should have God for mysecond. God is not good enough. I dislike and I deny the divine right ofkings. But I dislike more and I deny more the divine right of divinity."
Then after a pause in which he swallowed his passion, he said to MacIan:"You have got the right second, anyhow."
The Highlander did not answer, but stood as if thunderstruck with onelong and heavy thought. Then at last he turned abruptly to his second inthe silk hat and said: "Who are you?"
The man in the silk hat blinked and bridled in affected surprise, likeone who was in truth accustomed to be doubted.
"I am King Edward VII," he said, with shaky arrogance. "Do you doubt myword?"
"I do not doubt it in the least," answered MacIan.
"Then, why," said the large man in the silk hat, trembling from head tofoot, "why do you wear your hat before the king?"
"Why should I take it off," retorted MacIan, with equal heat, "before ausurper?"
Turnbull swung round on his heel. "Well, really," he said, "I thought atleast you were a loyal subject."
"I am the only loyal subject," answered the Gael. "For nearly thirtyyears I have walked these islands and have not found another."
"You are always hard to follow," remarked Turnbull, genially, "andsometimes so much so as to be hardly worth following."
"I alone am loyal," insisted MacIan; "for I alone am in rebellion. I amready at any instant to restore the Stuarts. I am ready at any instantto defy the Hanoverian brood--and I defy it now even when face to facewith the actual ruler of the enormous British Empire!"
And folding his arms and throwing back his lean, hawklike face,he haughtily confronted the man with the formal frock-coat and theeccentric elbow.
"What right had you stunted German squires," he cried, "to interfere ina quarrel between Scotch and English and Irish gentlemen? Who made you,whose fathers could not splutter English while they walked in Whitehall,who made you the judge between the republic of Sidney and the monarchyof Montrose? What had your sires to do with England that they shouldhave the foul offering of the blood of Derwentwater and the heart ofJimmy Dawson? Where are the corpses of Culloden? Where is the bloodof Lochiel?" MacIan advanced upon
his opponent with a bony and pointedfinger, as if indicating the exact pocket in which the blood of thatCameron was probably kept; and Edward VII fell back a few paces inconsiderable confusion.
"What good have you ever done to us?" he continued in harsher andharsher accents, forcing the other back towards the flower-beds. "Whatgood have you ever done, you race of German sausages? Yards of barbarianetiquette, to throttle the freedom of aristocracy! Gas of northernmetaphysics to blow up Broad Church bishops like balloons. Bad picturesand bad manners and pantheism and the Albert Memorial. Go back toHanover, you humbug? Go to----"
Before the end of this tirade the arrogance of the monarch had entirelygiven way; he had fairly turned tail and was trundling away down thepath. MacIan strode after him still preaching and flourishing his large,lean hands. The other two remained in the centre of the lawn--Turnbullin convulsions of laughter, the lunatic in convulsions of disgust.Almost at the same moment a third figure came stepping swiftly acrossthe lawn.
The advancing figure walked with a stoop, and yet somehow flung hisforked and narrow beard forward. That carefully cut and pointed yellowbeard was, indeed, the most emphatic thing about him. When he claspedhis hands behind him, under the tails of his coat, he would wag hisbeard at a man like a big forefinger. It performed almost all hisgestures; it was more important than the glittering eye-glasses throughwhich he looked or the beautiful bleating voice in which he spoke. Hisface and neck were of a lusty red, but lean and stringy; he always worehis expensive gold-rim eye-glasses slightly askew upon his aquilinenose; and he always showed two gleaming foreteeth under his moustache,in a smile so perpetual as to earn the reputation of a sneer. But forthe crooked glasses his dress was always exquisite; and but for thesmile he was perfectly and perennially depressed.
"Don't you think," said the new-comer, with a sort of superciliousentreaty, "that we had better all come into breakfast? It is such amistake to wait for breakfast. It spoils one's temper so much."
"Quite so," replied Turnbull, seriously.
"There seems almost to have been a little quarrelling here," said theman with the goatish beard.
"It is rather a long story," said Turnbull, smiling. "Originally, itmight be called a phase in the quarrel between science and religion."
The new-comer started slightly, and Turnbull replied to the question onhis face.
"Oh, yes," he said, "I am science!"
"I congratulate you heartily," answered the other, "I am Doctor Quayle."
Turnbull's eyes did not move, but he realized that the man in the panamahat had lost all his ease of a landed proprietor and had withdrawn toa distance of thirty yards, where he stood glaring with all thecontraction of fear and hatred that can stiffen a cat.
* * *
MacIan was sitting somewhat disconsolately on a stump of tree, his largeblack head half buried in his large brown hands, when Turnbull strodeup to him chewing a cigarette. He did not look up, but his comrade andenemy addressed him like one who must free himself of his feelings.
"Well, I hope, at any rate," he said, "that you like your preciousreligion now. I hope you like the society of this poor devil whom yourdamned tracts and hymns and priests have driven out of his wits. Fivemen in this place, they tell me, five men in this place who might havebeen fathers of families, and every one of them thinks he is God theFather. Oh! you may talk about the ugliness of science, but there is noone here who thinks he is Protoplasm."
"They naturally prefer a bright part," said MacIan, wearily. "Protoplasmis not worth going mad about."
"At least," said Turnbull, savagely, "it was your Jesus Christ whostarted all this bosh about being God."
For one instant MacIan opened the eyes of battle; then his tightenedlips took a crooked smile and he said, quite calmly:
"No, the idea is older; it was Satan who first said that he was God."
"Then, what," asked Turnbull, very slowly, as he softly picked a flower,"what is the difference between Christ and Satan?"
"It is quite simple," replied the Highlander. "Christ descended intohell; Satan fell into it."
"Does it make much odds?" asked the free-thinker.
"It makes all the odds," said the other. "One of them wanted to go upand went down; the other wanted to go down and went up. A god can behumble, a devil can only be humbled."
"Why are you always wanting to humble a man?" asked Turnbull, knittinghis brows. "It affects me as ungenerous."
"Why were you wanting to humble a god when you found him in thisgarden?" asked MacIan.
"That was an extreme case of impudence," said Turnbull.
"Granting the man his almighty pretensions, I think he was very modest,"said MacIan. "It is we who are arrogant, who know we are only men. Theordinary man in the street is more of a monster than that poor fellow;for the man in the street treats himself as God Almighty when he knowshe isn't. He expects the universe to turn round him, though he knows heisn't the centre."
"Well," said Turnbull, sitting down on the grass, "this is a digression,anyhow. What I want to point out is, that your faith does end in asylumsand my science doesn't."
"Doesn't it, by George!" cried MacIan, scornfully. "There are a few menhere who are mad on God and a few who are mad on the Bible. But I betthere are many more who are simply mad on madness."
"Do you really believe it?" asked the other.
"Scores of them, I should say," answered MacIan. "Fellows who haveread medical books or fellows whose fathers and uncles had somethinghereditary in their heads--the whole air they breathe is mad."
"All the same," said Turnbull, shrewdly, "I bet you haven't found amadman of that sort."
"I bet I have!" cried Evan, with unusual animation. "I've been walkingabout the garden talking to a poor chap all the morning. He's simplybeen broken down and driven raving by your damned science. Talk aboutbelieving one is God--why, it's quite an old, comfortable, firesidefancy compared with the sort of things this fellow believes. He believesthat there is a God, but that he is better than God. He says God will beafraid to face him. He says one is always progressing beyond the best.He put his arm in mine and whispered in my ear, as if it were theapocalypse: 'Never trust a God that you can't improve on.'"
"What can he have meant?" said the atheist, with all his logic awake."Obviously one should not trust any God that one can improve on."
"It is the way he talks," said MacIan, almost indifferently; "but hesays rummier things than that. He says that a man's doctor ought todecide what woman he marries; and he says that children ought not tobe brought up by their parents, because a physical partiality will thendistort the judgement of the educator."
"Oh, dear!" said Turnbull, laughing, "you have certainly come across apretty bad case, and incidentally proved your own. I suppose some men dolose their wits through science as through love and other good things."
"And he says," went on MacIan, monotonously, "that he cannot see whyanyone should suppose that a triangle is a three-sided figure. He saysthat on some higher plane----"
Turnbull leapt to his feet as by an electric shock. "I never could havebelieved," he cried, "that you had humour enough to tell a lie. You'vegone a bit too far, old man, with your little joke. Even in a lunaticasylum there can't be anybody who, having thought about the matter,thinks that a triangle has not got three sides. If he exists he must bea new era in human psychology. But he doesn't exist."
"I will go and fetch him," said MacIan, calmly; "I left the poor fellowwandering about by the nasturtium bed."
MacIan vanished, and in a few moments returned, trailing with him hisown discovery among lunatics, who was a slender man with a fixed smileand an unfixed and rolling head. He had a goatlike beard just longenough to be shaken in a strong wind. Turnbull sprang to his feetand was like one who is speechless through choking a sudden shout oflaughter.
"Why, you great donkey," he shouted, in an ear-shattering whisper,"that's not one of the patients at all. That's one of the docto
rs."
Evan looked back at the leering head with the long-pointed beard andrepeated the word inquiringly: "One of the doctors?"
"Oh, you know what I mean," said Turnbull, impatiently. "The medicalauthorities of the place."
Evan was still staring back curiously at the beaming and beardedcreature behind him.
"The mad doctors," said Turnbull, shortly.
"Quite so," said MacIan.
After a rather restless silence Turnbull plucked MacIan by the elbow andpulled him aside.
"For goodness sake," he said, "don't offend this fellow; he may be asmad as ten hatters, if you like, but he has us between his fingerand thumb. This is the very time he appointed to talk with us aboutour--well, our exeat."
"But what can it matter?" asked the wondering MacIan. "He can't keep usin the asylum. We're not mad."
"Jackass!" said Turnbull, heartily, "of course we're not mad. Of course,if we are medically examined and the thing is thrashed out, they willfind we are not mad. But don't you see that if the thing is thrashed outit will mean letters to this reference and telegrams to that; and at thefirst word of who we are, we shall be taken out of a madhouse, wherewe may smoke, to a jail, where we mayn't. No, if we manage this veryquietly, he may merely let us out at the front door as stray revellers.If there's half an hour of inquiry, we are cooked."
MacIan looked at the grass frowningly for a few seconds, and then saidin a new, small and childish voice: "I am awfully stupid, Mr. Turnbull;you must be patient with me."
Turnbull caught Evan's elbow again with quite another gesture. "Come,"he cried, with the harsh voice of one who hides emotion, "come and letus be tactful in chorus."
The doctor with the pointed beard was already slanting it forward at amore than usually acute angle, with the smile that expressed expectancy.
"I hope I do not hurry you, gentlemen," he said, with the faintestsuggestion of a sneer at their hurried consultation, "but I believe youwanted to see me at half past eleven."
"I am most awfully sorry, Doctor," said Turnbull, with ready amiability;"I never meant to keep you waiting; but the silly accident that haslanded us in your garden may have some rather serious consequences toour friends elsewhere, and my friend here was just drawing my attentionto some of them."
"Quite so! Quite so!" said the doctor, hurriedly. "If you really wantto put anything before me, I can give you a few moments in myconsulting-room."
He led them rapidly into a small but imposing apartment, which seemedto be built and furnished entirely in red-varnished wood. There was onedesk occupied with carefully docketed papers; and there were severalchairs of the red-varnished wood--though of different shape. All alongthe wall ran something that might have been a bookcase, only that it wasnot filled with books, but with flat, oblong slabs or cases of the samepolished dark-red consistency. What those flat wooden cases were theycould form no conception.
The doctor sat down with a polite impatience on his professional perch;MacIan remained standing, but Turnbull threw himself almost with luxuryinto a hard wooden arm-chair.
"This is a most absurd business, Doctor," he said, "and I am ashamed totake up the time of busy professional men with such pranks from outside.The plain fact is, that he and I and a pack of silly men and girls haveorganized a game across this part of the country--a sort of combinationof hare and hounds and hide and seek--I dare say you've heard of it. Weare the hares, and, seeing your high wall look so inviting, we tumbledover it, and naturally were a little startled with what we found on theother side."
"Quite so!" said the doctor, mildly. "I can understand that you werestartled."
Turnbull had expected him to ask what place was the headquarters of thenew exhilarating game, and who were the male and female enthusiasts whohad brought it to such perfection; in fact, Turnbull was busy making upthese personal and topographical particulars. As the doctor did not askthe question, he grew slightly uneasy, and risked the question: "I hopeyou will accept my assurance that the thing was an accident and that nointrusion was meant."
"Oh, yes, sir," replied the doctor, smiling, "I accept everything thatyou say."
"In that case," said Turnbull, rising genially, "we must not furtherinterrupt your important duties. I suppose there will be someone to letus out?"
"No," said the doctor, still smiling steadily and pleasantly, "therewill be no one to let you out."
"Can we let ourselves out, then?" asked Turnbull, in some surprise.
"Why, of course not," said the beaming scientist; "think how dangerousthat would be in a place like this."
"Then, how the devil are we to get out?" cried Turnbull, losing hismanners for the first time.
"It is a question of time, of receptivity, and treatment," said thedoctor, arching his eyebrows indifferently. "I do not regard either ofyour cases as incurable."
And with that the man of the world was struck dumb, and, as in allintolerable moments, the word was with the unworldly.
MacIan took one stride to the table, leant across it, and said: "Wecan't stop here, we're not mad people!"
"We don't use the crude phrase," said the doctor, smiling at hispatent-leather boots.
"But you _can't_ think us mad," thundered MacIan. "You never saw usbefore. You know nothing about us. You haven't even examined us."
The doctor threw back his head and beard. "Oh, yes," he said, "verythoroughly."
"But you can't shut a man up on your mere impressions without documentsor certificates or anything?"
The doctor got languidly to his feet. "Quite so," he said. "Youcertainly ought to see the documents."
He went across to the curious mock book-shelves and took down one ofthe flat mahogany cases. This he opened with a curious key at hiswatch-chain, and laying back a flap revealed a quire of foolscap coveredwith close but quite clear writing. The first three words were in suchlarge copy-book hand that they caught the eye even at a distance. Theywere: "MacIan, Evan Stuart."
Evan bent his angry eagle face over it; yet something blurred it andhe could never swear he saw it distinctly. He saw something that began:"Prenatal influences predisposing to mania. Grandfather believed inreturn of the Stuarts. Mother carried bone of St. Eulalia with which shetouched children in sickness. Marked religious mania at early age----"
Evan fell back and fought for his speech. "Oh!" he burst out at last."Oh! if all this world I have walked in had been as sane as my motherwas."
Then he compressed his temples with his hands, as if to crush them. Andthen lifted suddenly a face that looked fresh and young, as if he haddipped and washed it in some holy well.
"Very well," he cried; "I will take the sour with the sweet. I will paythe penalty of having enjoyed God in this monstrous modern earth thatcannot enjoy man or beast. I will die happy in your madhouse, onlybecause I know what I know. Let it be granted, then--MacIan is a mystic;MacIan is a maniac. But this honest shopkeeper and editor whom I havedragged on my inhuman escapades, you cannot keep him. He will go free,thank God, he is not down in any damned document. His ancestor, I amcertain, did not die at Culloden. His mother, I swear, had no relics.Let my friend out of your front door, and as for me----"
The doctor had already gone across to the laden shelves, and after a fewminutes' short-sighted peering, had pulled down another parallelogram ofdark-red wood.
This also he unlocked on the table, and with the same unerringegotistic eye on of the company saw the words, written in large letters:"Turnbull, James."
Hitherto Turnbull himself had somewhat scornfully surrendered his partin the whole business; but he was too honest and unaffected not tostart at his own name. After the name, the inscription appeared to run:"Unique case of Eleutheromania. Parentage, as so often in such cases,prosaic and healthy. Eleutheromaniac signs occurred early, however,leading him to attach himself to the individualist Bradlaugh. Recentoutbreak of pure anarchy----"
Turnbull slammed the case to, almost smashing it, and said with a burstof savage laughter: "Oh! come along, MacIan; I don'
t care so much, evenabout getting out of the madhouse, if only we get out of this room. Youwere right enough, MacIan, when you spoke about--about mad doctors."
Somehow they found themselves outside in the cool, green garden, andthen, after a stunned silence, Turnbull said: "There is one thing thatwas puzzling me all the time, and I understand it now."
"What do you mean?" asked Evan.
"No man by will or wit," answered Turnbull, "can get out of this garden;and yet we got into it merely by jumping over a garden wall. The wholething explains itself easily enough. That undefended wall was an opentrap. It was a trap laid for two celebrated lunatics. They saw us get inright enough. And they will see that we do not get out."
Evan gazed at the garden wall, gravely for more than a minute, and thenhe nodded without a word.