THE BALL AND THE CROSS
G.K. Chesterton
I. A DISCUSSION SOMEWHAT IN THE AIR
The flying ship of Professor Lucifer sang through the skies like
a silver arrow; the bleak white steel of it, gleaming in the
bleak blue emptiness of the evening. That it was far above the
earth was no expression for it; to the two men in it, it seemed
to be far above the stars. The professor had himself invented
the flying machine, and had also invented nearly everything in
it. Every sort of tool or apparatus had, in consequence, to the
full, that fantastic and distorted look which belongs to the
miracles of science. For the world of science and evolution is
far more nameless and elusive and like a dream than the world of
poetry and religion; since in the latter images and ideas remain
themselves eternally, while it is the whole idea of evolution
that identities melt into each other as they do in a nightmare.
All the tools of Professor Lucifer were the ancient human tools
gone mad, grown into unrecognizable shapes, forgetful of their
origin, forgetful of their names. That thing which looked like an
enormous key with three wheels was really a patent and very
deadly revolver. That object which seemed to be created by the
entanglement of two corkscrews was really the key. The thing
which might have been mistaken for a tricycle turned upside-down
was the inexpressibly important instrument to which the corkscrew
was the key. All these things, as I say, the professor had
invented; he had invented everything in the flying ship, with the
exception, perhaps, of himself. This he had been born too late
actually to inaugurate, but he believed at least, that he had
considerably improved it.
There was, however, another man on board, so to speak, at the
time. Him, also, by a curious coincidence, the professor had not
invented, and him he had not even very greatly improved, though
he had fished him up with a lasso out of his own back garden, in
Western Bulgaria, with the pure object of improving him. He was
an exceedingly holy man, almost entirely covered with white hair.
You could see nothing but his eyes, and he seemed to talk with
them. A monk of immense learning and acute intellect he had made
himself happy in a little stone hut and a little stony garden in
the Balkans, chiefly by writing the most crushing refutations of
exposures of certain heresies, the last professors of which had
been burnt (generally by each other) precisely 1,119 years
previously. They were really very plausible and thoughtful
heresies, and it was really a creditable or even glorious
circumstance, that the old monk had been intellectual enough to
detect their fallacy; the only misfortune was that nobody in the
modern world was intellectual enough even to understand their
argument. The old monk, one of whose names was Michael, and the
other a name quite impossible to remember or repeat in our
Western civilization, had, however, as I have said, made himself
quite happy while he was in a mountain hermitage in the society
of wild animals. And now that his luck had lifted him above all
the mountains in the society of a wild physicist, he made himself
happy still.
"I have no intention, my good Michael," said Professor Lucifer,
"of endeavouring to convert you by argument. The imbecility of
your traditions can be quite finally exhibited to anybody with
mere ordinary knowledge of the world, the same kind of knowledge
which teaches us not to sit in draughts or not to encourage
friendliness in impecunious people. It is folly to talk of this
or that demonstrating the rationalist philosophy. Everything
demonstrates it. Rubbing shoulders with men of all kinds----"
"You will forgive me," said the monk, meekly from under loads of
white beard, "but I fear I do not understand; was it in order
that I might rub my shoulder against men of all kinds that you
put me inside this thing?"
"An entertaining retort, in the narrow and deductive manner of
the Middle Ages," replied the Professor, calmly, "but even upon
your own basis I will illustrate my point. We are up in the sky.
In your religion and all the religions, as far as I know (and I
know everything), the sky is made the symbol of everything that
is sacred and merciful. Well, now you are in the sky, you know
better. Phrase it how you like, twist it how you like, you know
that you know better. You know what are a man's real feelings
about the heavens, when he finds himself alone in the heavens,
surrounded by the heavens. You know the truth, and the truth is
this. The heavens are evil, the sky is evil, the stars are evil.
This mere space, this mere quantity, terrifies a man more than
tigers or the terrible plague. You know that since our science
has spoken, the bottom has fallen out of the Universe. Now,
heaven is the hopeless thing, more hopeless than any hell. Now,
if there be any comfort for all your miserable progeny of morbid
apes, it must be in the earth, underneath you, under the roots of
the grass, in the place where hell was of old. The fiery crypts,
the lurid cellars of the underworld, to which you once condemned
the wicked, are hideous enough, but at least they are more homely
than the heaven in which we ride. And the time will come when you
will all hide in them, to escape the horror of the stars."
"I hope you will excuse my interrupting you," said Michael, with
a slight cough, "but I have always noticed----"
"Go on, pray go on," said Professor Lucifer, radiantly, "I really
like to draw out your simple ideas."
"Well, the fact is," said the other, "that much as I admire your
rhetoric and the rhetoric of your school, from a purely verbal
point of view, such little study of you and your school in human
history as I have been enabled to make has led me to--er--rather
singular conclusion, which I find great difficulty in expressing,
especially in a foreign language."
"Come, come," said the Professor, encouragingly, "I'll help you
out. How did my view strike you?"
"Well, the truth is, I know I don't express it properly, but
somehow it seemed to me that you always convey ideas of that kind
with most eloquence, when--er--when----"
"Oh! get on," cried Lucifer, boisterously.
"Well, in point of fact when your flying ship is just going to
run into something. I thought you wouldn't mind my mentioning it,
but it's running into something now."
Lucifer exploded with an oath and leapt erect, leaning hard upon
the handle that acted as a helm to the vessel. For the last ten
minutes they had been shooting downwards into great cracks and
caverns of cloud. Now, through a sort of purple haze, could be
seen comparatively near to them what seemed to be the upper part
of a huge, dark orb or sphere, islanded in a sea of cloud. The
Professor's eyes were blazing like a maniac's.
"It is a new world," he cried, with a dreadful mirth. "It is a
new planet and it shall bear my name. This star and not that
other vulgar one shall be 'Lucifer, sun of the morning.' Here we
will have no chartered lunacies, here we will have no gods. Here
man shall be as innocent as the daisies, as innocent and as
cruel--here the intellect----"
"There seems," said Michael, timidly, "to be something sticking
up in the middle of it."
"So there is," said the Professor, leaning over the side of the
ship, his spectacles shining with intellectual excitement. "What
can it be? It might of course be merely a----"
Then a shriek indescribable broke out of him of a sudden, and he
flung up his arms like a lost spirit. The monk took the helm in a
tired way; he did not seem much astonished for he came from an
ignorant part of the world in which it is not uncommon for lost
spirits to shriek when they see the curious shape which the
Professor had just seen on the top of the mysterious ball, but he
took the helm only just in time, and by driving it hard to the
left he prevented the flying ship from smashing into St. Paul's
Cathedral.
A plain of sad-coloured cloud lay along the level of the top of
the Cathedral dome, so that the ball and the cross looked like a
buoy riding on a leaden sea. As the flying ship swept towards it,
this plain of cloud looked as dry and definite and rocky as any
grey desert. Hence it gave to the mind and body a sharp and
unearthly sensation when the ship cut and sank into the cloud as
into any common mist, a thing without resistance. There was, as
it were, a deadly shock in the fact that there was no shock. It
was as if they had cloven into ancient cliffs like so much
butter. But sensations awaited them which were much stranger than
those of sinking through the solid earth. For a moment their eyes
and nostrils were stopped with darkness and opaque cloud; then
the darkness warmed into a kind of brown fog. And far, far below
them the brown fog fell until it warmed into fire. Through the
dense London atmosphere they could see below them the flaming
London lights; lights which lay beneath them in squares and
oblongs of fire. The fog and fire were mixed in a passionate
vapour; you might say that the fog was drowning the flames; or
you might say that the flames had set the fog on fire. Beside the
ship and beneath it (for it swung just under the ball), the
immeasurable dome itself shot out and down into the dark like a
combination of voiceless cataracts. Or it was like some cyclopean
sea-beast sitting above London and letting down its tentacles
bewilderingly on every side, a monstrosity in that starless
heaven. For the clouds that belonged to London had closed over
the heads of the voyagers sealing up the entrance of the upper
air. They had broken through a roof and come into a temple of
twilight.
They were so near to the ball that Lucifer leaned his hand
against it, holding the vessel away, as men push a boat off from
a bank. Above it the cross already draped in the dark mists of
the borderland was shadowy and more awful in shape and size.
Professor Lucifer slapped his hand twice upon the surface of the
great orb as if he were caressing some enormous animal. "This is
the fellow," he said, "this is the one for my money."
"May I with all respect inquire," asked the old monk, "what on
earth you are talking about?"
"Why this," cried Lucifer, smiting the ball again, "here is the
only symbol, my boy. So fat. So satisfied. Not like that scraggy
individual, stretching his arms in stark weariness." And he
pointed up to the cross, his face dark with a grin. "I was
telling you just now, Michael, that I can prove the best part of
the rationalist case and the Christian humbug from any symbol you
liked to give me, from any instance I came across. Here is an
instance with a vengeance. What could possibly express your
philosophy and my philosophy better than the shape of that cross
and the shape of this ball? This globe is reasonable; that cross
is unreasonable. It is a four-legged animal, with one leg longer
than the others. The globe is inevitable. The cross is arbitrary.
Above all the globe is at unity with itself; the cross is
primarily and above all things at enmity with itself. The cross
is the conflict of two hostile lines, of irreconcilable
direction. That silent thing up there is essentially a collision,
a crash, a struggle in stone. Pah! that sacred symbol of yours
has actually given its name to a description of desperation and
muddle. When we speak of men at once ignorant of each other and
frustrated by each other, we say they are at cross-purposes. Away
with the thing! The very shape of it is a contradiction in
terms."
"What you say is perfectly true," said Michael, with serenity.
"But we like contradictions in terms. Man is a contradiction in
terms; he is a beast whose superiority to other beasts consists
in having fallen. That cross is, as you say, an eternal
collision; so am I. That is a struggle in stone. Every form of
life is a struggle in flesh. The shape of the cross is
irrational, just as the shape of the human animal is irrational.
You say the cross is a quadruped with one limb longer than the
rest. I say man is a quadruped who only uses two of his legs."
The Professor frowned thoughtfully for an instant, and said: "Of
course everything is relative, and I would not deny that the
element of struggle and self-contradiction, represented by that
cross, has a necessary place at a certain evolutionary stage.
But surely the cross is the lower development and the sphere the
higher. After all it is easy enough to see what is really wrong
with Wren's architectural arrangement."
"And what is that, pray?" inquired Michael, meekly.
"The cross is on top of the ball," said Professor Lucifer,
simply. "That is surely wrong. The ball should be on top of the
cross. The cross is a mere barbaric prop; the ball is perfection.
The cross at its best is but the bitter tree of man's history;
the ball is the rounded, the ripe and final fruit. And the fruit
should be at the top of the tree, not at the bottom of it."
"Oh!" said the monk, a wrinkle coming into his forehead, "so you
think that in a rationalistic scheme of symbolism the ball should
be on top of the cross?"
"It sums up my whole allegory," said the professor.
"Well, that is really very interesting," resumed Michael slowly,
"because I think in that case you would see a most singular
effect, an effect that has generally been achieved by all those
able and powerful systems which rationalism, or the religion of
the ball, has produced to lead or teach mankind. You would see, I
think, that thing happen which is always the ultimate embodiment
and logical outcome of your logical scheme."
"What are you talking about?" asked Lucifer. "What would happen?"
"I mean it would fall down," said the monk, looking wistfully
into the void.
Lucifer made an angry movement and opened his mouth to speak, but
Michael, with all his air of deliberation, was proceeding before
he could bring out a word.
"I once knew a man like you, Lucifer," he said, with a maddening
monotony and slowness of articulation. "He took this----"
"There is no man like me," cried Lucifer, with a violence that
shook the ship.
"As I was observing," continued Michael, "this man also took the
view that the symbol of Christianity was a symbol of savagery and
all unreason. His history is rather amusing. It is also a perfect
allegory of what happens to rationalists like yourself. He began,
of course, by refusing to allow a crucifix in his house, or round
his wife's neck, or even in a picture. He said, as you say, that
it was an arbitrary and fantastic shape, that it was a
monstrosity, loved because it was paradoxical. Then he began to
grow fiercer and more eccentric; he would batter the crosses by
the roadside; for he lived in a Roman Catholic country. Finally
in a height of frenzy he climbed the steeple of the Parish Church
and tore down the cross, waving it in the air, and uttering wild
soliloquies up there under the stars. Then one still summer
evening as he was wending his way homewards, along a lane, the
devil of his madness came upon him with a violence and
transfiguration which changes the world. He was standing smoking,
for a moment, in the front of an interminable line of palings,
when his eyes were opened. Not a light shifted, not a leaf
stirred, but he saw as if by a sudden change in the eyesight that
this paling was an army of innumerable crosses linked together
over hill and dale. And he whirled up his heavy stick and went at
it as if at an army. Mile after mile along his homeward path he
broke it down and tore it up. For he hated the cross and every
paling is a wall of crosses. When he returned to his house he was
a literal madman. He sat upon a chair and then started up from it
for the cross-bars of the carpentry repeated the intolerable
image. He flung himself upon a bed only to remember that this,
too, like all workmanlike things, was constructed on the accursed
plan. He broke his furniture because it was made of crosses. He
burnt his house because it was made of crosses. He was found in
the river."
Lucifer was looking at him with a bitten lip.
"Is that story really true?" he asked.
"Oh, no," said Michael, airily. "It is a parable. It is a parable
of you and all your rationalists. You begin by breaking up the
Cross; but you end by breaking up the habitable world. We leave
you saying that nobody ought to join the Church against his will.
When we meet you again you are saying that no one has any will to
join it with. We leave you saying that there is no such place as
Eden. We find you saying that there is no such place as Ireland.
You start by hating the irrational and you come to hate
everything, for everything is irrational and so----"
Lucifer leapt upon him with a cry like a wild beast's. "Ah," he
screamed, "to every man his madness. You are mad on the cross.
Let it save you."
And with a herculean energy he forced the monk backwards out of
the reeling car on to the upper part of the stone ball. Michael,
with as abrupt an agility, caught one of the beams of the cross
and saved himself from falling. At the same instant Lucifer drove
down a lever and the ship shot up with him in it alone.
"Ha! ha!" he yelled, "what sort of a support do you find it, old
fellow?"
"For practical purposes of support," replied Michael grimly, "it
is at any rate a great deal better than the ball. May I ask if
you are going to leave me here?"
"Yes, yes. I mount! I mount!" cried the professor in ungovernable
excitement. "_Altiora peto_. My path is upward."
"How often have you told me, Professor, that there is really no
up or down in space?" said the monk. "I shall mount up as much as
you will."
"Indeed," said Lucifer, leering over the side of the flying ship.
"May I ask what you are going to do?"
The monk pointed downward at Ludgate Hill. "I am going," he said,
"to climb up into a star."
Those who look at the matter most superficially regard paradox as
something which belongs to jesting and light journalism. Paradox
of this kind is to be found in the saying of the dandy, in the
decadent comedy, "Life is much too important to be taken
seriously." Those who look at the matter a little more deeply or
delicately see that paradox is a thing which especially belongs
to all religions. Paradox of this kind is to be found in such a
saying as "The meek shall inherit the earth." But those who see
and feel the fundamental fact of the matter know that paradox is
a thing which belongs not to religion only, but to all vivid and
violent practical crises of human living. This kind of paradox
may be clearly perceived by anybody who happens to be hanging in
mid-space, clinging to one arm of the Cross of St. Paul's.
Father Michael in spite of his years, and in spite of his
asceticism (or because of it, for all I know), was a very healthy
and happy old gentleman. And as he swung on a bar above the
sickening emptiness of air, he realized, with that sort of dead
detachment which belongs to the brains of those in peril, the
deathless and hopeless contradiction which is involved in the
mere idea of courage. He was a happy and healthy old gentleman
and therefore he was quite careless about it. And he felt as
every man feels in the taut moment of such terror that his chief
danger was terror itself; his only possible strength would be a
coolness amounting to carelessness, a carelessness amounting
almost to a suicidal swagger. His one wild chance of coming out
safely would be in not too desperately desiring to be safe. There
might be footholds down that awful facade, if only he could not
care whether they were footholds or no. If he were foolhardy he
might escape; if he were wise he would stop where he was till he
dropped from the cross like a stone. And this antinomy kept on
repeating itself in his mind, a contradiction as large and
staring as the immense contradiction of the Cross; he remembered
having often heard the words, "Whosoever shall lose his life the
same shall save it." He remembered with a sort of strange pity
that this had always been made to mean that whoever lost his
physical life should save his spiritual life. Now he knew the
truth that is known to all fighters, and hunters, and climbers of
cliffs. He knew that even his animal life could only be saved by
a considerable readiness to lose it.
Some will think it improbable that a human soul swinging
desperately in mid-air should think about philosophical
inconsistencies. But such extreme states are dangerous things to
dogmatize about. Frequently they produce a certain useless and
joyless activity of the mere intellect, thought not only divorced
from hope but even from desire. And if it is impossible to
dogmatize about such states, it is still more impossible to
describe them. To this spasm of sanity and clarity in Michael's
mind succeeded a spasm of the elemental terror; the terror of the
animal in us which regards the whole universe as its enemy;
which, when it is victorious, has no pity, and so, when it is
defeated has no imaginable hope. Of that ten minutes of terror it
is not possible to speak in human words. But then again in that
damnable darkness there began to grow a strange dawn as of grey
and pale silver. And of this ultimate resignation or certainty it
is even less possible to write; it is something stranger than
hell itself; it is perhaps the last of the secrets of God. At the
highest crisis of some incurable anguish there will suddenly fall
upon the man the stillness of an insane contentment. It is not
hope, for hope is broken and romantic and concerned with the
future; this is complete and of the present. It is not faith, for
faith by its very nature is fierce, and as it were at once
doubtful and defiant; but this is simply a satisfaction. It is
not knowledge, for the intellect seems to have no particular part
in it. Nor is it (as the modern idiots would certainly say it is)
a mere numbness or negative paralysis of the powers of grief. It
is not negative in the least; it is as positive as good news. In
some sense, indeed, it is good news. It seems almost as if there
were some equality among things, some balance in all possible
contingencies which we are not permitted to know lest we should
learn indifference to good and evil, but which is sometimes shown
to us for an instant as a last aid in our last agony.
Michael certainly could not have given any sort of rational
account of this vast unmeaning satisfaction which soaked through
him and filled him to the brim. He felt with a sort of
half-witted lucidity that the cross was there, and the ball was
there, and the dome was there, that he was going to climb down
from them, and that he did not mind in the least whether he was
killed or not. This mysterious mood lasted long enough to start
him on his dreadful descent and to force him to continue it. But
six times before he reached the highest of the outer galleries
terror had returned on him like a flying storm of darkness and
thunder. By the time he had reached that place of safety he
almost felt (as in some impossible fit of drunkenness) that he
had two heads; one was calm, careless, and efficient; the other
saw the danger like a deadly map, was wise, careful, and useless.
He had fancied that he would have to let himself vertically down
the face of the whole building. When he dropped into the upper
gallery he still felt as far from the terrestrial globe as if he
had only dropped from the sun to the moon. He paused a little,
panting in the gallery under the ball, and idly kicked his heels,
moving a few yards along it. And as he did so a thunderbolt
struck his soul. A man, a heavy, ordinary man, with a composed
indifferent face, and a prosaic sort of uniform, with a row of
buttons, blocked his way. Michael had no mind to wonder whether
this solid astonished man, with the brown moustache and the
nickel buttons, had also come on a flying ship. He merely let his
mind float in an endless felicity about the man. He thought how
nice it would be if he had to live up in that gallery with that
one man for ever. He thought how he would luxuriate in the
nameless shades of this man's soul and then hear with an endless
excitement about the nameless shades of the souls of all his
aunts and uncles. A moment before he had been dying alone. Now
he was living in the same world with a man; an inexhaustible
ecstasy. In the gallery below the ball Father Michael had found
that man who is the noblest and most divine and most lovable of
all men, better than all the saints, greater than all the
heroes--man Friday.
In the confused colour and music of his new paradise, Michael
heard only in a faint and distant fashion some remarks that this
beautiful solid man seemed to be making to him; remarks about
something or other being after hours and against orders. He also
seemed to be asking how Michael "got up" there. This beautiful
man evidently felt as Michael did that the earth was a star and
was set in heaven.
At length Michael sated himself with the mere sensual music of
the voice of the man in buttons. He began to listen to what he
said, and even to make some attempt at answering a question which
appeared to have been put several times and was now put with some
excess of emphasis. Michael realized that the image of God in
nickel buttons was asking him how he had come there. He said that
he had come in Lucifer's ship. On his giving this answer the
demeanour of the image of God underwent a remarkable change. From
addressing Michael gruffly, as if he were a malefactor, he began
suddenly to speak to him with a sort of eager and feverish
amiability as if he were a child. He seemed particularly anxious
to coax him away from the balustrade. He led him by the arm
towards a door leading into the building itself, soothing him all
the time. He gave what even Michael (slight as was his knowledge
of the world) felt to be an improbable account of the sumptuous
pleasures and varied advantages awaiting him downstairs. Michael
followed him, however, if only out of politeness, down an
apparently interminable spiral of staircase. At one point a door
opened. Michael stepped through it, and the unaccountable man in
buttons leapt after him and pinioned him where he stood. But he
only wished to stand; to stand and stare. He had stepped as it
were into another infinity, out under the dome of another heaven.
But this was a dome of heaven made by man. The gold and green and
crimson of its sunset were not in the shapeless clouds but in
shapes of cherubim and seraphim, awful human shapes with a
passionate plumage. Its stars were not above but far below, like
fallen stars still in unbroken constellations; the dome itself
was full of darkness. And far below, lower even than the lights,
could be seen creeping or motionless, great black masses of men.
The tongue of a terrible organ seemed to shake the very air in
the whole void; and through it there came up to Michael the sound
of a tongue more terrible; the dreadful everlasting voice of man,
calling to his gods from the beginning to the end of the world.
Michael felt almost as if he were a god, and all the voices were
hurled at him.
"No, the pretty things aren't here," said the demi-god in
buttons, caressingly. "The pretty things are downstairs. You
come along with me. There's something that will surprise you
downstairs; something you want very much to see."
Evidently the man in buttons did not feel like a god, so Michael
made no attempt to explain his feelings to him, but followed him
meekly enough down the trail of the serpentine staircase. He had
no notion where or at what level he was. He was still full of the
cold splendour of space, and of what a French writer has
brilliantly named the "vertigo of the infinite," when another
door opened, and with a shock indescribable he found himself on
the familiar level, in a street full of faces, with the houses
and even the lamp-posts above his head. He felt suddenly happy
and suddenly indescribably small. He fancied he had been changed
into a child again; his eyes sought the pavement seriously as
children's do, as if it were a thing with which something
satisfactory could be done. He felt the full warmth of that
pleasure from which the proud shut themselves out; the pleasure
which not only goes with humiliation, but which almost is
humiliation. Men who have escaped death by a hair have it, and
men whose love is returned by a woman unexpectedly, and men whose
sins are forgiven them. Everything his eye fell on it feasted on,
not aesthetically, but with a plain, jolly appetite as of a boy
eating buns. He relished the squareness of the houses; he liked
their clean angles as if he had just cut them with a knife. The
lit squares of the shop windows excited him as the young are
excited by the lit stage of some promising pantomime. He
happened to see in one shop which projected with a bulging
bravery on to the pavement some square tins of potted meat, and
it seemed like a hint of a hundred hilarious high teas in a
hundred streets of the world. He was, perhaps, the happiest of
all the children of men. For in that unendurable instant when he
hung, half slipping, to the ball of St. Paul's, the whole
universe had been destroyed and re-created.
Suddenly through all the din of the dark streets came a crash of
glass. With that mysterious suddenness of the Cockney mob, a rush
was made in the right direction, a dingy office, next to the shop
of the potted meat. The pane of glass was lying in splinters
about the pavement. And the police already had their hands on a
very tall young man, with dark, lank hair and dark, dazed eyes,
with a grey plaid over his shoulder, who had just smashed the
shop window with a single blow of his stick.
"I'd do it again," said the young man, with a furious white face.
"Anybody would have done it. Did you see what it said? I swear
I'd do it again." Then his eyes encountered the monkish habit of
Michael, and he pulled off his grey tam-o'-shanter with the
gesture of a Catholic.
"Father, did you see what they said?" he cried, trembling. "Did
you see what they dared to say? I didn't understand it at first.
I read it half through before I broke the window."
Michael felt he knew not how. The whole peace of the world was
pent up painfully in his heart. The new and childlike world which
he had seen so suddenly, men had not seen at all. Here they were
still at their old bewildering, pardonable, useless quarrels,
with so much to be said on both sides, and so little that need be
said at all. A fierce inspiration fell on him suddenly; he would
strike them where they stood with the love of God. They should
not move till they saw their own sweet and startling existence.
They should not go from that place till they went home embracing
like brothers and shouting like men delivered. From the Cross
from which he had fallen fell the shadow of its fantastic mercy;
and the first three words he spoke in a voice like a silver
trumpet, held men as still as stones. Perhaps if he had spoken
there for an hour in his illumination he might have founded a
religion on Ludgate Hill. But the heavy hand of his guide fell
suddenly on his shoulder.
"This poor fellow is dotty," he said good-humouredly to the
crowd. "I found him wandering in the Cathedral. Says he came in
a flying ship. Is there a constable to spare to take care of him?"
There was a constable to spare. Two other constables attended to
the tall young man in grey; a fourth concerned himself with the
owner of the shop, who showed some tendency to be turbulent. They
took the tall young man away to a magistrate, whither we shall
follow him in an ensuing chapter. And they took the happiest man
in the world away to an asylum.
