II. THE RELIGION OF THE STIPENDIARY MAGISTRATE
The editorial office of _The Atheist_ had for some years past
become less and less prominently interesting as a feature of
Ludgate Hill. The paper was unsuited to the atmosphere. It showed
an interest in the Bible unknown in the district, and a knowledge
of that volume to which nobody else on Ludgate Hill could make
any conspicuous claim. It was in vain that the editor of _The
Atheist_ filled his front window with fierce and final demands as
to what Noah in the Ark did with the neck of the giraffe. It was
in vain that he asked violently, as for the last time, how the
statement "God is Spirit" could be reconciled with the statement
"The earth is His footstool." It was in vain that he cried with
an accusing energy that the Bishop of London was paid L12,000 a
year for pretending to believe that the whale swallowed Jonah. It
was in vain that he hung in conspicuous places the most thrilling
scientific calculations about the width of the throat of a whale.
Was it nothing to them all they that passed by? Did his sudden
and splendid and truly sincere indignation never stir any of the
people pouring down Ludgate Hill? Never. The little man who
edited _The Atheist_ would rush from his shop on starlit evenings
and shake his fist at St. Paul's in the passion of his holy war
upon the holy place. He might have spared his emotion. The cross
at the top of St. Paul's and _The Atheist_ shop at the foot of it
were alike remote from the world. The shop and the Cross were
equally uplifted and alone in the empty heavens.
To the little man who edited _The Atheist_, a fiery little
Scotchman, with fiery, red hair and beard, going by the name of
Turnbull, all this decline in public importance seemed not so
much sad or even mad, but merely bewildering and unaccountable.
He had said the worst thing that could be said; and it seemed
accepted and ignored like the ordinary second best of the
politicians. Every day his blasphemies looked more glaring, and
every day the dust lay thicker upon them. It made him feel as if
he were moving in a world of idiots. He seemed among a race of
men who smiled when told of their own death, or looked vacantly
at the Day of Judgement. Year after year went by, and year after
year the death of God in a shop in Ludgate became a less and less
important occurrence. All the forward men of his age discouraged
Turnbull. The socialists said he was cursing priests when he
should be cursing capitalists. The artists said that the soul was
most spiritual, not when freed from religion, but when freed from
morality. Year after year went by, and at least a man came by who
treated Mr. Turnbull's secularist shop with a real respect and
seriousness. He was a young man in a grey plaid, and he smashed
the window.
He was a young man, born in the Bay of Arisaig, opposite Rum and
the Isle of Skye. His high, hawklike features and snaky black
hair bore the mark of that unknown historic thing which is
crudely called Celtic, but which is probably far older than the
Celts, whoever they were. He was in name and stock a Highlander
of the Macdonalds; but his family took, as was common in such
cases, the name of a subordinate sept as a surname, and for all
the purposes which could be answered in London, he called himself
Evan MacIan. He had been brought up in some loneliness and
seclusion as a strict Roman Catholic, in the midst of that little
wedge of Roman Catholics which is driven into the Western
Highlands. And he had found his way as far as Fleet Street,
seeking some half-promised employment, without having properly
realized that there were in the world any people who were not
Roman Catholics. He had uncovered himself for a few moments
before the statue of Queen Anne, in front of St. Paul's
Cathedral, under the firm impression that it was a figure of the
Virgin Mary. He was somewhat surprised at the lack of deference
shown to the figure by the people bustling by. He did not
understand that their one essential historical principle, the one
law truly graven on their hearts, was the great and comforting
statement that Queen Anne is dead. This faith was as fundamental
as his faith, that Our Lady was alive. Any persons he had talked
to since he had touched the fringe of our fashion or civilization
had been by a coincidence, sympathetic or hypocritical. Or if
they had spoken some established blasphemies, he had been unable
to understand them merely owing to the preoccupied satisfaction
of his mind.
On that fantastic fringe of the Gaelic land where he walked as a
boy, the cliffs were as fantastic as the clouds. Heaven seemed to
humble itself and come closer to the earth. The common paths of
his little village began to climb quite suddenly and seemed
resolved to go to heaven. The sky seemed to fall down towards the
hills; the hills took hold upon the sky. In the sumptuous sunset
of gold and purple and peacock green cloudlets and islets were
the same. Evan lived like a man walking on a borderland, the
borderland between this world and another. Like so many men and
nations who grow up with nature and the common things, he
understood the supernatural before he understood the natural. He
had looked at dim angels standing knee-deep in the grass before
he had looked at the grass. He knew that Our Lady's robes were
blue before he knew the wild roses round her feet were red. The
deeper his memory plunged into the dark house of childhood the
nearer and nearer he came to the things that cannot be named.
All through his life he thought of the daylight world as a sort
of divine debris, the broken remainder of his first vision. The
skies and mountains were the splendid off-scourings of another
place. The stars were lost jewels of the Queen. Our Lady had
gone and left the stars by accident.
His private tradition was equally wild and unworldly. His
great-grandfather had been cut down at Culloden, certain in his
last instant that God would restore the King. His grandfather,
then a boy of ten, had taken the terrible claymore from the hand
of the dead and hung it up in his house, burnishing it and
sharpening it for sixty years, to be ready for the next
rebellion. His father, the youngest son and the last left alive,
had refused to attend on Queen Victoria in Scotland. And Evan
himself had been of one piece with his progenitors; and was not
dead with them, but alive in the twentieth century. He was not
in the least the pathetic Jacobite of whom we read, left behind
by a final advance of all things. He was, in his own fancy, a
conspirator, fierce and up to date. In the long, dark afternoons
of the Highland winter, he plotted and fumed in the dark. He
drew plans of the capture of London on the desolate sand of
Arisaig.
When he came up to capture London, it was not with an army of
white cockades, but with a stick and a satchel. London overawed
him a little, not because he thought it grand or even terrible,
but because it bewildered him; it was not the Golden City or even
hell; it was Limbo. He had one shock of sentiment, when he turned
that wonderful corner of Fleet Street and saw St. Paul's sitting
in the sky.
"Ah," he said, after a long pause, "that sort of thing was built
under the Stuarts!" Then with a sour grin he asked himself what
was the corresponding monument of the Brunswicks and the
Protestant Constitution. After some warning, he selected a
sky-sign of some pill.
Half an hour afterwards his emotions left him with an emptied
mind on the same spot. And it was in a mood of mere idle
investigation that he happened to come to a standstill opposite
the office of _The Atheist_. He did not see the word "atheist",
or if he did, it is quite possible that he did not know the
meaning of the word. Even as it was, the document would not have
shocked even the innocent Highlander, but for the troublesome and
quite unforeseen fact that the innocent Highlander read it
stolidly to the end; a thing unknown among the most enthusiastic
subscribers to the paper, and calculated in any case to create a
new situation.
With a smart journalistic instinct characteristic of all his
school, the editor of _The Atheist_ had put first in his paper
and most prominently in his window an article called "The
Mesopotamian Mythology and its Effects on Syriac Folk Lore." Mr.
Evan MacIan began to read this quite idly, as he would have read
a public statement beginning with a young girl dying in Brighton
and ending with Bile Beans. He received the very considerable
amount of information accumulated by the author with that tired
clearness of the mind which children have on heavy summer
afternoons--that tired clearness which leads them to go on asking
questions long after they have lost interest in the subject and
are as bored as their nurse. The streets were full of people and
empty of adventures. He might as well know about the gods of
Mesopotamia as not; so he flattened his long, lean face against
the dim bleak pane of the window and read all there was to read
about Mesopotamian gods. He read how the Mesopotamians had a god
named Sho (sometimes pronounced Ji), and that he was described as
being very powerful, a striking similarity to some expressions
about Jahveh, who is also described as having power. Evan had
never heard of Jahveh in his life, and imagining him to be some
other Mesopotamian idol, read on with a dull curiosity. He learnt
that the name Sho, under its third form of Psa, occurs in an
early legend which describes how the deity, after the manner of
Jupiter on so many occasions, seduced a Virgin and begat a hero.
This hero, whose name is not essential to our existence, was, it
was said, the chief hero and Saviour of the Mesopotamian ethical
scheme. Then followed a paragraph giving other examples of such
heroes and Saviours being born of some profligate intercourse
between God and mortal. Then followed a paragraph--but Evan did
not understand it. He read it again and then again. Then he did
understand it. The glass fell in ringing fragments on to the
pavement, and Evan sprang over the barrier into the shop,
brandishing his stick.
"What is this?" cried little Mr. Turnbull, starting up with hair
aflame. "How dare you break my window?"
"Because it was the quickest cut to you," cried Evan, stamping.
"Stand up and fight, you crapulous coward. You dirty lunatic,
stand up, will you? Have you any weapons here?"
"Are you mad?" asked Turnbull, glaring.
"Are you?" cried Evan. "Can you be anything else when you plaster
your own house with that God-defying filth? Stand up and fight, I
say."
A great light like dawn came into Mr. Turnbull's face. Behind his
red hair and beard he turned deadly pale with pleasure. Here,
after twenty lone years of useless toil, he had his reward.
Someone was angry with the paper. He bounded to his feet like a
boy; he saw a new youth opening before him. And as not
unfrequently happens to middle-aged gentlemen when they see a new
youth opening before them, he found himself in the presence of
the police.
The policemen, after some ponderous questionings, collared both
the two enthusiasts. They were more respectful, however, to the
young man who had smashed the window, than to the miscreant who
had had his window smashed. There was an air of refined mystery
about Evan MacIan, which did not exist in the irate little
shopkeeper, an air of refined mystery which appealed to the
policemen, for policemen, like most other English types, are at
once snobs and poets. MacIan might possibly be a gentleman, they
felt; the editor manifestly was not. And the editor's fine
rational republican appeals to his respect for law, and his
ardour to be tried by his fellow citizens, seemed to the police
quite as much gibberish as Evan's mysticism could have done. The
police were not used to hearing principles, even the principles
of their own existence.
The police magistrate, before whom they were hurried and tried,
was a Mr. Cumberland Vane, a cheerful, middle-aged gentleman,
honourably celebrated for the lightness of his sentences and the
lightness of his conversation. He occasionally worked himself up
into a sort of theoretic rage about certain particular offenders,
such as the men who took pokers to their wives, talked in a
loose, sentimental way about the desirability of flogging them,
and was hopelessly bewildered by the fact that the wives seemed
even more angry with him than with their husbands. He was a tall,
spruce man, with a twist of black moustache and incomparable
morning dress. He looked like a gentleman, and yet, somehow, like
a stage gentleman.
He had often treated serious crimes against mere order or
property with a humane flippancy. Hence, about the mere breaking
of an editor's window, he was almost uproarious.
"Come, Mr. MacIan, come," he said, leaning back in his chair, "do
you generally enter you friends' houses by walking through the
glass?" (Laughter.)
"He is not my friend," said Evan, with the stolidity of a dull
child.
"Not your friend, eh?" said the magistrate, sparkling. "Is he
your brother-in-law?" (Loud and prolonged laughter.)
"He is my enemy," said Evan, simply; "he is the enemy of God."
Mr. Vane shifted sharply in his seat, dropping the eye-glass out
of his eye in a momentary and not unmanly embarrassment.
"You mustn't talk like that here," he said, roughly, and in a
kind of hurry, "that has nothing to do with us."
Evan opened his great, blue eyes; "God," he began.
"Be quiet," said the magistrate, angrily, "it is most undesirable
that things of that sort should be spoken about--a--in public,
and in an ordinary Court of Justice. Religion is--a--too personal
a matter to be mentioned in such a place."
"Is it?" answered the Highlander, "then what did those policemen
swear by just now?"
"That is no parallel," answered Vane, rather irritably; "of
course there is a form of oath--to be taken reverently--
reverently, and there's an end of it. But to talk in a public
place about one's most sacred and private sentiments--well, I
call it bad taste. (Slight applause.) I call it irreverent.
I call it irreverent, and I'm not specially orthodox either."
"I see you are not," said Evan, "but I am."
"We are wondering from the point," said the police magistrate,
pulling himself together.
"May I ask why you smashed this worthy citizen's window?"
Evan turned a little pale at the mere memory, but he answered
with the same cold and deadly literalism that he showed
throughout.
"Because he blasphemed Our Lady."
"I tell you once and for all," cried Mr. Cumberland Vane, rapping
his knuckles angrily on the table, "I tell you, once and for all,
my man, that I will not have you turning on any religious rant or
cant here. Don't imagine that it will impress me. The most
religious people are not those who talk about it. (Applause.)
You answer the questions and do nothing else."
"I did nothing else," said Evan, with a slight smile.
"Eh," cried Vane, glaring through his eye-glass.
"You asked me why I broke his window," said MacIan, with a face
of wood. "I answered, 'Because he blasphemed Our Lady.' I had
no other reason. So I have no other answer." Vane continued to
gaze at him with a sternness not habitual to him.
"You are not going the right way to work, Sir," he said, with
severity. "You are not going the right way to work to--a--have
your case treated with special consideration. If you had simply
expressed regret for what you had done, I should have been
strongly inclined to dismiss the matter as an outbreak of temper.
Even now, if you say that you are sorry I shall only----"
"But I am not in the least sorry," said Evan, "I am very
pleased."
"I really believe you are insane," said the stipendiary,
indignantly, for he had really been doing his best as a
good-natured man, to compose the dispute. "What conceivable right
have you to break other people's windows because their opinions
do not agree with yours? This man only gave expression to his
sincere belief."
"So did I," said the Highlander.
"And who are you?" exploded Vane. "Are your views necessarily the
right ones? Are you necessarily in possession of the truth?"
"Yes," said MacIan.
The magistrate broke into a contemptuous laugh.
"Oh, you want a nurse to look after you," he said. "You must pay
L10."
Evan MacIan plunged his hands into his loose grey garment and
drew out a queer looking leather purse. It contained exactly
twelve sovereigns. He paid down the ten, coin by coin, in
silence, and equally silently returned the remaining two to the
receptacle. Then he said, "May I say a word, your worship?"
Cumberland Vane seemed half hypnotized with the silence and
automatic movements of the stranger; he made a movement with his
head which might have been either "yes" or "no". "I only wished
to say, your worship," said MacIan, putting back the purse in his
trouser pocket, "that smashing that shop window was, I confess, a
useless and rather irregular business. It may be excused,
however, as a mere preliminary to further proceedings, a sort of
preface. Wherever and whenever I meet that man," and he pointed
to the editor of _The Atheist_, "whether it be outside this door
in ten minutes from now, or twenty years hence in some distant
country, wherever and whenever I meet that man, I will fight him.
Do not be afraid. I will not rush at him like a bully, or bear
him down with any brute superiority. I will fight him like a
gentleman; I will fight him as our fathers fought. He shall
choose how, sword or pistol, horse or foot. But if he refuses, I
will write his cowardice on every wall in the world. If he had
said of my mother what he said of the Mother of God, there is not
a club of clean men in Europe that would deny my right to call
him out. If he had said it of my wife, you English would
yourselves have pardoned me for beating him like a dog in the
market place. Your worship, I have no mother; I have no wife. I
have only that which the poor have equally with the rich; which
the lonely have equally with the man of many friends. To me this
whole strange world is homely, because in the heart of it there
is a home; to me this cruel world is kindly, because higher than
the heavens there is something more human than humanity. If a man
must not fight for this, may he fight for anything? I would fight
for my friend, but if I lost my friend, I should still be there.
I would fight for my country, but if I lost my country, I should
still exist. But if what that devil dreams were true, I should
not be--I should burst like a bubble and be gone. I could not
live in that imbecile universe. Shall I not fight for my own
existence?"
The magistrate recovered his voice and his presence of mind. The
first part of the speech, the bombastic and brutally practical
challenge, stunned him with surprise; but the rest of Evan's
remarks, branching off as they did into theoretic phrases, gave
his vague and very English mind (full of memories of the hedging
and compromise in English public speaking) an indistinct
sensation of relief, as if the man, though mad, were not so
dangerous as he had thought. He went into a sort of weary
laughter.
"For Heaven's sake, man," he said, "don't talk so much. Let other
people have a chance (laughter). I trust all that you said about
asking Mr. Turnbull to fight, may be regarded as rubbish. In case
of accidents, however, I must bind you over to keep the peace."
"To keep the peace," repeated Evan, "with whom?"
"With Mr. Turnbull," said Vane.
"Certainly not," answered MacIan. "What has he to do with peace?"
"Do you mean to say," began the magistrate, "that you refuse
to..." The voice of Turnbull himself clove in for the first time.
"Might I suggest," he said, "That I, your worship, can settle to
some extent this absurd matter myself. This rather wild gentleman
promises that he will not attack me with any ordinary assault--
and if he does, you may be sure the police shall hear of it. But
he says he will not. He says he will challenge me to a duel; and
I cannot say anything stronger about his mental state than to say
that I think that it is highly probable that he will. (Laughter.)
But it takes two to make a duel, your worship (renewed laughter).
I do not in the least mind being described on every wall in the
world as the coward who would not fight a man in Fleet Street,
about whether the Virgin Mary had a parallel in Mesopotamian
mythology. No, your worship. You need not trouble to bind him
over to keep the peace. I bind myself over to keep the peace,
and you may rest quite satisfied that there will be no duel with
me in it."
Mr. Cumberland Vane rolled about, laughing in a sort of relief.
"You're like a breath of April, sir," he cried. "You're ozone
after that fellow. You're perfectly right. Perhaps I have taken
the thing too seriously. I should love to see him sending you
challenges and to see you smiling. Well, well."
Evan went out of the Court of Justice free, but strangely shaken,
like a sick man. Any punishment of suppression he would have felt
as natural; but the sudden juncture between the laughter of his
judge and the laughter of the man he had wronged, made him feel
suddenly small, or at least, defeated. It was really true that
the whole modern world regarded his world as a bubble. No cruelty
could have shown it, but their kindness showed it with a ghastly
clearness. As he was brooding, he suddenly became conscious of a
small, stern figure, fronting him in silence. Its eyes were grey
and awful, and its beard red. It was Turnbull.
"Well, sir," said the editor of _The Atheist_, "where is the
fight to be? Name the field, sir."
Evan stood thunderstruck. He stammered out something, he knew not
what; he only guessed it by the answer of the other.
"Do I want to fight? Do I want to fight?" cried the furious
Free-thinker. "Why, you moonstruck scarecrow of superstition, do
you think your dirty saints are the only people who can die?
Haven't you hung atheists, and burned them, and boiled them, and
did they ever deny their faith? Do you think we don't want to
fight? Night and day I have prayed--I have longed--for an atheist
revolution--I have longed to see your blood and ours on the
streets. Let it be yours or mine?"
"But you said..." began MacIan.
"I know," said Turnbull scornfully. "And what did you say? You
damned fool, you said things that might have got us locked up for
a year, and shadowed by the coppers for half a decade. If you
wanted to fight, why did you tell that ass you wanted to? I got
you out, to fight if you want to. Now, fight if you dare."
"I swear to you, then," said MacIan, after a pause. "I swear to
you that nothing shall come between us. I swear to you that
nothing shall be in my heart or in my head till our swords clash
together. I swear it by the God you have denied, by the Blessed
Lady you have blasphemed; I swear it by the seven swords in her
heart. I swear it by the Holy Island where my fathers are, by the
honour of my mother, by the secret of my people, and by the
chalice of the Blood of God."
The atheist drew up his head. "And I," he said, "give my word."
