IX. THE STRANGE LADY
Moonrise with a great and growing moon opened over all those
flats, making them seem flatter and larger than they were,
turning them to a lake of blue light. The two companions trudged
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. Leaving it
standing there, he clutched his black-haired skull with his great
claws of hands, as was his custom when forcing the pace of his
brain. Then his hands dropped again and he spoke.
"I'm sure you're thinking the same as I am," he said; "how long
are we to be on this damned seesaw?"
The other did not answer, but his silence seemed somehow solid as
assent; and MacIan went on conversationally. Neither noticed that
both had instinctively stood still before the sign of the fixed
and standing sword.
"It is hard to guess what God means in this business. But he
means something--or the other thing, or both. Whenever we have
tried to fight each other something has stopped us. Whenever we
have tried to be reconciled to each other, something has stopped
us again. By the run of our luck we have never had time to be
either friends or enemies. Something always jumped out of the
bushes."
Turnbull nodded gravely and glanced round at the huge and
hedgeless meadow which fell away towards the horizon into a
glimmering high road.
"Nothing will jump out of bushes here anyhow," he said.
"That is what I meant," said MacIan, and stared steadily at the
heavy hilt of his standing sword, which in the slight wind swayed
on its tempered steel like some huge thistle on its stalk.
"That is what I meant; we are quite alone here. I have not heard
a horse-hoof or a footstep or the hoot of a train for miles. So I
think we might stop here and ask for a miracle."
"Oh! might we?" said the atheistic editor with a sort of gusto of
disgust.
"I beg your pardon," said MacIan, meekly. "I forgot your
prejudices." He eyed the wind-swung sword-hilt in sad meditation
and resumed: "What I mean is, we might find out in this quiet
place whether there really is any 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 this
moonlight and solitude there happens anything to interrupt us--if
it be lightning striking our sword-blades or a rabbit running
under our legs--I will take it as a sign from God and we will
shake hands for ever."
Turnbull's mouth twitched in angry humour under his red
moustache. He said: "I will wait for signs from God until I have
any signs of His existence; but God--or Fate--forbid that a man
of scientific culture should refuse any kind of experiment."
"Very well, then," said MacIan, shortly. "We are more quiet here
than anywhere else; let us engage." And he plucked his
sword-point out of the turf.
Turnbull regarded him for a second and a half with a baffling
visage almost black against the moonrise; then his hand made a
sharp movement to his hip and his sword shone in the moon.
As old chess-players open every game with established gambits,
they opened with a thrust and parry, orthodox and even frankly
ineffectual. But in MacIan's soul more formless 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 for the third lunge, and the
worst, had almost spitted the lunger when a shrill, small cry
came from behind him, a cry such as is not made by any of the
beasts that perish.
Turnbull must have been more superstitious than he knew, for he
stopped in the act of going forward. MacIan was brazenly
superstitious, and he dropped his sword. After all, he had
challenged the universe to send an interruption; and this was an
interruption, whatever else it was. An instant afterwards the
sharp, weak cry was repeated. This time it was certain that it
was human and that it was female.
MacIan stood rolling those great blue Gaelic eyes that contrasted
with his dark hair. "It is the voice of God," he said again and
again.
"God hasn't got much of a voice," said Turnbull, who snatched at
every chance of cheap profanity. "As a matter of fact, MacIan, it
isn't the voice of God, but it's something a jolly sight more
important--it is the voice of man--or rather of woman. So I think
we'd better scoot in its direction."
MacIan snatched up his fallen weapon without a word, and the two
raced away towards that part of the distant road from which the
cry was now constantly renewed.
They had to run over a curve of country that looked smooth but
was very rough; a neglected field which they soon found to be
full of the tallest grasses and the deepest rabbit-holes.
Moreover, that great 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, though much heavier, avoided
such an overthrow only by having the quick and incalculable feet
of the mountaineer; but both of them may be said to have leapt
off a low cliff when they leapt into the road.
The moonlight lay on the white road with a more naked and
electric glare than on the grey-green upland, and though the
scene which it revealed was complicated, it was not difficult to
get its first features at a glance.
A small but very neat black-and-yellow motor-car was standing
stolidly, slightly to the left of the road. A somewhat larger
light-green motor-car was tipped half-way into a ditch on the
same side, 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 fourth, however, had already advanced on the
chauffeur of the black-and-yellow car, and was threatening him
with a stick. The chauffeur had risen to defend himself. By
his side sat a young lady.
She was sitting bolt upright, a slender and rigid figure gripping
the sides of her seat, and her first few cries had ceased. She
was 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 at that distance it could be seen that her profile was of
the aquiline and eager sort, like a young falcon hardly free of
the nest.
Turnbull had concealed in him somewhere a fund of common sense
and knowledge of the world of which he himself and his best
friends were hardly aware. He was one of those who take in much
of the shows 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 varied knowledge about the existence of
men. He had come to know types by instinct and dilemmas with a
glance; he saw the crux of the situation in the road, and what he
saw made him redouble his pace.
He knew that the men were rich; he knew that they were drunk; and
he knew, what was worst of all, that they were fundamentally
frightened. And he knew this also, that no common ruffian (such
as attacks ladies in novels) is ever so savage and ruthless as a
coarse kind of gentleman when he is really alarmed. The reason 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 chauffeur had
smashed their car on purpose; that they must get to the Cri that
evening, and that he would jolly well have to take them there.
The chauffeur had mildly objected that he was driving a lady.
"Oh! we'll take care of the lady," said the red-faced young man,
and went off into gurgling and almost senile laughter.
By the time the two champions came up, things had grown more
serious. The intoxication of the man talking to the chauffeur had
taken one of its perverse and catlike jumps into mere screaming
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 rowdies rushed
forward booing in idiot excitement, fell over the chauffeur, and,
either by accident or design, kicked him as he lay. The drunkard
got to his feet again; but the chauffeur did not.
The man who had kicked kept a kind of half-witted conscience or
cowardice, for he stood staring at the senseless body and
murmuring words of inconsequent self-justification, making
gestures with his hands as if he were arguing with somebody. But
the other three, with a mere whoop and howl of victory, were
boarding the car on three sides at once. It was 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, kicking and pouring forth a rivulet of soliloquy. But
the other dropped at the interruption, turned upon Turnbull and
began a battering bout of fisticuffs. At the same moment the man
crawled out of the ditch in a masquerade of mud and rushed at his
old enemy from behind. The whole had not taken a second; and an
instant after MacIan was in the midst of them.
Turnbull had tossed away his sheathed sword, greatly preferring
his hands, except in the avowed etiquette of the duel; for he had
learnt to use his hands in the old street-battles of Bradlaugh.
But to MacIan the sword even 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, found
his own stick fly up in the air as by a conjuring trick, with a
turn of the swordsman's wrist. Another of the revellers picked
the stick out of the ditch and ran in upon MacIan, calling to his
companion to assist him.
"I haven't got a stick," grumbled the disarmed man, and looked
vaguely about the ditch.
"Perhaps," said MacIan, politely, "you would like this one." With
the word the drunkard found his hand that had grasped the stick
suddenly twisted and empty; and the stick lay at the feet of his
companion 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
countering and pommelling with the third young man. The fourth
young man was still engaged with himself, kicking his legs in
helpless rotation on the back of the car and talking with
melodious rationality.
At length Turnbull's opponent began to back before the battery of
his heavy hands, still fighting, for he was the soberest and
boldest of the four. If these are annals of military glory, it is
due to him to say that he need not have abandoned the conflict;
only that as he backed to the edge of the ditch his foot caught
in a loop of grass 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 at a sullen trot down the road,
leaving even the walking-stick lying behind them in the
moonlight. MacIan plucked the struggling and aspiring idiot off
the back of the car like a stray cat, and left him swaying
unsteadily in the moon. Then he approached the front part of the
car in a somewhat embarrassed manner and pulled off his cap.
For some solid seconds the lady and he merely looked at each
other, and MacIan had an irrational feeling of being in a picture
hung on a wall. That is, he was motionless, even lifeless, and
yet staringly significant, like a picture. The 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. And he whose whole soul was with the
swords and stately manners of the eighteenth century, he who was
a Jacobite risen from the dead, had an overwhelming sense of
being once more in the picture, when he had so long been out of
the picture.
In that short and strong silence he absorbed the lady from head
to foot. He had never really looked at a human being before in
his life. He saw her face and hair first, then that she had long
suede gloves; then that there was a fur cap 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 instantaneous arrest of speech
might need more explaining; but she may well have been stunned
with the squalid attack and the abrupt rescue. Yet it was she
who remembered herself first and suddenly called out with
self-accusing horror:
"Oh, that poor, poor man!"
They both swung round abruptly and saw that Turnbull, with his
recovered sword under his arm-pit, was already lifting the fallen
chauffeur into the car. He was only stunned and was slowly
awakening, feebly waving his left arm.
The lady in long gloves and the fur cap leapt out and ran rapidly
towards them, only to be reassured by Turnbull, who (unlike many
of his school) really knew a little science when he invoked it to
redeem the world. "He's all right," said he; "he's quite safe.
But I'm afraid he won't be able to drive the car for half an hour
or so."
"I can drive the car," said the young woman in the fur cap with
stony practicability.
"Oh, in that case," began MacIan, uneasily; and that paralysing
shyness which is a part of romance induced him to make a backward
movement as if leaving her to herself. But Turnbull was more
rational than he, being more indifferent.
"I don't think you ought to drive home alone, ma'am," he said,
gruffly. "There seem to be a lot of rowdy parties along this
road, and the man will be no use for an hour. If you will tell
us where you are going, we will see you safely there and say good
night."
The young lady exhibited all the abrupt disturbance of a person
who is not commonly disturbed. She said almost sharply and yet
with evident sincerity: "Of course I am awfully grateful to you
for all you've done--and there's plenty of room if you'll come
in."
Turnbull, with the complete innocence of an absolutely sound
motive, immediately jumped into the car; but the girl cast an eye
at MacIan, who stood in the road for an instant as if rooted like
a tree. Then he also tumbled his long legs into the tonneau,
having that sense of degradedly diving into heaven which so many
have known in so many human houses when they consented to stop to
tea or were allowed to stop to supper. 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 thought it was the end of the world. Almost at
the same instant that the car plucked itself out of the mud and
whipped away up the road, the man who had been flung into the
ditch rose waveringly to his feet. When he saw the car escaping
he ran after it and shouted something which, owing to the
increasing distance, could not be heard. It is awful to reflect
that, if his remark was valuable, it is quite lost to the world.
The car shot on up and down the shining moonlit lanes, and there
was no sound in it except the occasional click or catch of its
machinery; for through some cause or other no soul inside it
could think of a word to say. The lady symbolized her feelings,
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 and
she fell into a more ordinary pace; but still she did not speak.
Turnbull, who kept a more common and sensible view of the case
than anyone else, made some remark about the moonlight; but
something indescribable made him also relapse into silence.
All this time MacIan had been in a sort of monstrous delirium,
like some fabulous hero snatched up into the moon. The difference
between this experience and common 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
more actual than dreaming, so this seemed by another degree more
actual than waking itself. But it was another life altogether,
like a cosmos with a new dimension.
He felt he had been hurled into some new incarnation: into the
midst of new relations, wrongs and rights, with towering
responsibilities and almost tragic joys which he had as yet had
no time to examine. Heaven had not merely sent him a message;
Heaven itself had opened around him and given him an hour of its
own ancient and star-shattering energy. He had never felt so much
alive 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 the
height of her cheek-bone; the fact that her hands were small but
heavily gloved as they gripped the steering-wheel; the fact that
a white witch light was on the road; the fact that the brisk
breeze of their passage stirred and fluttered a little not only
the brown hair of her head but the black fur on her cap. All
these facts were to him certain and incredible, like sacraments.
When they had driven half a mile farther, a big shadow was flung
across the path, followed by its bulky owner, who eyed the car
critically but let it pass. The silver moonlight picked out a
piece or two 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 seemed to doubt his own authority and
stepped back again. The girl was a daughter of the rich; and this
police suspicion (under which all the poor live day and night)
stung her for the first time into speech.
"What can they mean?" she cried out in a kind of temper; "this
car's going like a snail."
There was a short silence, and then Turnbull said: "It is
certainly very odd, you are driving quietly enough."
"You are driving nobly," said MacIan, and his words (which had no
meaning whatever) sounded hoarse and ungainly even in his own
ears.
They passed the next mile and a half swiftly and smoothly; yet
among the many things which they passed in the course of it was a
clump of eager policemen standing at a cross-road. As they
passed, one of the policemen shouted something to the others; but
nothing else happened. Eight hundred yards farther on, Turnbull
stood up suddenly in the swaying car.
"My God, MacIan!" he called out, showing his first emotion of
that night. "I don't believe it's the pace; it couldn't be the
pace. I believe it's us."
MacIan sat motionless for a few moments and then turned up at his
companion a face that was as white as the moon above it.
"You may be right," he said at last; "if you are, I must tell
her."
"I will tell the lady if you like," said Turnbull, with his
unconquered good temper.
"You!" said MacIan, with a sort of sincere and instinctive
astonishment. "Why should you--no, I must tell her, of
course----"
And he leant forward and spoke to the lady in the fur cap.
"I am afraid, madam, that we may have got you into some trouble,"
he said, and even as he said it it sounded wrong, like everything
he said to this 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 flattening hammer fell upon poor
Evan's embarrassment; for the fluffy brown head with the furry
black cap did not turn by a section of the compass.
"We are chased by the police," repeated MacIan, vigorously; then
he added, as if beginning an explanation, "You see, I am a
Catholic."
The wind whipped back a curl of the brown hair so as to
necessitate a new theory of aesthetics touching the line of the
cheek-bone; but the head did not turn.
"You see," began MacIan, again blunderingly, "this gentleman
wrote in his newspaper that Our Lady was a common woman, a bad
woman, and so we agreed to fight; and we were fighting quite a
little time ago--but that was before we saw you."
The young lady driving her car had half turned her face to
listen; and it was not a reverent or a patient face that she
showed him. Her Norman nose was tilted a trifle too high upon
the slim stalk of her neck and body.
When MacIan saw that arrogant and uplifted profile pencilled
plainly against the moonshine, he accepted an ultimate defeat.
He had expected the angels to despise him if he were wrong, but
not to despise him so much as this.
"You see," said the stumbling spokesman, "I was angry with him
when he insulted the Mother of God, and I asked him to fight a
duel with me; but the police are all trying to stop it."
Nothing seemed to waver or flicker in the fair young falcon
profile; and it only opened its lips to say, after a silence: "I
thought people in our time were supposed to respect each other's
religion."
Under the shadow of that arrogant face MacIan could only fall
back on the obvious answer: "But what about a man's irreligion?"
The face only answered: "Well, you ought to be more broadminded."
If anyone else in the world had said the words, MacIan would have
snorted with his equine neigh of scorn. But in this case he
seemed knocked down by a superior simplicity, as if his eccentric
attitude were rebuked by the innocence 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.
He could have applied moral terms to the material objects of her
environment. If someone had spoken of "her generous ribbon" or
"her chivalrous gloves" or "her merciful shoe-buckle," it would
not have seemed to him nonsense.
He was silent, and the girl went on in a lower key as if she were
momentarily softened and a little saddened also. "It won't do,
you know," she said; "you can't find out the truth in that way.
There are such heaps of churches and people thinking different
things nowadays, and they all think they are right. My uncle was
a Swedenborgian."
MacIan sat with bowed head, listening hungrily to her voice but
hardly to her words, and seeing his great world drama grow
smaller and smaller before his eyes till it was no bigger than a
child's toy theatre.
"The time's gone by for all that," she went on; "you can't find
out the real thing like that--if there is really anything to
find----" and she sighed rather drearily; for, like many of the
women of our wealthy class, she was old and broken in thought,
though young and clean enough in her emotions.
"Our object," said Turnbull, shortly, "is to make an effective
demonstration"; and after that word, MacIan looked at his vision
again and found it smaller than ever.
"It would be in the newspapers, of course," said the girl.
"People read the newspapers, but they don't believe them, or
anything else, I think." And she sighed again.
She drove in silence a third of a mile before she added, as if
completing the sentence: "Anyhow, the whole thing's quite
absurd."
"I don't think," began Turnbull, "that you quite realize----
Hullo! hullo--hullo--what's this?"
The amateur chauffeur had been forced to bring the car to a
staggering stoppage, for a file of fat, blue policemen made a
wall across the way. A sergeant came to the side and touched his
peaked cap to the lady.
"Beg your pardon, miss," he said with some embarrassment, for he
knew her for a daughter of a dominant house, "but we have reason
to believe that the gentlemen in your car are----" and he
hesitated for a polite phrase.
"I am Evan MacIan," said that gentleman, and stood up in a sort
of gloomy pomp, not wholly without a touch of the sulks of a
schoolboy.
"Yes, we will get out, sergeant," said Turnbull, more easily; "my
name is James Turnbull. We must not incommode the lady."
"What are you taking them up for?" asked the young woman, looking
straight in front of her along the road.
"It's under the new act," said the sergeant, almost
apologetically. "Incurable disturbers of the peace."
"What will happen to them?" she asked, with the same frigid
clearness.
"Westgate Adult Reformatory," he replied, briefly.
"Until when?"
"Until they are cured," said the official.
"Very well, sergeant," said the young lady, with a sort of tired
common sense. "I am sure I don't want to protect criminals or go
against the law; but I must tell you that these gentlemen have
done me a considerable service; you won't mind drawing your men a
little farther off while I say good night to them. Men like that
always misunderstand."
The sergeant was profoundly disquieted from the beginning at the
mere idea of arresting anyone in the company of a great lady; to
refuse one of her minor requests was quite beyond 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 now to surrender at last.
MacIan, the blood thundering in his brain at the thought of that
instant of farewell, bent over, fumbled at the handle and flung
open the door to get out.
But he did not get out. He did not get out, because it is
dangerous to jump out of a car when it is going at full speed.
And the car was going at full speed, because the young lady,
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 greyhound. The
police made one rush to follow, and then dropped so grotesque and
hopeless a chase. Away in the vanishing distance they could see
the sergeant furiously making notes.
The open door, still left loose on its hinges, swung and banged
quite crazily as they went whizzing up one road and down another.
Nor did MacIan sit down; he stood up stunned and yet staring, as
he would have stood up at the trumpet of the Last Day. A black
dot in the distance sprang up a tall black forest, swallowed them
and spat them out again at the other end. A railway bridge grew
larger and larger till it leapt upon their backs bellowing, and
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
left behind them with their dust. Sometimes even a slouching
rustic would be afoot on the road and would look after them, as
after a flying phantom. But still MacIan stood up staring at
earth and heaven; and still the door he had flung open flapped
loose like a flag. Turnbull, after a few minutes of dumb
amazement, had yielded to the healthiest element in his nature
and gone off into uncontrollable fits of laughter. The girl had
not stirred an inch.
After another half mile that seemed a mere flash, Turnbull leant
over and locked the door. Evan staggered at last into his seat
and hid his throbbing head in his hands; and still the car flew
on and its driver sat inflexible and silent. The moon had already
gone down, and the whole darkness was faintly troubled with
twilight and the first movement of beasts and fowls. It was that
mysterious moment when light is coming as if it were something
unknown whose nature one could not guess--a 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 fire began to burn between the black
stems of the fir-trees; and, like so many things in nature,
though not in books on evolution, the daybreak, when it did come,
came much quicker than one would think. The gloomy heavens were
ripped up and rolled away like a scroll, revealing splendours, as
the car went roaring up the curve of a great hill; and above them
and black against the broadening light, there stood one of those
crouching and fantastic trees that are first signals of the sea.
