X. THE SWORDS REJOINED
As they came over the hill and down on the other side of it, it is nottoo much to say that the whole universe of God opened over them andunder them, like a thing unfolding to five times its size. Almost undertheir feet opened the enormous sea, at the bottom of a steep valleywhich fell down into a bay; and the sea under their feet blazed at themalmost as lustrous and almost as empty as the sky. The sunrise openedabove them like some cosmic explosion, shining and shattering and yetsilent; as if the world were blown to pieces without a sound. Roundthe rays of the victorious sun swept a sort of rainbow of confused andconquered colours--brown and blue and green and flaming rose-colour;as though gold were driving before it all the colours of the world. Thelines of the landscape down which they sped, were the simple, strict,yet swerving, lines of a rushing river; so that it was almost as if theywere being sucked down in a huge still whirlpool. Turnbull had some suchfeeling, for he spoke for the first time for many hours.
"If we go down at this rate we shall be over the sea cliff," he said.
"How glorious!" said MacIan.
When, however, they had come into the wide hollow at the bottom of thatlandslide, the car took a calm and graceful curve along the side ofthe sea, melted into the fringe of a few trees, and quietly, yetastonishingly, stopped. A belated light was burning in the broad morningin the window of a sort of lodge- or gate-keepers' cottage; and the girlstood up in the car and turned her splendid face to the sun.
Evan seemed startled by the stillness, like one who had been born amidsound and speed. He wavered on his long legs as he stood up; he pulledhimself together, and the only consequence was that he trembled fromhead to foot. Turnbull had already opened the door on his side andjumped out.
The moment he had done so the strange young woman had one more madmovement, and deliberately drove the car a few yards farther. Then shegot out with an almost cruel coolness and began pulling off her longgloves and almost whistling.
"You can leave me here," she said, quite casually, as if they had metfive minutes before. "That is the lodge of my father's place. Pleasecome in, if you like--but I understood that you had some business."
Evan looked at that lifted face and found it merely lovely; he was fartoo much of a fool to see that it was working with a final fatigueand that its austerity was agony. He was even fool enough to ask it aquestion. "Why did you save us?" he said, quite humbly.
The girl tore off one of her gloves, as if she were tearing off herhand. "Oh, I don't know," she said, bitterly. "Now I come to think ofit, I can't imagine."
Evan's thoughts, that had been piled up to the morning star, abruptlylet him down with a crash into the very cellars of the emotionaluniverse. He remained in a stunned silence for a long time; and that, ifhe had only known, was the wisest thing that he could possibly do at themoment.
Indeed, the silence and the sunrise had their healing effect, for whenthe extraordinary lady spoke again, her tone was more friendly andapologetic. "I'm not really ungrateful," she said; "it was very good ofyou to save me from those men."
"But why?" repeated the obstinate and dazed MacIan, "why did you save usfrom the other men? I mean the policemen?"
The girl's great brown eyes were lit up with a flash that was at oncefinal desperation and the loosening of some private and passionatereserve.
"Oh, God knows!" she cried. "God knows that if there is a God He hasturned His big back on everything. God knows I have had no pleasure inmy life, though I am pretty and young and father has plenty of money.And then people come and tell me that I ought to do things and I dothem and it's all drivel. They want you to do work among the poor; whichmeans reading Ruskin and feeling self-righteous in the best room ina poor tenement. Or to help some cause or other, which always meansbundling people out of crooked houses, in which they've always lived,into straight houses, in which they often die. And all the time you haveinside only the horrid irony of your own empty head and empty heart. Iam to give to the unfortunate, when my whole misfortune is that I havenothing to give. I am to teach, when I believe nothing at all that I wastaught. I am to save the children from death, and I am not even certainthat I should not be better dead. I suppose if I actually saw a childdrowning I should save it. But that would be from the same motive fromwhich I have saved you, or destroyed you, whichever it is that I havedone."
"What was the motive?" asked Evan, in a low voice.
"My motive is too big for my mind," answered the girl.
Then, after a pause, as she stared with a rising colour at theglittering sea, she said: "It can't be described, and yet I am trying todescribe it. It seems to me not only that I am unhappy, but that thereis no way of being happy. Father is not happy, though he is a Member ofParliament----" She paused a moment and added with a ghost of a smile:"Nor Aunt Mabel, though a man from India has told her the secret of allcreeds. But I may be wrong; there may be a way out. And for one stark,insane second, I felt that, after all, you had got the way out and thatwas why the world hated you. You see, if there were a way out, it wouldbe sure to be something that looked very queer."
Evan put his hand to his forehead and began stumblingly: "Yes, I supposewe do seem----"
"Oh, yes, you look queer enough," she said, with ringing sincerity."You'll be all the better for a wash and brush up."
"You forget our business, madam," said Evan, in a shaking voice; "wehave no concern but to kill each other."
"Well, I shouldn't be killed looking like that if I were you," shereplied, with inhuman honesty.
Evan stood and rolled his eyes in masculine bewilderment. Then camethe final change in this Proteus, and she put out both her hands for aninstant and said in a low tone on which he lived for days and nights:
"Don't you understand that I did not dare to stop you? What you aredoing is so mad that it may be quite true. Somehow one can never reallymanage to be an atheist."
Turnbull stood staring at the sea; but his shoulders showed that heheard, and after one minute he turned his head. But the girl had onlybrushed Evan's hand with hers and had fled up the dark alley by thelodge gate.
Evan stood rooted upon the road, literally like some heavy statue hewnthere in the age of the Druids. It seemed impossible that he shouldever move. Turnbull grew restless with this rigidity, and at last,after calling his companion twice or thrice, went up and clapped himimpatiently on one of his big shoulders. Evan winced and leapt away fromhim with a repulsion which was not the hate of an unclean thing nor thedread of a dangerous one, but was a spasm of awe and separation fromsomething from which he was now sundered as by the sword of God. He didnot hate the atheist; it is possible that he loved him. But Turnbullwas now something more dreadful than an enemy: he was a thing sealedand devoted--a thing now hopelessly doomed to be either a corpse or anexecutioner.
"What is the matter with you?" asked Turnbull, with his hearty handstill in the air; and yet he knew more about it than his innocent actionwould allow.
"James," said Evan, speaking like one under strong bodily pain, "I askedfor God's answer and I have got it--got it in my vitals. He knows howweak I am, and that I might forget the peril of the faith, forget theface of Our Lady--yes, even with your blow upon her cheek. But thehonour of this earth has just this about it, that it can make a man'sheart like iron. I am from the Lords of the Isles and I dare not be amere deserter. Therefore, God has tied me by the chain of my worldlyplace and word, and there is nothing but fighting now."
"I think I understand you," said Turnbull, "but you say everything tailforemost."
"She wants us to do it," said Evan, in a voice crushed with passion."She has hurt herself so that we might do it. She has left her goodname and her good sleep and all her habits and dignity flung away on theother side of England in the hope that she may hear of us and that wehave broken some hole into heaven."
"I thought I knew what you mean," said Turnbull, biting his beard; "itdoes seem as if we ought to do something after all she has done thisnight."
"I
never liked you so much before," said MacIan, in bitter sorrow.
As he spoke, three solemn footmen came out of the lodge gate andassembled to assist the chauffeur to his room. The mere sight of themmade the two wanderers flee as from a too frightful incongruity, andbefore they knew where they were, they were well upon the grassy ledgeof England that overlooks the Channel. Evan said suddenly: "Will theylet me see her in heaven once in a thousand ages?" and addressed theremark to the editor of _The Atheist_, as on which he would be likely orqualified to answer. But no answer came; a silence sank between the two.
Turnbull strode sturdily to the edge of the cliff and looked out, hiscompanion following, somewhat more shaken by his recent agitation.
"If that's the view you take," said Turnbull, "and I don't say you arewrong, I think I know where we shall be best off for the business. As ithappens, I know this part of the south coast pretty well. And unless Iam mistaken there's a way down the cliff just here which will land us ona stretch of firm sand where no one is likely to follow us."
The Highlander made a gesture of assent and came also almost to the edgeof the precipice. The sunrise, which was broadening over sea and shore,was one of those rare and splendid ones in which there seems to be nomist or doubt, and nothing but a universal clarification more and morecomplete. All the colours were transparent. It seemed like a triumphantprophecy of some perfect world where everything being innocent will beintelligible; a world where even our bodies, so to speak, may be as ofburning glass. Such a world is faintly though fiercely figured in thecoloured windows of Christian architecture. The sea that lay beforethem was like a pavement of emerald, bright and almost brittle; thesky against which its strict horizon hung was almost absolutely white,except that close to the sky line, like scarlet braids on the hem of agarment, lay strings of flaky cloud of so gleaming and gorgeous a redthat they seemed cut out of some strange blood-red celestial metal, ofwhich the mere gold of this earth is but a drab yellow imitation.
"The hand of Heaven is still pointing," muttered the man of superstitionto himself. "And now it is a blood-red hand."
The cool voice of his companion cut in upon his monologue, calling tohim from a little farther along the cliff, to tell him that he had foundthe ladder of descent. It began as a steep and somewhat greasy path,which then tumbled down twenty or thirty feet in the form of a fall ofrough stone steps. After that, there was a rather awkward drop on toa ledge of stone and then the journey was undertaken easily and evenelegantly by the remains of an ornamental staircase, such as might havebelonged to some long-disused watering-place. All the time that thetwo travellers sank from stage to stage of this downward journey, thereclosed over their heads living bridges and caverns of the most variedfoliage, all of which grew greener, redder, or more golden, in thegrowing sunlight of the morning. Life, too, of the more moving sort roseat the sun on every side of them. Birds whirred and fluttered in theundergrowth, as if imprisoned in green cages. Other birds were shakenup in great clouds from the tree-tops, as if they were blossoms detachedand scattered up to heaven. Animals which Turnbull was too much of aLondoner and MacIan too much of a Northerner to know, slipped by amongthe tangle or ran pattering up the tree-trunks. Both the men, accordingto their several creeds, felt the full thunder of the psalm of life asthey had never heard it before; MacIan felt God the Father, benignantin all His energies, and Turnbull that ultimate anonymous energy, that_Natura Naturans_, which is the whole theme of Lucretius. It was downthis clamorous ladder of life that they went down to die.
They broke out upon a brown semicircle of sand, so free from humanimprint as to justify Turnbull's profession. They strode out uponit, stuck their swords in the sand, and had a pause too importantfor speech. Turnbull eyed the coast curiously for a moment, like oneawakening memories of childhood; then he said abruptly, like a manremembering somebody's name: "But, of course, we shall be better offstill round the corner of Cragness Point; nobody ever comes there atall." And picking up his sword again, he began striding towards a bigbluff of the rocks which stood out upon their left. MacIan followed himround the corner and found himself in what was certainly an even finerfencing court, of flat, firm sand, enclosed on three sides by whitewalls of rock, and on the fourth by the green wall of the advancing sea.
"We are quite safe here," said Turnbull, and, to the other's surprise,flung himself down, sitting on the brown beach.
"You see, I was brought up near here," he explained. "I was sent fromScotland to stop with my aunt. It is highly probable that I may diehere. Do you mind if I light a pipe?"
"Of course, do whatever you like," said MacIan, with a choking voice,and he went and walked alone by himself along the wet, glistening sands.
Ten minutes afterwards he came back again, white with his own whirlwindof emotions; Turnbull was quite cheerful and was knocking out the end ofhis pipe.
"You see, we have to do it," said MacIan. "She tied us to it."
"Of course, my dear fellow," said the other, and leapt up as lightly asa monkey.
They took their places gravely in the very centre of the great square ofsand, as if they had thousands of spectators. Before saluting, MacIan,who, being a mystic, was one inch nearer to Nature, cast his eye roundthe huge framework of their heroic folly. The three walls of rock allleant a little outward, though at various angles; but this impressionwas exaggerated in the direction of the incredible by the heavy load ofliving trees and thickets which each wall wore on its top like ahuge shock of hair. On all that luxurious crest of life the risen andvictorious sun was beating, burnishing it all like gold, and every birdthat rose with that sunrise caught a light like a star upon it like thedove of the Holy Spirit. Imaginative life had never so much crowded uponMacIan. He felt that he could write whole books about the feelings of asingle bird. He felt that for two centuries he would not tire of beinga rabbit. He was in the Palace of Life, of which the very tapestriesand curtains were alive. Then he recovered himself, and remembered hisaffairs. Both men saluted, and iron rang upon iron. It was exactlyat the same moment that he realized that his enemy's left ankle wasencircled with a ring of salt water that had crept up to his feet.
"What is the matter?" said Turnbull, stopping an instant, for he hadgrown used to every movement of his extraordinary fellow-traveller'sface.
MacIan glanced again at that silver anklet of sea-water and then lookedbeyond at the next promontory round which a deep sea was boiling andleaping. Then he turned and looked back and saw heavy foam being shakenup to heaven about the base of Cragness Point.
"The sea has cut us off," he said, curtly.
"I have noticed it," said Turnbull with equal sobriety. "What view doyou take of the development?"
Evan threw away his weapon, and, as his custom was, imprisoned his bighead in his hands. Then he let them fall and said: "Yes, I know what itmeans; and I think it is the fairest thing. It is the finger of God--redas blood--still pointing. But now it points to two graves."
There was a space filled with the sound of the sea, and then MacIanspoke again in a voice pathetically reasonable: "You see, we both savedher--and she told us both to fight--and it would not be just that eithershould fail and fall alone, while the other----"
"You mean," said Turnbull, in a voice surprisingly soft and gentle,"that there is something fine about fighting in a place where even theconqueror must die?"
"Oh, you have got it right, you have got it right!" cried out Evan, inan extraordinary childish ecstasy. "Oh, I'm sure that you really believein God!"
Turnbull answered not a word, but only took up his fallen sword.
For the third time Evan MacIan looked at those three sides of Englishcliff hung with their noisy load of life. He had been at a loss tounderstand the almost ironical magnificence of all those teemingcreatures and tropical colours and smells that smoked happily to heaven.But now he knew that he was in the closed court of death and that allthe gates were sealed.
He drank in the last green and the last red and the last gold, thoseunique and
indescribable things of God, as a man drains good wine at thebottom of his glass. Then he turned and saluted his enemy once more, andthe two stood up and fought till the foam flowed over their knees.
Then MacIan stepped backward suddenly with a splash and held up hishand. "Turnbull!" he cried; "I can't help it--fair fighting is more eventhan promises. And this is not fair fighting."
"What the deuce do you mean?" asked the other, staring.
"I've only just thought of it," cried Evan, brokenly. "We're very wellmatched--it may go on a good time--the tide is coming up fast--and I'ma foot and a half taller. You'll be washed away like seaweed before it'sabove my breeches. I'll not fight foul for all the girls and angels inthe universe."
"Will you oblige me," said Turnbull, with staring grey eyes and a voiceof distinct and violent politeness; "will you oblige me by jolly wellminding your own business? Just you stand up and fight, and we'll seewho will be washed away like seaweed. You wanted to finish this fightand you shall finish it, or I'll denounce you as a coward to the wholeof that assembled company."
Evan looked very doubtful and offered a somewhat wavering weapon; buthe was quickly brought back to his senses by his opponent's sword-point,which shot past him, shaving his shoulder by a hair. By this time thewaves were well up Turnbull's thigh, and what was worse, they werebeginning to roll and break heavily around them.
MacIan parried this first lunge perfectly, the next less perfectly; thethird in all human probability he would not have parried at all; theChristian champion would have been pinned like a butterfly, and theatheistic champion left to drown like a rat, with such consolation ashis view of the cosmos afforded him. But just as Turnbull launched hisheaviest stroke, the sea, in which he stood up to his hips, launcheda yet heavier one. A wave breaking beyond the others smote him heavilylike a hammer of water. One leg gave way, he was swung round and suckedinto the retreating sea, still gripping his sword.
MacIan put his sword between his teeth and plunged after hisdisappearing enemy. He had the sense of having the whole universe on topof him as crest after crest struck him down. It seemed to him quite acosmic collapse, as if all the seven heavens were falling on him oneafter the other. But he got hold of the atheist's left leg and he didnot let it go.
After some ten minutes of foam and frenzy, in which all the senses atonce seemed blasted by the sea, Evan found himself laboriously swimmingon a low, green swell, with the sword still in his teeth and the editorof _The Atheist_ still under his arm. What he was going to do he hadnot even the most glimmering idea; so he merely kept his grip and swamsomehow with one hand.
He ducked instinctively as there bulked above him a big, black wave,much higher than any that he had seen. Then he saw that it was hardlythe shape of any possible wave. Then he saw that it was a fisherman'sboat, and, leaping upward, caught hold of the bow. The boat pitchedforward with its stern in the air for just as much time as was neededto see that there was nobody in it. After a moment or two of desperateclambering, however, there were two people in it, Mr. Evan MacIan,panting and sweating, and Mr. James Turnbull, uncommonly close to beingdrowned. After ten minutes' aimless tossing in the empty fishing-boat herecovered, however, stirred, stretched himself, and looked round onthe rolling waters. Then, while taking no notice of the streams of saltwater that were pouring from his hair, beard, coat, boots, and trousers,he carefully wiped the wet off his sword-blade to preserve it from thepossibilities of rust.
MacIan found two oars in the bottom of the deserted boat and begansomewhat drearily to row.
* * *
A rainy twilight was clearing to cold silver over the moaning sea,when the battered boat that had rolled and drifted almost aimlessly allnight, came within sight of land, though of land which looked almostas lost and savage as the waves. All night there had been but littlelifting in the leaden sea, only now and then the boat had been heavedup, as on a huge shoulder which slipped from under it; such occasionalsea-quakes came probably from the swell of some steamer that had passedit in the dark; otherwise the waves were harmless though restless. Butit was piercingly cold, and there was, from time to time, a splutter ofrain like the splutter of the spray, which seemed almost to freeze asit fell. MacIan, more at home than his companion in this quite barbarousand elemental sort of adventure, had rowed toilsomely with the heavyoars whenever he saw anything that looked like land; but for the mostpart had trusted with grim transcendentalism to wind and tide. Among theimplements of their first outfit the brandy alone had remained to him,and he gave it to his freezing companion in quantities which greatlyalarmed that temperate Londoner; but MacIan came from the cold seas andmists where a man can drink a tumbler of raw whisky in a boat without itmaking him wink.
When the Highlander began to pull really hard upon the oars, Turnbullcraned his dripping red head out of the boat to see the goal of hisexertions. It was a sufficiently uninviting one; nothing so far as couldbe seen but a steep and shelving bank of shingle, made of loose littlepebbles such as children like, but slanting up higher than a house. Onthe top of the mound, against the sky line, stood up the brown skeletonof some broken fence or breakwater. With the grey and watery dawncrawling up behind it, the fence really seemed to say to our philosophicadventurers that they had come at last to the other end of nowhere.
Bent by necessity to his labour, MacIan managed the heavy boat with realpower and skill, and when at length he ran it up on a smoother part ofthe slope it caught and held so that they could clamber out, not sinkingfarther than their knees into the water and the shingle. A foot ortwo farther up their feet found the beach firmer, and a few momentsafterwards they were leaning on the ragged breakwater and looking backat the sea they had escaped.
They had a dreary walk across wastes of grey shingle in the grey dawnbefore they began to come within hail of human fields or roads; nor hadthey any notion of what fields or roads they would be. Their boots werebeginning to break up and the confusion of stones tried them severely,so that they were glad to lean on their swords, as if they were thestaves of pilgrims. MacIan thought vaguely of a weird ballad of his owncountry which describes the soul in Purgatory as walking on a plain fullof sharp stones, and only saved by its own charities upon earth.
If ever thou gavest hosen and shoon Every night and all, Sit thee down and put them on, And Christ receive thy soul.
Turnbull had no such lyrical meditations, but he was in an even worsetemper.
At length they came to a pale ribbon of road, edged by a shelf of roughand almost colourless turf; and a few feet up the slope there stoodgrey and weather-stained, one of those big wayside crucifixes which areseldom seen except in Catholic countries.
MacIan put his hand to his head and found that his bonnet was not there.Turnbull gave one glance at the crucifix--a glance at once sympatheticand bitter, in which was concentrated the whole of Swinburne's poem onthe same occasion.
O hidden face of man, whereover The years have woven a viewless veil, If thou wert verily man's lover What did thy love or blood avail? Thy blood the priests mix poison of, And in gold shekels coin thy love.
Then, leaving MacIan in his attitude of prayer, Turnbull began to lookright and left very sharply, like one looking for something. Suddenly,with a little cry, he saw it and ran forward. A few yards from themalong the road a lean and starved sort of hedge came pitifully to anend. Caught upon its prickly angle, however, there was a very small andvery dirty scrap of paper that might have hung there for months, sinceit escaped from someone tearing up a letter or making a spill out ofa newspaper. Turnbull snatched at it and found it was the corner of aprinted page, very coarsely printed, like a cheap novelette, and justlarge enough to contain the words: "_et c'est elle qui_----"
"Hurrah!" cried Turnbull, waving his fragment; "we are safe at last.We are free at last. We are somewhere better than England or Eden orParadise. MacIan, we are in the Land of the Duel!" r />
"Where do you say?" said the other, looking at him heavily and withknitted brows, like one almost dazed with the grey doubts of desolatetwilight and drifting sea.
"We are in France!" cried Turnbull, with a voice like a trumpet, "in theland where things really happen--_Tout arrive en France_. We arrivein France. Look at this little message," and he held out the scrap ofpaper. "There's an omen for you superstitious hill folk. _C'est ellequi--Mais oui, mais oui, c'est elle qui sauvera encore le monde_."
"France!" repeated MacIan, and his eyes awoke again in his head likelarge lamps lighted.
"Yes, France!" said Turnbull, and all the rhetorical part of him came tothe top, his face growing as red as his hair. "France, that has alwaysbeen in rebellion for liberty and reason. France, that has alwaysassailed superstition with the club of Rabelais or the rapier ofVoltaire. France, at whose first council table sits the sublime figureof Julian the Apostate. France, where a man said only the other daythose splendid unanswerable words"--with a superb gesture--"'we haveextinguished in heaven those lights that men shall never light again.'"
"No," said MacIan, in a voice that shook with a controlled passion. "ButFrance, which was taught by St. Bernard and led to war by Joan ofArc. France that made the crusades. France that saved the Church andscattered the heresies by the mouths of Bossuet and Massillon. France,which shows today the conquering march of Catholicism, as brain afterbrain surrenders to it, Brunetiere, Coppee, Hauptmann, Barres, Bourget,Lemaitre."
"France!" asserted Turnbull with a sort of rollicking self-exaggeration,very unusual with him, "France, which is one torrent of splendidscepticism from Abelard to Anatole France."
"France," said MacIan, "which is one cataract of clear faith from St.Louis to Our Lady of Lourdes."
"France at least," cried Turnbull, throwing up his sword in schoolboytriumph, "in which these things are thought about and fought about.France, where reason and religion clash in one continual tournament.France, above all, where men understand the pride and passion which haveplucked our blades from their scabbards. Here, at least, we shall not bechased and spied on by sickly parsons and greasy policemen, because wewish to put our lives on the game. Courage, my friend, we have come tothe country of honour."
MacIan did not even notice the incongruous phrase "my friend", butnodding again and again, drew his sword and flung the scabbard farbehind him in the road.
"Yes," he cried, in a voice of thunder, "we will fight here and _He_shall look on at it."
Turnbull glanced at the crucifix with a sort of scowling good-humour andthen said: "He may look and see His cross defeated."
"The cross cannot be defeated," said MacIan, "for it is Defeat."
A second afterwards the two bright, blood-thirsty weapons made the signof the cross in horrible parody upon each other.
They had not touched each other twice, however, when upon the hill,above the crucifix, there appeared another horrible parody of its shape;the figure of a man who appeared for an instant waving his outspreadarms. He had vanished in an instant; but MacIan, whose fighting face wasset that way, had seen the shape momentarily but quite photographically.And while it was like a comic repetition of the cross, it was also,in that place and hour, something more incredible. It had been onlyinstantaneously on the retina of his eye; but unless his eye and mindwere going mad together, the figure was that of an ordinary Londonpoliceman.
He tried to concentrate his senses on the sword-play; but one half ofhis brain was wrestling with the puzzle; the apocalyptic and almostseraphic apparition of a stout constable out of Clapham on top of adreary and deserted hill in France. He did not, however, have to puzzlelong. Before the duellists had exchanged half a dozen passes, the big,blue policeman appeared once more on the top of the hill, a palpablemonstrosity in the eye of heaven. He was waving only one arm now andseemed to be shouting directions. At the same moment a mass of blueblocked the corner of the road behind the small, smart figure ofTurnbull, and a small company of policemen in the English uniform cameup at a kind of half-military double.
Turnbull saw the stare of consternation in his enemy's face and swunground to share its cause. When he saw it, cool as he was, he staggeredback.
"What the devil are you doing here?" he called out in a high, shrillvoice of authority, like one who finds a tramp in his own larder.
"Well, sir," said the sergeant in command, with that sort of heavycivility shown only to the evidently guilty, "seems to me we might askwhat are you doing here?"
"We are having an affair of honour," said Turnbull, as if it werethe most rational thing in the world. "If the French police like tointerfere, let them interfere. But why the blue blazes should youinterfere, you great blue blundering sausages?"
"I'm afraid, sir," said the sergeant with restraint, "I'm afraid I don'tquite follow you."
"I mean, why don't the French police take this up if it's got to betaken up? I always heard that they were spry enough in their own way."
"Well, sir," said the sergeant reflectively, "you see, sir, the Frenchpolice don't take this up--well, because you see, sir, this ain'tFrance. This is His Majesty's dominions, same as 'Ampstead 'eath."
"Not France?" repeated Turnbull, with a sort of dull incredulity.
"No, sir," said the sergeant; "though most of the people talk French.This is the island called St. Loup, sir, an island in the Channel.We've been sent down specially from London, as you were such speciallydistinguished criminals, if you'll allow me to say so. Which remindsme to warn you that anything you say may be used against you at yourtrial."
"Quite so," said Turnbull, and lurched suddenly against the sergeant,so as to tip him over the edge of the road with a crash into the shinglebelow. Then leaving MacIan and the policemen equally and instantaneouslynailed to the road, he ran a little way along it, leapt off on to a partof the beach, which he had found in his journey to be firmer, andwent across it with a clatter of pebbles. His sudden calculation wassuccessful; the police, unacquainted with the various levels ofthe loose beach, tried to overtake him by the shorter cut and foundthemselves, being heavy men, almost up to their knees in shoals ofslippery shingle. Two who had been slower with their bodies were quickerwith their minds, and seeing Turnbull's trick, ran along the edge of theroad after him. Then MacIan finally awoke, and leaving half hissleeve in the grip of the only man who tried to hold him, took the twopolicemen in the small of their backs with the impetus of a cannon-balland, sending them also flat among the stones, went tearing after histwin defier of the law.
As they were both good runners, the start they had gained was decisive.They dropped over a high breakwater farther on upon the beach, turnedsharply, and scrambled up a line of ribbed rocks, crowned with athicket, crawled through it, scratching their hands and faces, anddropped into another road; and there found that they could slacken theirspeed into a steady trot. In all this desperate dart and scramble,they still kept hold of their drawn swords, which now, indeed, in thevigorous phrase of Bunyan, seemed almost to grow out of their hands.
They had run another half mile or so when it became apparent thatthey were entering a sort of scattered village. One or two whitewashedcottages and even a shop had appeared along the side of the road. Then,for the first time, Turnbull twisted round his red bear to get a glimpseof his companion, who was a foot or two behind, and remarked abruptly:"Mr. MacIan, we've been going the wrong way to work all along. We'retraced everywhere, because everybody knows about us. It's as if one wentabout with Kruger's beard on Mafeking Night."
"What do you mean?" said MacIan, innocently.
"I mean," said Turnbull, with steady conviction, "that what we want is alittle diplomacy, and I am going to buy some in a shop."