“Hurrah!” cried Turnbull, waving his fragment; “we are safe at last. We are free at last. We are somewhere better than England or Eden or Paradise. MacIan, we are in the Land of the Duel!”
“Where do you say?” said the other, looking at him heavily and with knitted brows, like one almost dazed with the grey doubts of desolate twilight and drifting sea.
“We are in France!” cried Turnbull, with a voice like a trumpet, “in the land where things really happen–Tout arrive en France. We arrive in France. Look at this little message,” and he held out the scrap of paper. “There’s an omen for you superstitious hill folk. C’est elle qui–Mais oui, mais oui, c’est elle qui sauvera encore le monde.”
“France!” repeated MacIan, and his eyes awoke again in his head like large lamps lighted.
“Yes, France!” said Turnbull, and all the rhetorical part of him came to the top, his face growing as red as his hair. “France, that has always been in rebellion for liberty and reason. France, that has always assailed superstition with the club of Rabelais or the rapier of Voltaire. France, at whose first council table sits the sublime figure of Julian the Apostate. France, where a man said only the other day those splendid unanswerable words”– with a superb gesture–“‘we have extinguished in heaven those lights that men shall never light again.’”
“No,” said MacIan, in a voice that shook with a controlled passion. “But France, which was taught by St. Bernard and led to war by Joan of Arc. France that made the crusades. France that saved the Church and scattered the heresies by the mouths of Bossuet and Massillon. France, which shows today the conquering march of Catholicism, as brain after brain 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 splendid scepticism 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 schoolboy triumph, “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 have plucked our blades from their scabbards. Here, at least, we shall not be chased and spied on by sickly parsons and greasy policemen, because we wish to put our lives on the game. Courage, my friend, we have come to the country of honour.”
MacIan did not even notice the incongruous phrase “my friend”, but nodding again and again, drew his sword and flung the scabbard far behind 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 and then 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 sign of 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 outspread arms. He had vanished in an instant; but MacIan, whose fighting face was set 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 only instantaneously on the retina of his eye; but unless his eye and mind were going mad together, the figure was that of an ordinary London policeman.
He tried to concentrate his senses on the sword-play; but one half of his brain was wrestling with the puzzle; the apocalyptic and almost seraphic apparition of a stout constable out of Clapham on top of a dreary and deserted hill in France. He did not, however, have to puzzle long. Before the duellists had exchanged half a dozen passes, the big, blue policeman appeared once more on the top of the hill, a palpable monstrosity in the eye of heaven. He was waving only one arm now and seemed to be shouting directions. At the same moment a mass of blue blocked the corner of the road behind the small, smart figure of Turnbull, and a small company of policemen in the English uniform came up at a kind of half-military double.
Turnbull saw the stare of consternation in his enemy’s face and swung round to share its cause. When he saw it, cool as he was, he staggered back.
“What the devil are you doing here?” he called out in a high, shrill voice of authority, like one who finds a tramp in his own larder.
“Well, sir,” said the sergeant in command, with that sort of heavy civility shown only to the evidently guilty, “seems to me we might ask what are you doing here?”
“We are having an affair of honour,” said Turnbull, as if it were the most rational thing in the world. “If the French police like to interfere, let them interfere. But why the blue blazes should you interfere, you great blue blundering sausages?”
“I’m afraid, sir,” said the sergeant with restraint, “I’m afraid I don’t quite follow you.”
“I mean, why don’t the French police take this up if it’s got to be taken up? I always heard that they were spry enough in their own way.”
“Well, sir,” said the sergeant reflectively, “you see, sir, the French police don’t take this up–well, because you see, sir, this ain’t France. 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 specially distinguished criminals, if you’ll allow me to say so. Which reminds me to warn you that anything you say may be used against you at your trial.”
“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 shingle below. Then leaving MacIan and the policemen equally and instantaneously nailed to the road, he ran a little way along it, leapt off on to a part of the beach, which he had found in his journey to be firmer, and went across it with a clatter of pebbles. His sudden calculation was successful; the police, unacquainted with the various levels of the loose beach, tried to overtake him by the shorter cut and found themselves, being heavy men, almost up to their knees in shoals of slippery shingle. Two who had been slower with their bodies were quicker with their minds, and seeing Turnbull’s trick, ran along the edge of the road after him. Then MacIan finally awoke, and leaving half his sleeve in the grip of the only man who tried to hold him, took the two policemen in the small of their backs with the impetus of a cannon-ball and, sending them also flat among the stones, went tearing after his twin 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, turned sharply, and scrambled up a line of ribbed rocks, crowned with a thicket, crawled through it, scratching their hands and faces, and dropped into another road; and there found that they could slacken their speed into a steady trot. In all this desperate dart and scramble, they still kept hold of their drawn swords, which now, indeed, in the vigorous phrase of Bunyan, seemed almost to grow out of their hands.