“Don’t you think,” said the new-comer, with a sort of supercilious entreaty, “that we had better all come into breakfast? It is such a mistake to wait for breakfast. It spoils one’s temper so much.”
“Quite so,” replied Turnbull, seriously.
“There seems almost to have been a little quarrelling here,” said the man with the goatish beard.
“It is rather a long story,” said Turnbull, smiling. “Originally, it might be called a phase in the quarrel between science and religion.”
The new-comer started slightly, and Turnbull replied to the question on his face.
“Oh, yes,” he said, “I am science!”
“I congratulate you heartily,” answered the other, “I am Doctor Quayle.”
Turnbull’s eyes did not move, but he realized that the man in the panama hat had lost all his ease of a landed proprietor and had withdrawn to a distance of thirty yards, where he stood glaring with all the contraction of fear and hatred that can stiffen a cat.
* * *
MacIan was sitting somewhat disconsolately on a stump of tree, his large black head half buried in his large brown hands, when Turnbull strode up to him chewing a cigarette. He did not look up, but his comrade and enemy addressed him like one who must free himself of his feelings.
“Well, I hope, at any rate,” he said, “that you like your precious religion now. I hope you like the society of this poor devil whom your damned tracts and hymns and priests have driven out of his wits. Five men in this place, they tell me, five men in this place who might have been fathers of families, and every one of them thinks he is God the Father. Oh! you may talk about the ugliness of science, but there is no one here who thinks he is Protoplasm.”
“They naturally prefer a bright part,” said MacIan, wearily. “Protoplasm is not worth going mad about.”
“At least,” said Turnbull, savagely, “it was your Jesus Christ who started all this bosh about being God.”
For one instant MacIan opened the eyes of battle; then his tightened lips took a crooked smile and he said, quite calmly:
“No, the idea is older; it was Satan who first said that he was God.”
“Then, what,” asked Turnbull, very slowly, as he softly picked a flower, “what is the difference between Christ and Satan?”
“It is quite simple,” replied the Highlander. “Christ descended into hell; Satan fell into it.”
“Does it make much odds?” asked the free-thinker.
“It makes all the odds,” said the other. “One of them wanted to go up and went down; the other wanted to go down and went up. A god can be humble, a devil can only be humbled.”
“Why are you always wanting to humble a man?” asked Turnbull, knitting his brows. “It affects me as ungenerous.”
“Why were you wanting to humble a god when you found him in this garden?” asked MacIan.
“That was an extreme case of impudence,” said Turnbull.
“Granting the man his almighty pretensions, I think he was very modest,” said MacIan. “It is we who are arrogant, who know we are only men. The ordinary man in the street is more of a monster than that poor fellow; for the man in the street treats himself as God Almighty when he knows he isn’t. He expects the universe to turn round him, though he knows he isn’t the centre.”
“Well,” said Turnbull, sitting down on the grass, “this is a digression, anyhow. What I want to point out is, that your faith does end in asylums and my science doesn’t.”
“Doesn’t it, by George!” cried MacIan, scornfully. “There are a few men here who are mad on God and a few who are mad on the Bible. But I bet there are many more who are simply mad on madness.”
“Do you really believe it?” asked the other.
“Scores of them, I should say,” answered MacIan. “Fellows who have read medical books or fellows whose fathers and uncles had something hereditary in their heads–the whole air they breathe is mad.”
“All the same,” said Turnbull, shrewdly, “I bet you haven’t found a madman of that sort.”
“I bet I have!” cried Evan, with unusual animation. “I’ve been walking about the garden talking to a poor chap all the morning. He’s simply been broken down and driven raving by your damned science. Talk about believing one is God–why, it’s quite an old, comfortable, fireside fancy compared with the sort of things this fellow believes. He believes that there is a God, but that he is better than God. He says God will be afraid to face him. He says one is always progressing beyond the best. He put his arm in mine and whispered in my ear, as if it were the apocalypse: ‘Never trust a God that you can’t improve on.’”
“What can he have meant?” said the atheist, with all his logic awake. “Obviously one should not trust any God that one can improve on.”
“It is the way he talks,” said MacIan, almost indifferently; “but he says rummier things than that. He says that a man’s doctor ought to decide what woman he marries; and he says that children ought not to be brought up by their parents, because a physical partiality will then distort the judgement of the educator.”
“Oh, dear!” said Turnbull, laughing, “you have certainly come across a pretty bad case, and incidentally proved your own. I suppose some men do lose their wits through science as through love and other good things.”
“And he says,” went on MacIan, monotonously, “that he cannot see why anyone should suppose that a triangle is a three-sided figure. He says that on some higher plane–”
Turnbull leapt to his feet as by an electric shock. “I never could have believed,” he cried, “that you had humour enough to tell a lie. You’ve gone a bit too far, old man, with your little joke. Even in a lunatic asylum there can’t be anybody who, having thought about the matter, thinks that a triangle has not got three sides. If he exists he must be a new era in human psychology. But he doesn’t exist.”
“I will go and fetch him,” said MacIan, calmly; “I left the poor fellow wandering about by the nasturtium bed.”
MacIan vanished, and in a few moments returned, trailing with him his own discovery among lunatics, who was a slender man with a fixed smile and an unfixed and rolling head. He had a goatlike beard just long enough to be shaken in a strong wind. Turnbull sprang to his feet and was like one who is speechless through choking a sudden shout of laughter.
“Why, you great donkey,” he shouted, in an ear-shattering whisper, “that’s not one of the patients at all. That’s one of the doctors.”
Evan looked back at the leering head with the long-pointed beard and repeated the word inquiringly: “One of the doctors?”
“Oh, you know what I mean,” said Turnbull, impatiently. “The medical authorities of the place.”
Evan was still staring back curiously at the beaming and bearded creature behind him.
“The mad doctors,” said Turnbull, shortly.
“Quite so,” said MacIan.
After a rather restless silence Turnbull plucked MacIan by the elbow and pulled him aside.
“For goodness sake,” he said, “don’t offend this fellow; he may be as mad as ten hatters, if you like, but he has us between his finger and thumb. This is the very time he appointed to talk with us about our– well, our exeat.”
“But what can it matter?” asked the wondering MacIan. “He can’t keep us in the asylum. We’re not mad.”
“Jackass!” said Turnbull, heartily, “of course we’re not mad. Of course, if we are medically examined and the thing is thrashed out, they will find we are not mad. But don’t you see that if the thing is thrashed out it will mean letters to this reference and telegrams to that; and at the first word of who we are, we shall be taken out of a madhouse, where we may smoke, to a jail, where we mayn’t. No, if we manage this very quietly, he may merely let us out at the front door as stray revellers. If there’s half an hour of inquiry, we are cooked.”