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I am obliged to use Love."
He gave to the word an indescribable sound of something hard and
heavy, as if he were saying "boots". Turnbull suddenly gripped
his sword and said, shortly, "I see how you are placed quite
well, sir. You will not call the police. Mr. MacIan, shall we
engage?" MacIan plucked his sword out of the grass.
"I must and will stop this shocking crime," cried the Tolstoian,
crimson in the face. "It is against all modern ideas. It is
against the principle of love. How you, sir, who pretend to be a
Christian..."
MacIan turned upon him with a white face and bitter lip. "Sir,"
he said, "talk about the principle of love as much as you like.
You seem to me colder than a lump of stone; but I am willing to
believe that you may at some time have loved a cat, or a dog, or
a child. When you were a baby, I suppose you loved your mother.
Talk about love, then, till the world is sick of the word. But
don't you talk about Christianity. Don't you dare to say one
word, white or black, about it. Christianity is, as far as you
are concerned, a horrible mystery. Keep clear of it, keep silent
upon it, as you would upon an abomination. It is a thing that has
made men slay and torture each other; and you will never know
why. It is a thing that has made men do evil that good might
come; and you will never understand the evil, let alone the good.
Christianity is a thing that could only make you vomit, till you
are other than you are. I would not justify it to you even if I
could. Hate it, in God's name, as Turnbull does, who is a man.
It is a monstrous thing, for which men die. And if you will stand
here and talk about love for another ten minutes it is very
probable that you will see a man die for it."
And he fell on guard. Turnbull was busy settling something loose
in his elaborate hilt, and the pause was broken by the stranger.
"Suppose I call the police?" he said, with a heated face.
"And deny your most sacred dogma," said MacIan.
"Dogma!" cried the man, in a sort of dismay. "Oh, we have no
_dogmas_, you know!"
There was another silence, and he said again, airily:
"You know, I think, there's something in what Shaw teaches about
no moral principles being quite fixed. Have you ever read _The
Quintessence of Ibsenism_? Of course he went very wrong over the
war."
Turnbull, with a bent, flushed face, was tying up the loose piece
of the pommel with string. With the string in his teeth, he said,
"Oh, make up your damned mind and clear out!"
"It's a serious thing," said the philosopher, shaking his head.
"I must be alone and consider which is the higher point of view.
I rather feel that in a case so extreme as this..." and he went
slowly away. As he disappeared among the trees, they heard him
murmuring in a sing-song voice, "New occasions teach new duties,"
out of a poem by James Russell Lowell.
"Ah," said MacIan, drawing a deep breath. "Don't you believe in
prayer now? I prayed for an angel."
"An hour ago," said the Highlander, in his heavy meditative
voice, "I felt the devil weakening my heart and my oath against
you, and I prayed that God would send an angel to my aid."
"Well?" inquired the other, finishing his mending and wrapping
the rest of the string round his hand to get a firmer grip.
"Well?"
"Well, that man was an angel," said MacIan.
"I didn't know they were as bad as that," answered Turnbull.
"We know that devils sometimes quote Scripture and counterfeit
good," replied the mystic. "Why should not angels sometimes come
to show us the black abyss of evil on whose brink we stand. If
that man had not tried to stop us...I might...I might have
stopped."
"I know what you mean," said Turnbull, grimly.
"But then he came," broke out MacIan, "and my soul said to me:
'Give up fighting, and you will become like That. Give up vows
and dogmas, and fixed things, and you may grow like That. You may
learn, also, that fog of false philosophy. You may grow fond of
that mire of crawling, cowardly morals, and you may come to think
a blow bad, because it hurts, and not because it humiliates. You
may come to think murder wrong, because it is violent, and not
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