The Ball and The Cross | Page 6

to lose it.
Some will think it improbable that a human soul swinging desperately in mid-air should
think about philosophical inconsistencies. But such extreme states are dangerous things to
dogmatize about. Frequently they produce a certain useless and joyless activity of the
mere intellect, thought not only divorced from hope but even from desire. And if it is
impossible to dogmatize about such states, it is still more impossible to describe them. To
this spasm of sanity and clarity in Michael's mind succeeded a spasm of the elemental
terror; the terror of the animal in us which regards the whole universe as its enemy; which,
when it is victorious, has no pity, and so, when it is defeated has no imaginable hope. Of
that ten minutes of terror it is not possible to speak in human words. But then again in
that damnable darkness there began to grow a strange dawn as of grey and pale silver.
And of this ultimate resignation or certainty it is even less possible to write; it is
something stranger than hell itself; it is perhaps the last of the secrets of God. At the
highest crisis of some incurable anguish there will suddenly fall upon the man the
stillness of an insane contentment. It is not hope, for hope is broken and romantic and
concerned with the future; this is complete and of the present. It is not faith, for faith by
its very nature is fierce, and as it were at once doubtful and defiant; but this is simply a
satisfaction. It is not knowledge, for the intellect seems to have no particular part in it.
Nor is it (as the modern idiots would certainly say it is) a mere numbness or negative

paralysis of the powers of grief. It is not negative in the least; it is as positive as good
news. In some sense, indeed, it is good news. It seems almost as if there were some
equality among things, some balance in all possible contingencies which we are not
permitted to know lest we should learn indifference to good and evil, but which is
sometimes shown to us for an instant as a last aid in our last agony.
Michael certainly could not have given any sort of rational account of this vast
unmeaning satisfaction which soaked through him and filled him to the brim. He felt with
a sort of half-witted lucidity that the cross was there, and the ball was there, and the dome
was there, that he was going to climb down from them, and that he did not mind in the
least whether he was killed or not. This mysterious mood lasted long enough to start him
on his dreadful descent and to force him to continue it. But six times before he reached
the highest of the outer galleries terror had returned on him like a flying storm of
darkness and thunder. By the time he had reached that place of safety he almost felt (as in
some impossible fit of drunkenness) that he had two heads; one was calm, careless, and
efficient; the other saw the danger like a deadly map, was wise, careful, and useless. He
had fancied that he would have to let himself vertically down the face of the whole
building. When he dropped into the upper gallery he still felt as far from the terrestrial
globe as if he had only dropped from the sun to the moon. He paused a little, panting in
the gallery under the ball, and idly kicked his heels, moving a few yards along it. And as
he did so a thunderbolt struck his soul. A man, a heavy, ordinary man, with a composed
indifferent face, and a prosaic sort of uniform, with a row of buttons, blocked his way.
Michael had no mind to wonder whether this solid astonished man, with the brown
moustache and the nickel buttons, had also come on a flying ship. He merely let his mind
float in an endless felicity about the man. He thought how nice it would be if he had to
live up in that gallery with that one man for ever. He thought how he would luxuriate in
the nameless shades of this man's soul and then hear with an endless excitement about the
nameless shades of the souls of all his aunts and uncles. A moment before he had been
dying alone. Now he was living in the same world with a man; an inexhaustible ecstasy.
In the gallery below the ball Father Michael had found that man who is the noblest and
most divine and most lovable of all men, better than all the saints, greater than all the
heroes--man Friday.
In the confused colour and music of his new paradise, Michael heard only