The Ball and The Cross | Page 7

in a faint and
distant fashion some remarks that this beautiful solid man seemed to be making to him;
remarks about something or other being after hours and against orders. He also seemed to
be asking how Michael "got up" there. This beautiful man evidently felt as Michael did
that the earth was a star and was set in heaven.
At length Michael sated himself with the mere sensual music of the voice of the man in
buttons. He began to listen to what he said, and even to make some attempt at answering
a question which appeared to have been put several times and was now put with some
excess of emphasis. Michael realized that the image of God in nickel buttons was asking
him how he had come there. He said that he had come in Lucifer's ship. On his giving
this answer the demeanour of the image of God underwent a remarkable change. From
addressing Michael gruffly, as if he were a malefactor, he began suddenly to speak to him
with a sort of eager and feverish amiability as if he were a child. He seemed particularly
anxious to coax him away from the balustrade. He led him by the arm towards a door
leading into the building itself, soothing him all the time. He gave what even Michael

(slight as was his knowledge of the world) felt to be an improbable account of the
sumptuous pleasures and varied advantages awaiting him downstairs. Michael followed
him, however, if only out of politeness, down an apparently interminable spiral of
staircase. At one point a door opened. Michael stepped through it, and the unaccountable
man in buttons leapt after him and pinioned him where he stood. But he only wished to
stand; to stand and stare. He had stepped as it were into another infinity, out under the
dome of another heaven. But this was a dome of heaven made by man. The gold and
green and crimson of its sunset were not in the shapeless clouds but in shapes of
cherubim and seraphim, awful human shapes with a passionate plumage. Its stars were
not above but far below, like fallen stars still in unbroken constellations; the dome itself
was full of darkness. And far below, lower even than the lights, could be seen creeping or
motionless, great black masses of men. The tongue of a terrible organ seemed to shake
the very air in the whole void; and through it there came up to Michael the sound of a
tongue more terrible; the dreadful everlasting voice of man, calling to his gods from the
beginning to the end of the world. Michael felt almost as if he were a god, and all the
voices were hurled at him.
"No, the pretty things aren't here," said the demi-god in buttons, caressingly. "The pretty
things are downstairs. You come along with me. There's something that will surprise you
downstairs; something you want very much to see."
Evidently the man in buttons did not feel like a god, so Michael made no attempt to
explain his feelings to him, but followed him meekly enough down the trail of the
serpentine staircase. He had no notion where or at what level he was. He was still full of
the cold splendour of space, and of what a French writer has brilliantly named the
"vertigo of the infinite," when another door opened, and with a shock indescribable he
found himself on the familiar level, in a street full of faces, with the houses and even the
lamp-posts above his head. He felt suddenly happy and suddenly indescribably small. He
fancied he had been changed into a child again; his eyes sought the pavement seriously as
children's do, as if it were a thing with which something satisfactory could be done. He
felt the full warmth of that pleasure from which the proud shut themselves out; the
pleasure which not only goes with humiliation, but which almost is humiliation. Men
who have escaped death by a hair have it, and men whose love is returned by a woman
unexpectedly, and men whose sins are forgiven them. Everything his eye fell on it feasted
on, not aesthetically, but with a plain, jolly appetite as of a boy eating buns. He relished
the squareness of the houses; he liked their clean angles as if he had just cut them with a
knife. The lit squares of the shop windows excited him as the young are excited by the lit
stage of some promising pantomime. He happened to see in one shop which projected
with a bulging bravery on to the pavement some square tins of potted meat, and it seemed
like a hint of a hundred hilarious high teas in a hundred streets of the world. He