The Ball and The Cross | Page 8

was,
perhaps, the happiest of all the children of men. For in that unendurable instant when he
hung, half slipping, to the ball of St. Paul's, the whole universe had been destroyed and
re-created.
Suddenly through all the din of the dark streets came a crash of glass. With that
mysterious suddenness of the Cockney mob, a rush was made in the right direction, a
dingy office, next to the shop of the potted meat. The pane of glass was lying in splinters
about the pavement. And the police already had their hands on a very tall young man,
with dark, lank hair and dark, dazed eyes, with a grey plaid over his shoulder, who had

just smashed the shop window with a single blow of his stick.
"I'd do it again," said the young man, with a furious white face. "Anybody would have
done it. Did you see what it said? I swear I'd do it again." Then his eyes encountered the
monkish habit of Michael, and he pulled off his grey tam-o'-shanter with the gesture of a
Catholic.
"Father, did you see what they said?" he cried, trembling. "Did you see what they dared
to say? I didn't understand it at first. I read it half through before I broke the window."
Michael felt he knew not how. The whole peace of the world was pent up painfully in his
heart. The new and childlike world which he had seen so suddenly, men had not seen at
all. Here they were still at their old bewildering, pardonable, useless quarrels, with so
much to be said on both sides, and so little that need be said at all. A fierce inspiration
fell on him suddenly; he would strike them where they stood with the love of God. They
should not move till they saw their own sweet and startling existence. They should not go
from that place till they went home embracing like brothers and shouting like men
delivered. From the Cross from which he had fallen fell the shadow of its fantastic mercy;
and the first three words he spoke in a voice like a silver trumpet, held men as still as
stones. Perhaps if he had spoken there for an hour in his illumination he might have
founded a religion on Ludgate Hill. But the heavy hand of his guide fell suddenly on his
shoulder.
"This poor fellow is dotty," he said good-humouredly to the crowd. "I found him
wandering in the Cathedral. Says he came in a flying ship. Is there a constable to spare to
take care of him?"
There was a constable to spare. Two other constables attended to the tall young man in
grey; a fourth concerned himself with the owner of the shop, who showed some tendency
to be turbulent. They took the tall young man away to a magistrate, whither we shall
follow him in an ensuing chapter. And they took the happiest man in the world away to
an asylum.

II. THE RELIGION OF THE STIPENDIARY MAGISTRATE
The editorial office of The Atheist had for some years past become less and less
prominently interesting as a feature of Ludgate Hill. The paper was unsuited to the
atmosphere. It showed an interest in the Bible unknown in the district, and a knowledge
of that volume to which nobody else on Ludgate Hill could make any conspicuous claim.
It was in vain that the editor of The Atheist filled his front window with fierce and final
demands as to what Noah in the Ark did with the neck of the giraffe. It was in vain that
he asked violently, as for the last time, how the statement "God is Spirit" could be
reconciled with the statement "The earth is His footstool." It was in vain that he cried
with an accusing energy that the Bishop of London was paid L12,000 a year for
pretending to believe that the whale swallowed Jonah. It was in vain that he hung in
conspicuous places the most thrilling scientific calculations about the width of the throat
of a whale. Was it nothing to them all they that passed by? Did his sudden and splendid
and truly sincere indignation never stir any of the people pouring down Ludgate Hill?
Never. The little man who edited The Atheist would rush from his shop on starlit
evenings and shake his fist at St. Paul's in the passion of his holy war upon the holy place.
He might have spared his emotion. The cross at the top of St. Paul's and The Atheist shop
at the foot of it were alike remote from the world. The shop and the Cross were equally

uplifted and alone in the empty heavens.
To the little man who edited The Atheist, a fiery little Scotchman,