“The ball and——” he repeated.
“What is the matter with you?” asked MacIan.
“I had a dream,” said Turnbull, thickly and obscurely, “in which I saw the cross struck crooked and the ball secure——”
“I had a dream,” said MacIan, “in which I saw the cross erect and the ball invisible. They were both dreams from hell. There must be some round earth to plant the cross upon. But here is the awful difference—that the round world will not consent even to continue round. The astronomers are always telling us that it is shaped like an orange, or like an egg, or like a German sausage. They beat the old world about like a bladder and thump it into a thousand shapeless shapes. Turnbull, we cannot trust the ball to be always a ball; we cannot trust reason to be reasonable. In the end the great terrestrial globe will go quite lop-sided, and only the cross will stand upright.”
There was a long silence, and then Turnbull said, hesitatingly: “Has it occurred to you that since—since those two dreams, or whatever they were——”
“Well?” murmured MacIan.
“Since then,” went on Turnbull, in the same low voice, “since then we have never even looked for our swords.”
“You are right,” answered Evan almost inaudibly. “We have found something which we both hate more than we ever hated each other, and I think I know its name.”
Turnbull seemed to frown and flinch for a moment. “It does not much matter what you call it,” he said, “so long as you keep out of its way.”
The bushes broke and snapped abruptly behind them, and a very tall figure towered above Turnbull with an arrogant stoop and a projecting chin, a chin of which the shape showed queerly even in its shadow upon the path.