The strange gentleman smiled again and said, easily enough: “Do you want to fight? What do you want to fight about?”
MacIan had understood his man pretty well up to that point; an instinct common to all men with the aristocratic tradition of Europe had guided him. He knew that the kind of man who in his own back garden wears good clothes and spoils them with a bad hat is not the kind of man who has an abstract horror of illegal actions of violence or the evasion of the police. But a man may understand ragging and yet be very far from understanding religious ragging. This seeming host of theirs might comprehend a quarrel of husband and lover or a difficulty at cards or even escape from a pursuing tailor; but it still remained doubtful whether he would feel the earth fail under him in that earthquake instant when the Virgin is compared to a goddess of Mesopotamia. Even MacIan, therefore (whose tact was far from being his strong point), felt the necessity for some compromise in the mode of approach. At last he said, and even then with hesitation:
“We are fighting about God; there can be nothing so important as that.”
The tilted eye-glasses of the old gentleman fell abruptly from his nose, and he thrust his aristocratic chin so far forward that his lean neck seemed to shoot out longer like a telescope.
“About God?” he queried, in a key completely new.
“Look here!” cried Turnbull, taking his turn roughly, “I'll tell you what it's all about. I think that there's no God. I take it that it's nobody's business but mine—or God's, if there is one. This young gentleman from the Highlands happens to think that it's his business. In consequence, he first takes a walking-stick and smashes my shop; then he takes the same walking-stick and tries to smash me. To this I naturally object. I suggest that if it comes to that we should both have sticks. He improves on the suggestion and proposes that we should both have steel-pointed sticks. The police (with characteristic unreasonableness) will not accept either of our proposals; the result is that we run about dodging the police and have jumped over our garden wall into your magnificent garden to throw ourselves on your magnificent hospitality.”
The face of the old gentleman had grown redder and redder during this address, but it was still smiling; and when he broke out it was with a kind of guffaw.
“So you really want to fight with drawn swords in my garden,” he asked, “about whether there is really a God?”
“Why not?” said MacIan, with his simple monstrosity of speech; “all man's worship began when the Garden of Eden was founded.”
“Yes, by——!” said Turnbull, with an oath, “and ended when the Zoological Gardens were founded.”