“We were just going to take some slight refreshment when you interrupted us...”

The little man had a dawning expression of understanding and stooped and picked up the unused bottle of wine, eyeing it curiously.

Turnbull continued: 

“But that refreshment was preparatory to something which I fear you will find less comprehensible, but on which our minds are entirely fixed, sir.  We are forced to fight a duel.  We are forced by honour and an internal intellectual need.  Do not, for your own sake, attempt to stop us.  I know all the excellent and ethical things that you will want to say to us.  I know all about the essential requirements of civil order:  I have written leading articles about them all my life.  I know all about the sacredness of human life; I have bored all my friends with it.  Try and understand our position.  This man and I are alone in the modern world in that we think that God is essentially important.  I think He does not exist; that is where the importance comes in for me.  But this man thinks that He does exist, and thinking that very properly thinks Him more important than anything else.  Now we wish to make a great demonstration and assertion—­something that will set the world on fire like the first Christian persecutions.  If you like, we are attempting a mutual martyrdom.  The papers have posted up every town against us.  Scotland Yard has fortified every police station with our enemies; we are driven therefore to the edge of a lonely lane, and indirectly to taking liberties with your summer-house in order to arrange our...”

“Stop!” roared the little man in the butterfly necktie.  “Put me out of my intellectual misery.  Are you really the two tomfools I have read of in all the papers?  Are you the two people who wanted to spit each other in the Police Court?  Are you?  Are you?”

“Yes,” said MacIan, “it began in a Police Court.”

The little man slung the bottle of wine twenty yards away like a stone.

“Come up to my place,” he said.  “I’ve got better stuff than that.  I’ve got the best Beaune within fifty miles of here.  Come up.  You’re the very men I wanted to see.”

Even Turnbull, with his typical invulnerability, was a little taken aback by this boisterous and almost brutal hospitality.

“Why...sir...” he began.

“Come up!  Come in!” howled the little man, dancing with delight.  “I’ll give you a dinner.  I’ll give you a bed!  I’ll give you a green smooth lawn and your choice of swords and pistols.  Why, you fools, I adore fighting!  It’s the only good thing in God’s world!  I’ve walked about these damned fields and longed to see somebody cut up and killed and the blood running.  Ha!  Ha!”

And he made sudden lunges with his stick at the trunk of a neighbouring tree so that the ferrule made fierce prints and punctures in the bark.

“Excuse me,” said MacIan suddenly with the wide-eyed curiosity of a child, “excuse me, but...”