ce are on his tracks again. A lunatic lends Turnbull and MacIan
his yacht and so the chase continues. But by this time Chesterton is
getting just a trifle bored. He realizes that no matter how many
adventures his heroes get into, or how many paradoxes they fling down
each other's throats, the end of the story, the final inevitable end
which alone makes a series of rapid adventures worth while, is not even
on the horizon. An element of that spurious mysticism already described
invades the book. It begins to be clear that Chesterton is trying to
drag in a moral somehow, if need be, by the hair of its head. The two
yachters spend two weeks of geographical perplexity and come to a
desert island. They land, but think it wiser, on the whole, to postpone
fighting until they have finished the champagne and cigars with which
their vessel is liberally stored. This takes a week. Just as they are
about to begin the definitive duel they discover that they are not upon
a desert island at all, they are near Margate. And the police are there,
too. So once more they are chased. They land in a large garden in front
of an old gentleman who assures them that he is God. He turns out to be
a lunatic, and the place an asylum. There follows a characteristic piece
of that abuse of science for which Chesterton has never attempted to
suggest a substitute. MacIan and Turnbull find themselves prisoners,
unable to get out. Then they dream dreams. Each sees himself in an
aeroplane flying over Fleet Street and Ludgate Hill, where a battle is
raging. But the woolly element is very pronounced by this time, and we
can make neither head nor tail of these dreams and the conversations
which accompany them. The duellists are imprisoned for a month in
horrible cells. They find their way into the garden, and are told that
all England is now in the hands of the alienists, by a new Act of
Parliament: this has been the only possible manner of putting a stop to
the revolution started by MacIan and Turnbull. These two find all the
persons they had met with during their odyssey, packed away in the
asylum, which is a wonderful place worked by petroleum machinery. But
the matter-of-fact grocer from the Channel Island, regarding the whole
affair as an infringement of the Rights of Man, sets the petroleum
alight. Michael, the celestial being who had appeared in the first
chapter and disappeared at the end of it, is dragged out of a cell in an
imbecile condition. Lucifer c