CHAPTER III--_Two Voices_
In a place in which there was total darkness for hours, there was alsofor hours total silence. Then a voice spoke out of the darkness, noone could have told from where, and said aloud--
"So ends the Empire of Notting Hill. As it began in blood, so it endedin blood, and all things are always the same."
And there was silence again, and then again there was a voice, but ithad not the same tone; it seemed that it was not the same voice.
"If all things are always the same, it is because they are alwaysheroic. If all things are always the same, it is because they arealways new. To each man one soul only is given; to each soul only isgiven a little power--the power at some moments to outgrow and swallowup the stars. If age after age that power comes upon men, whatevergives it to them is great. Whatever makes men feel old is mean--anempire or a skin-flint shop. Whatever makes men feel young is great--agreat war or a love-story. And in the darkest of the books of Godthere is written a truth that is also a riddle. It is of the newthings that men tire--of fashions and proposals and improvements andchange. It is the old things that startle and intoxicate. It is theold things that are young. There is no sceptic who does not feel thatmany have doubted before. There is no rich and fickle man who does notfeel that all his novelties are ancient. There is no worshipper ofchange who does not feel upon his neck the vast weight of theweariness of the universe. But we who do the old things are fed bynature with a perpetual infancy. No man who is in love thinks that anyone has been in love before. No woman who has a child thinks thatthere have been such things as children. No people that fight fortheir own city are haunted with the burden of the broken empires. Yes,O dark voice, the world is always the same, for it is alwaysunexpected."
A little gust of wind blew through the night, and then the first voiceanswered--
"But in this world there are some, be they wise or foolish, whomnothing intoxicates. There are some who see all your disturbances likea cloud of flies. They know that while men will laugh at your NottingHill, and will study and rehearse and sing of Athens and Jerusalem,Athens and Jerusalem were silly suburbs like your Notting Hill. Theyknow that the earth itself is a suburb, and can feel only drearilyand respectably amused as they move upon it."
"They are philosophers or they are fools," said the other voice. "Theyare not men. Men live, as I say, rejoicing from age to age insomething fresher than progress--in the fact that with every baby anew sun and a new moon are made. If our ancient humanity were a singleman, it might perhaps be that he would break down under the memory ofso many loyalties, under the burden of so many diverse heroisms, underthe load and terror of all the goodness of men. But it has pleased Godso to isolate the individual soul that it can only learn of all othersouls by hearsay, and to each one goodness and happiness come with theyouth and violence of lightning, as momentary and as pure. And thedoom of failure that lies on all human systems does not in real factaffect them any more than the worms of the inevitable grave affect achildren's game in a meadow. Notting Hill has fallen; Notting Hill hasdied. But that is not the tremendous issue. Notting Hill has lived."
"But if," answered the other voice, "if what is achieved by all theseefforts be only the common contentment of humanity, why do men soextravagantly toil and die in them? Has nothing been done by NottingHill than any chance clump of farmers or clan of savages would nothave done without it? What might have been done to Notting Hill if theworld had been different may be a deep question; but there is adeeper. What could have happened to the world if Notting Hill hadnever been?"
The other voice replied--
"The same that would have happened to the world and all the starrysystems if an apple-tree grew six apples instead of seven; somethingwould have been eternally lost. There has never been anything in theworld absolutely like Notting Hill. There will never be anything quitelike it to the crack of doom. I cannot believe anything but that Godloved it as He must surely love anything that is itself andunreplaceable. But even for that I do not care. If God, with all Histhunders, hated it, I loved it."
And with the voice a tall, strange figure lifted itself out of the_debris_ in the half-darkness.
The other voice came after a long pause, and as it were hoarsely.
"But suppose the whole matter were really a hocus-pocus. Suppose thatwhatever meaning you may choose in your fancy to give to it, the realmeaning of the whole was mockery. Suppose it was all folly. Suppose--"
"I have been in it," answered the voice from the tall and strangefigure, "and I know it was not."
A smaller figure seemed half to rise in the dark.
"Suppose I am God," said the voice, "and suppose I made the world inidleness. Suppose the stars, that you think eternal, are only theidiot fireworks of an everlasting schoolboy. Suppose the sun and themoon, to which you sing alternately, are only the two eyes of one vastand sneering giant, opened alternately in a never-ending wink. Supposethe trees, in my eyes, are as foolish as enormous toad-stools. SupposeSocrates and Charlemagne are to me only beasts, made funnier bywalking on their hind legs. Suppose I am God, and having made things,laugh at them."
"And suppose I am man," answered the other. "And suppose that I givethe answer that shatters even a laugh. Suppose I do not laugh back atyou, do not blaspheme you, do not curse you. But suppose, standing upstraight under the sky, with every power of my being, I thank you forthe fools' paradise you have made. Suppose I praise you, with aliteral pain of ecstasy, for the jest that has brought me so terriblea joy. If we have taken the child's games, and given them theseriousness of a Crusade, if we have drenched your grotesque Dutchgarden with the blood of martyrs, we have turned a nursery into atemple. I ask you, in the name of Heaven, who wins?"
The sky close about the crests of the hills and trees was beginning toturn from black to grey, with a random suggestion of the morning. Theslight figure seemed to crawl towards the larger one, and the voicewas more human.
"But suppose, friend," it said, "suppose that, in a bitterer and morereal sense, it was all a mockery. Suppose that there had been, fromthe beginning of these great wars, one who watched them with a sensethat is beyond expression, a sense of detachment, of responsibility,of irony, of agony. Suppose that there were one who knew it was all ajoke."
The tall figure answered--
"He could not know it. For it was not all a joke."
And a gust of wind blew away some clouds that sealed the sky-line, andshowed a strip of silver behind his great dark legs. Then the othervoice came, having crept nearer still.
"WAYNE, IT WAS ALL A JOKE."]
"Adam Wayne," it said, "there are men who confess only in _articulomortis_; there are people who blame themselves only when they can nolonger help others. I am one of them. Here, upon the field of thebloody end of it all, I come to tell you plainly what you would neverunderstand before. Do you know who I am?"
"I know you, Auberon Quin," answered the tall figure, "and I shall beglad to unburden your spirit of anything that lies upon it."
"Adam Wayne," said the other voice, "of what I have to say you cannotin common reason be glad to unburden me. Wayne, it was all a joke.When I made these cities, I cared no more for them than I care for acentaur, or a merman, or a fish with legs, or a pig with feathers, orany other absurdity. When I spoke to you solemnly and encouraginglyabout the flag of your freedom and the peace of your city, I wasplaying a vulgar practical joke on an honest gentleman, a vulgarpractical joke that has lasted for twenty years. Though no one couldbelieve it of me, perhaps, it is the truth that I am a man both timidand tender-hearted. I never dared in the early days of your hope, orthe central days of your supremacy, to tell you this; I never dared tobreak the colossal calm of your face. God knows why I should do itnow, when my farce has ended in tragedy and the ruin of all yourpeople! But I say it now. Wayne, it was done as a joke."
There was silence, and the freshening breeze blew the sky clearer andclearer, leaving great spaces of the white dawn.
At last Wa
yne said, very slowly--
"You did it all only as a joke?"
"Yes," said Quin, briefly.
"When you conceived the idea," went on Wayne, dreamily, "of an armyfor Bayswater and a flag for Notting Hill, there was no gleam, nosuggestion in your mind that such things might be real andpassionate?"
"No," answered Auberon, turning his round white face to the morningwith a dull and splendid sincerity; "I had none at all."
Wayne sprang down from the height above him and held out his hand.
"I will not stop to thank you," he said, with a curious joy in hisvoice, "for the great good for the world you have actually wrought.All that I think of that I have said to you a moment ago, even when Ithought that your voice was the voice of a derisive omnipotence, itslaughter older than the winds of heaven. But let me say what isimmediate and true. You and I, Auberon Quin, have both of usthroughout our lives been again and again called mad. And we are mad.We are mad, because we are not two men, but one man. We are mad,because we are two lobes of the same brain, and that brain has beencloven in two. And if you ask for the proof of it, it is not hard tofind. It is not merely that you, the humorist, have been in these darkdays stripped of the joy of gravity. It is not merely that I, thefanatic, have had to grope without humour. It is that, though we seemto be opposite in everything, we have been opposite like man andwoman, aiming at the same moment at the same practical thing. We arethe father and the mother of the Charter of the Cities."
Quin looked down at the _debris_ of leaves and timber, the relics ofthe battle and stampede, now glistening in the growing daylight, andfinally said--
"Yet nothing can alter the antagonism--the fact that I laughed atthese things and you adored them."
Wayne's wild face flamed with something god-like, as he turned it tobe struck by the sunrise.
"I know of something that will alter that antagonism, something thatis outside us, something that you and I have all our lives perhapstaken too little account of. The equal and eternal human being willalter that antagonism, for the human being sees no real antagonismbetween laughter and respect, the human being, the common man, whommere geniuses like you and me can only worship like a god. When darkand dreary days come, you and I are necessary, the pure fanatic, thepure satirist. We have between us remedied a great wrong. We havelifted the modern cities into that poetry which every one who knowsmankind knows to be immeasurably more common than the commonplace. Butin healthy people there is no war between us. We are but the two lobesof the brain of a ploughman. Laughter and love are everywhere. Thecathedrals, built in the ages that loved God, are full of blasphemousgrotesques. The mother laughs continually at the child, the loverlaughs continually at the lover, the wife at the husband, the friendat the friend. Auberon Quin, we have been too long separated; let usgo out together. You have a halberd and I a sword, let us start ourwanderings over the world. For we are its two essentials. Come, it isalready day."
In the blank white light Auberon hesitated a moment. Then he made theformal salute with his halberd, and they went away together into theunknown world.
THE END
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