The Napoleon of Notting Hill Read online

  The old gentleman opened his eyes with some surprise.

  “Are you, then,” he said, “no longer a democracy in England?”

  Barker laughed.

  “The situation invites paradox,” he said. “We are, in a sense, the purest democracy. We have become a despotism. Have you not noticed how continually in history democracy becomes despotism? People call it the decay of democracy. It is simply its fulfilment. Why take the trouble to number and register and enfranchise all the innumerable John Robinsons, when you can take one John Robinson with the same intellect or lack of intellect as all the rest, and have done with it? The old idealistic republicans used to found democracy on the idea that all men were equally intelligent. Believe me, the sane and enduring democracy is founded on the fact that all men are equally idiotic. Why should we not choose out of them one as much as another? All that we want for Government is a man not criminal and insane, who can rapidly look over some petitions and sign some proclamations. To think what time was wasted in arguing about the House of Lords, Tories saying it ought to be preserved because it was clever, and Radicals saying it ought to be destroyed because it was stupid, and all the time no one saw that it was right because it was stupid, because that chance mob of ordinary men thrown there by accident of blood, were a great democratic protest against the Lower House, against the eternal insolence of the aristocracy of talents. We have established now in England, the thing towards which all systems have dimly groped, the dull popular despotism without illusions. We want one man at the head of our State, not because he is brilliant or virtuous, but because he is one man and not a chattering crowd. To avoid the possible chance of hereditary diseases or such things, we have abandoned hereditary monarchy. The King of England is chosen like a juryman upon an official rotation list. Beyond that the whole system is quietly despotic, and we have not found it raise a murmur.”

  “Do you really mean,” asked the President, incredulously, “that you choose any ordinary man that comes to hand and make him despot...that you trust to the chance of some alphabetical list...”

  “And why not?” cried Barker. “Did not half the historical nations trust to the chance of the eldest sons of eldest sons, and did not half of them get on tolerably well? To have a perfect system is impossible; to have a system is indispensable. All hereditary monarchies were a matter of luck: so are alphabetical monarchies. Can you find a deep philosophical meaning in the difference between the Stuarts and the Hanoverians? Believe me, I will undertake to find a deep philosophical meaning in the contrast between the dark tragedy of the A’s, and the solid success of the B’s.”

  “And you risk it?” asked the other. “Though the man may be a tyrant or a cynic or a criminal?”

  “We risk it,” answered Barker, with a perfect placidity. “Suppose he is a tyrant...he is still a check on a hundred tyrants. Suppose he is a cynic, it is to his interest to govern well. Suppose he is a criminal...by removing poverty and substituting power, we put a check on his criminality. In short, by substituting despotism we have put a total check on one criminal and a partial check on all the rest.”

  The Nicaraguan old gentleman leaned over with a queer expression in his eyes.

  “My church, sir,” he said, “has taught me to respect faith. I do not wish to speak with any disrespect of yours, however fantastic. But do you really mean that you will trust to the ordinary man, the man who may happen to come next, as a good despot?”

  “I do,” said Barker, simply. “He may not be a good man. But he will be a good despot. For when he comes to a mere business routine of government he will endeavour to do ordinary justice. Do we not assume the same thing in a jury?”

  The old President smiled.

  “I don’t know,” he said, “that I have any particular objection in detail to your excellent scheme of Government. My only objection is a quite personal one. It is, that if I were asked whether I would belong to it, I should ask first of all, if I was not permitted, as an alternative, to be a toad in a ditch. That is all. You cannot argue with the choice of the soul.”

  “Of the soul,” said Barker, knitting his brows, “I cannot pretend to say anything, but speaking in the interests of the public...”

  Mr. Auberon Quin rose suddenly to his feet.

  “If you’ll excuse me, gentlemen,” he said, “I will step out for a moment into the air.”

  “I’m so sorry, Auberon,” said Lambert, good-naturedly; “do you feel bad?”

  “Not bad exactly,” said Auberon, with self-restraint; “rather good, if anything. Strangely and richly good. The fact is I want to reflect a little on those beautiful words that have just been uttered. ‘Speaking,’ yes, that was the phrase, ‘speaking in the interests of the public.’ One cannot get the honey from such things without being alone for a little.”

  “Is he really off his chump, do you think?” asked Lambert.

  The old President looked after him with queerly vigilant eyes.

  “He is a man, I think,” he said, “who cares for nothing but a joke. He is a dangerous man.”

  Lambert laughed in the act of lifting some macaroni to his mouth.

  “Dangerous!” he said. “You don’t know little Quin, sir!”

  “Every man is dangerous,” said the old man, without moving, “who cares only for one thing. I was once dangerous myself.”

  And with a pleasant smile he finished his coffee and rose, bowing profoundly, passed out into the fog, which had again grown dense and sombre. Three days afterwards they heard that he had died quietly in lodgings in Soho.

  * * *

  Drowned somewhere else in the dark sea of fog was a little figure shaking and quaking, with what might at first sight have seemed terror or ague; but which was really that strange malady, a lonely laughter. He was repeating over and over to himself with a rich accent “But speaking in the interests of the public....”

  CHAPTER III

  THE HILL OF HUMOUR

  “IN a little square garden of yellow roses, beside the sea,” said Auberon Quin, “there was a Nonconformist minister who had never been to Wimbledon. His family did not understand his sorrow or the strange look in his eyes. But one day they repented their neglect, for they heard that a body had been found on the shore, battered, but wearing patent leather boots. As it happened, it turned out not to be the minister at all. But in the dead man’s pocket there was a return ticket to Maidstone.”

  There was a short pause as Quin and his friends Barker and Lambert went swinging on through the slushy grass of Kensington Gardens. Then Auberon resumed.

  “That story,” he said reverently, “is the test of humour.”

  They walked on further and faster, wading through higher grass as they began to climb a slope.

  “I perceive,” continued Auberon, “that you have passed the test, and consider the anecdote excruciatingly funny; since you say nothing. Only coarse humour is received with pot-house applause. The great anecdote is received in silence, like a benediction. You felt pretty benedicted, didn’t you, Barker?”

  “I saw the point,” said Barker, somewhat loftily.

  “Do you know,” said Quin, with a sort of idiot gaiety, “I have lots of stories as good as that. Listen to this one.”

  And he slightly cleared his throat.

  “Dr. Polycarp was, as you all know, an unusually sallow bimetallist. ‘There,’ people of wide experience would say, ‘there goes the sallowest bimetallist in Cheshire.’ Once this was said so that he overheard it: it was said by an actuary, under a sunset of mauve and grey. Polycarp turned upon him. ‘Sallow!’ he cried fiercely, ‘sallow! Quis tulerit Gracchos de seditione querentes.’ It was said that no actuary ever made game of Dr. Polycarp again.”

  Barker nodded with a simple sagacity. Lambert only grunted.

  “Here is another,” continued the insatiable Quin. “In a hollow of the grey-green hills of rainy Ireland, lived an old, old woman, whose uncle was always Cambridge at the Boat Race. But in her grey-green hollows, she
knew nothing of this: she didn’t know that there was a Boat Race. Also she did not know that she had an uncle. She had heard of nobody at all, except of George the First, of whom she had heard (I know not why), and in whose historical memory she put her simple trust. And by and by, in God’s good time, it was discovered that this uncle of hers was not really her uncle, and they came and told her so. She smiled through her tears, and said only, ‘Virtue is its own reward.’ ”

  Again there was a silence, and then Lambert said:

  “It seems a bit mysterious.”

  “Mysterious!” cried the other. “The true humour is mysterious. Do you not realize the chief incident of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries?”

  “And what’s that?” asked Lambert, shortly.

  “It is very simple,” replied the other. “Hitherto it was the ruin of a joke that people did not see it. Now it is the sublime victory of a joke that people do not see it. Humour, my friends, is the one sanctity remaining to mankind. It is the one thing you are thoroughly afraid of. Look at that tree.”

  His interlocutors looked vaguely towards a beech that leant out towards them from the ridge of the hill.

  “If,” said Mr. Quin, “I were to say that you did not see the great truths of science exhibited by that tree, though they stared any man of intellect in the face, what would you think or say? You would merely regard me as a pedant with some unimportant theory about vegetable cells. If I were to say that you did not see in that tree the vile mismanagement of local politics, you would dismiss me as a Socialist crank with some particular fad about public parks. If I were to say that you were guilty of the supreme blasphemy of looking at that tree and not seeing in it a new religion, a special revelation of God, you would simply say I was a mystic, and think no more about me. But if...and he lifted a pontifical hand...if I say that you cannot see the humour of that tree, and that I see the humour of it...my God! you will roll about at my feet.”

  He paused a moment, and then resumed.

  “Yes; a sense of humour, a weird and delicate sense of humour, is the new religion of mankind! It is towards that men will strain themselves with the asceticism of saints. Exercises, spiritual exercises, will be set in it. It will be asked, ‘Can you see the humour of this iron railing?’ or ‘Can you see the humour of this field of corn? Can you see the humour of the stars? Can you see the humour of the sunsets?’ How often I have laughed myself to sleep over a violet sunset.”

  “Quite so,” said Mr. Barker, with an intelligent embarrassment.

  “Let me tell you another story. How often it happens that the M.P.’s for Essex are less punctual than one would suppose. The least punctual Essex M.P., perhaps, was James Wilson, who said, in the very act of plucking a poppy...”

  Lambert suddenly faced round and struck his stick into the ground in a defiant attitude.

  “Auberon,” he said, “chuck it. I won’t stand it. It’s all bosh.”

  Both men stared at him, for there was something very explosive about the words, as if they had been corked up painfully for a long time.

  “You have,” began Quin, “no...”

  “I don’t care a curse,” said Lambert, violently, “whether I have ‘a delicate sense of humour’ or not. I won’t stand it. It’s all a confounded fraud. There’s no joke in those infernal tales at all. You know there isn’t as well as I do.”

  “Well,” replied Quin, slowly, “it is true that I, with my rather gradual mental processes, did not see any joke in them. But the finer sense of Barker perceived it.”

  Barker turned a fierce red, but continued to stare at the horizon.

  “You ass,” said Lambert; “why can’t you be like other people? Why can’t you say something really funny, or hold your tongue? The man who sits on his hat in a pantomime is a long sight funnier than you are.”

  Quin regarded him steadily. They had reached the top of the ridge and the wind struck their faces.

  “Lambert,” said Auberon, “you are a great and good man, though I’m hanged if you look it. You are more. You are a great revolutionist or deliverer of the world, and I look forward to seeing you carved in marble between Luther and Danton, if possible in your present attitude, the hat slightly on one side. I said as I came up the hill that the new humour was the last of the religions. You have made it the last of the superstitions. But let me give you a very serious warning. Be careful how you ask me to do anything outre, to imitate the man in the pantomime, and to sit on my hat. Because I am a man whose soul has been emptied of all pleasures but folly. And for twopence I’d do it.”

  “Do it then,” said Lambert, swinging his stick impatiently. “It would be funnier than the bosh you and Barker talk.”

  Quin, standing on the top of the hill, stretched his hand out towards the main avenue of Kensington Gardens.

  “Two hundred yards away,” he said, “are all your fashionable acquaintances with nothing on earth to do but to stare at each other and at us. We are standing upon an elevation under the open sky, a peak as it were of fantasy, a Sinai of humour. We are in a great pulpit or platform, lit up with sunlight, and half London can see us. Be careful how you suggest things to me. For there is in me a madness which goes beyond martyrdom, the madness of an utterly idle man.”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about,” said Lambert, contemptuously. “I only know I’d rather you stood on your silly head, than talked so much.”

  “Auberon! for goodness’ sake...” cried Barker, springing forward; but he was too late. Faces from, all the benches and avenues were turned in their direction. Groups stopped and small crowds collected; and the sharp sunlight picked out the whole scene in blue, green and black, like a picture in a child’s toy-book. And on the top of the small hill Mr. Auberon Quin stood with considerable athletic neatness upon his head, and waved his patent-leather boots in the air.

  “For God’s sake, Quin, get up, and don’t be an idiot,” cried Barker, wringing his hands; “we shall have the whole town here.”

  “Yes, get up, get up, man,” said Lambert, amused and annoyed. “I was only fooling; get up.”

  Auberon did so with a bound, and flinging his hat higher than the trees, proceeded to hop about on one leg with a serious expression. Barker stamped wildly.

  “Oh, let’s get home, Barker, and leave him,” said Lambert; “some of your proper and correct police will look after him. Here they come!”

  Two grave-looking men in quiet uniforms came up the hill towards them. One held a paper in his hand.

  “There he is, officer,” said Lambert, cheerfully; “we ain’t responsible for him.”

  The officer looked at the capering Mr. Quin with a quiet eye.

  “We have not come, gentlemen,” he said, “about what I think you are alluding to. We have come from head-quarters to announce the selection of His Majesty the King. It is the rule, inherited from the old regime, that the news should be brought to the new Sovereign immediately, wherever he is; so we have followed you across Kensington Gardens.”

  Barker’s eyes were blazing in his pale face. He was consumed with ambition throughout his life. With a certain dull magnanimity of the intellect he had really believed in the chance method of selecting despots. But this sudden suggestion, that the selection might have fallen upon him, unnerved him with pleasure.

  “Which of us,” he began, and the respectful official interrupted him.

  “Not you, sir, I am sorry to say. If I may be permitted to say so, we know your services to the Government, and should be very thankful if it were. The choice has fallen...”

  “God bless my soul!” said Lambert, jumping back two paces. “Not me. Don’t say I’m autocrat of all the Russias.”

  “No, sir,” said the officer, with a slight cough and a glance towards Auberon, who was at that moment putting his head between his legs and making a noise like a cow; “the gentleman whom we have to congratulate seems at the moment...er...er...occupied.”

  “Not Quin!” shrieked Barker, rushing up t
o him; “it can’t be. Auberon, for God’s sake pull yourself together. You’ve been made King!”

  With his head still upside down between his legs, Mr. Quin answered modestly:

  “I am not worthy. I cannot reasonably claim to equal the great men who have previously swayed the sceptre of Britain. Perhaps the only peculiarity that I can claim is that I am probably the first monarch that ever spoke out his soul to the people of England with his head and body in this position. This may in some sense give me, to quote a poem that I wrote in my youth:

  “A nobler office on the earth

  Than valour, power of brain, or birth

  Could give the warrior kings of old.

  The intellect clarified by this posture...”

  Lambert and Barker made a kind of rush at him.

  “Don’t you understand?” cried Lambert. “It’s not a joke. They’ve really made you King. By gosh! they must have rum taste.”

  “The great Bishops of the Middle Ages,” said Quin, kicking his legs in the air, as he was dragged, up more or less upside down, “were in the habit of refusing the honour of election three times and then accepting it. A mere matter of detail separates me from those great men. I will accept the post three times and refuse it afterwards. Oh! I will toil for you, my faithful people! You shall have a banquet of humour.”

  By this time he had been landed the right way up, and the two men were still trying in vain to impress him with the gravity of the situation.

  “Did you not tell me, Wilfrid Lambert,” he said, “that I should be of more public value if I adopted a more popular form of humour? And when should a popular form of humour be more firmly riveted upon me than now, when I have become the darling of a whole people? Officer,” he continued, addressing the startled messenger, “are there no ceremonies to celebrate my entry into the city?”