I. — INTRODUCTORY REMARKS ON THE ART OF PROPHECY
II. — THE MAN IN GREEN
III. — THE HILL OF HUMOUR
I. — THE CHARTER OF THE CITIES
II. — THE COUNCIL OF THE PROVOSTS
III. — ENTER A LUNATIC
I. — THE MENTAL CONDITION OF ADAM WAYNE
II. — THE REMARKABLE MR. TURNBULL
III. — THE EXPERIMENT OF MR. BUCK
I. — THE BATTLE OF THE LAMPS
II. — THE CORRESPONDENT OF THE "COURT JOURNAL"
III. — THE GREAT ARMY OF SOUTH KENSINGTON
I. — THE EMPIRE OF NOTTING HILL
II. — THE LAST BATTLE
III. — TWO VOICES
I. — INTRODUCTORY REMARKS ON THE ART OF PROPHECY
THE human race, to which
so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games
from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a
nuisance for the few people who grow up. And one of the games to
which it is most attached is called, "Keep tomorrow dark,"
and which is also named (by the rustics in Shropshire, I have no
doubt) "Cheat the Prophet." The players listen very
carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say
about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait
until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go
and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes,
however, it is great fun.
For human beings, being
children, have the childish wilfulness and the childish secrecy. And
they never have from the beginning of the world done what the wise
men have seen to be inevitable. They stoned the false prophets, it is
said; but they could have stoned true prophets with a greater and
juster enjoyment. Individually, men may present a more or less
rational appearance, eating, sleeping, and scheming. But humanity as
a whole is changeful, mystical, fickle, delightful. Men are men, but
Man is a woman.
But in the beginning of
the twentieth century the game of Cheat the Prophet was made far more
difficult than it had ever been before. The reason was, that there
were so many prophets and so many prophecies, that it was difficult
to elude all their ingenuities. When a man did something free and
frantic and entirely his own, a horrible thought struck him
afterwards; it might have been predicted. Whenever a duke climbed a
lamp-post, when a dean got drunk, he could not be really happy, he
could not be certain that he was not fulfilling some prophecy. In the
beginning of the twentieth century you could not see the ground for
clever men. They were so common that a stupid man was quite
exceptional, and when they found him, they followed him in crowds
down the street and treasured him up and gave him some high post in
the State. And all these clever men were at work giving accounts of
what would happen in the next age, all quite clear, all quite
keen-sighted and ruthless, and all quite different. And it seemed
that the good old game of hoodwinking your ancestors could not really
be managed this time, because the ancestors neglected meat and sleep
and practical politics, so that they might meditate day and night on
what their descendants would be likely to do.
But the way the prophets
of the twentieth century went to work was this. They took something
or other that was certainly going on in their time, and then said
that it would go on more and more until something extraordinary
happened. And very often they added that in some odd place that
extraordinary thing had happened, and that it showed the signs of the
times.
Thus, for instance, there
were Mr. H. G. Wells and others, who thought that science would take
charge of the future; and just as the motor-car was quicker than the
coach, so some lovely thing would be quicker than the motorcar; and
so on for ever. And there arose from their ashes Dr. Quilp, who said
that a man could be sent on his machine so fast round the world that
he could keep up a long chatty conversation in some old-world village
by saying a word of a sentence each time he came round. And it was
said that the experiment had been tried on an apoplectic old major,
who was sent round the world so fast that there seemed to be (to the
inhabitants of some other star) a continuous band round the earth of
white whiskers, red complexion and tweeds...a thing like the ring of
Saturn.
Then there was the
opposite school. There was Mr. Edward Carpenter, who thought we
should in a very short time return to Nature, and live simply and
slowly as the animals do. And Edward Carpenter was followed by James
Pickie, D.D. (of Pocahontas College), who said that men were
immensely improved by grazing, or taking their food slowly and
continuously, alter the manner of cows. And he said that he had, with
the most encouraging results, turned city men out on all fours in a
field covered with veal cutlets. Then Tolstoy and the Humanitarians
said that the world was growing more merciful, and therefore no one
would ever desire to kill. And Mr. Mick not only became a vegetarian,
but at length declared vegetarianism doomed ("shedding," as
he called it finely, "the green blood of the silent animals"),
and predicted that men in a better age would live on nothing but
salt. And then came the pamphlet from Oregon (where the thing was
tried), the pamphlet called "Why should Salt suffer?" and
there was more trouble.And on the other hand,
some people were predicting that the lines of kinship would become
narrower and sterner. There was Mr. Cecil Rhodes, who thought that
the one thing of the future was the British Empire, and that there
would be a gulf between those who were of the Empire and those who
were not, between the Chinaman in Hong-Kong and the Chinaman outside,
between the Spaniard on the Rock of Gibraltar and the Spaniard off
it, similar to the gulf between man and the lower animals. And in the
same way his impetuous friend, Dr. Zoppi ("the Paul of
Anglo-Saxonism"), carried it yet further, and held that, as a
result of this view, cannibalism should be held to mean eating a
member of the Empire, not eating one of the subject peoples, who
should, he said, be killed without needless pain. His horror at the
idea of eating a man in British Guiana showed how they misunderstood
his stoicism who thought him devoid of feeling. He was, however, in a
hard position; as it was said that he had attempted the experiment,
and, living in London, had to subsist entirely on Italian
organ-grinders. And his end was terrible, for just when he had begun,
Sir Paul Swiller read his great paper at the Royal Society, proving
that the savages were not only quite right in eating their enemies,
but right on moral and hygienic grounds, since it was true that the
qualities of the enemy, when eaten, passed into the eater. The notion
that the nature of an Italian organ-man was irrevocably growing and
burgeoning inside him was almost more than the kindly old professor
could bear.
There was Mr. Benjamin
Kidd, who said that the growing note of our race would be the care
for and knowledge of the future. His idea was developed more
powerfully by William Borker, who wrote that passage which every
schoolboy knows by heart, about men in future ages weeping by the
graves of their descendants, and tourists being shown over the scene
of the historic battle which was to take place some centuries
afterwards.
And Mr. Stead, too, was
prominent, who thought that England would in the twentieth century be
united to America; and his young lieutenant, Graham Podge, who
included the states of France, Germany, and Russia in the American
Union, the State of Russia being abbreviated to Ra.
There was Mr. Sidney Webb,
also, who said that the future would see a continuously increasing
order and neatness in the life of the people, and his poor friend
Fipps, who went mad and ran about the country with an axe, hacking
branches off the trees whenever there were not the same number on
both sides.
All these clever men were
prophesying with every variety of ingenuity what would happen soon,
and they all did it in the same way, by taking something they saw
'going strong,' as the saying is, and carrying it as far as ever
their imagination could stretch. This, they said, was the true and
simple way of anticipating the future. "Just as," said Dr.
Pellkins, in a fine passage, "...just as when we see a pig in a
litter larger than the other pigs, we know that by an unalterable law
of the Inscrutable it will some day be larger than an elephant, just
as we know, when we see weeds and dandelions growing more and more
thickly in a garden, that they must, in spite of all our efforts,
grow taller than the chimney-pots and swallow the house from sight,
so we know and reverently acknowledge, that when any power in human
politics has shown for any period of time any considerable activity,
it will go on until it reaches to the sky."
And it did certainly
appear that the prophets had put the people (engaged in the old game
of Cheat the Prophet) in a quite unprecedented difficulty. It seemed
really hard to do anything without fulfilling some of their
prophecies.
But there was,
nevertheless, in the eyes of labourers in the streets, of peasants in
the fields, of sailors and children, and especially women, a strange
look that kept the wise men in a perfect fever of doubt. They could
not fathom the motionless mirth in their eyes. They still had
something up their sleeve; they were still playing the game of Cheat
the Prophet.
Then the wise men grew
like wild things, and swayed hither and thither, crying, "What
can it be? What can it be? What will London be like a century hence?
Is there anything we have not thought of? Houses upside down...more
hygienic, perhaps? Men walking on hands...make feet flexible, don't
you know? Moon... motor-cars... no heads..." And so they swayed
and wondered until they died and were buried nicely.
Then the people went and
did what they liked. Let me no longer conceal the painful truth. The
people had cheated the prophets of the twentieth century. When the
curtain goes up on this story, eighty years after the present date,
London is almost exactly like what it is now.
II. — THE MAN IN GREEN
VERY few words are needed
to explain why London, a hundred years hence, will be very like it is
now, or rather, since I must slip into a prophetic past, why London,
when my story opens, was very like it was in those enviable days when
I was still alive.
The reason can be stated
in one sentence. The people had absolutely lost faith in revolutions.
All revolutions are doctrinal...such as the French one, or the one
that introduced Christianity. For it stands to common sense that you
cannot upset all existing things, customs, and compromises, unless
you believe in something outside them, something positive and divine.
Now, England, during this century, lost all belief in this. It
believed in a thing called Evolution. And it said, "All
theoretic changes have ended in blood and ennui. If we change, we
must change slowly and safely, as the animals do. Nature's
revolutions are the only successful ones. There has been no
conservative reaction in favour of tails."
And some things did
change. Things that were not much thought of dropped out of sight.
Things that had not often happened did not happen at all. Thus, for
instance, the actual physical force ruling the country, the soldiers
and police, grew smaller and smaller, and at last vanished almost to
a point. The people combined could have swept the few policemen away
in ten minutes: they did not, because they did not believe it would
do them the least good. They had lost faith in revolutions.
Democracy was dead; for no
one minded the governing class governing. England was now practically
a despotism, but not an hereditary one. Some one in the official
class was made King. No one cared how; no one cared who. He was
merely an universal secretary.
In this manner it happened
that everything in London was very quiet. That vague and somewhat
depressed reliance upon things happening as they have always
happened, which is with all Londoners a mood, had become an assumed
condition. There was really no reason for any man doing anything but
the thing he had done the day before.
There was therefore no
reason whatever why the three young men who had always walked up to
their Government office together should not walk up to it together on
this particular wintry and cloudy morning. Everything in that age had
become mechanical, and Government clerks especially. All those clerks
assembled regularly at their posts. Three of those clerks always
walked into town together. All the neighbourhood knew them: two of
them were tall and one short. And on this particular morning the
short clerk was only a few seconds late to join the other two as they
passed his gate: he could have overtaken them in three strides; he
could have called after them easily. But he did not.
For some reason that will
never be understood until all souls are judged (if they are ever
judged; the idea was at this time classed with fetish worship) he did
not join his two companions, but walked steadily behind them. The day
was dull, their dress was dull, everything was dull; but in some odd
impulse he walked through street after street, through district after
district, looking at the backs of the two men, who would have swung
round at the sound of his voice. Now, there is a law written in the
darkest of the Books of Life, and it is this: If you look at a thing
nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you
look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing
it for the first time.
So the short Government
official looked at the coat-tails of the tall Government officials,
and through street after street, and round corner after corner, saw
only coat-tails, coat-tails, and again coat-tails...when, he did not
in the least know why, something happened to his eyes.
Two black dragons were
walking backwards in front of him. Two black dragons were looking at
him with evil eyes. The dragons were walking backwards it was true,
but they kept their eyes fixed on him none the less. The eyes which
he saw were, in truth, only the two buttons at the back of a
frock-coat: perhaps some traditional memory of their meaningless
character gave this half-witted prominence to their gaze. The slit
between the tails was the nose-line of the monster: whenever the
tails flapped in the winter wind the dragons licked their lips. It
was only a momentary fancy, but the small clerk found it imbedded in
his soul ever afterwards. He never could again think of men in
frock-coats except as dragons walking backwards. He explained
afterwards, quite tactfully and nicely, to his two official friends,
that while feeling an inexpressible regard for each of them he could
not seriously regard the face of either of them as anything but a
kind of tail. It was, he admitted, a handsome tail...a tail elevated
in the air. But if, he said, any true friend of theirs wished to see
their faces, to look into the eyes of their soul, that friend must be
allowed to walk reverently round behind them, so as to see them from
the rear. There he would see the two black dragons with the blind
eyes.
But when first the two
black dragons sprang out of the fog upon the small clerk, they had
merely the effect of all miracles...they changed the universe. He
discovered the fact that all romantics know...that adventures happen
on dull days, and not on sunny ones. When the chord of monotony is
stretched most tight, then it breaks with a sound like song. He had
scarcely noticed the weather before, but with the four dead eyes
glaring at him he looked round and realized the strange dead day.
The morning was wintry and
dim, not misty, but darkened with that shadow of cloud or snow which
steeps everything in a green or copper twilight. The light there is
on such a day seems not so much to come from the clear heavens as to
be a phosphorescence clinging to the shapes themselves. The load of
heaven and the clouds is like a load of waters, and the men move like
fishes, feeling that they are on the floor of a sea. Everything in a
London street completes the fantasy; the carriages and cabs
themselves resemble deep-sea creatures with eyes of flame. He had
been startled at first to meet two dragons. Now he found he was among
deep-sea dragons possessing the deep sea.
The two young men in front
were like the small young man himself, well-dressed. The lines of
their frock-coats and silk hats had that luxuriant severity which
makes the modern fop, hideous as he is, a favourite exercise of the
modern draughtsman; that element which Mr. Max Beerbohm has admirably
expressed in speaking of "certain congruities of dark cloth and
the rigid perfection of linen."
They walked with the gait
of an affected snail, and they spoke at the longest intervals,
dropping a sentence at about every sixth lamp-post.
They crawled on past the
lamp-posts; their mien was so immovable that a fanciful description
might almost say, that the lamp-posts crawled past the men, as in a
dream. Then the small man suddenly ran after them and said:
"I want to get my
hair cut. I say, do you know a little shop anywhere where they cut
your hair properly? I keep on having my hair cut, but it keeps on
growing again."
One of the tall men looked
at him with the air of a pained naturalist.
"Why, here is a
little place," cried the small man, with a sort of imbecile
cheerfulness, as the bright bulging window of a fashionable
toilet-saloon glowed abruptly out of the foggy twilight. "Do you
know, I often find hairdressers when I walk about London. I'll lunch
with you at Cicconani's. You know, I'm awfully fond of hairdressers'
shops. They're miles better than those nasty butchers'." And he
disappeared into the doorway.
The man called James
continued to gaze after him, a monocle screwed into his eye.
"What the devil do
you make of that fellow?" he asked his companion, a pale young
man with a high nose.
The pale young man
reflected conscientiously for some minutes, and then said:
"Had a knock on his
head when he was a kid, I should think."
"No, I don't think
it's that," replied the Honourable James Barker. "I've
sometimes fancied he was a sort of artist, Lambert."
"Bosh!" cried
Mr. Lambert, briefly.
"I admit I can't make
him out," resumed Barker, abstractedly; "he never opens his
mouth without saying something so indescribably half-witted that to
call him a fool seems the very feeblest attempt at characterization.
But there's another thing about him that's rather funny. Do you know
that he has the one collection of Japanese lacquer in Europe? Have
you ever seen his books? All Greek poets and mediaeval French and
that sort of thing. Have you ever been in his rooms? It's like being
inside an amethyst. And he moves about in all that and talks
like...like a turnip."
"Well, damn all
books. Your blue books as well," said the ingenuous Mr. Lambert,
with a friendly simplicity. "You ought to understand such
things. What do you make of him?"
"He's beyond me,"
returned Barker. "But if you asked me for my opinion, I should
say he was a man with a taste for nonsense, as they call
it...artistic fooling, and all that kind of thing. And I seriously
believe that he has talked nonsense so much that he has half
bewildered his own mind and doesn't know the difference between
sanity and insanity. He has gone round the mental world, so to speak,
and found the place where the East and the West are one, and extreme
idiocy is as good as sense. But I can't explain these psychological
games."
"You can't explain
them to me," replied Mr. Wilfrid Lambert, with candour.
As they passed up the long
streets towards their restaurant the copper twilight cleared slowly
to a pale yellow, and by the time they reached it they stood
discernible in a tolerable winter daylight. The Honourable James
Barker, one of the most powerful officials in the English Government
(by this time a rigidly official one), was a lean and elegant young
man, with a blank handsome face and bleak blue eyes. He had a great
amount of intellectual capacity, of that peculiar kind which raises a
man from throne to throne and lets him die loaded with honours
without having either amused or enlightened the mind of a single man.
Wilfrid Lambert, the youth with the nose which appeared to impoverish
the rest of his face, had also contributed little to the enlargement
of the human spirit, but he had the honourable excuse of being a
fool.
Lambert would have been
called a silly man; Barker, with all his cleverness, might have been
called a stupid man. But mere silliness and stupidity sank into
insignificance in the presence of the awful and mysterious treasures
of foolishness apparently stored up in the small figure that stood
waiting for them outside Cicconani's. The little man, whose name was
Auberon Quin, had an appearance compounded of a baby and an owl. His
round head, round eyes, seemed to have been designed by nature
playfully with a pair of compasses. His flat dark hair and
preposterously long frock-coat gave him something of the look of a
child's "Noah." When he entered a room of strangers, they
mistook him for a small boy, and wanted to take him on their knees,
until he spoke, when they perceived that a boy would have been more
intelligent.
"I have been waiting
quite a long time," said Quin, mildly. "It's awfully funny
I should see you coming up the street at last."
"Why?" asked
Lambert, staring. "You told us to come here yourself."
"My mother used to
tell people to come to places," said the sage.
They were about to turn
into the restaurant with a resigned air, when their eyes were caught
by something in the street. The weather, though cold and blank, was
now quite clear, and across the dull brown of the wood pavement and
between the dull grey terraces was moving something not to be seen
for miles around...not to be seen perhaps at that time in England...a
man dressed in bright colours. A small crowd hung on the man's heels.
He was a tall stately man,
clad in a military uniform of brilliant green, splashed with great
silver facings. From the shoulder swung a short green furred cloak,
somewhat like that of a Hussar, the lining of which gleamed every now
and then with a kind of tawny crimson. His breast glittered with
medals; round his neck was the red ribbon and star of some foreign
order; and a long straight sword, with a blazing hilt, trailed and
clattered along the pavement. At this time the pacific and
utilitarian development of Europe had relegated all such customs to
the Museums. The only remaining force, the small but well-organized
police, were attired in a sombre and hygienic manner. But even those
who remembered the last Life Guards and Lancers who disappeared in
1912 must have known at a glance that this was not, and never had
been, an English uniform; and this conviction would have been
heightened by the yellow aquiline face, like Dante carved in bronze,
which rose, crowned with white hair, out of the green military
collar, a keen and distinguished, but not an English face.
The magnificence with
which the green-clad gentleman walked down the centre of the road
would be something difficult to express in human language. For it was
an ingrained simplicity and arrogance, something in the mere carriage
of the head and body, which made ordinary moderns in the street stare
after him; but it had comparatively little to do with actual
conscious gestures or expression. In the matter of these merely
temporary movements, the man appeared to be rather worried and
inquisitive, but he was inquisitive with the inquisitiveness of a
despot and worried as with the responsibilities of a god. The men who
lounged and wondered behind him followed partly with an astonishment
at his brilliant uniform, that is to say, partly because of that
instinct which makes us all follow one who looks like a madman, but
far more because of that instinct which makes all men follow (and
worship) any one who chooses to behave like a king. He had to so
sublime an extent that great quality of royalty...an almost imbecile
unconsciousness of everybody, that people went after him as they do
after kings...to see what would be the first thing or person he would
take notice of. And all the time, as we have said, in spite of his
quiet splendour, there was an air about him as if he were looking for
somebody; an expression of inquiry.
Suddenly that expression
of inquiry vanished, none could tell why, and was replaced by an
expression of contentment. Amid the rapt attention of the mob of
idlers, the magnificent green gentleman deflected himself from his
direct course down the centre of the road and walked to one side of
it. He came to a halt opposite to a large poster of Colman's Mustard
erected on a wooden hoarding. His spectators almost held their
breath.
He took from a small
pocket in his uniform a little penknife; with this he made a slash at
the stretched paper. Completing the rest of the operation with his
fingers, he tore off a strip or rag of paper, yellow in colour and
wholly irregular in outline. Then for the first time the great being
addressed his adoring onlookers:
"Can any one,"
he said, with a pleasing foreign accent, "lend me a pin?"
Mr. Lambert, who happened
to be nearest, and who carried innumerable pins for the purpose of
attaching innumerable buttonholes, lent him one, which was received
with extravagant but dignified bows, and hyperboles of thanks.
The gentleman in green,
then, with every appearance of being gratified, and even puffed up,
pinned the piece of yellow paper to the green silk and silver-lace
adornments of his breast. Then he turned his eyes round again,
searching and unsatisfied.
"Anything else I can
do, sir?" asked Lambert, with the absurd politeness of the
Englishman when once embarrassed.
"Red," said the
stranger, vaguely, "red."
"I beg your pardon?"
"I beg yours also,
Senor," said the stranger, bowing. "I was wondering whether
any of you had any red about you."
"Any red about
us?...well, really...no, I don't think I have...I used to carry a red
bandanna once, but..."
"Barker," asked
Auberon Quin, suddenly, "where's your red cockatoo? Where's your
red cockatoo?"
"What do you mean?"
asked Barker, desperately. "What cockatoo? You've never seen me
with any cockatoo."
"I know," said
Auberon, vaguely mollified. "Where's it been all the time?"
Barker swung round, not
without resentment.
"I am sorry, sir,"
he said, shortly but civilly, "none of us seem to have anything
red to lend you. But why, if one may ask..."
"I thank you, Senor,
it is nothing. I can, since there is nothing else, fulfil my own
requirements."
And standing for a second
of thought with the penknife in his hand, he stabbed his left palm.
The blood fell with so full a stream that it struck the stones
without dripping. The foreigner pulled out his handkerchief and tore
a piece from it with his teeth. The rag was immediately soaked in
scarlet.
"Since you are so
generous, Senor," he said, "another pin, perhaps."
Lambert held one out, with
eyes protruding like a frog's.
The red linen was pinned
beside the yellow paper, and the foreigner took off his hat.
"I have to thank you
all, gentlemen," he said; and wrapping the remainder of the
handkerchief round his bleeding hand, he resumed his walk with an
overwhelming stateliness.
While all the rest paused,
in some disorder, little Mr. Auberon Quin ran after the stranger and
stopped him, with hat in hand. Considerably to everybody's
astonishment, he addressed him in the purest Spanish:
"Senor," he said
in that language, "pardon a hospitality, perhaps indiscreet,
towards one who appears to be a distinguished, but a solitary guest
in London. Will you do me and my friends, with whom you have held
some conversation, the honour of lunching with us at the adjoining
restaurant?"
The man in the green
uniform had turned a fiery colour of pleasure at the mere sound of
his own language, and he accepted the invitation with that profusion
of bows which so often shows, in the case of the Southern races, the
falsehood of the notion that ceremony has nothing to do with feeling.
"Senor," he
said, "your language is my own; but all my love for my people
shall not lead me to deny to yours the possession of so chivalrous an
entertainer. Let me say that the tongue is Spanish but the heart
English." And he passed with the rest into Cicconani's.
"Now, perhaps,"
said Barker, over the fish and sherry, intensely polite, but burning
with curiosity, "perhaps it would be rude of me to ask why you
did that?"
"Did what, Senor?"
asked the guest, who spoke English quite well, though in a manner
indefinably American.
"Well," said the
Englishman, in some confusion, "I mean tore a strip off a
hoarding and... er... cut yourself... and..."
"To tell you that,
Senor," answered the other, with a certain sad pride, "involves
merely telling you who I am. I am Juan del Fuego, President of
Nicaragua."
The manner with which the
President of Nicaragua leant back and drank his sherry showed that to
him this explanation covered all the facts observed and a great deal
more. Barker's brow, however, was still a little clouded.
"And the yellow
paper," he began, with anxious friendliness, "and the red
rag..."
"The yellow paper and
the red rag," said Fuego, with indescribable grandeur, "are
the colours of Nicaragua."
"But Nicaragua..."
began Barker, with great hesitation, "Nicaragua is no longer
a..."
"Nicaragua has been
conquered like Athens. Nicaragua has been annexed like Jerusalem,"
cried the old man, with amazing fire. "The Yankee and the German
and the brute powers of modernity have trampled it with the hoofs of
oxen. But Nicaragua is not dead. Nicaragua is an idea."
Auberon Quin suggested
timidly, "A brilliant idea."
"Yes," said the
foreigner, snatching at the word. "You are right, generous
Englishman. An idea brilliant, a burning thought. Senor, you asked me
why, in my desire to see the colours of my country, I snatched at
paper and blood. Can you not understand the ancient sanctity of
colours? The Church has her symbolic colours. And think of what
colours mean to us...think of the position of one like myself, who
can see nothing but those two colours, nothing but the red and the
yellow. To me all shapes are equal, all common and noble things are
in a democracy of combination. Wherever there is a field of marigolds
and the red cloak of an old woman, there is Nicaragua. Wherever there
is a field of poppies and a yellow patch of sand, there is Nicaragua,
Wherever there is a lemon and a red sunset, there is my country.
Wherever I see a red pillar-box and a yellow sunset, there my heart
beats. Blood and a splash of mustard can be my heraldry. If there be
yellow mud and red mud in the same ditch, it is better to me than
white stars."
"And if," said
Quin, with equal enthusiasm, "there should happen to be yellow
wine and red wine at the same lunch, you could not confine yourself
to sherry. Let me order some Burgundy, and complete, as it were, a
sort of Nicaraguan heraldry in your inside."
Barker was fiddling with
his knife, and was evidently making up his mind to say something,
with the intense nervousness of the amiable Englishman.
"I am to understand,
then," he said at last, with a cough, "that you, ahem, were
the President of Nicaragua when it made its...er...one must, of
course, agree...its quite heroic resistance to...er..."
The ex-President of
Nicaragua waved his hand.
"You need not
hesitate in speaking to me," he said. "I am quite fully
aware that the whole tendency of the world of to-day is against
Nicaragua and against me. I shall not consider it any diminution of
your evident courtesy if you say what you think of the misfortunes
that have laid my republic in ruins."
Barker looked immeasurably
relieved and gratified.
"You are most
generous, President," he said, with some hesitation over the
title, "and I will take advantage of your generosity to express
the doubts which, I must confess, we moderns have about such things
as...er...the Nicaraguan independence."
"So your sympathies
are," said Del Fuego, quite calmly, "with the big nation
which..."
"Pardon me, pardon
me, President," said Barker, warmly; "my sympathies are
with no nation. You misunderstand, I think, the modern intellect. We
do not disapprove of the fire and extravagance of such commonwealths
as yours only to become more extravagant on a larger scale. We do not
condemn Nicaragua because we think Britain ought to be more
Nicaraguan. We do not discourage small nationalities because we wish
large nationalities to have all their smallness, all their uniformity
of outlook, all their exaggeration of spirit. If I differ with the
greatest respect from your Nicaraguan enthusiasm, it is not because a
nation or ten nations were against you; it is because civilization
was against you. We moderns believe in a great cosmopolitan
civilization, one which shall include all the talents of all the
absorbed peoples..."
"The Senor will
forgive me," said the President. "May I ask the Senor how,
under ordinary circumstances, he catches a wild horse?"
"I never catch a wild
horse," replied Barker, with dignity.
"Precisely,"
said the other; "and there ends your absorption of the talents.
That is what I complain of your cosmopolitanism. When you say you
want all peoples to unite, you really mean that you want all peoples
to unite to learn the tricks of your people. If the Bedouin Arab does
not know how to read, some English missionary or schoolmaster must be
sent to teach him to read, but no one ever says, 'This schoolmaster
does not know how to ride on a camel; let us pay a Bedouin to teach
him.' You say your civilization will include all talents. Will it? Do
you really mean to say that at the moment when the Esquimaux has
learnt to vote for a County Council, you will have learnt to spear a
walrus? I recur to the example I gave. In Nicaragua we had a way of
catching wild horses...by lassoing the fore-feet-which was supposed
to be the best in South America. If you are going to include all the
talents, go and do it. If not, permit me to say, what I have always
said, that something went from the world when Nicaragua was
civilized."
"Something, perhaps,"
replied Barker, "but that something a mere barbarian dexterity.
I do not know that I could chip flints as well as a primeval man, but
I know that civilization can make these knives which are better, and
I trust to civilization."
"You have good
authority," answered the Nicaraguan. "Many clever men like
you have trusted to civilization. Many clever Babylonians, many
clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell
me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilization,
what there is particularly immortal about yours?"
"I think you do not
quite understand, President, what ours is," answered Barker.
"You judge it rather as if England was still a poor and
pugnacious island; you have been long out of Europe. Many things have
happened."
"And what,"
asked the other, "would you call the summary of those things?"
"The summary of those
things," answered Barker, with great animation, "is that we
are rid of the superstitions, and in becoming so we have not merely
become rid of the superstitions which have been most frequently and
most enthusiastically so described. The superstition of big
nationalities is bad, but the superstition of small nationalities is
worse. The superstition of reverencing our own country is bad, but
the superstition of reverencing other people's countries is worse. It
is so everywhere, and in a hundred ways. The superstition of monarchy
is bad, and the superstition of aristocracy is bad, but the
superstition of democracy is the worst of all."
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...."