الفصل الفصل 15 · Two Voices_

. Two Voices_

In a place in which there was total darkness for hours, there was also

for hours total silence. Then a voice spoke out of the darkness, no

one could have told from where, and said aloud--

"So ends the Empire of Notting Hill. As it began in blood, so it ended

in blood, and all things are always the same."

And there was silence again, and then again there was a voice, but it

had 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 always

heroic. If all things are always the same, it is because they are

always new. To each man one soul only is given; to each soul only is

given a little power--the power at some moments to outgrow and swallow

up the stars. If age after age that power comes upon men, whatever

gives it to them is great. Whatever makes men feel old is mean--an

empire or a skin-flint shop. Whatever makes men feel young is great--a

great war or a love-story. And in the darkest of the books of God

there is written a truth that is also a riddle. It is of the new

things that men tire--of fashions and proposals and improvements and

change. It is the old things that startle and intoxicate. It is the

old things that are young. There is no sceptic who does not feel that

many have doubted before. There is no rich and fickle man who does not

feel that all his novelties are ancient. There is no worshipper of

change who does not feel upon his neck the vast weight of the

weariness of the universe. But we who do the old things are fed by

nature with a perpetual infancy. No man who is in love thinks that any

one has been in love before. No woman who has a child thinks that

there have been such things as children. No people that fight for

their own city are haunted with the burden of the broken empires. Yes,

O dark voice, the world is always the same, for it is always

unexpected."

A little gust of wind blew through the night, and then the first voice

answered--

"But in this world there are some, be they wise or foolish, whom

nothing intoxicates. There are some who see all your disturbances like

a cloud of flies. They know that while men will laugh at your Notting

Hill, and will study and rehearse and sing of Athens and Jerusalem,

Athens and Jerusalem were silly suburbs like your Notting Hill. They

know that the earth itself is a suburb, and can feel only drearily

and respectably amused as they move upon it."

"They are philosophers or they are fools," said the other voice. "They

are not men. Men live, as I say, rejoicing from age to age in

something fresher than progress--in the fact that with every baby a

new sun and a new moon are made. If our ancient humanity were a single

man, it might perhaps be that he would break down under the memory of

so many loyalties, under the burden of so many diverse heroisms, under

the load and terror of all the goodness of men. But it has pleased God

so to isolate the individual soul that it can only learn of all other

souls by hearsay, and to each one goodness and happiness come with the

youth and violence of lightning, as momentary and as pure. And the

doom of failure that lies on all human systems does not in real fact

affect them any more than the worms of the inevitable grave affect a

children's game in a meadow. Notting Hill has fallen; Notting Hill has

died. But that is not the tremendous issue. Notting Hill has lived."

"But if," answered the other voice, "if what is achieved by all these

efforts be only the common contentment of humanity, why do men so

extravagantly toil and die in them? Has nothing been done by Notting

Hill than any chance clump of farmers or clan of savages would not

have done without it? What might have been done to Notting Hill if the

world had been different may be a deep question; but there is a

deeper. What could have happened to the world if Notting Hill had

never been?"

The other voice replied--

"The same that would have happened to the world and all the starry

systems if an apple-tree grew six apples instead of seven; something

would have been eternally lost. There has never been anything in the

world absolutely like Notting Hill. There will never be anything quite

like it to the crack of doom. I cannot believe anything but that God

loved it as He must surely love anything that is itself and

unreplaceable. But even for that I do not care. If God, with all His

thunders, 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 that

whatever meaning you may choose in your fancy to give to it, the real

meaning of the whole was mockery. Suppose it was all folly. Suppose--"

"I have been in it," answered the voice from the tall and strange

figure, "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 in

idleness. Suppose the stars, that you think eternal, are only the

idiot fireworks of an everlasting schoolboy. Suppose the sun and the

moon, to which you sing alternately, are only the two eyes of one vast

and sneering giant, opened alternately in a never-ending wink. Suppose

the trees, in my eyes, are as foolish as enormous toad-stools. Suppose

Socrates and Charlemagne are to me only beasts, made funnier by

walking 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 give

the answer that shatters even a laugh. Suppose I do not laugh back at

you, do not blaspheme you, do not curse you. But suppose, standing up

straight under the sky, with every power of my being, I thank you for

the fools' paradise you have made. Suppose I praise you, with a

literal pain of ecstasy, for the jest that has brought me so terrible

a joy. If we have taken the child's games, and given them the

seriousness of a Crusade, if we have drenched your grotesque Dutch

garden with the blood of martyrs, we have turned a nursery into a

temple. I ask you, in the name of Heaven, who wins?"

The sky close about the crests of the hills and trees was beginning to

turn from black to grey, with a random suggestion of the morning. The

slight figure seemed to crawl towards the larger one, and the voice

was more human.

"But suppose, friend," it said, "suppose that, in a bitterer and more

real sense, it was all a mockery. Suppose that there had been, from

the beginning of these great wars, one who watched them with a sense

that is beyond expression, a sense of detachment, of responsibility,

of irony, of agony. Suppose that there were one who knew it was all a

joke."

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, and

showed a strip of silver behind his great dark legs. Then the other

voice came, having crept nearer still.

[Illustration: "WAYNE, IT WAS ALL A JOKE."]

"Adam Wayne," it said, "there are men who confess only in _articulo

mortis_; there are people who blame themselves only when they can no

longer help others. I am one of them. Here, upon the field of the

bloody end of it all, I come to tell you plainly what you would never

understand before. Do you know who I am?"

"I know you, Auberon Quin," answered the tall figure, "and I shall be

glad to unburden your spirit of anything that lies upon it."

"Adam Wayne," said the other voice, "of what I have to say you cannot

in 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 a

centaur, or a merman, or a fish with legs, or a pig with feathers, or

any other absurdity. When I spoke to you solemnly and encouragingly

about the flag of your freedom and the peace of your city, I was

playing a vulgar practical joke on an honest gentleman, a vulgar

practical joke that has lasted for twenty years. Though no one could

believe it of me, perhaps, it is the truth that I am a man both timid

and tender-hearted. I never dared in the early days of your hope, or

the central days of your supremacy, to tell you this; I never dared to

break the colossal calm of your face. God knows why I should do it

now, when my farce has ended in tragedy and the ruin of all your

people! But I say it now. Wayne, it was done as a joke."

There was silence, and the freshening breeze blew the sky clearer and

clearer, leaving great spaces of the white dawn.

At last Wayne 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 army

for Bayswater and a flag for Notting Hill, there was no gleam, no

suggestion in your mind that such things might be real and

passionate?"

"No," answered Auberon, turning his round white face to the morning

with 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 his

voice, "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 I

thought that your voice was the voice of a derisive omnipotence, its

laughter older than the winds of heaven. But let me say what is

immediate and true. You and I, Auberon Quin, have both of us

throughout 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 been

cloven in two. And if you ask for the proof of it, it is not hard to

find. It is not merely that you, the humorist, have been in these dark

days stripped of the joy of gravity. It is not merely that I, the

fanatic, have had to grope without humour. It is that, though we seem

to be opposite in everything, we have been opposite like man and

woman, aiming at the same moment at the same practical thing. We are

the father and the mother of the Charter of the Cities."

Quin looked down at the _debris_ of leaves and timber, the relics of

the battle and stampede, now glistening in the growing daylight, and

finally said--

"Yet nothing can alter the antagonism--the fact that I laughed at

these things and you adored them."

Wayne's wild face flamed with something god-like, as he turned it to

be struck by the sunrise.

"I know of something that will alter that antagonism, something that

is outside us, something that you and I have all our lives perhaps

taken too little account of. The equal and eternal human being will

alter that antagonism, for the human being sees no real antagonism

between laughter and respect, the human being, the common man, whom

mere geniuses like you and me can only worship like a god. When dark

and dreary days come, you and I are necessary, the pure fanatic, the

pure satirist. We have between us remedied a great wrong. We have

lifted the modern cities into that poetry which every one who knows

mankind knows to be immeasurably more common than the commonplace. But

in healthy people there is no war between us. We are but the two lobes

of the brain of a ploughman. Laughter and love are everywhere. The

cathedrals, built in the ages that loved God, are full of blasphemous

grotesques. The mother laughs continually at the child, the lover

laughs continually at the lover, the wife at the husband, the friend

at the friend. Auberon Quin, we have been too long separated; let us

go out together. You have a halberd and I a sword, let us start our

wanderings over the world. For we are its two essentials. Come, it is

already day."

In the blank white light Auberon hesitated a moment. Then he made the

formal salute with his halberd, and they went away together into the

unknown world.

THE END

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