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 realise 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 outré, 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
