Gilbert Chesterton: The Napoleon of Notting Hill

“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 to 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:

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?”

“Ceremonies,” began the official, with embarrassment, “have been more or less neglected for some little time, and...”

Auberon Quin began gradually to take off his coat.

“All ceremony,” he said, “consists in the reversal of the obvious. Thus men, when they wish to be priests or judges, dress up like women. Kindly help me on with this coat.” And he held it out.