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 ar