DWALA left his valet abruptly and spent many hours walking up and down the picture-gallery, deep in thought. Some of his slow ideas were coming suddenly to maturity.
Men—these strange wild beasts that lived wholly in a delirium of invented characters, assigning fantastic attributes to one another and acting solemn plays where everything was real—blood, knives, and misery—everything but the characters themselves—had thrust on him the strangest mask of all; they had made him great. And now, at the touch of one small hand on the lever, all the machinery of the theatre was in motion to make him greater still, with the greatest greatness of all—for so to his rude mind, unskilled in the abstract mystery of Royalty, seemed political greatness, the power of ordering men’s days and nights.
Himself, he was nothing—nothing to anyone but himself; for others he was a suit of irrelevant attributes; no one cared what he thought or felt or was; his Ego had no place in their scheme. He had been always the same; and all his differences were of human making. First Man clapped on him the attribute of Monkey, and purposed putting him in a cage and offering him for an entertainment. Then Man clapped God, King, Prisoner, and Millionaire on him in quick succession; now they were preparing Statesman for him to wear. Empty garments all of them, by the very essence of things: Nature makes no Gods, Kings, Prisoners, Millionaires or Statesmen. All fanciful unsubstantialities of men, real only in their effect on men, as laws of gravity are real only in the eagerness of little things to be impelled; empty shells, inhabited by irrelevant I’s that live in corners of them, apart and unconsidered; vacancies, chosen at random for a centre of genuflexions, services, obediences, gold, velvet, paper, and different sorts of food. A wise Providence has ordained that Man’s eyes should be blind to the vision of real naked Nature-given personality: were it suddenly otherwise, the long-wrought classifications of the ages would disappear at once in a confusion of particular differences; all leadership and direction would be lost; just as Science would shiver to a heap of individual facts if she were robbed of her slow-built generalisations.
Dwala saw that he could never merely put aside his mask and say, Behold me as I am. Such revelations are unthinkable to the human mind: one might as well say, Behold me, for I have disappeared. He could renounce Statesman if he liked, stay Millionaire, go back to God or King or Monkey; but until he went away from men, and hid himself in the wild forest, he could never be plain self again: he must inhabit either a palace, or a temple, or a cage.
What was he going to do, he asked himself, in this new mask that Man was preparing for him with so much labour? The answer was evident; Lady Wyse knew it too. He was making a Joke, a big slow Joke; men were rolling it painfully up the board for him, panting and groaning, and when it reached the top he would tip it lightly over and see it fall with a crash like a falling mountain. Surely that would make him laugh?
And after? Well, that was a little matter. They would kill him, perhaps; he would die laughing at them, laughing in their angry shame-lit faces as they stabbed him. More probably they would let him go. They would hardly exhibit him in Earl’s Court: ‘Pithecanthropus erectus, ex-Cabinet Minister.’ He would get back to the woods of Borneo again, and laugh among the trees. In any case, he would have had his Joke.
Meanwhile other attributes had been laid on him for which he had no use: power to demand a million little satisfactions, gross and fine, for which he had no taste. Space to sleep and wake, food enough to nourish him—that was all he wanted till the great Joke reached the tumbling point. A thousand minor jokes would crop up by the way in the endless inequality of masks: jokes too slender for his own handling. Must all this go to waste? Why not enjoy by proxy? To his large mind it was indifferent who was the agent of enjoyment: himself or another, as they had the fitter talent. Therefore he had long been vaguely seeking someone who could replace him in the present; an ambassador in the courts of luxury; someone vivid, eager, strong and discontented, some Enemy of the World, who could exploit for him the minor meannesses of men, a preparatory humiliation, a handy touchstone for everyday use. Surely Hartopp was the man?
Dwala went with a candle in the middle of the night to his valet’s bedroom and awoke him from uneasy sleep.
‘I’ve made up my mind I must know this Mr. Hartopp, Prosser.’
‘I’m afraid you mightn’t like him if you saw him, sir,’ said the valet, sitting up in his night-cap, with hollow eyes, as of one rescued only for a while from some fear to which he must return anon.
‘I don’t know. We’ll go and look for him to-morrow. You know where he lives?’
‘Whereabouts, sir. Somewhere off Shaftesbury Avenue.’
‘All right. We’ll go and look him up to-morrow. That’ll be rippin’. Good-night.’