Napoleon of Notting Hill
Napoleon of Notting Hill
Napoleon of Notting Hill
NOTTING HILL
BY
G. K. CHESTERTON
1904
The Napoleon of Notting Hill By G. K. Chesterton.
©GlobalGrey 2018
globalgreyebooks.com
CONTENTS
To Hilaire Belloc
BOOK 1
Chapter 1. Introductory Remarks On The Art Of Prophecy
Chapter 2. The Man In Green
Chapter 3. The Hill Of Humour
BOOK 2
Chapter 1. The Charter Of The Cities
Chapter 2. The Council Of The Provosts
Chapter 3. Enter A Lunatic
BOOK 3
Chapter 1. The Mental Condition Of Adam Wayne
Chapter 2. The Remarkable Mr. Turnbull
Chapter 3. The Experiment Of Mr. Buck
BOOK 4
Chapter 1. The Battle Of The Lamps
Chapter 2. The Correspondent Of The Court Journal
Chapter 3. The Great Army Of South Kensington
BOOK 5
Chapter 1. The Empire Of Notting Hill
Chapter 2. The Last Battle
Chapter 3. Two Voices
1
TO HILAIRE BELLOC
G. K. C.
3
BOOK 1
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For human beings, being children, have the childish wilfulness and the
childish secrecy. And they never have from the beginning of the world
done what the wise men have seen to be inevitable. They stoned the false
prophets, it is said; but they could have stoned true prophets with a
greater and juster enjoyment. Individually, men may present a more or
less rational appearance, eating, sleeping, and scheming. But humanity
as a whole is changeful, mystical, fickle, delightful. Men are men, but
Man is a woman.
But in the beginning of the twentieth century the game of Cheat the
Prophet was made far more difficult than it had ever been before. The
reason was, that there were so many prophets and so many prophecies,
that it was difficult to elude all their ingenuities. When a man did
something free and frantic and entirely his own, a horrible thought
struck him afterwards; it might have been predicted. Whenever a duke
climbed a lamp-post, when a dean got drunk, he could not be really
happy, he could not be certain that he was not fulfilling some prophecy.
In the beginning of the twentieth century you could not see the ground
for clever men. They were so common that a stupid man was quite
exceptional, and when they found him, they followed him in crowds
down the street and treasured him up and gave him some high post in
the State. And all these clever men were at work giving accounts of what
would happen in the next age, all quite clear, all quite keen-sighted and
ruthless, and all quite different. And it seemed that the good old game of
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But the way the prophets of the twentieth century went to work was this.
They took something or other that was certainly going on in their time,
and then said that it would go on more and more until something
extraordinary happened. And very often they added that in some odd
place that extraordinary thing had happened, and that it showed the
signs of the times.
Thus, for instance, there were Mr. H. G. Wells and others, who thought
that science would take charge of the future; and just as the motor-car
was quicker than the coach, so some lovely thing would be quicker than
the motor-car; and so on for ever. And there arose from their ashes Dr.
Quilp, who said that a man could be sent on his machine so fast round
the world that he could keep up a long, chatty conversation in some old-
world village by saying a word of a sentence each time he came round.
And it was said that the experiment had been tried on an apoplectic old
major, who was sent round the world so fast that there seemed to be (to
the inhabitants of some other star) a continuous band round the earth of
white whiskers, red complexion and tweeds — a thing like the ring of
Saturn.
Then there was the opposite school. There was Mr. Edward Carpenter,
who thought we should in a very short time return to Nature, and live
simply and slowly as the animals do. And Edward Carpenter was
followed by James Pickie, D.D. (of Pocohontas College), who said that
men were immensely improved by grazing, or taking their food slowly
and continuously, after the manner of cows. And he said that he had,
with the most encouraging results, turned city men out on all fours in a
field covered with veal cutlets. Then Tolstoy and the Humanitarians said
that the world was growing more merciful, and therefore no one would
ever desire to kill. And Mr. Mick not only became a vegetarian, but at
length declared vegetarianism doomed (“shedding,” as he called it finely,
“the green blood of the silent animals”), and predicted that men in a
better age would live on nothing but salt. And then came the pamphlet
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from Oregon (where the thing was tried), the pamphlet called “Why
should Salt suffer?” and there was more trouble.
And on the other hand, some people were predicting that the lines of
kinship would become narrower and sterner. There was Mr. Cecil
Rhodes, who thought that the one thing of the future was the British
Empire, and that there would be a gulf between those who were of the
Empire and those who were not, between the Chinaman in Hong Kong
and the Chinaman outside, between the Spaniard on the Rock of
Gibraltar and the Spaniard off it, similar to the gulf between man and the
lower animals. And in the same way his impetuous friend, Dr. Zoppi
(“the Paul of Anglo-Saxonism”), carried it yet further, and held that, as a
result of this view, cannibalism should be held to mean eating a member
of the Empire, not eating one of the subject peoples, who should, he said,
be killed without needless pain. His horror at the idea of eating a man in
British Guiana showed how they misunderstood his stoicism who
thought him devoid of feeling. He was, however, in a hard position; as it
was said that he had attempted the experiment, and, living in London,
had to subsist entirely on Italian organ-grinders. And his end was
terrible, for just when he had begun, Sir Paul Swiller read his great paper
at the Royal Society, proving that the savages were not only quite right in
eating their enemies, but right on moral and hygienic grounds, since it
was true that the qualities of the enemy, when eaten, passed into the
eater. The notion that the nature of an Italian organ-man was irrevocably
growing and burgeoning inside him was almost more than the kindly old
professor could bear.
There was Mr. Benjamin Kidd, who said that the growing note of our
race would be the care for and knowledge of the future. His idea was
developed more powerfully by William Borker, who wrote that passage
which every schoolboy knows by heart, about men in future ages
weeping by the graves of their descendants, and tourists being shown
over the scene of the historic battle which was to take place some
centuries afterwards.
And Mr. Stead, too, was prominent, who thought that England would in
the twentieth century be united to America; and his young lieutenant,
Graham Podge, who included the states of France, Germany, and Russia
in the American Union, the State of Russia being abbreviated to Ra.
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There was Mr. Sidney Webb, also, who said that the future would see a
continuously increasing order and neatness in the life of the people, and
his poor friend Fipps, who went mad and ran about the country with an
axe, hacking branches off the trees whenever there were not the same
number on both sides.
All these clever men were prophesying with every variety of ingenuity
what would happen soon, and they all did it in the same way, by taking
something they saw “going strong,” as the saying is, and carrying it as far
as ever their imagination could stretch. This, they said, was the true and
simple way of anticipating the future. “Just as,” said Dr. Pellkins, in a
fine passage — “just as when we see a pig in a litter larger than the other
pigs, we know that by an unalterable law of the Inscrutable it will some
day be larger than an elephant — just as we know, when we see weeds
and dandelions growing more and more thickly in a garden, that they
must, in spite of all our efforts, grow taller than the chimney-pots and
swallow the house from sight, so we know and reverently acknowledge,
that when any power in human politics has shown for any period of time
any considerable activity, it will go on until it reaches to the sky.”
And it did certainly appear that the prophets had put the people
(engaged in the old game of Cheat the Prophet) in a quite unprecedented
difficulty. It seemed really hard to do anything without fulfilling some of
their prophecies.
Then the wise men grew like wild things, and swayed hither and thither,
crying, “What can it be? What can it be? What will London be like a
century hence? Is there anything we have not thought of? Houses upside
down — more hygienic, perhaps? Men walking on hands — make feet
flexible, don’t you know? Moon . . . motor-cars . . . no heads. . . . ” And so
they swayed and wondered until they died and were buried nicely.
8
Then the people went and did what they liked. Let me no longer conceal
the painful truth. The people had cheated the prophets of the twentieth
century. When the curtain goes up on this story, eighty years after the
present date, London is almost exactly like what it is now.
9
Very few words are needed to explain why London, a hundred years
hence, will be very like it is now, or rather, since I must slip into a
prophetic past, why London, when my story opens, was very like it was
in those enviable days when I was still alive.
The reason can be stated in one sentence. The people had absolutely lost
faith in revolutions. All revolutions are doctrinal — such as the French
one, or the one that introduced Christianity. For it stands to common
sense that you cannot upset all existing things, customs, and
compromises, unless you believe in something outside them, something
positive and divine. Now, England, during this century, lost all belief in
this. It believed in a thing called Evolution. And it said, “All theoretic
changes have ended in blood and ennui. If we change, we must change
slowly and safely, as the animals do. Nature’s revolutions are the only
successful ones. There has been no conservative reaction in favour of
tails.”
And some things did change. Things that were not much thought of
dropped out of sight. Things that had not often happened did not happen
at all. Thus, for instance, the actual physical force ruling the country, the
soldiers and police, grew smaller and smaller, and at last vanished
almost to a point. The people combined could have swept the few
policemen away in ten minutes: they did not, because they did not
believe it would do them the least good. They had lost faith in
revolutions.
Democracy was dead; for no one minded the governing class governing.
England was now practically a despotism, but not an hereditary one.
Some one in the official class was made King. No one cared how: no one
cared who. He was merely an universal secretary.
There was therefore no reason whatever why the three young men who
had always walked up to their Government office together should not
walk up to it together on this particular wintry and cloudy morning.
Everything in that age had become mechanical, and Government clerks
especially. All those clerks assembled regularly at their posts. Three of
those clerks always walked into town together. All the neighbourhood
knew them: two of them were tall and one short. And on this particular
morning the short clerk was only a few seconds late to join the other two
as they passed his gate: he could have overtaken them in three strides; he
could have called after them easily. But he did not.
For some reason that will never be understood until all souls are judged
(if they are ever judged; the idea was at this time classed with fetish
worship) he did not join his two companions, but walked steadily behind
them. The day was dull, their dress was dull, everything was dull; but in
some odd impulse he walked through street after street, through district
after district, looking at the backs of the two men, who would have
swung round at the sound of his voice. Now, there is a law written in the
darkest of the Books of Life, and it is this: If you look at a thing nine
hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it
the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first
time.
Two black dragons were walking backwards in front of him. Two black
dragons were looking at him with evil eyes. The dragons were walking
backwards it was true, but they kept their eyes fixed on him none the
less. The eyes which he saw were, in truth, only the two buttons at the
back of a frock-coat: perhaps some traditional memory of their
meaningless character gave this half-witted prominence to their gaze.
The slit between the tails was the nose-line of the monster: whenever the
tails flapped in the winter wind the dragons licked their lips. It was only
a momentary fancy, but the small clerk found it imbedded in his soul
ever afterwards. He never could again think of men in frock-coats except
as dragons walking backwards. He explained afterwards, quite tactfully
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and nicely, to his two official friends, that (while feeling an inexpressible
regard for each of them) he could not seriously regard the face of either
of them as anything but a kind of tail. It was, he admitted, a handsome
tail — a tail elevated in the air. But if, he said, any true friend of theirs
wished to see their faces, to look into the eyes of their soul, that friend
must be allowed to walk reverently round behind them, so as to see them
from the rear. There he would see the two black dragons with the blind
eyes.
But when first the two black dragons sprang out of the fog upon the
small clerk, they had merely the effect of all miracles — they changed the
universe. He discovered the fact that all romantics know — that
adventures happen on dull days, and not on sunny ones. When the chord
of monotony is stretched most tight, then it breaks with a sound like
song. He had scarcely noticed the weather before, but with the four dead
eyes glaring at him he looked round and realised the strange dead day.
The morning was wintry and dim, not misty, but darkened with that
shadow of cloud or snow which steeps everything in a green or copper
twilight. The light there is on such a day seems not so much to come
from the clear heavens as to be a phosphorescence clinging to the shapes
themselves. The load of heaven and the clouds is like a load of waters,
and the men move like fishes, feeling that they are on the floor of a sea.
Everything in a London street completes the fantasy; the carriages and
cabs themselves resemble deep-sea creatures with eyes of flame. He had
been startled at first to meet two dragons. Now he found he was among
deep-sea dragons possessing the deep sea.
The two young men in front were like the small young man himself, well-
dressed. The lines of their frock-coats and silk hats had that luxuriant
severity which makes the modern fop, hideous as he is, a favourite
exercise of the modern draughtsman; that element which Mr. Max
Beerbohm has admirably expressed in speaking of “certain congruities of
dark cloth and the rigid perfection of linen.”
They walked with the gait of an affected snail, and they spoke at the
longest intervals, dropping a sentence at about every sixth lamp-post.
They crawled on past the lamp-posts; their mien was so immovable that
a fanciful description might almost say, that the lamp-posts crawled past
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the men, as in a dream. Then the small man suddenly ran after them and
said —
“I want to get my hair cut. I say, do you know a little shop anywhere
where they cut your hair properly? I keep on having my hair cut, but it
keeps on growing again.”
One of the tall men looked at him with the air of a pained naturalist.
“Why, here is a little place,” cried the small man, with a sort of imbecile
cheerfulness, as the bright bulging window of a fashionable toilet-saloon
glowed abruptly out of the foggy twilight. “Do you know, I often find
hair-dressers when I walk about London. I’ll lunch with you at
Cicconani’s . You know, I’m awfully fond of hair-dressers’ shops. They’re
miles better than those nasty butchers’.” And he disappeared into the
doorway.
The man called James continued to gaze after him, a monocle screwed
into his eye.
“What the devil do you make of that fellow?” he asked his companion, a
pale young man with a high nose.
The pale young man reflected conscientiously for some minutes, and
then said —
“No, I don’t think it’s that,” replied the Honourable James Barker. “I’ve
sometimes fancied he was a sort of artist, Lambert.”
“I admit I can’t make him out,” resumed Barker, abstractedly; “he never
opens his mouth without saying something so indescribably half-witted
that to call him a fool seems the very feeblest attempt at characterisation.
But there’s another thing about him that’s rather funny. Do you know
that he has the one collection of Japanese lacquer in Europe? Have you
ever seen his books? All Greek poets and mediæval French and that sort
of thing. Have you ever been in his rooms? It’s like being inside an
amethyst. And he moves about in all that and talks like — like a turnip.”
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“Well, damn all books. Your blue books as well,” said the ingenuous Mr.
Lambert, with a friendly simplicity. “You ought to understand such
things. What do you make of him?”
“He’s beyond me,” returned Barker. “But if you asked me for my opinion,
I should say he was a man with a taste for nonsense, as they call it —
artistic fooling, and all that kind of thing. And I seriously believe that he
has talked nonsense so much that he has half bewildered his own mind
and doesn’t know the difference between sanity and insanity. He has
gone round the mental world, so to speak, and found the place where the
East and the West are one, and extreme idiocy is as good as sense. But I
can’t explain these psychological games.”
“You can’t explain them to me,” replied Mr. Wilfrid Lambert, with
candour.
As they passed up the long streets towards their restaurant the copper
twilight cleared slowly to a pale yellow, and by the time they reached it
they stood discernible in a tolerable winter daylight. The Honourable
James Barker, one of the most powerful officials in the English
Government (by this time a rigidly official one), was a lean and elegant
young man, with a blank handsome face and bleak blue eyes. He had a
great amount of intellectual capacity, of that peculiar kind which raises a
man from throne to throne and lets him die loaded with honours without
having either amused or enlightened the mind of a single man. Wilfrid
Lambert, the youth with the nose which appeared to impoverish the rest
of his face, had also contributed little to the enlargement of the human
spirit, but he had the honourable excuse of being a fool.
Lambert would have been called a silly man; Barker, with all his
cleverness, might have been called a stupid man. But mere silliness and
stupidity sank into insignificance in the presence of the awful and
mysterious treasures of foolishness apparently stored up in the small
figure that stood waiting for them outside Cicconani’s . The little man,
whose name was Auberon Quin, had an appearance compounded of a
baby and an owl. His round head, round eyes, seemed to have been
designed by nature playfully with a pair of compasses. His flat dark hair
and preposterously long frock-coat gave him something of the look of a
child’s “Noah.” When he entered a room of strangers, they mistook him
14
for a small boy, and wanted to take him on their knees, until he spoke,
when they perceived that a boy would have been more intelligent.
“I have been waiting quite a long time,” said Quin, mildly. “It’s awfully
funny I should see you coming up the street at last.”
“My mother used to tell people to come to places,” said the sage.
They were about to turn into the restaurant with a resigned air, when
their eyes were caught by something in the street. The weather, though
cold and blank, was now quite clear, and across the dull brown of the
wood pavement and between the dull grey terraces was moving
something not to be seen for miles round — not to be seen perhaps at
that time in England — a man dressed in bright colours. A small crowd
hung on the man’s heels.
The magnificence with which the green-clad gentleman walked down the
centre of the road would be something difficult to express in human
language. For it was an ingrained simplicity and arrogance, something in
the mere carriage of the head and body, which made ordinary moderns
in the street stare after him; but it had comparatively little to do with
actual conscious gestures or expression. In the matter of these merely
15
Suddenly that expression of inquiry vanished, none could tell why, and
was replaced by an expression of contentment. Amid the rapt attention
of the mob of idlers, the magnificent green gentleman deflected himself
from his direct course down the centre of the road and walked to one
side of it. He came to a halt opposite to a large poster of Colman’s
Mustard erected on a wooden hoarding. His spectators almost held their
breath.
He took from a small pocket in his uniform a little penknife; with this he
made a slash at the stretched paper. Completing the rest of the operation
with his fingers, he tore off a strip or rag of paper, yellow in colour and
wholly irregular in outline. Then for the first time the great being
addressed his adoring onlookers —
“Can any one,” he said, with a pleasing foreign accent, “lend me a pin?”
“Anything else I can do, sir?” asked Lambert, with the absurd politeness
of the Englishman when once embarrassed.
“I beg yours also, Señor,” said the stranger, bowing. “I was wondering
whether any of you had any red about you.”
“Any red about us? — well really — no, I don’t think I have — I used to
carry a red bandanna once, but —”
“I know,” said Auberon, vaguely mollified. “Where’s it been all the time?”
“I thank you, Señor, it is nothing. I can, since there is nothing else, fulfil
my own requirements.”
And standing for a second of thought with the penknife in his hand, he
stabbed his left palm. The blood fell with so full a stream that it struck
the stones without dripping. The foreigner pulled out his handkerchief
and tore a piece from it with his teeth. The rag was immediately soaked
in scarlet.
The red linen was pinned beside the yellow paper, and the foreigner took
off his hat.
While all the rest paused, in some disorder, little Mr. Auberon Quin ran
after the stranger and stopped him, with hat in hand. Considerably to
everybody’s astonishment, he addressed him in the purest Spanish —
The man in the green uniform had turned a fiery colour of pleasure at
the mere sound of his own language, and he accepted the invitation with
that profusion of bows which so often shows, in the case of the Southern
races, the falsehood of the notion that ceremony has nothing to do with
feeling.
“Señor,” he said, “your language is my own; but all my love for my people
shall not lead me to deny to yours the possession of so chivalrous an
entertainer. Let me say that the tongue is Spanish but the heart English.”
And he passed with the rest into Cicconani’s .
“Now, perhaps,” said Barker, over the fish and sherry, intensely polite,
but burning with curiosity, “perhaps it would be rude of me to ask why
you did that?”
“Did what, Señor?” asked the guest, who spoke English quite well,
though in a manner indefinably American.
“Well,” said the Englishman, in some confusion, “I mean tore a strip off a
hoarding and . . . er . . . cut yourself . . . and. . . . ”
“To tell you that, Señor,” answered the other, with a certain sad pride,
“involves merely telling you who I am. I am Juan del Fuego, President of
Nicaragua.”
The manner with which the President of Nicaragua leant back and drank
his sherry showed that to him this explanation covered all the facts
observed and a great deal more. Barker’s brow, however, was still a little
clouded.
“And the yellow paper,” he began, with anxious friendliness, “and the red
rag. . . . ”
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“The yellow paper and the red rag,” said Fuego, with indescribable
grandeur, “are the colours of Nicaragua.”
“Yes,” said the foreigner, snatching at the word. “You are right, generous
Englishman. An idea brilliant, a burning thought. Señor, you asked me
why, in my desire to see the colours of my country, I snatched at paper
and blood. Can you not understand the ancient sanctity of colours? The
Church has her symbolic colours. And think of what colours mean to us
— think of the position of one like myself, who can see nothing but those
two colours, nothing but the red and the yellow. To me all shapes are
equal, all common and noble things are in a democracy of combination.
Wherever there is a field of marigolds and the red cloak of an old woman,
there is Nicaragua. Wherever there is a field of poppies and a yellow
patch of sand, there is Nicaragua. Wherever there is a lemon and a red
sunset, there is my country. Wherever I see a red pillar-box and a yellow
sunset, there my heart beats. Blood and a splash of mustard can be my
heraldry. If there be yellow mud and red mud in the same ditch, it is
better to me than white stars.”
“And if,” said Quin, with equal enthusiasm, “there should happen to be
yellow wine and red wine at the same lunch, you could not confine
yourself to sherry. Let me order some Burgundy, and complete, as it
were, a sort of Nicaraguan heraldry in your inside.”
Barker was fiddling with his knife, and was evidently making up his
mind to say something, with the intense nervousness of the amiable
Englishman.
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“You need not hesitate in speaking to me,” he said. “I’m quite fully aware
that the whole tendency of the world of to-day is against Nicaragua and
against me. I shall not consider it any diminution of your evident
courtesy if you say what you think of the misfortunes that have laid my
republic in ruins.”
“You are most generous, President,” he said, with some hesitation over
the title, “and I will take advantage of your generosity to express the
doubts which, I must confess, we moderns have about such things as —
er — the Nicaraguan independence.”
“So your sympathies are,” said Del Fuego, quite calmly, “with the big
nation which —”
“The Señor will forgive me,” said the President. “May I ask the Señor
how, under ordinary circumstances, he catches a wild horse?”
“Precisely,” said the other; “and there ends your absorption of the
talents. That is what I complain of your cosmopolitanism. When you say
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you want all peoples to unite, you really mean that you want all peoples
to unite to learn the tricks of your people. If the Bedouin Arab does not
know how to read, some English missionary or schoolmaster must be
sent to teach him to read, but no one ever says, ‘This schoolmaster does
not know how to ride on a camel; let us pay a Bedouin to teach him.’ You
say your civilisation will include all talents. Will it? Do you really mean
to say that at the moment when the Esquimaux has learnt to vote for a
County Council, you will have learnt to spear a walrus? I recur to the
example I gave. In Nicaragua we had a way of catching wild horses — by
lassooing the fore feet — which was supposed to be the best in South
America. If you are going to include all the talents, go and do it. If not,
permit me to say what I have always said, that something went from the
world when Nicaragua was civilised.”
“You have good authority,” answered the Nicaraguan. “Many clever men
like you have trusted to civilisation. Many clever Babylonians, many
clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me,
in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is
particularly immortal about yours?”
“I think you do not quite understand, President, what ours is,” answered
Barker. “You judge it rather as if England was still a poor and pugnacious
island; you have been long out of Europe. Many things have happened.”
“And what,” asked the other, “would you call the summary of those
things?”
Barker laughed.
“The situation invites paradox,” he said. “We are, in a sense, the purest
democracy. We have become a despotism. Have you not noticed how
continually in history democracy becomes despotism? People call it the
decay of democracy. It is simply its fulfilment. Why take the trouble to
number and register and enfranchise all the innumerable John
Robinsons, when you can take one John Robinson with the same
intellect or lack of intellect as all the rest, and have done with it? The old
idealistic republicans used to found democracy on the idea that all men
were equally intelligent. Believe me, the sane and enduring democracy is
founded on the fact that all men are equally idiotic. Why should we not
choose out of them one as much as another. All that we want for
Government is a man not criminal and insane, who can rapidly look over
some petitions and sign some proclamations. To think what time was
wasted in arguing about the House of Lords, Tories saying it ought to be
preserved because it was clever, and Radicals saying it ought to be
destroyed because it was stupid, and all the time no one saw that it was
right because it was stupid, because that chance mob of ordinary men
thrown there by accident of blood, were a great democratic protest
against the Lower House, against the eternal insolence of the aristocracy
of talents. We have established now in England, the thing towards which
all systems have dimly groped, the dull popular despotism without
illusions. We want one man at the head of our State, not because he is
brilliant or virtuous, but because he is one man and not a chattering
crowd. To avoid the possible chance of hereditary diseases or such
things, we have abandoned hereditary monarchy. The King of England is
chosen like a juryman upon an official rotation list. Beyond that the
whole system is quietly despotic, and we have not found it raise a
murmur.”
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“Do you really mean,” asked the President, incredulously, “that you
choose any ordinary man that comes to hand and make him despot —
that you trust to the chance of some alphabetical list. . . . ”
“And why not?” cried Barker. “Did not half the historical nations trust to
the chance of the eldest sons of eldest sons, and did not half of them get
on tolerably well? To have a perfect system is impossible; to have a
system is indispensable. All hereditary monarchies were a matter of luck:
so are alphabetical monarchies. Can you find a deep philosophical
meaning in the difference between the Stuarts and the Hanoverians?
Believe me, I will undertake to find a deep philosophical meaning in the
contrast between the dark tragedy of the A’s, and the solid success of the
B’s.”
“And you risk it?” asked the other. “Though the man may be a tyrant or a
cynic or a criminal.”
“My church, sir,” he said, “has taught me to respect faith. I do not wish to
speak with any disrespect of yours, however fantastic. But do you really
mean that you will trust to the ordinary man, the man who may happen
to come next, as a good despot?”
“I do,” said Barker, simply. “He may not be a good man. But he will be a
good despot. For when he comes to a mere business routine of
government he will endeavour to do ordinary justice. Do we not assume
the same thing in a jury?”
personal one. It is, that if I were asked whether I would belong to it, I
should ask first of all, if I was not permitted, as an alternative, to be a
toad in a ditch. That is all. You cannot argue with the choice of the soul.”
“Of the soul,” said Barker, knitting his brows, “I cannot pretend to say
anything, but speaking in the interests of the public —”
“If you’ll excuse me, gentlemen,” he said, “I will step out for a moment
into the air.”
The old President looked after him with queerly vigilant eyes.
“He is a man, I think,” he said, “who cares for nothing but a joke. He is a
dangerous man.”
“Every man is dangerous,” said the old man without moving, “who cares
only for one thing. I was once dangerous myself.”
And with a pleasant smile he finished his coffee and rose, bowing
profoundly, passed out into the fog, which had again grown dense and
sombre. Three days afterwards they heard that he had died quietly in
lodgings in Soho.
Drowned somewhere else in the dark sea of fog was a little figure shaking
and quaking, with what might at first sight have seemed terror or ague:
but which was really that strange malady, a lonely laughter. He was
24
repeating over and over to himself with a rich accent —“But speaking in
the interests of the public. . . . ”
25
“In a little square garden of yellow roses, beside the sea,” said Auberon
Quin, “there was a Nonconformist minister who had never been to
Wimbledon. His family did not understand his sorrow or the strange
look in his eyes. But one day they repented their neglect, for they heard
that a body had been found on the shore, battered, but wearing patent
leather boots. As it happened, it turned out not to be the minister at all.
But in the dead man’s pocket there was a return ticket to Maidstone.”
There was a short pause as Quin and his friends Barker and Lambert
went swinging on through the slushy grass of Kensington Gardens. Then
Auberon resumed.
They walked on further and faster, wading through higher grass as they
began to climb a slope.
“I perceive,” continued Auberon, “that you have passed the test, and
consider the anecdote excruciatingly funny; since you say nothing. Only
coarse humour is received with pot-house applause. The great anecdote
is received in silence, like a benediction. You felt pretty benedicted,
didn’t you, Barker?”
“Do you know,” said Quin, with a sort of idiot gaiety, “I have lots of
stories as good as that. Listen to this one.”
“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.”
27
“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.
“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.”
“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.”
28
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.
“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 régime, 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.
“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.”
30
“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 —
“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
31
“But, your Majesty,” said the officer, after a moment’s bewilderment and
manipulation, “you’re putting it on with the tails in front.”
“The reversal of the obvious,” said the King, calmly, “is as near as we can
come to ritual with our imperfect apparatus. Lead on.”
The rest of that afternoon and evening was to Barker and Lambert a
nightmare, which they could not properly realise or recall. The King,
with his coat on the wrong way, went towards the streets that were
awaiting him, and the old Kensington Palace which was the Royal
residence. As he passed small groups of men, the groups turned into
crowds, and gave forth sounds which seemed strange in welcoming an
autocrat. Barker walked behind, his brain reeling, and, as the crowds
grew thicker and thicker, the sounds became more and more unusual.
And when he had reached the great market-place opposite the church,
Barker knew that he had reached it, though he was roods behind,
because a cry went up such as had never before greeted any of the kings
of the earth.
32
BOOK 2
33
“To stop all this foolery, of course,” replied Barker; and he disappeared
into the room.
Fidgetting with his fingers, and scarcely knowing what he was doing, the
young politician held it out.
“A quaint old custom,” he explained, smiling above the ruins. “When the
King receives the representatives of the House of Barker, the hat of the
latter is immediately destroyed in this manner. It represents the absolute
finality of the act of homage expressed in the removal of it. It declares
that never until that hat shall once more appear upon your head (a
contingency which I firmly believe to be remote) shall the House of
Barker rebel against the Crown of England.”
“What does it all mean?” cried the other, with a gesture of passionate
rationality. “Are you mad?”
34
“Not in the least,” replied the King, pleasantly. “Madmen are always
serious; they go mad from lack of humour. You are looking serious
yourself, James.”
“Why can’t you keep it to your own private life?” expostulated the other.
“You’ve got plenty of money, and plenty of houses now to play the fool in,
but in the interests of the public —”
“Epigrammatic,” said the King, shaking his finger sadly at him. “None of
your daring scintillations here. As to why I don’t do it in private, I rather
fail to understand your question. The answer is of comparative limpidity.
I don’t do it in private, because it is funnier to do it in public. You appear
to think that it would be amusing to be dignified in the banquet hall and
in the street, and at my own fireside (I could procure a fireside) to keep
the company in a roar. But that is what every one does. Every one is
grave in public, and funny in private. My sense of humour suggests the
reversal of this; it suggests that one should be funny in public, and
solemn in private. I desire to make the State functions, parliaments,
coronations, and so on, one roaring old-fashioned pantomime. But, on
the other hand, I shut myself up alone in a small store-room for two
hours a day, where I am so dignified that I come out quite ill.”
By this time Barker was walking up and down the room, his frock coat
flapping like the black wings of a bird.
“Well, you will ruin the country, that’s all,” he said shortly.
“It seems to me,” said Auberon, “that the tradition of ten centuries is
being broken, and the House of Barker is rebelling against the Crown of
England. It would be with regret (for I admire your appearance) that I
should be obliged forcibly to decorate your head with the remains of this
hat, but —”
The King stopped sharply in the act of lifting the silken remnants,
dropped them, and walked up to Barker, looking at him steadily.
35
“I made a kind of vow,” he said, “that I would not talk seriously, which
always means answering silly questions. But the strong man will always
be gentle with politicians.
Barker ran round the room after him, bombarding him with demands
and entreaties. But he received no response except in the new language.
He came out banging the door again, and sick like a man coming on
shore. As he strode along the streets he found himself suddenly opposite
Cicconani’s restaurant, and for some reason there rose up before him the
green fantastic figure of the Spanish General, standing, as he had seen
him last, at the door, with the words on his lips, “You cannot argue with
the choice of the soul.”
The King came out from his dancing with the air of a man of business
legitimately tired. He put on an overcoat, lit a cigar, and went out into
the purple night.
“I have a few notes,” he said, “for my dying speech;” and he turned over
the leaves. “Dying speech for political assassination; ditto, if by former
friend — h’m, h’m. Dying speech for death at hands of injured husband
(repentant). Dying speech for same (cynical). I am not quite sure which
meets the present. . . . ”
“I’m the King of the Castle,” said the boy, truculently, and very pleased
with nothing in particular.
The King was a kind-hearted man, and very fond of children, like all
people who are fond of the ridiculous.
“Infant,” he said, “I’m glad you are so stalwart a defender of your old
inviolate Notting Hill. Look up nightly to that peak, my child, where it
lifts itself among the stars so ancient, so lonely, so unutterably Notting.
37
So long as you are ready to die for the sacred mountain, even if it were
ringed with all the armies of Bayswater —”
“Yes, sir,” said Captain Bowler, rubbing his nose, “you are a member of
‘The Encouragers of Egyptian Renaissance,’ and ‘The Teutonic Tombs
Club,’ and ‘The Society for the Recovery of London Antiquities,’ and —”
The Society for the Recovery of London Antiquities met a month after in
a corrugated iron hall on the outskirts of one of the southern suburbs of
London. A large number of people had collected there under the coarse
and flaring gas-jets when the King arrived, perspiring and genial. On
taking off his great-coat, he was perceived to be in evening dress,
wearing the Garter. His appearance at the small table, adorned only with
a glass of water, was received with respectful cheering.
The chairman (Mr. Huggins) said that he was sure that they had all been
pleased to listen to such distinguished lecturers as they had heard for
some time past (hear, hear). Mr. Burton (hear, hear), Mr. Cambridge,
Professor King (loud and continued cheers), our old friend Peter Jessop,
Sir William White (loud laughter), and other eminent men, had done
honour to their little venture (cheers). But there were other
circumstances which lent a certain unique quality to the present occasion
(hear, hear). So far as his recollection went, and in connection with the
Society for the Recovery of London Antiquities it went very far (loud
cheers), he did not remember that any of their lecturers had borne the
title of King. He would therefore call upon King Auberon briefly to
address the meeting.
The King began by saying that this speech might be regarded as the first
declaration of his new policy for the nation. “At this supreme hour of my
life I feel that to no one but the members of the Society for the Recovery
of London Antiquities can I open my heart (cheers). If the world turns
upon my policy, and the storms of popular hostility begin to rise (no, no),
I feel that it is here, with my brave Recoverers around me, that I can best
meet them, sword in hand” (loud cheers).
His Majesty then went on to explain that, now old age was creeping upon
him, he proposed to devote his remaining strength to bringing about a
keener sense of local patriotism in the various municipalities of London.
How few of them knew the legends of their own boroughs! How many
there were who had never heard of the true origin of the Wink of
Wandsworth! What a large proportion of the younger generation in
39
The King paused, visibly affected, but collecting himself, resumed once
more.
“I trust that to very few of you, at least, I need dwell on the sublime
origins of these legends. The very names of your boroughs bear witness
to them. So long as Hammersmith is called Hammersmith, its people
will live in the shadow of that primal hero, the Blacksmith, who led the
democracy of the Broadway into battle till he drove the chivalry of
Kensington before him and overthrew them at that place which in
honour of the best blood of the defeated aristocracy is still called
Kensington Gore. Men of Hammersmith will not fail to remember that
the very name of Kensington originated from the lips of their hero. For at
the great banquet of reconciliation held after the war, when the
disdainful oligarchs declined to join in the songs of the men of the
Broadway (which are to this day of a rude and popular character), the
great Republican leader, with his rough humour, said the words which
are written in gold upon his monument, ‘Little birds that can sing and
won’t sing, must be made to sing.’ So that the Eastern Knights were
called Cansings or Kensings ever afterwards. But you also have great
memories, O men of Kensington! You showed that you could sing, and
sing great war-songs. Even after the dark day of Kensington Gore,
history will not forget those three Knights who guarded your disordered
retreat from Hyde Park (so called from your hiding there), those three
Knights after whom Knightsbridge is named. Nor will it forget the day of
your re-emergence, purged in the fire of calamity, cleansed of your
40
Here the King buried his face in his handkerchief and hurriedly left the
platform, overcome by emotions.
The members of the Society for the Recovery of London Antiquities rose
in an indescribable state of vagueness. Some were purple with
indignation; an intellectual few were purple with laughter; the great
majority found their minds a blank. There remains a tradition that one
pale face with burning blue eyes remained fixed upon the lecturer, and
after the lecture a red-haired boy ran out of the room.
42
The King got up early next morning and came down three steps at a time
like a schoolboy. Having eaten his breakfast hurriedly, but with an
appetite, he summoned one of the highest officials of the Palace, and
presented him with a shilling. “Go and buy me,” he said, “a shilling
paint-box, which you will get, unless the mists of time mislead me, in a
shop at the corner of the second and dirtier street that leads out of
Rochester Row. I have already requested the Master of the Buckhounds
to provide me with cardboard. It seemed to me (I know not why) that it
fell within his department.”
The King was happy all that morning with his cardboard and his paint-
box. He was engaged in designing the uniforms and coats-of-arms for
the various municipalities of London. They gave him deep and no
inconsiderable thought. He felt the responsibility.
“I cannot think,” he said, “why people should think the names of places
in the country more poetical than those in London. Shallow romanticists
go away in trains and stop in places called Hugmy-in-the-Hole, or
Bumps-on-the-Puddle. And all the time they could, if they liked, go and
live at a place with the dim, divine name of St. John’s Wood. I have never
been to St. John’s Wood. I dare not. I should be afraid of the
innumerable night of fir trees, afraid to come upon a blood-red cup and
the beating of the wings of the Eagle. But all these things can be
imagined by remaining reverently in the Harrow train.”
As he was reflecting in this vein, the door was flung open, and an official
announced Mr. Barker and Mr. Lambert.
Mr. Barker and Mr. Lambert were not particularly surprised to find the
King sitting on the floor amid a litter of water-colour sketches. They were
not particularly surprised because the last time they had called on him
they had found him sitting on the floor, surrounded by a litter of
children’s bricks, and the time before surrounded by a litter of wholly
unsuccessful attempts to make paper darts. But the trend of the royal
infant’s remarks, uttered from amid this infantile chaos, was not quite
the same affair.
For some time they let him babble on, conscious that his remarks meant
nothing. And then a horrible thought began to steal over the mind of
James Barker. He began to think that the King’s remarks did not mean
nothing.
“In God’s name, Auberon,” he suddenly volleyed out, startling the quiet
hall, “you don’t mean that you are really going to have these city guards
and city walls and things?”
“I am, indeed,” said the infant, in a quiet voice. “Why shouldn’t I have
them? I have modelled them precisely on your political principles. Do
you know what I’ve done, Barker? I’ve behaved like a true Barkerian. I’ve
. . . but perhaps it won’t interest you, the account of my Barkerian
conduct.”
“But, in God’s name, don’t you see, Quin, that the thing is quite
different? In the centre it doesn’t matter so much, just because the whole
object of despotism is to get some sort of unity. But if any damned parish
can go to any damned man —”
“I see your difficulty,” said King Auberon, calmly. “You feel that your
talents may be neglected. Listen!” And he rose with immense
magnificence. “I solemnly give to my liege subject, James Barker, my
special and splendid favour, the right to override the obvious text of the
Charter of the Cities, and to be, in his own right, Lord High Provost of
South Kensington. And now, my dear James, you are all right. Good
day.”
The reception which the Charter of the Cities met at the hands of the
public may mildly be described as mixed. In one sense it was popular
enough. In many happy homes that remarkable legal document was read
aloud on winter evenings amid uproarious appreciation, when
everything had been learnt by heart from that quaint but immortal old
classic, Mr. W. W. Jacobs. But when it was discovered that the King had
45
The Lord High Provost of the Good and Valiant City of West Kensington
wrote a respectful letter to the King, explaining that upon State occasions
it would, of course, be his duty to observe what formalities the King
thought proper, but that it was really awkward for a decent householder
not to be allowed to go out and put a post-card in a pillar-box without
being escorted by five heralds, who announced, with formal cries and
blasts of a trumpet, that the Lord High Provost desired to catch the post.
The Lord High Provost of Shepherd’s Bush said his wife did not like men
hanging round the kitchen.
Ten years had not tired the King of his joke. There were still new faces to
be seen looking out from the symbolic head-gears he had designed,
gazing at him from amid the pastoral ribbons of Shepherd’s Bush or
from under the sombre hoods of the Blackfriars Road. And the interview
which was promised him with the Provost of North Kensington he
anticipated with a particular pleasure, for “he never really enjoyed,” he
said, “the full richness of the mediæval garments unless the people
compelled to wear them were very angry and business-like.”
Mr. Buck was both. At the King’s command the door of the audience-
chamber was thrown open and a herald appeared in the purple colours of
Mr. Buck’s commonwealth emblazoned with the Great Eagle which the
King had attributed to North Kensington, in vague reminiscence of
Russia, for he always insisted on regarding North Kensington as some
kind of semi-arctic neighbourhood. The herald announced that the
Provost of that city desired audience of the King.
47
“From North Kensington?” said the King, rising graciously. “What news
does he bring from that land of high hills and fair women? He is
welcome.”
The herald advanced into the room, and was immediately followed by
twelve guards clad in purple, who were followed by an attendant bearing
the banner of the Eagle, who was followed by another attendant bearing
the keys of the city upon a cushion, who was followed by Mr. Buck in a
great hurry. When the King saw his strong animal face and steady eyes,
he knew that he was in the presence of a great man of business, and
consciously braced himself.
“Well, well,” he said, cheerily coming down two or three steps from a
daïs, and striking his hands lightly together, “I am glad to see you. Never
mind, never mind. Ceremony is not everything.”
“Never mind, never mind,” said the King, gaily. “A knowledge of Courts
is by no means an unmixed merit; you will do it next time, no doubt.”
The man of business looked at him sulkily from under his black brows
and said again without show of civility —
“Well, well,” replied the King, good-naturedly, “if you ask me I don’t
mind telling you, not because I myself attach any importance to these
forms in comparison with the Honest Heart. But it is usual — it is usual
— that is all, for a man when entering the presence of Royalty to lie down
on his back on the floor and elevating his feet towards heaven (as the
source of Royal power) to say three times ‘Monarchical institutions
improve the manners.’ But there, there — such pomp is far less truly
dignified than your simple kindliness.”
The Provost’s face was red with anger, and he maintained silence.
“And now,” said the King, lightly, and with the exasperating air of a man
softening a snub; “what delightful weather we are having! You must find
your official robes warm, my Lord. I designed them for your own snow-
bound land.”
48
“Right,” said the King, nodding a great number of times with quite
unmeaning solemnity; “right, right, right. Business, as the sad glad old
Persian said, is business. Be punctual. Rise early. Point the pen to the
shoulder. Point the pen to the shoulder, for you know not whence you
come nor why. Point the pen to the shoulder, for you know not when you
go nor where.”
The Provost pulled a number of papers from his pocket and savagely
flapped them open.
The King, who was rather inattentively engaged in drawing the Provost’s
nose with his finger on the window-pane, heard the last two words.
“The chief point is,” continued Buck, doggedly, “that the only part that is
really in question is one dirty little street — Pump Street — a street with
nothing in it but a public-house and a penny toy-shop, and that sort of
thing. All the respectable people of Notting Hill have accepted our
compensation. But the ineffable Wayne sticks out over Pump Street. Says
he’s Provost of Notting Hill. He’s only Provost of Pump Street.”
“And drop the whole scheme!” cried out Buck, with a burst of brutal
spirit. “I’ll be damned if we do. No. I’m for sending in workmen to pull
down without more ado.”
“Strike for the purple Eagle!” cried the King, hot with historical
associations.
“I’ll tell you what it is,” said Buck, losing his temper altogether. “If your
Majesty would spend less time in insulting respectable people with your
silly coats-of-arms, and more time over the business of the nation —”
“The situation is not bad,” he said; “the haughty burgher defying the
King in his own Palace. The burgher’s head should be thrown back and
the right arm extended; the left may be lifted towards Heaven, but that I
leave to your private religious sentiment. I have sunk back in this chair,
stricken with baffled fury. Now again, please.”
Buck’s mouth opened like a dog’s, but before he could speak another
herald appeared at the door.
“It is a fit symbol,” said the King, “your immortal bay-wreath. Fulham
may seek for wealth, and Kensington for art, but when did the men of
Bayswater care for anything but glory?”
“Our cousin of Bayswater,” said the King, with delight; “what can we get
for you?” The King was heard also distinctly to mutter, “Cold beef, cold
‘am, cold chicken,” his voice dying into silence.
“I came to see your Majesty,” said the Provost of Bayswater, whose name
was Wilson, “about that Pump Street affair.”
“I have just been explaining the situation to his Majesty,” said Buck,
curtly, but recovering his civility. “I am not sure, however, whether his
Majesty knows how much the matter affects you also.”
“It affects both of us, yer see, yer Majesty, as this scheme was started for
the benefit of the ‘ole neighbourhood. So Mr. Buck and me we put our
‘eads together —”
“Perfect!” he cried in ecstacy. “Your heads together! I can see it! Can’t
you do it now? Oh, do do it now!”
“I suppose,” he began bitterly, but the King stopped him with a gesture of
listening.
“Hush,” he said, “I think I hear some one else coming. I seem to hear
another herald, a herald whose boots creak.”
“The Lord High Provost of South Kensington!” cried the King. “Why, that
is my old friend James Barker! What does he want, I wonder? If the
tender memories of friendship have not grown misty, I fancy he wants
something for himself, probably money. How are you, James?”
Mr. James Barker, whose guard was attired in a splendid blue, and
whose blue banner bore three gold birds singing, rushed, in his blue and
gold robes, into the room. Despite the absurdity of all the dresses, it was
worth noticing that he carried his better than the rest, though he loathed
51
The King swept his eyes anxiously round the room, which now blazed
with the trappings of three cities.
“Yes, your Majesty,” said Mr. Wilson of Bayswater, a little eagerly. “What
does yer Majesty think necessary?”
“A little yellow,” said the King, firmly. “Send for the Provost of West
Kensington.”
Amid some materialistic protests he was sent for, and arrived with his
yellow halberdiers in his saffron robes, wiping his forehead with a
handkerchief. After all, placed as he was, he had a good deal to say on the
matter.
“Welcome, West Kensington,” said the King. “I have long wished to see
you touching that matter of the Hammersmith land to the south of the
Rowton House. Will you hold it feudally from the Provost of
Hammersmith? You have only to do him homage by putting his left arm
in his overcoat and then marching home in state.”
“No, your Majesty; I’d rather not,” said the Provost of West Kensington,
who was a pale young man with a fair moustache and whiskers, who kept
a successful dairy. The King struck him heartily on the shoulder.
“The fierce old West Kensington blood,” he said; “they are not wise who
ask it to do homage.”
Then he glanced again round the room. It was full of a roaring sunset of
colour, and he enjoyed the sight, possible to so few artists — the sight of
his own dreams moving and blazing before him. In the foreground the
52
yellow of the West Kensington liveries outlined itself against the dark
blue draperies of South Kensington. The crests of these again brightened
suddenly into green as the almost woodland colours of Bayswater rose
behind them. And over and behind all, the great purple plumes of North
Kensington showed almost funereal and black.
They carried a yellow banner with a great red lion, named by the King as
the Notting Hill emblem, after a small public-house in the
neighbourhood, which he once frequented.
Between the two lines of his followers there advanced towards the King a
tall, red-haired young man, with high features and bold blue eyes. He
would have been called handsome, but that a certain indefinable air of
his nose being too big for his face, and his feet for his legs, gave him a
look of awkwardness and extreme youth. His robes were red, according
to the King’s heraldry, and, alone among the Provosts, he was girt with a
great sword. This was Adam Wayne, the intractable Provost of Notting
Hill.
The King flung himself back in his chair, and rubbed his hands.
“What a day, what a day!” he said to himself. “Now there’ll be a row. I’d
no idea it would be such fun as it is. These Provosts are so very
indignant, so very reasonable, so very right. This fellow, by the look in
his eyes, is even more indignant than the rest. No sign in those large blue
eyes, at any rate, of ever having heard of a joke. He’ll remonstrate with
the others, and they’ll remonstrate with him, and they’ll all make
themselves sumptuously happy remonstrating with me.”
54
Mr. Buck made a bitter face, and James Barker’s nostrils curled; Wilson
began to giggle faintly, and the Provost of West Kensington followed in a
smothered way. But the big blue eyes of Adam Wayne never changed,
and he called out in an odd, boyish voice down the hall —
And with a great gesture he flung it down on the ground, and knelt on
one knee behind it.
“You speak well, sire,” said Adam Wayne, “as you ever speak, when you
say that my love is not less than the love of these. Small would it be if it
were not more. For I am the heir of your scheme — the child of the great
Charter. I stand here for the rights the Charter gave me, and I swear, by
your sacred crown, that where I stand, I stand fast.”
Then Buck said, in his jolly, jarring voice: “Is the whole world mad?”
mad but the humorist, who cares for nothing and possesses everything. I
thought that there was only one humorist in England. Fools! — dolts! —
open your cows’ eyes; there are two! In Notting Hill — in that
unpromising elevation — there has been born an artist! You thought to
spoil my joke, and bully me out of it, by becoming more and more
modern, more and more practical, more and more bustling and rational.
Oh, what a feast it was to answer you by becoming more and more
august, more and more gracious, more and more ancient and mellow!
But this lad has seen how to bowl me out. He has answered me back,
vaunt for vaunt, rhetoric for rhetoric. He has lifted the only shield I
cannot break, the shield of an impenetrable pomposity. Listen to him.
You have come, my Lord, about Pump Street?”
“About the city of Notting Hill,” answered Wayne, proudly, “of which
Pump Street is a living and rejoicing part.”
“That which is large enough for the rich to covet,” said Wayne, drawing
up his head, “is large enough for the poor to defend.”
The King slapped both his legs, and waved his feet for a second in the air.
“Every respectable person in Notting Hill,” cut in Buck, with his cold,
coarse voice, “is for us and against you. I have plenty of friends in
Notting Hill.”
“Your friends are those who have taken your gold for other men’s
hearthstones, my Lord Buck,” said Provost Wayne. “I can well believe
they are your friends.”
“They’ve never sold dirty toys, anyhow,” said Buck, laughing shortly.
“They’ve sold dirtier things,” said Wayne, calmly: “they have sold
themselves.”
“It’s no good, my Buckling,” said the King, rolling about on his chair.
“You can’t cope with this chivalrous eloquence. You can’t cope with an
artist. You can’t cope with the humorist of Notting Hill. Oh, Nunc
dimittis— that I have lived to see this day! Provost Wayne, you stand
firm?”
56
“Let them wait and see,” said Wayne. “If I stood firm before, do you
think I shall weaken now that I have seen the face of the King? For I fight
for something greater, if greater there can be, than the hearthstones of
my people and the Lordship of the Lion. I fight for your royal vision, for
the great dream you dreamt of the League of the Free Cities. You have
given me this liberty. If I had been a beggar and you had flung me a coin,
if I had been a peasant in a dance and you had flung me a favour, do you
think I would have let it be taken by any ruffians on the road? This
leadership and liberty of Notting Hill is a gift from your Majesty, and if it
is taken from me, by God! it shall be taken in battle, and the noise of that
battle shall be heard in the flats of Chelsea and in the studios of St.
John’s Wood.”
“It is too much — it is too much,” said the King. “Nature is weak. I must
speak to you, brother artist, without further disguise. Let me ask you a
solemn question. Adam Wayne, Lord High Provost of Notting Hill, don’t
you think it splendid?”
“Bowled out again,” said the King. “You will keep up the pose. Funnily, of
course, it is serious. But seriously, isn’t it funny?”
“Hang it all, don’t play any more. The whole business — the Charter of
the Cities. Isn’t it immense?”
“Oh, hang you! But, of course, I see. You want me to clear the room of
these reasonable sows. You want the two humorists alone together.
Leave us, gentlemen.”
Buck threw a sour look at Barker, and at a sullen signal the whole
pageant of blue and green, of red, gold, and purple, rolled out of the
room, leaving only two in the great hall, the King sitting in his seat on the
daïs, and the red-clad figure still kneeling on the floor before his fallen
sword.
The King bounded down the steps and smacked Provost Wayne on the
back.
57
“Before the stars were made,” he cried, “we were made for each other. It
is too beautiful. Think of the valiant independence of Pump Street. That
is the real thing. It is the deification of the ludicrous.”
“Oh, come, come,” said the King, impatiently, “you needn’t keep it up
with me. The augurs must wink sometimes from sheer fatigue of the
eyelids. Let us enjoy this for half an hour, not as actors, but as dramatic
critics. Isn’t it a joke?”
“I do not understand your Majesty. I cannot believe that while I fight for
your royal charter your Majesty deserts me for these dogs of the gold
hunt.”
“Oh, damn your — But what’s this? What the devil’s this?”
The King stared into the young Provost’s face, and in the twilight of the
room began to see that his face was quite white and his lip shaking.
“What in God’s name is the matter?” cried Auberon, holding his wrist.
Wayne flung back his face, and the tears were shining on it.
“I am only a boy,” he said, “but it’s true. I would paint the Red Lion on
my shield if I had only my blood.”
“My God in Heaven!” he said; “is it possible that there is within the four
seas of Britain a man who takes Notting Hill seriously?”
The King said nothing, but merely went back up the steps of the daïs, like
a man dazed. He fell back in his chair again and kicked his heels.
58
“If this sort of thing is to go on,” he said weakly, “I shall begin to doubt
the superiority of art to life. In Heaven’s name, do not play with me. Do
you really mean that you are — God help me! — a Notting Hill patriot;
that you are —?”
Wayne made a violent gesture, and the King soothed him wildly.
“All right — all right — I see you are; but let me take it in. You do really
propose to fight these modern improvers with their boards and
inspectors and surveyors and all the rest of it?”
“And I suppose,” he said, “that you think that the dentists and small
tradesmen and maiden ladies who inhabit Notting Hill, will rally with
war-hymns to your standard?”
“And I suppose,” said the King, with his head back among the cushions,
“that it never crossed your mind that”— his voice seemed to lose itself
luxuriantly —“never crossed your mind that any one ever thought that
the idea of a Notting Hill idealism was — er — slightly — slightly
ridiculous?”
“Of course they think so,” said Wayne. “What was the meaning of
mocking the prophets?”
“You have been my tutor, Sire,” said the Provost, “in all that is high and
honourable.”
“It was your Majesty who first stirred my dim patriotism into flame. Ten
years ago, when I was a boy (I am only nineteen), I was playing on the
slope of Pump Street, with a wooden sword and a paper helmet,
dreaming of great wars. In an angry trance I struck out with my sword,
and stood petrified, for I saw that I had struck you, Sire, my King, as you
59
“Oh, Lord, Lord, Lord,” he murmured, “what a life! what a life! All my
work! I seem to have done it all. So you’re the red-haired boy that hit me
in the waistcoat. What have I done? God, what have I done? I thought I
would have a joke, and I have created a passion. I tried to compose a
burlesque, and it seems to be turning halfway through into an epic. What
is to be done with such a world? In the Lord’s name, wasn’t the joke
broad and bold enough? I abandoned my subtle humour to amuse you,
and I seem to have brought tears to your eyes. What’s to be done with
people when you write a pantomime for them — call the sausages classic
festoons, and the policeman cut in two a tragedy of public duty? But why
am I talking? Why am I asking questions of a nice young gentleman who
is totally mad? What is the good of it? What is the good of anything? Oh,
Lord! Oh, Lord!”
“Don’t you really think the sacred Notting Hill at all absurd?”
“Notting Hill,” said the Provost, simply, “is a rise or high ground of the
common earth, on which men have built houses to live, in which they are
born, fall in love, pray, marry, and die. Why should I think it absurd?”
The King’s thoughts were in a kind of rout; he could not collect them.
“Well, I—” began Auberon —“I admit I have generally thought it had its
graver side.”
“Then you are wrong,” said Wayne, with incredible violence. “Crucifixion
is comic. It is exquisitely diverting. It was an absurd and obscene kind of
impaling reserved for people who were made to be laughed at — for
slaves and provincials, for dentists and small tradesmen, as you would
say. I have seen the grotesque gallows-shape, which the little Roman
gutter-boys scribbled on walls as a vulgar joke, blazing on the pinnacles
of the temples of the world. And shall I turn back?”
“This laughter with which men tyrannise is not the great power you think
it. Peter was crucified, and crucified head downwards. What could be
funnier than the idea of a respectable old Apostle upside down? What
could be more in the style of your modern humour? But what was the
good of it? Upside down or right side up, Peter was Peter to mankind.
Upside down he stills hangs over Europe, and millions move and breathe
only in the life of his Church.”
“There is something in what you say,” he said. “You seem to have been
thinking, young man.”
“Only feeling, sire,” answered the Provost. “I was born, like other men, in
a spot of the earth which I loved because I had played boys’ games there,
and fallen in love, and talked with my friends through nights that were
nights of the gods. And I feel the riddle. These little gardens where we
told our loves. These streets where we brought out our dead. Why should
they be commonplace? Why should they be absurd? Why should it be
grotesque to say that a pillar-box is poetic when for a year I could not see
a red pillar-box against the yellow evening in a certain street without
being wracked with something of which God keeps the secret, but which
is stronger than sorrow or joy? Why should any one be able to raise a
laugh by saying ‘the Cause of Notting Hill’? — Notting Hill where
thousands of immortal spirits blaze with alternate hope and fear.”
Auberon was flicking dust off his sleeve with quite a new seriousness on
his face, distinct from the owlish solemnity which was the pose of his
humour.
“It is very difficult,” he said at last. “It is a damned difficult thing. I see
what you mean; I agree with you even up to a point — or I should like to
agree with you, if I were young enough to be a prophet and poet. I feel a
truth in everything you say until you come to the words ‘Notting Hill.’
And then I regret to say that the old Adam awakes roaring with laughter
and makes short work of the new Adam, whose name is Wayne.”
For the first time Provost Wayne was silent, and stood gazing dreamily at
the floor.
Evening was closing in, and the room had grown darker.
The Provost of Notting Hill seemed to have fallen into a kind of trance;
in his eyes was an elvish light.
62
“I know of a magic wand, but it is a wand that only one or two may
rightly use, and only seldom. It is a fairy wand of great fear, stronger
than those who use it — often frightful, often wicked to use. But whatever
is touched with it is never again wholly common; whatever is touched
with it takes a magic from outside the world. If I touch, with this fairy
wand, the railways and the roads of Notting Hill, men will love them, and
be afraid of them for ever.”
“What the devil are you talking about?” asked the King.
“There it is,” said Wayne; and pointed to the floor, where his sword lay
flat and shining.
“The sword!” cried the King; and sprang up straight on the daïs.
“Yes, yes,” cried Wayne, hoarsely. “The things touched by that are not
vulgar; the things touched by that —”
“You will shed blood for that!” he cried. “For a cursed point of view —”
“Oh, you kings, you kings!” cried out Adam, in a burst of scorn. “How
humane you are, how tender, how considerate! You will make war for a
frontier, or the imports of a foreign harbour; you will shed blood for the
precise duty on lace, or the salute to an admiral. But for the things that
make life itself worthy or miserable — how humane you are! I say here,
and I know well what I speak of, there were never any necessary wars but
the religious wars. There were never any just wars but the religious wars.
There were never any humane wars but the religious wars. For these men
were fighting for something that claimed, at least, to be the happiness of
a man, the virtue of a man. A Crusader thought, at least, that Islam hurt
the soul of every man, king or tinker, that it could really capture. I think
Buck and Barker and these rich vultures hurt the soul of every man, hurt
every inch of the ground, hurt every brick of the houses, that they can
63
really capture. Do you think I have no right to fight for Notting Hill, you
whose English Government has so often fought for tomfooleries? If, as
your rich friends say, there are no gods, and the skies are dark above us,
what should a man fight for, but the place where he had the Eden of
childhood and the short heaven of first love? If no temples and no
scriptures are sacred, what is sacred if a man’s own youth is not sacred?”
“It is hard,” he said, biting his lips, “to assent to a view so desperate — so
responsible. . . . ”
As he spoke, the door of the audience chamber fell ajar, and through the
aperture came, like the sudden chatter of a bird, the high, nasal, but well-
bred voice of Barker.
“What the devil is all this? What am I saying? What are you saying? Have
you hypnotised me? Curse your uncanny blue eyes! Let me go. Give me
back my sense of humour. Give it me back — give it me back, I say!”
The King fell back in his chair, and went into a roar of Rabelaisian
laughter.
BOOK 3
65
A little while after the King’s accession a small book of poems appeared,
called “Hymns on the Hill.” They were not good poems, nor was the book
successful, but it attracted a certain amount of attention from one
particular school of critics. The King himself, who was a member of the
school, reviewed it in his capacity of literary critic to “Straight from the
Stables,” a sporting journal. They were known as the Hammock School,
because it had been calculated malignantly by an enemy that no less than
thirteen of their delicate criticisms had begun with the words, “I read
this book in a hammock: half asleep in the sleepy sunlight, I . . . ”; after
that there were important differences. Under these conditions they liked
everything, but especially everything silly. “Next to authentic goodness in
a book,” they said —“next to authentic goodness in a book (and that,
alas! we never find) we desire a rich badness.” Thus it happened that
their praise (as indicating the presence of a rich badness) was not
universally sought after, and authors became a little disquieted when
they found the eye of the Hammock School fixed upon them with
peculiar favour.
The peculiarity of “Hymns on the Hill” was the celebration of the poetry
of London as distinct from the poetry of the country. This sentiment or
affectation was, of course, not uncommon in the twentieth century, nor
was it, although sometimes exaggerated, and sometimes artificial, by any
means without a great truth at its root, for there is one respect in which a
town must be more poetical than the country, since it is closer to the
spirit of man; for London, if it be not one of the masterpieces of man, is
at least one of his sins. A street is really more poetical than a meadow,
because a street has a secret. A street is going somewhere, and a meadow
nowhere. But, in the case of the book called “Hymns on the Hill,” there
was another peculiarity, which the King pointed out with great acumen
in his review. He was naturally interested in the matter, for he had
himself published a volume of lyrics about London under his pseudonym
of “Daisy Daydream.”
This difference, as the King pointed out, consisted in the fact that, while
mere artificers like “Daisy Daydream” (on whose elaborate style the
King, over his signature of “Thunderbolt,” was perhaps somewhat too
66
“Surely,” wrote the King, “no one but a woman could have written those
lines. A woman has always a weakness for nature; with her art is only
beautiful as an echo or shadow of it. She is praising the hansom cab by
theme and theory, but her soul is still a child by the sea, picking up
shells. She can never be utterly of the town, as a man can; indeed, do we
not speak (with sacred propriety) of ‘a man about town’? Who ever spoke
of a woman about town? However much, physically, ‘about town’ a
woman may be, she still models herself on nature; she tries to carry
nature with her; she bids grasses to grow on her head, and furry beasts to
bite her about the throat. In the heart of a dim city, she models her hat
on a flaring cottage garden of flowers. We, with our nobler civic
sentiment, model ours on a chimney pot; the ensign of civilisation. And
rather than be without birds, she will commit massacre, that she may
turn her head into a tree, with dead birds to sing on it.”
This kind of thing went on for several pages, and then the critic
remembered his subject, and returned to it.
they were shadows and colours. He saw all this because he was a poet,
though in practice a bad poet. It is too often forgotten that just as a bad
man is nevertheless a man, so a bad poet is nevertheless a poet.
He was a genuine natural mystic, one of those who live on the border of
fairyland. But he was perhaps the first to realise how often the boundary
of fairyland runs through a crowded city. Twenty feet from him (for he
was very short-sighted) the red and white and yellow suns of the gas-
lights thronged and melted into each other like an orchard of fiery trees,
the beginning of the woods of elf-land.
But, oddly enough, it was because he was a small poet that he came to his
strange and isolated triumph. It was because he was a failure in
literature that he became a portent in English history. He was one of
those to whom nature has given the desire without the power of artistic
expression. He had been a dumb poet from his cradle. He might have
been so to his grave, and carried unuttered into the darkness a treasure
of new and sensational song. But he was born under the lucky star of a
single coincidence. He happened to be at the head of his dingy
municipality at the time of the King’s jest, at the time when all
municipalities were suddenly commanded to break out into banners and
flowers. Out of the long procession of the silent poets, who have been
passing since the beginning of the world, this one man found himself in
the midst of an heraldic vision, in which he could act and speak and live
lyrically. While the author and the victims alike treated the whole matter
as a silly public charade, this one man, by taking it seriously, sprang
suddenly into a throne of artistic omnipotence. Armour, music,
standards, watch-fires, the noise of drums, all the theatrical properties
were thrown before him. This one poor rhymster, having burnt his own
rhymes, began to live that life of open air and acted poetry of which all
69
the poets of the earth have dreamed in vain; the life for which the Iliad is
only a cheap substitute.
One instance may suffice. Walking along Pump Street with a friend, he
said, as he gazed dreamily at the iron fence of a little front garden, “How
those railings stir one’s blood!”
His friend, who was also a great intellectual admirer, looked at them
painfully, but without any particular emotion. He was so troubled about
it that he went back quite a large number of times on quiet evenings and
stared at the railings, waiting for something to happen to his blood, but
without success. At last he took refuge in asking Wayne himself. He
discovered that the ecstacy lay in the one point he had never noticed
about the railings even after his six visits — the fact that they were, like
the great majority of others — in London, shaped at the top after the
manner of a spear. As a child, Wayne had half unconsciously compared
them with the spears in pictures of Lancelot and St. George, and had
grown up under the shadow of the graphic association. Now, whenever
he looked at them, they were simply the serried weapons that made a
hedge of steel round the sacred homes of Notting Hill. He could not have
cleansed his mind of that meaning even if he tried. It was not a fanciful
comparison, or anything like it. It would not have been true to say that
the familiar railings reminded him of spears; it would have been far truer
to say that the familiar spears occasionally reminded him of railings.
A couple of days after his interview with the King, Adam Wayne was
pacing like a caged lion in front of five shops that occupied the upper end
of the disputed street. They were a grocer’s, a chemist’s, a barber’s, an
old curiosity shop and a toy-shop that sold also newspapers. It was these
71
five shops which his childish fastidiousness had first selected as the
essentials of the Notting Hill campaign, the citadel of the city. If Notting
Hill was the heart of the universe, and Pump Street was the heart of
Notting Hill, this was the heart of Pump Street. The fact that they were
all small and side by side realised that feeling for a formidable comfort
and compactness which, as we have said, was the heart of his patriotism,
and of all patriotism. The grocer (who had a wine and spirit licence) was
included because he could provision the garrison; the old curiosity shop
because it contained enough swords, pistols, partisans, cross-bows, and
blunderbusses to arm a whole irregular regiment; the toy and paper shop
because Wayne thought a free press an essential centre for the soul of
Pump Street; the chemist’s to cope with outbreaks of disease among the
besieged; and the barber’s because it was in the middle of all the rest,
and the barber’s son was an intimate friend and spiritual affinity.
“There are, after all, enigmas,” he said “even to the man who has faith.
There are doubts that remain even after the true philosophy is completed
in every rung and rivet. And here is one of them. Is the normal human
need, the normal human condition, higher or lower than those special
states of the soul which call out a doubtful and dangerous glory? those
special powers of knowledge or sacrifice which are made possible only by
the existence of evil? Which should come first to our affections, the
enduring sanities of peace or the half-maniacal virtues of battle? Which
should come first, the man great in the daily round or the man great in
emergency? Which should come first, to return to the enigma before me,
the grocer or the chemist? Which is more certainly the stay of the city,
the swift chivalrous chemist or the benignant all-providing grocer? In
such ultimate spiritual doubts it is only possible to choose a side by the
higher instincts, and to abide the issue. In any case, I have made my
choice. May I be pardoned if I choose wrongly, but I choose the grocer.”
72
“Good morning, sir,” said the grocer, who was a middle-aged man,
partially bald, with harsh red whiskers and beard, and forehead lined
with all the cares of the small tradesman. “What can I do for you, sir?”
“Why, sir,” said the grocer, “that sounds like the times when I was a boy
and we used to have elections.”
“You will have them again,” said Wayne, firmly, “and far greater things.
Listen, Mr. Mead. I know the temptations which a grocer has to a too
cosmopolitan philosophy. I can imagine what it must be to sit all day as
you do surrounded with wares from all the ends of the earth, from
strange seas that we have never sailed and strange forests that we could
not even picture. No Eastern king ever had such argosies or such cargoes
coming from the sunrise and the sunset, and Solomon in all his glory was
not enriched like one of you. India is at your elbow,” he cried, lifting his
voice and pointing his stick at a drawer of rice, the grocer making a
movement of some alarm, “China is before you, Demerara is behind you,
America is above your head, and at this very moment, like some old
Spanish admiral, you hold Tunis in your hands.”
Mr. Mead dropped the box of dates which he was just lifting, and then
picked it up again vaguely.
Barbary, your sugar from the strange islands of the tropics, your tea from
the secret villages of the Empire of the Dragon. That this room might be
furnished, forests may have been spoiled under the Southern Cross, and
leviathans speared under the Polar Star. But you yourself — surely no
inconsiderable treasure — you yourself, the brain that wields these vast
interests — you yourself, at least, have grown to strength and wisdom
between these grey houses and under this rainy sky. This city which
made you, and thus made your fortunes, is threatened with war. Come
forth and tell to the ends of the earth this lesson. Oil is from the North
and fruits from the South; rices are from India and spices from Ceylon;
sheep are from New Zealand and men from Notting Hill.”
The grocer sat for some little while, with dim eyes and his mouth open,
looking rather like a fish. Then he scratched the back of his head, and
said nothing. Then he said —
“All those, sir?” said the grocer, with greatly increased interest.
“Yes, yes; all those,” replied Wayne, still a little bewildered, like a man
splashed with cold water.
“Very good, sir; thank you, sir,” said the grocer with animation. “You
may count upon my patriotism, sir.”
“I count upon it already,” said Wayne, and passed out into the gathering
night.
“What a nice fellow he is!” he said. “It’s odd how often they are nice.
Much nicer than those as are all right.”
He was a man, and entered. A short, dark young man was behind the
counter with spectacles, and greeted him with a bright but entirely
business-like smile.
“Let me see,” said Wayne, in a friendly but vague manner. “Let me have
some sal volatile.”
“One and six — one and six,” replied Wayne, with a wild submissiveness.
“I come to ask you, Mr. Bowles, a terrible question.”
“I come,” he resumed aloud, “to ask you a question which goes to the
roots of your miraculous toils. Mr. Bowles, shall all this witchery cease?”
And he waved his stick around the shop.
“In Notting Hill we have felt to its core the elfish mystery of your
profession. And now Notting Hill itself is threatened.”
The chemist appeared to pause, only a moment, to take in the insult, and
immediately said —
“Alum,” said the Provost, wildly. “I resume. It is in this sacred town alone
that your priesthood is reverenced. Therefore, when you fight for us you
fight not only for yourself, but for everything you typify. You fight not
only for Notting Hill, but for Fairyland, for as surely as Buck and Barker
and such men hold sway, the sense of Fairyland in some strange manner
diminishes.”
“Oh yes, sir,” said the chemist, with great animation; “we are always glad
to oblige a good customer.”
Adam Wayne went out of the shop with a deep sense of fulfilment of
soul.
“It is so fortunate,” he said, “to have tact, to be able to play upon the
peculiar talents and specialities, the cosmopolitanism of the grocer and
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His conversation with the man who kept the shop of curiosities had
begun encouragingly. The man who kept the shop of curiosities had,
indeed, enchanted him with a phrase. He was standing drearily at the
door of his shop, a wrinkled man with a grey pointed beard, evidently a
gentleman who had come down in the world.
“And how does your commerce go, you strange guardian of the past?”
said Wayne, affably.
“Well, sir, not very well,” replied the man, with that patient voice of his
class which is one of the most heart-breaking things in the world.
“Things are terribly quiet.”
“Why not,” said Wayne, gently having reached the crisis of his delicate
persuasion —“why not be a colonel?”
It was at this point, in all probability, that the interview began to yield
more disappointing results. The man appeared inclined at first to regard
the suggestion of becoming a colonel as outside the sphere of immediate
and relevant discussion. A long exposition of the inevitable war of
independence, coupled with the purchase of a doubtful sixteenth-century
sword for an exaggerated price, seemed to resettle matters. Wayne left
the shop, however, somewhat infected with the melancholy of its owner.
“War!” said Wayne, warmly. “But not for anything inconsistent with the
beautiful and the civilised arts. War for beauty. War for society. War for
peace. A great chance is offered you of repelling that slander which, in
defiance of the lives of so many artists, attributes poltroonery to those
who beautify and polish the surface of our lives. Why should not
hairdressers be heroes? Why should not —”
“Now, you get out,” said the barber, irascibly. “We don’t want any of your
sort here. You get out.”
Adam Wayne laid his hand for a moment on the sword, then dropped it.
“Notting Hill,” he said, “will need her bolder sons;” and he turned
gloomily to the toy-shop.
It was one of those queer little shops so constantly seen in the side
streets of London, which must be called toy-shops only because toys
upon the whole predominate; for the remainder of goods seem to consist
of almost everything else in the world — tobacco, exercise-books, sweet-
stuff, novelettes, halfpenny paper clips, halfpenny pencil sharpeners,
bootlaces, and cheap fireworks. It also sold newspapers, and a row of
dirty-looking posters hung along the front of it.
“Sir,” said Wayne, “I am going from house to house in this street of ours,
seeking to stir up some sense of the danger which now threatens our city.
Nowhere have I felt my duty so difficult as here. For the toy-shop keeper
has to do with all that remains to us of Eden before the first wars began.
You sit here meditating continually upon the wants of that wonderful
time when every staircase leads to the stars, and every garden-path to
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“I don’t,” said Mr. Turnbull, of the toy-shop, shortly, but with great
emphasis.
The little toy-shop keeper sprang up suddenly, slapping his fat hands like
two fans on the counter.
“War?” he cried. “Not really, sir? Is it true? Oh, what a joke! Oh, what a
sight for sore eyes!”
He sprang out of the way just in time to avoid Mr. Turnbull, who took a
flying leap over the counter and dashed to the front of the shop.
He came back with two of the torn posters in his hand which were
flapping outside his shop.
“Look at those, sir,” he said, and flung them down on the counter.
“LAST FIGHTING.
REDUCTION OF THE CENTRAL DERVISH CITY.
REMARKABLE, ETC.”
Wayne bent over them again, evidently puzzled; then he looked at the
dates. They were both dated in August fifteen years before.
“Why do you keep these old things?” he said, startled entirely out of his
absurd tact of mysticism. “Why do you hang them outside your shop?”
“Because,” said the other, simply, “they are the records of the last war.
You mentioned war just now. It happens to be my hobby.”
“Come with me,” said Turnbull, shortly, and led him into a parlour at the
back of the shop.
In the centre of the parlour stood a large deal table. On it were set rows
and rows of the tin and lead soldiers which were part of the shopkeeper’s
stock. The visitor would have thought nothing of it if it had not been for a
certain odd grouping of them, which did not seem either entirely
commercial or entirely haphazard.
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“You are acquainted, no doubt,” said Turnbull, turning his big eyes upon
Wayne —“you are acquainted, no doubt, with the arrangement of the
American and Nicaraguan troops in the last battle;” and he waved his
hand towards the table.
“Ah! you were at that time occupied too much, perhaps, with the Dervish
affair. You will find it in this corner.” And he pointed to a part of the
floor where there was another arrangement of children’s soldiers
grouped here and there.
“In that case,” he said, “I may approach you with an unusual degree of
confidence. Touching the matter of the defence of Notting Hill, I—”
“Defence of Notting Hill? Yes, sir. This way, sir,” said Turnbull, with
great perturbation. “Just step into this side room;” and he led Wayne
into another apartment, in which the table was entirely covered with an
arrangement of children’s bricks. A second glance at it told Wayne that
the bricks were arranged in the form of a precise and perfect plan of
Notting Hill. “Sir,” said Turnbull, impressively, “you have, by a kind of
accident, hit upon the whole secret of my life. As a boy, I grew up among
the last wars of the world, when Nicaragua was taken and the dervishes
wiped out. And I adopted it as a hobby, sir, as you might adopt
astronomy or bird-stuffing. I had no ill-will to any one, but I was
interested in war as a science, as a game. And suddenly I was bowled out.
The big Powers of the world, having swallowed up all the small ones,
came to that confounded agreement, and there was no more war. There
was nothing more for me to do but to do what I do now — to read the old
campaigns in dirty old newspapers, and to work them out with tin
soldiers. One other thing had occurred to me. I thought it an amusing
fancy to make a plan of how this district or ours ought to be defended if it
were ever attacked. It seems to interest you too.”
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Mr. Turnbull looked at the other for a moment, then hesitated, and then
sat down beside the bricks and the stranger. He did not rise again for
seven hours, when the dawn broke.
“That,” said Wayne, “is not counting the five pounds you took yesterday.
What did you do with it?”
“Ah, that is rather interesting!” replied Turnbull, with his mouth full. “I
used that five pounds in a kindly and philanthropic act.”
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Wayne was gazing with mystification in his queer and innocent eyes.
“I used that five pounds,” continued the other, “in giving no less than
forty little London boys rides in hansom cabs.”
“Mad!” said Wayne, laying down his pencil; “and five pounds gone!”
“You are in error,” explained Turnbull. “You grave creatures can never be
brought to understand how much quicker work really goes with the
assistance of nonsense and good meals. Stripped of its decorative
beauties, my statement was strictly accurate. Last night I gave forty half-
crowns to forty little boys, and sent them all over London to take hansom
cabs. I told them in every case to tell the cabman to bring them to this
spot. In half an hour from now the declaration of war will be posted up.
At the same time the cabs will have begun to come in, you will have
ordered out the guard, the little boys will drive up in state, we shall
commandeer the horses for cavalry, use the cabs for barricade, and give
the men the choice between serving in our ranks and detention in our
basements and cellars. The little boys we can use as scouts. The main
thing is that we start the war with an advantage unknown in all the other
armies — horses. And now,” he said, finishing his beer, “I will go and
drill the troops.”
An earnest and eloquent petition was sent up to the King signed with the
names of Wilson, Barker, Buck, Swindon, and others. It urged that at the
forthcoming conference to be held in his Majesty’s presence touching the
final disposition of the property in Pump Street, it might be held not
inconsistent with political decorum and with the unutterable respect
they entertained for his Majesty if they appeared in ordinary morning
dress, without the costume decreed for them as Provosts. So it happened
that the company appeared at that council in frock-coats and that the
King himself limited his love of ceremony to appearing (after his not
unusual manner), in evening dress with one order — in this case not the
Garter, but the button of the Club of Old Clipper’s Best Pals, a decoration
obtained (with difficulty) from a halfpenny boy’s paper. Thus also it
happened that the only spot of colour in the room was Adam Wayne,
who entered in great dignity with the great red robes and the great
sword.
“We have met,” said Auberon, “to decide the most arduous of modern
problems. May we be successful.” And he sat down gravely.
Buck turned his chair a little, and flung one leg over the other.
“The difficulty may be very simply stated,” said Wayne. “You may offer a
million and it will be very difficult for you to get Pump Street.”
“But look here, Mr. Wayne,” cried Barker, striking in with a kind of cold
excitement. “Just look here. You’ve no right to take up a position like
that. You’ve a right to stand out for a bigger price, but you aren’t doing
that. You’re refusing what you and every sane man knows to be a
splendid offer simply from malice or spite — it must be malice or spite.
87
And that kind of thing is really criminal; it’s against the public good. The
King’s Government would be justified in forcing you.”
With his lean fingers spread on the table, he stared anxiously at Wayne’s
face, which did not move.
“It shall,” said Buck, shortly, turning to the table with a jerk. “We have
done our best to be decent.”
“Was it my Lord Buck,” he inquired, “who said that the King of England
‘shall’ do something?”
“Until he does,” said Wayne, calmly, “the power and government of this
great nation is on my side and not yours, and I defy you to defy it.”
“In what sense,” cried Barker, with his feverish eyes and hands, “is the
Government on your side?”
“And there you sit,” cried Wayne, springing erect and with a voice like a
trumpet, “with no argument but to insult the King before his face.”
“I am hard to bully,” he began — and the slow tones of the King struck in
with incomparable gravity —
“My Lord Buck, I must ask you to remember that your King is present. It
is not often that he needs to protect himself among his subjects.”
“For God’s sake don’t back up the madman now,” he implored. “Have
your joke another time. Oh, for Heaven’s sake —”
Barker turned restlessly in his chair, and Buck cursed without speaking.
The King went on in a comfortable voice —
Wayne turned his blue eyes on the King, and to every one’s surprise
there was a look in them not of triumph, but of a certain childish
distress.
Buck looked genuinely pleased, for business men are all simple-minded,
and have therefore that degree of communion with fanatics. The King,
for some reason, looked, for the first time in his life, ashamed.
“This very kind speech of the Provost of Notting Hill,” began Buck,
pleasantly, “seems to me to show that we have at least got on to a
friendly footing. Now come, Mr. Wayne. Five hundred pounds have been
offered to you for a property you admit not to be worth a hundred. Well,
I am a rich man and I won’t be outdone in generosity. Let us say fifteen
hundred pounds, and have done with it. And let us shake hands;” and he
rose, glowing and laughing.
“I’ll stand the racket,” said Buck, heartily. “Mr. Wayne is a gentleman
and has spoken up for me. So I suppose the negotiations are at an end.”
Wayne bowed.
“They are indeed at an end. I am sorry I cannot sell you the property.”
“Mr. Buck has spoken correctly,” said the King; “the negotiations are at
an end.”
All the men at the table rose to their feet; Wayne alone rose without
excitement.
“You have it,” said Auberon, smiling, but not lifting his eyes from the
table. And amid a dead silence the Provost of Notting Hill passed out of
the room.
“Of course,” said Buck, turning to him with sombre decisiveness. “You’re
perfectly right, Barker. He is a good enough fellow, but he can be treated
as mad. Let’s put it in simple form. Go and tell any twelve men in any
town, go and tell any doctor in any town, that there is a man offered
fifteen hundred pounds for a thing he could sell commonly for four
hundred, and that when asked for a reason for not accepting it he pleads
the inviolate sanctity of Notting Hill and calls it the Holy Mountain.
What would they say? What more can we have on our side than the
common sense of everybody? On what else do all laws rest? I’ll tell you,
Barker, what’s better than any further discussion. Let’s send in workmen
on the spot to pull down Pump Street. And if old Wayne says a word,
arrest him as a lunatic. That’s all.”
“I always regarded you, Buck, if you don’t mind my saying so, as a very
strong man. I’ll follow you.”
But Buck, being finally serious, was also cautious, and did not again
make the mistake of disrespect.
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Barker and Wilson looked at him admiringly; the King more admiringly
still.
say, his own interests, for the man has a kind heart and many talents,
and a couple of good doctors would probably put him righter than all the
free cities and sacred mountains in creation. I therefore assume, if I may
use so bold a word, that your Majesty will not offer any obstacle to our
proceeding with the improvements.”
And Mr. Buck sat down amid subdued but excited applause among the
allies.
“Mr. Buck,” said the King, “I beg your pardon, for a number of beautiful
and sacred thoughts, in which you were generally classified as a fool. But
there is another thing to be considered. Suppose you send in your
workmen, and Mr. Wayne does a thing regrettable indeed, but of which,
I am sorry to say, I think him quite capable — knocks their teeth out?”
“I have thought of that, your Majesty,” said Mr. Buck, easily, “and I think
it can simply be guarded against. Let us send in a strong guard of, say, a
hundred men — a hundred of the North Kensington Halberdiers” (he
smiled grimly), “of whom your Majesty is so fond. Or say a hundred and
fifty. The whole population of Pump Street, I fancy, is only about a
hundred.”
“Still they might stand together and lick you,” said the King, dubiously.
“It might happen,” said the King, restlessly, “that one Notting Hiller
fought better than two North Kensingtons.”
“It might,” said Buck, coolly; “then say two hundred and fifty.”
“Your Majesty,” said Buck, and leaned back easily in his chair, “suppose
they are. If anything be clear, it is clear that all fighting matters are mere
matters of arithmetic. Here we have a hundred and fifty, say, of Notting
Hill soldiers. Or say two hundred. If one of them can fight two of us — we
can send in, not four hundred, but six hundred, and smash him. That is
all. It is out of all immediate probability that one of them could fight four
of us. So what I say is this. Run no risks. Finish it at once. Send in eight
93
hundred men and smash him — smash him almost without seeing him.
And go on with the improvements.”
And Mr. Buck pulled out a bandanna and blew his nose.
“Do you know, Mr. Buck,” said the King, staring gloomily at the table,
“the admirable clearness of your reason produces in my mind a
sentiment which I trust I shall not offend you by describing as an
aspiration to punch your head. You irritate me sublimely. What can it be
in me? Is it the relic of a moral sense?”
“But your Majesty,” said Barker, eagerly and suavely, “does not refuse
our proposals?”
“Revolution.”
The King glanced quickly at the men round the table. They were all
looking down silently: their brows were red.
“More sportsmanlike,” said Buck, grimly, “but a great deal less humane.
We are not artists, and streets purple with gore do not catch our eye in
the right way.”
“It is pitiful,” said Auberon. “With five or six times their number, there
will be no fight at all.”
“I hope not,” said Buck, rising and adjusting his gloves. “We desire no
fight, your Majesty. We are peaceable business men.”
And he went out of the room before any one else could stir.
And James Barker went on, laughing, with a high colour, slapping his
bamboo on his leg.
95
The King watched the tail of the retreating regiment with a look of
genuine depression, which made him seem more like a baby than ever.
Then he swung round and struck his hands together.
“In a world without humour,” he said, “the only thing to do is to eat. And
how perfect an exception! How can these people strike dignified
attitudes, and pretend that things matter, when the total ludicrousness
of life is proved by the very method by which it is supported? A man
strikes the lyre, and says, ‘Life is real, life is earnest,’ and then goes into a
room and stuffs alien substances into a hole in his head. I think Nature
was indeed a little broad in her humour in these matters. But we all fall
back on the pantomime, as I have in this municipal affair. Nature has her
farces, like the act of eating or the shape of the kangaroo, for the more
brutal appetite. She keeps her stars and mountains for those who can
appreciate something more subtly ridiculous.” He turned to his equerry.
“But, as I said ‘eating,’ let us have a picnic like two nice little children.
Just run and bring me a table and a dozen courses or so, and plenty of
champagne, and under these swinging boughs, Bowler, we will return to
Nature.”
“Things take too long in this world,” he said. “I detest all this Barkerian
business about evolution and the gradual modification of things. I wish
the world had been made in six days, and knocked to pieces again in six
more. And I wish I had done it. The joke’s good enough in a broad way,
sun and moon and the image of God, and all that, but they keep it up so
damnably long. Did you ever long for a miracle, Bowler?”
“No, sir,” said Bowler, who was an evolutionist, and had been carefully
brought up.
“Then I have,” answered the King. “I have walked along a street with the
best cigar in the cosmos in my mouth, and more Burgundy inside me
96
than you ever saw in your life, and longed that the lamp-post would turn
into an elephant to save me from the hell of blank existence. Take my
word for it, my evolutionary Bowler, don’t you believe people when they
tell you that people sought for a sign, and believed in miracles because
they were ignorant. They did it because they were wise, filthily, vilely
wise — too wise to eat or sleep or put on their boots with patience. This
seems delightfully like a new theory of the origin of Christianity, which
would itself be a thing of no mean absurdity. Take some more wine.”
The wind blew round them as they sat at their little table, with its white
cloth and bright wine-cups, and flung the tree-tops of Holland Park
against each other, but the sun was in that strong temper which turns
green into gold. The King pushed away his plate, lit a cigar slowly, and
went on —
The King stopped, with his cigar lifted, for there had slid into his eyes the
startled look of a man listening. He did not move for a few moments;
then he turned his head sharply towards the high, thin, and lath-like
paling which fenced certain long gardens and similar spaces from the
lane. From behind it there was coming a curious scrambling and
scraping noise, as of a desperate thing imprisoned in this box of thin
wood. The King threw away his cigar, and jumped on to the table. From
this position he saw a pair of hands hanging with a hungry clutch on the
top of the fence. Then the hands quivered with a convulsive effort, and a
97
head shot up between them — the head of one of the Bayswater Town
Council, his eyes and whiskers wild with fear. He swung himself over,
and fell on the other side on his face, and groaned openly and without
ceasing. The next moment the thin, taut wood of the fence was struck as
by a bullet, so that it reverberated like a drum, and over it came tearing
and cursing, with torn clothes and broken nails and bleeding faces,
twenty men at one rush. The King sprang five feet clear off the table on
to the ground. The moment after the table was flung over, sending
bottles and glasses flying, and the débris was literally swept along the
ground by that stream of men pouring past, and Bowler was borne along
with them, as the King said in his famous newspaper article, “like a
captured bride.” The great fence swung and split under the load of
climbers that still scaled and cleared it. Tremendous gaps were torn in it
by this living artillery; and through them the King could see more and
more frantic faces, as in a dream, and more and more men running. They
were as miscellaneous as if some one had taken the lid off a human
dustbin. Some were untouched, some were slashed and battered and
bloody, some were splendidly dressed, some tattered and half naked,
some were in the fantastic garb of the burlesque cities, some in the
dullest modern dress. The King stared at all of them, but none of them
looked at the King. Suddenly he stepped forward.
“Beaten,” said the politician —“beaten all to hell!” And he plunged past
with nostrils shaking like a horse’s, and more and more men plunged
after him.
Almost as he spoke, the last standing strip of fence bowed and snapped,
flinging, as from a catapult, a new figure upon the road. He wore the
flaming red of the halberdiers of Notting Hill, and on his weapon there
was blood, and in his face victory. In another moment masses of red
glowed through the gaps of the fence, and the pursuers, with their
halberds, came pouring down the lane. Pursued and pursuers alike swept
by the little figure with the owlish eyes, who had not taken his hands out
of his pockets.
The King had still little beyond the confused sense of a man caught in a
torrent — the feeling of men eddying by. Then something happened
which he was never able afterwards to describe, and which we cannot
98
describe for him. Suddenly in the dark entrance, between the broken
gates of a garden, there appeared framed a flaming figure.
Adam Wayne, the conqueror, with his face flung back, and his mane like
a lion’s, stood with his great sword point upwards, the red raiment of his
office flapping round him like the red wings of an archangel. And the
King saw, he knew not how, something new and overwhelming. The
great green trees and the great red robes swung together in the wind. The
sword seemed made for the sunlight. The preposterous masquerade,
born of his own mockery, towered over him and embraced the world.
This was the normal, this was sanity, this was nature; and he himself,
with his rationality and his detachment and his black frock-coat, he was
the exception and the accident — a blot of black upon a world of crimson
and gold.
99
BOOK 4
100
Mr. Buck, who, though retired, frequently went down to his big drapery
stores in Kensington High Street, was locking up those premises, being
the last to leave. It was a wonderful evening of green and gold, but that
did not trouble him very much. If you had pointed it out, he would have
agreed seriously, for the rich always desire to be artistic.
He stepped out into the cool air, buttoning up his light yellow coat, and
blowing great clouds from his cigar, when a figure dashed up to him in
another yellow overcoat, but unbuttoned and flying behind him.
“Hullo, Barker!” said the draper. “Any of our summer articles? You’re too
late. Factory Acts, Barker. Humanity and progress, my boy.”
“By Wayne.”
Buck looked at Barker’s fierce white face for the first time, as it gleamed
in the lamplight.
Barker was still standing, and on the fret, but after a moment’s
hesitation, he sat down as if he might spring up again the next minute.
They ordered drinks in silence.
“How did it happen?” asked Buck, turning his big bold eyes on him.
“How the devil do I know?” cried Barker. “It happened like — like a
dream. How can two hundred men beat six hundred? How can they?”
“Well,” said Buck, coolly, “how did they? You ought to know.”
“I don’t know; I can’t describe,” said the other, drumming on the table.
“It seemed like this. We were six hundred, and marched with those
101
Buck, who was idly dabbing the ash of his cigar on the ash-tray, began to
move it deliberately over the table, making feathery grey lines, a kind of
map.
“But though the little streets were all deserted (which got a trifle on my
nerves), as we got deeper and deeper into them, a thing began to happen
that I couldn’t understand. Sometimes a long way ahead — three turns or
corners ahead, as it were — there broke suddenly a sort of noise,
clattering, and confused cries, and then stopped. Then, when it
happened, something, I can’t describe it — a kind of shake or stagger
went down the line, as if the line were a live thing, whose head had been
struck, or had been an electric cord. None of us knew why we were
moving, but we moved and jostled. Then we recovered, and went on
through the little dirty streets, round corners, and up twisted ways. The
little crooked streets began to give me a feeling I can’t explain — as if it
were a dream. I felt as if things had lost their reason, and we should
never get out of the maze. Odd to hear me talk like that, isn’t it? The
streets were quite well-known streets, all down on the map. But the fact
remains. I wasn’t afraid of something happening. I was afraid of nothing
ever happening — nothing ever happening for all God’s eternity.”
He drained his glass and called for more whisky. He drank it, and went
on.
“And then something did happen. Buck, it’s the solemn truth, that
nothing has ever happened to you in your life. Nothing had ever
happened to me in my life.”
102
“I have no doubt,” said Buck. “If that was Portobello Road, don’t you see
what happened?”
struck where I saw the scarlet of Wayne’s fellows, struck again and again.
Two of them went over, bleeding on the stones, thank God; and I
laughed and found myself sprawling in the gutter again, and got up
again, and struck again, and broke my halberd to pieces. I hurt a man’s
head, though.”
Buck set down his glass with a bang, and spat out curses through his
thick moustache.
“What is the matter?” asked Barker, stopping, for the man had been calm
up to now, and now his agitation was far more violent than his own.
“The matter?” said Buck, bitterly; “don’t you see how these maniacs have
got us? Why should two idiots, one a clown and the other a screaming
lunatic, make sane men so different from themselves? Look here, Barker;
I will give you a picture. A very well-bred young man of this century is
dancing about in a frock-coat. He has in his hands a nonsensical
seventeenth-century halberd, with which he is trying to kill men in a
street in Notting Hill. Damn it! don’t you see how they’ve got us? Never
mind how you felt — that is how you looked. The King would put his
cursed head on one side and call it exquisite. The Provost of Notting Hill
would put his cursed nose in the air and call it heroic. But in Heaven’s
name what would you have called it — two days before?”
“You haven’t been through it, Buck,” he said. “You don’t understand
fighting — the atmosphere.”
“I don’t deny the atmosphere,” said Buck, striking the table. “I only say
it’s their atmosphere. It’s Adam Wayne’s atmosphere. It’s the
atmosphere which you and I thought had vanished from an educated
world for ever.”
“Well, it hasn’t,” said Barker; “and if you have any lingering doubts, lend
me a poleaxe, and I’ll show you.”
There was a long silence, and then Buck turned to his neighbour and
spoke in that good-tempered tone that comes of a power of looking facts
in the face — the tone in which he concluded great bargains.
104
“Barker,” he said, “you are right. This old thing — this fighting, has come
back. It has come back suddenly and taken us by surprise. So it is first
blood to Adam Wayne. But, unless reason and arithmetic and everything
else have gone crazy, it must be next and last blood to us. But when an
issue has really arisen, there is only one thing to do — to study that issue
as such and win in it. Barker, since it is fighting, we must understand
fighting. I must understand fighting as coolly and completely as I
understand drapery; you must understand fighting as coolly and
completely as you understand politics. Now, look at the facts. I stick
without hesitation to my original formula. Fighting, when we have the
stronger force, is only a matter of arithmetic. It must be. You asked me
just now how two hundred men could defeat six hundred. I can tell you.
Two hundred men can defeat six hundred when the six hundred behave
like fools. When they forget the very conditions they are fighting in;
when they fight in a swamp as if it were a mountain; when they fight in a
forest as if it were a plain; when they fight in streets without
remembering the object of streets.”
“The thing would have been as possible,” said Buck, simply, “as simple as
arithmetic. There are a certain number of street entries that lead to
Pump Street. There are not nine hundred; there are not nine million.
They do not grow in the night. They do not increase like mushrooms. It
must be possible, with such an overwhelming force as we have, to
advance by all of them at once. In every one of the arteries, or
approaches, we can put almost as many men as Wayne can put into the
field altogether. Once do that, and we have him to demonstration. It is
like a proposition of Euclid.”
“I’ll tell you what I think,” said Buck, getting up jovially. “I think Adam
Wayne made an uncommonly spirited little fight; and I think I am
confoundedly sorry for him.”
“Buck, you are a great man!” cried Barker, rising also. “You’ve knocked
me sensible again. I am ashamed to say it, but I was getting romantic. Of
course, what you say is adamantine sense. Fighting, being physical, must
be mathematical. We were beaten because we were neither mathematical
nor physical nor anything else — because we deserved to be beaten. Hold
all the approaches, and with our force we must have him. When shall we
open the next campaign?”
“Now!” cried Barker, following him eagerly. “Do you mean now? It is so
late.”
“Do you think fighting is under the Factory Acts?” he said; and he called
a cab. “Notting Hill Gate Station,” he said; and the two drove off.
His cab carried him like a thunderbolt from the King to Wilson, from
Wilson to Swindon, from Swindon to Barker again; if his course was
jagged, it had the jaggedness of the lightning. Only two things he carried
with him — his inevitable cigar and the map of North Kensington and
Notting Hill. There were, as he again and again pointed out, with every
variety of persuasion and violence, only nine possible ways of
approaching Pump Street within a quarter of a mile round it; three out of
Westbourne Grove, two out of Ladbroke Grove, and four out of Notting
Hill High Street. And he had detachments of two hundred each,
stationed at every one of the entrances before the last green of that
strange sunset had sunk out of the black sky.
The sky was particularly black, and on this alone was one false protest
raised against the triumphant optimism of the Provost of North
Kensington. He overruled it with his infectious common sense.
“There is no such thing,” he said, “as night in London. You have only to
follow the line of street lamps. Look, here is the map. Two hundred
purple North Kensington soldiers under myself march up Ossington
Street, two hundred more under Captain Bruce, of the North Kensington
Guard, up Clanricarde Gardens. 1 Two hundred yellow West Kensingtons
under Provost Swindon attack from Pembridge Road. Two hundred
more of my men from the eastern streets, leading away from Queen’s
Road. Two detachments of yellows enter by two roads from Westbourne
Grove. Lastly, two hundred green Bayswaters come down from the North
through Chepstow Place, and two hundred more under Provost Wilson
himself, through the upper part of Pembridge Road. Gentlemen, it is
mate in two moves. The enemy must either mass in Pump Street and be
cut to pieces; or they must retreat past the Gaslight & Coke Co., and rush
on my four hundred; or they must retreat past St. Luke’s Church, and
rush on the six hundred from the West. Unless we are all mad, it’s plain.
Come on. To your quarters and await Captain Brace’s signal to advance.
Then you have only to walk up a line of gas-lamps and smash this
nonsense by pure mathematics. To-morrow we shall all be civilians
again.”
1 Clanricarde Gardens at this time was no longer a cul-de-sac, but was connected by Pump Street to
His optimism glowed like a great fire in the night, and ran round the
terrible ring in which Wayne was now held helpless. The fight was
already over. One man’s energy for one hour had saved the city from war.
For the next ten minutes Buck walked up and down silently beside the
motionless clump of his two hundred. He had not changed his
appearance in any way, except to sling across his yellow overcoat a case
with a revolver in it. So that his light-clad modern figure showed up
oddly beside the pompous purple uniforms of his halberdiers, which
darkly but richly coloured the black night.
At length a shrill trumpet rang from some way up the street; it was the
signal of advance. Buck briefly gave the word, and the whole purple line,
with its dimly shining steel, moved up the side alley. Before it was a slope
of street, long, straight, and shining in the dark. It was a sword pointed
at Pump Street, the heart at which nine other swords were pointed that
night.
“Halt — point arms!” cried Buck, suddenly, and as he spoke there came a
clatter of feet tumbling along the stones. But the halberds were levelled
in vain. The figure that rushed up was a messenger from the contingent
of the North.
“Victory, Mr. Buck!” he cried, panting; “they are ousted. Provost Wilson
of Bayswater has taken Pump Street.”
“Then, which way are they retreating? It must be either by St. Luke’s to
meet Swindon, or by the Gas Company to meet us. Run like mad to
Swindon, and see that the yellows are holding the St. Luke’s Road. We
will hold this, never fear. We have them in an iron trap. Run!”
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As the messenger dashed away into the darkness, the great guard of
North Kensington swung on with the certainty of a machine. Yet scarcely
a hundred yards further their halberd-points again fell in line gleaming
in the gaslight; for again a clatter of feet was heard on the stones, and
again it proved to be only the messenger.
“Mr. Provost,” he said, “the yellow West Kensingtons have been holding
the road by St. Luke’s for twenty minutes since the capture of Pump
Street. Pump Street is not two hundred yards away; they cannot be
retreating down that road.”
“Then they are retreating down this,” said Provost Buck, with a final
cheerfulness, “and by good fortune down a well-lighted road, though it
twists about. Forward!”
As they moved along the last three hundred yards of their journey, Buck
fell, for the first time in his life, perhaps, into a kind of philosophical
reverie, for men of his type are always made kindly, and as it were
melancholy, by success.
“I am sorry for poor old Wayne, I really am,” he thought. “He spoke up
splendidly for me at that Council. And he blacked old Barker’s eye with
considerable spirit. But I don’t see what a man can expect when he fights
against arithmetic, to say nothing of civilisation. And what a wonderful
hoax all this military genius is! I suspect I’ve just discovered what
Cromwell discovered, that a sensible tradesman is the best general, and
that a man who can buy men and sell men can lead and kill them. The
thing’s simply like adding up a column in a ledger. If Wayne has two
hundred men, he can’t put two hundred men in nine places at once. If
they’re ousted from Pump Street they’re flying somewhere. If they’re not
flying past the church they’re flying past the Works. And so we have
them. We business men should have no chance at all except that cleverer
people than we get bees in their bonnets that prevent them from
reasoning properly — so we reason alone. And so I, who am
comparatively stupid, see things as God sees them, as a vast machine. My
God, what’s this?” and he clapped his hands to his eyes and staggered
back.
“What?” wailed another voice behind him, the voice of a certain Wilfred
Jarvis of North Kensington.
“Fools, all of you,” said a gross voice behind them; “we’re all blind. The
lamps have gone out.”
“The lamps! But why? where?” cried Buck, turning furiously in the
darkness. “How are we to get on? How are we to chase the enemy?
Where have they gone?”
“The enemy went —” said the rough voice behind, and then stopped
doubtfully.
“They went,” said the gruff voice, “past the Gas Works, and they’ve used
their chance.”
“Great God!” thundered Buck, and snatched at his revolver; “do you
mean they’ve turned out —”
But almost before he had spoken the words, he was hurled like a stone
from catapult into the midst of his own men.
“Notting Hill! Notting Hill!” cried frightful voices out of the darkness,
and they seemed to come from all sides, for the men of North
Kensington, unacquainted with the road, had lost all their bearings in the
black world of blindness.
“Notting Hill! Notting Hill!” cried the invisible people, and the invaders
were hewn down horribly with black steel, with steel that gave no glint
against any light.
Buck, though badly maimed with the blow of a halberd, kept an angry
but splendid sanity. He groped madly for the wall and found it.
Struggling with crawling fingers along it, he found a side opening and
retreated into it with the remnants of his men. Their adventures during
that prodigious night are not to be described. They did not know whether
they were going towards or away from the enemy. Not knowing where
110
they themselves were, or where their opponents were, it was mere irony
to ask where was the rest of their army. For a thing had descended upon
them which London does not know — darkness, which was before the
stars were made, and they were as much lost in it as if they had been
made before the stars. Every now and then, as those frightful hours wore
on, they buffeted in the darkness against living men, who struck at them
and at whom they struck, with an idiot fury. When at last the grey dawn
came, they found they had wandered back to the edge of the Uxbridge
Road. They found that in those horrible eyeless encounters, the North
Kensingtons and the Bayswaters and the West Kensingtons had again
and again met and butchered each other, and they heard that Adam
Wayne was barricaded in Pump Street.
111
Journalism had become, like most other such things in England under
the cautious government and philosophy represented by James Barker,
somewhat sleepy and much diminished in importance. This was partly
due to the disappearance of party government and public speaking,
partly to the compromise or dead-lock which had made foreign wars
impossible, but mostly, of course, to the temper of the whole nation
which was that of a people in a kind of back-water. Perhaps the most well
known of the remaining newspapers was the Court Journal, which was
published in a dusty but genteel-looking office just out of Kensington
High Street. For when all the papers of a people have been for years
growing more and more dim and decorous and optimistic, the dimmest
and most decorous and most optimistic is very likely to win. In the
journalistic competition which was still going on at the beginning of the
twentieth century, the final victor was the Court Journal.
For some mysterious reason the King had a great affection for hanging
about in the Court Journal office, smoking a morning cigarette and
looking over files. Like all ingrainedly idle men, he was very fond of
lounging and chatting in places where other people were doing work. But
one would have thought that, even in the prosaic England of his day, he
might have found a more bustling centre.
“You’ve heard the news, Pally — you’ve heard the news?” he said.
The Editor’s name was Hoskins, but the King called him Pally, which was
an abbreviation of Paladium of our Liberties.
112
“You’ll hear more of them,” said the King, dancing a few steps of a kind
of negro shuffle. “You’ll hear more of them, my blood-and-thunder
tribune. Do you know what I am going to do for you?”
“I’m going to put your paper on strong, dashing, enterprising lines,” said
the King. “Now, where are your posters of last night’s defeat?”
“I did not propose, your Majesty,” said the Editor, “to have any posters
exactly —”
“Paper, paper!” cried the King, wildly; “bring me paper as big as a house.
I’ll do you posters. Stop, I must take my coat off.” He began removing
that garment with an air of set intensity, flung it playfully at Mr. Hoskins’
head, entirely enveloping him, and looked at himself in the glass. “The
coat off,” he said, “and the hat on. That looks like a sub-editor. It is
indeed the very essence of sub-editing. Well,” he continued, turning
round abruptly, “come along with that paper.”
The Paladium had only just extricated himself reverently from the folds
of the King’s frock-coat, and said bewildered —
“Oh, you’ve got no enterprise,” said Auberon. “What’s that roll in the
corner? Wall-paper? Decorations for your private residence? Art in the
home, Pally? Fling it over here, and I’ll paint such posters on the back of
it that when you put it up in your drawing-room you’ll paste the original
pattern against the wall.” And the King unrolled the wall-paper,
spreading it over the whole floor. “Now give me the scissors,” he cried,
and took them himself before the other could stir.
He slit the paper into about five pieces, each nearly as big as a door. Then
he took a big blue pencil, and went down on his knees on the dusty oil-
cloth and began to write on them, in huge letters —
113
He contemplated it for some time, with his head on one side, and got up,
with a sigh.
“Not quite intense enough,” he said —“not alarming. I want the Court
Journal to be feared as well as loved. Let’s try something more hard-
hitting.” And he went down on his knees again. After sucking the blue
pencil for some time, he began writing again busily. “How will this do?”
he said —
“WAYNE WINS.
ASTOUNDING FIGHT IN THE DARK.
The gas-lamps in their courses fought against Buck.“
“(Nothing like our fine old English translation.) What else can we say?
Well, anything to annoy old Buck;” and he added, thoughtfully, in
smaller letters —
“Those will do for the present,” he said, and turned them both face
downwards. “Paste, please.”
The Paladium, with an air of great terror, brought the paste out of an
inner room.
“I was told,” he said, with his usual gruff civility, “that your Majesty was
here.”
“And of all things on earth,” cried the King, with delight, “here is an eye-
witness! An eye-witness who, I regret to observe, has at present only one
eye to witness with. Can you write us the special article, Buck? Have you
a rich style?”
“I took the liberty, your Majesty,” he said shortly, “of asking Mr. Barker
to come here also.”
As he spoke, indeed, Barker came swinging into the office, with his usual
air of hurry.
“Fighting still going on,” said Barker. “The four hundred from West
Kensington were hardly touched last night. They hardly got near the
place. Poor Wilson’s Bayswater men got cut about, though. They fought
confoundedly well. They took Pump Street once. What mad things do
happen in the world. To think that of all of us it should be little Wilson
with the red whiskers who came out best.”
“Yes,” said Buck; “it makes one a bit less proud of one’s h’s .”
The King suddenly folded or crumpled up the paper, and put it in his
pocket.
sentiment escapes me. You will receive my first article this evening by
the eight-o’clock post.”
“Barker,” said Buck, “business may be lower than politics, but war is, as I
discovered last night, a long sight more like business. You politicians are
such ingrained demagogues that even when you have a despotism you
think of nothing but public opinion. So you learn to tack and run, and are
afraid of the first breeze. Now we stick to a thing and get it. And our
mistakes help us. Look here! at this moment we’ve beaten Wayne.”
“Why the dickens not?” cried the other, flinging out his hands. “Look
here. I said last night that we had them by holding the nine entrances.
Well, I was wrong. We should have had them but for a singular event —
the lamps went out. But for that it was certain. Has it occurred to you,
my brilliant Barker, that another singular event has happened since that
singular event of the lamps going out?”
“By an astounding coincidence, the sun has risen,” cried out Buck, with a
savage air of patience. “Why the hell aren’t we holding all those
approaches now, and passing in on them again? It should have been
done at sunrise. The confounded doctor wouldn’t let me go out. You were
in command.”
arrived. Our mistakes,” he cried bitterly, and flung his cigarette on the
ground. “It is not we who learn from them.”
There was a silence for a few moments, and Barker lay back wearily in a
chair. The office clock ticked exactly in the stillness.
“Buck, does it ever cross your mind what this is all about? The
Hammersmith to Maida Vale thoroughfare was an uncommonly good
speculation. You and I hoped a great deal from it. But is it worth it? It
will cost us thousands to crush this ridiculous riot. Suppose we let it
alone?”
“Buck,” said Barker, “I always admired you. And you were quite right in
what you said the other day.”
“In what?”
“In saying,” said Barker, rising quietly, “that we had all got into Adam
Wayne’s atmosphere and out of our own. My friend, the whole territorial
kingdom of Adam Wayne extends to about nine streets, with barricades
at the end of them. But the spiritual kingdom of Adam Wayne extends,
God knows where — it extends to this office, at any rate. The red-haired
madman whom any two doctors would lock up is filling this room with
his roaring, unreasonable soul. And it was the red-haired madman who
said the last word you spoke.”
The King, meanwhile, was rattling along on the top of his blue omnibus.
The traffic of London as a whole had not, of course, been greatly
disturbed by these events, for the affair was treated as a Notting Hill riot,
118
and that area was marked off as if it had been in the hands of a gang of
recognised rioters. The blue omnibuses simply went round as they would
have done if a road were being mended, and the omnibus on which the
correspondent of the Court Journal was sitting swept round the corner
of Queen’s Road, Bayswater.
The King was alone on the top of the vehicle, and was enjoying the speed
at which it was going.
King Auberon descended from the omnibus with dignity. The guard or
picket of red halberdiers who had stopped the vehicle did not number
more than twenty, and they were under the command of a short, dark,
clever-looking young man, conspicuous among the rest as being clad in
an ordinary frock-coat, but girt round the waist with a red sash and a
long seventeenth-century sword. A shiny silk hat and spectacles
completed the outfit in a pleasing manner.
“To whom have I the honour of speaking?” said the King, endeavouring
to look like Charles I., in spite of personal difficulties.
The dark man in spectacles lifted his hat with equal gravity.
“Not with the King,” he said; “with the special war correspondent of
the Court Journal.”
“Very well, sir,” said Mr. Bowles, with an air of submission, “in our eyes
the sanctity of the press is at least as great as that of the throne. We
desire nothing better than that our wrongs and our glories should be
widely known. May I ask, Mr. Pinker, if you have any objection to being
presented to the Provost and to General Turnbull?”
“The Provost I have had the honour of meeting,” said Auberon, easily.
“We old journalists, you know, meet everybody. I should be most
delighted to have the same honour again. General Turnbull, also, it
would be a gratification to know. The younger men are so interesting. We
of the old Fleet Street gang lose touch with them.”
“Will you be so good as to step this way?” said the leader of O company.
The article from the special correspondent of the Court Journal arrived
in due course, written on very coarse copy-paper in the King’s arabesque
of handwriting, in which three words filled a page, and yet were illegible.
Moreover, the contribution was the more perplexing at first, as it opened
with a succession of erased paragraphs. The writer appeared to have
attempted the article once or twice in several journalistic styles. At the
side of one experiment was written, “Try American style,” and the
fragment began —
“The King must go. We want gritty men. Flapdoodle is all very . . .;” and
then broke off, followed by the note, “Good sound journalism safer. Try
it.”
This also stopped abruptly. The next annotation at the side was almost
undecipherable, but seemed to be something like —
“As I passed them and came over the curve of Silver Street, I saw the blue
cloudy masses of Barker’s men blocking the entrance to the high-road
like a sapphire smoke (good). The disposition of the allied troops, under
the general management of Mr. Wilson, appears to be as follows: The
Yellow army (if I may so describe the West Kensingtonians) lies, as I
have said, in a strip along the ridge, its furthest point westward being the
west side of Campden Hill Road, its furthest point eastward the
121
“The whole resembles some ancient and dainty Dutch flower-bed. Along
the crest of Campden Hill lie the golden crocuses of West Kensington.
They are, as it were, the first fiery fringe of the whole. Northward lies our
hyacinth Barker, with all his blue hyacinths. Round to the south-west
run the green rushes of Wilson of Bayswater, and a line of violet irises
(aptly symbolised by Mr. Buck) complete the whole. The argent exterior
. . . (I am losing the style. I should have said ‘Curving with a whisk’
instead of merely ‘Curving.’ Also I should have called the hyacinths
‘sudden.’ I cannot keep this up. War is too rapid for this style of writing.
Please ask office-boy to insert mots justes.)
“And how odd it is that one views a thing quite differently when one
knows it is defeated! I always thought Wayne was rather fine. But now,
122
when I know that he is done for, there seem to be nothing else but
Wayne. All the streets seem to point at him, all the chimneys seem to
lean towards him. I suppose it is a morbid feeling; but Pump Street
seems to be the only part of London that I feel physically. I suppose, I
say, that it is morbid. I suppose it is exactly how a man feels about his
heart when his heart is weak. ‘Pump Street’— the heart is a pump. And I
am drivelling.
“Our finest leader at the front is, beyond all question, General Wilson.
He has adopted alone among the other Provosts the uniform of his own
halberdiers, although that fine old sixteenth-century garb was not
originally intended to go with red side-whiskers. It was he who, against a
most admirable and desperate defence, broke last night into Pump Street
and held it for at least half an hour. He was afterwards expelled from it
by General Turnbull, of Notting Hill, but only after desperate fighting
and the sudden descent of that terrible darkness which proved so much
more fatal to the forces of General Buck and General Swindon.
“Provost Wayne himself, with whom I had, with great good fortune, a
most interesting interview, bore the most eloquent testimony to the
conduct of General Wilson and his men. His precise words are as
follows: ‘I have bought sweets at his funny little shop when I was four
years old, and ever since. I never noticed anything, I am ashamed to say,
except that he talked through his nose, and didn’t wash himself
particularly. And he came over our barricade like a devil from hell.’ I
repeated this speech to General Wilson himself, with some delicate
improvements, and he seemed pleased with it. He does not, however,
seem pleased with anything so much just now as he is with the wearing
of a sword. I have it from the front on the best authority that General
Wilson was not completely shaved yesterday. It is believed in military
circles that he is growing a moustache. . . .
“As I have said, there is nothing to report. I walk wearily to the pillar-box
at the corner of Pembridge Road to post my copy. Nothing whatever has
happened, except the preparations for a particularly long and feeble
siege, during which I trust I shall not be required to be at the Front. As I
glance up Pembridge Road in the growing dusk, the aspect of that road
reminds me that there is one note worth adding. General Buck has
suggested, with characteristic acumen, to General Wilson that, in order
123
“Later. — I write with some difficulty, because the blood will run down
my face and make patterns on the paper. Blood is a very beautiful thing;
that is why it is concealed. If you ask why blood runs down my face, I can
only reply that I was kicked by a horse. If you ask me what horse, I can
reply with some pride that it was a war-horse. If you ask me how a war-
horse came on the scene in our simple pedestrian warfare, I am reduced
to the necessity, so painful to a special correspondent, of recounting my
experiences.
“I was, as I have said, in the very act of posting my copy at the pillar-box,
and of glancing as I did so up the glittering curve of Pembridge Road,
studded with the lights of Wilson’s men. I don’t know what made me
pause to examine the matter, but I had a fancy that the line of lights,
where it melted into the indistinct brown twilight, was more indistinct
than usual. I was almost certain that in a certain stretch of the road
where there had been five lights there were now only four. I strained my
eyes; I counted them again, and there were only three. A moment after
there were only two; an instant after only one; and an instant after that
the lanterns near to me swung like jangled bells, as if struck suddenly.
They flared and fell; and for the moment the fall of them was like the fall
of the sun and stars out of heaven. It left everything in a primal
blindness. As a matter of fact, the road was not yet legitimately dark.
There were still red rays of a sunset in the sky, and the brown gloaming
was still warmed, as it were, with a feeling as of firelight. But for three
seconds after the lanterns swung and sank, I saw in front of me a
blackness blocking the sky. And with the fourth second I knew that this
blackness which blocked the sky was a man on a great horse; and I was
trampled and tossed aside as a swirl of horsemen swept round the
corner. As they turned I saw that they were not black, but scarlet; they
were a sortie of the besieged, Wayne riding ahead.
124
“I lifted myself from the gutter, blinded with blood from a very slight
skin-wound, and, queerly enough, not caring either for the blindness or
for the slightness of the wound. For one mortal minute after that
amazing cavalcade had spun past, there was dead stillness on the empty
road. And then came Barker and all his halberdiers running like devils in
the track of them. It had been their business to guard the gate by which
the sortie had broken out; but they had not reckoned, and small blame to
them, on cavalry. As it was, Barker and his men made a perfectly
splendid run after them, almost catching Wayne’s horses by the tails.
object. Just as Barker’s Blues were swinging round the corner after them,
they were stopped, but not by an enemy; only by the voice of one man,
and he a friend. Red Wilson of Bayswater ran alone along the main road
like a madman, waving them back with a halberd snatched from a
sentinel. He was in supreme command, and Barker stopped at the
corner, staring and bewildered. We could hear Wilson’s voice loud and
distinct out of the dusk, so that it seemed strange that the great voice
should come out of the little body. ‘Halt, South Kensington! Guard this
entry, and prevent them returning. I will pursue. Forward, the Green
Guards!’
“‘You fools!’ came the voice of Wilson, cleaving our panic with a splendid
cold anger. ‘Don’t you see? the horses have no riders!’
“Never did I admire any man’s intellect (even my own) so much as I did
Wilson’s at that moment. Without a word, he simply pointed the halberd
(which he still grasped) to the southern side of the road. As you know,
the streets running up to the ridge of Campden Hill from the main road
are peculiarly steep, they are more like sudden flights of stairs. We were
just opposite Aubrey Road, the steepest of all; up that it would have been
far more difficult to urge half-trained horses than to run up on one’s feet.
“‘Left wheel!’ hallooed Wilson. ‘They have gone up here,’ he added to me,
who happened to be at his elbow.
“‘Can’t say for certain,’ replied the Bayswater General. ‘They’ve gone up
here in a great hurry, anyhow. They’ve simply turned their horses loose,
because they couldn’t take them up. I fancy I know. I fancy they’re trying
to get over the ridge to Kensingston or Hammersmith, or somewhere,
and are striking up here because it’s just beyond the end of our line.
Damned fools, not to have gone further along the road, though. They’ve
only just shaved our last outpost. Lambert is hardly four hundred yards
from here. And I’ve sent him word.’
“‘Wilfrid Lambert’s his name,’ said the General; ‘used to be a “man about
town;” silly fellow with a big nose. That kind of man always volunteers
for some war or other; and what’s funnier, he generally isn’t half bad at
it. Lambert is distinctly good. The yellow West Kensingtons I always
reckoned the weakest part of the army; but he has pulled them together
uncommonly well, though he’s subordinate to Swindon, who’s a donkey.
In the attack from Pembridge Road the other night he showed great
pluck.’
“‘He has shown greater pluck than that,’ I said. ‘He has criticised my
sense of humour. That was his first engagement.’
“We reached the top of it, panting somewhat, and were just about to turn
the corner by a place called (in chivalrous anticipation of our wars of
sword and axe) Tower Creçy, when we were suddenly knocked in the
stomach (I can use no other term) by a horde of men hurled back upon
us. They wore the red uniform of Wayne; their halberds were broken;
their foreheads bleeding; but the mere impetus of their retreat staggered
us as we stood at the last ridge of the slope.
“‘Good old Lambert!’ yelled out suddenly the stolid Mr. Wilson of
Bayswater, in an uncontrollable excitement. ‘Damned jolly old Lambert!
He’s got there already! He’s driving them back on us! Hurrah! hurrah!
Forward, the Green Guards!’
“Will you pardon a little egotism? Every one likes a little egotism, when it
takes the form, as mine does in this case, of a disgraceful confession. The
thing is really a little interesting, because it shows how the merely artistic
habit has bitten into men like me. It was the most intensely exciting
occurrence that had ever come to me in my life; and I was really
intensely excited about it. And yet, as we turned that corner, the first
impression I had was of something that had nothing to do with the fight
at all. I was stricken from the sky as by a thunderbolt, by the height of
the Waterworks Tower on Campden Hill. I don’t know whether
Londoners generally realise how high it looks when one comes out, in
this way, almost immediately under it. For the second it seemed to me
that at the foot of it even human war was a triviality. For the second I felt
as if I had been drunk with some trivial orgie, and that I had been
sobered by the shock of that shadow. A moment afterwards, I realised
that under it was going on something more enduring than stone, and
something wilder than the dizziest height — the agony of man. And I
knew that, compared to that, this overwhelming tower was itself a
triviality; it was a mere stalk of stone which humanity could snap like a
stick.
“I don’t know why I have talked so much about this silly old Waterworks
Tower, which at the very best was only a tremendous background. It was
that, certainly, a sombre and awful landscape, against which our figures
were relieved. But I think the real reason was, that there was in my own
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mind so sharp a transition from the tower of stone to the man of flesh.
For what I saw first when I had shaken off, as it were, the shadow of the
tower, was a man, and a man I knew.
“Lambert stood at the further corner of the street that curved round the
tower, his figure outlined in some degree by the beginning of moonrise.
He looked magnificent, a hero; but he looked something much more
interesting than that. He was, as it happened, in almost precisely the
same swaggering attitude in which he had stood nearly fifteen years ago,
when he swung his walking-stick and struck it into the ground, and told
me that all my subtlety was drivel. And, upon my soul, I think he
required more courage to say that than to fight as he does now. For then
he was fighting against something that was in the ascendant,
fashionable, and victorious. And now he is fighting (at the risk of his life,
no doubt) merely against something which is already dead, which is
impossible, futile; of which nothing has been more impossible and futile
than this very sortie which has brought him into contact with it. People
nowadays allow infinitely too little for the psychological sense of victory
as a factor in affairs. Then he was attacking the degraded but
undoubtedly victorious Quin; now he is attacking the interesting but
totally extinguished Wayne.
“His name recalls me to the details of the scene. The facts were these. A
line of red halberdiers, headed by Wayne, were marching up the street,
close under the northern wall, which is, in fact, the bottom of a sort of
dyke or fortification of the Waterworks. Lambert and his yellow West
Kensingtons had that instant swept round the corner and had shaken the
Waynites heavily, hurling back a few of the more timid, as I have just
described, into our very arms. When our force struck the tail of Wayne’s,
every one knew that all was up with him. His favourite military barber
was struck down. His grocer was stunned. He himself was hurt in the
thigh, and reeled back against the wall. We had him in a trap with two
jaws. ‘Is that you?’ shouted Lambert, genially, to Wilson, across the
hemmed-in host of Notting Hill. ‘That’s about the ticket,’ replied General
Wilson; ‘keep them under the wall.’
“The men of Notting Hill were falling fast. Adam Wayne threw up his
long arms to the wall above him, and with a spring stood upon it; a
gigantic figure against the moon. He tore the banner out of the hands of
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the standard-bearer below him, and shook it out suddenly above our
heads, so that it was like thunder in the heavens.
“‘Round the Red Lion!’ he cried. ‘Swords round the Red Lion! Halberds
round the Red Lion! They are the thorns round rose.’
“His voice and the crack of the banner made a momentary rally, and
Lambert, whose idiotic face was almost beautiful with battle, felt it as by
an instinct, and cried —
“‘The banner of the Red Lion seldom stoops,’ said Wayne, proudly,
letting it out luxuriantly on the night wind.
“‘The banner stoops,’ cried Wayne, in a voice that must have startled
streets. ‘The banner of Notting Hill stoops to a hero.’ And with the words
he drove the spear-point and half the flag-staff through Lambert’s body
and dropped him dead upon the road below, a stone upon the stones of
the street.
“‘Notting Hill! Notting Hill!’ cried Wayne, in a sort of divine rage. ‘Her
banner is all the holier for the blood of a brave enemy! Up on the wall,
patriots! Up on the wall! Notting Hill!’
“With his long strong arm he actually dragged a man up on to the wall to
be silhouetted against the moon, and more and more men climbed up
there, pulled themselves and were pulled, till clusters and crowds of the
half-massacred men of Pump Street massed upon the wall above us.
“‘We have won!’ cried Wayne, striking his flag-staff in the ground.
‘Bayswater for ever! We have taught our enemies patriotism!’
“‘Oh, cut these fellows up and have done with it!’ cried one of Lambert’s
lieutenants, who was reduced to something bordering on madness by the
responsibility of succeeding to the command.
“‘Let us by all means try,’ said Wilson, grimly; and the two armies closed
round the third.
“Later.— The final touch has been given to all this terrible futility. Hours
have passed; morning has broken; men are still swaying and fighting at
the foot of the tower and round the corner of Aubrey Road; the fight has
not finished. But I know it is a farce.
“News has just come to show that Wayne’s amazing sortie, followed by
the amazing resistance through a whole night on the wall of the
Waterworks, is as if it had not been. What was the object of that strange
exodus we shall probably never know, for the simple reason that every
one who knew will probably be cut to pieces in the course of the next two
or three hours.
“I have heard, about three minutes ago, that Buck and Buck’s methods
have won after all. He was perfectly right, of course, when one comes to
think of it, in holding that it was physically impossible for a street to
defeat a city. While we thought he was patrolling the eastern gates with
his Purple army; while we were rushing about the streets and waving
halberds and lanterns; while poor old Wilson was scheming like Moltke
and fighting like Achilles to entrap the wild Provost of Notting Hill — Mr.
Buck, retired draper, has simply driven down in a hansom cab and done
something about as plain as butter and about as useful and nasty. He has
gone down to South Kensington, Brompton, and Fulham, and by
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spending about four thousand pounds of his private means, has raised
an army of nearly as many men; that is to say, an army big enough to
beat, not only Wayne, but Wayne and all his present enemies put
together. The army, I understand, is encamped along High Street,
Kensington, and fills it from the Church to Addison Road Bridge. It is to
advance by ten different roads uphill to the north.
“I repeat, I cannot stand it. It is like watching that wonderful play of old
Maeterlinck’s (you know my partiality for the healthy, jolly old authors of
the nineteenth century), in which one has to watch the quiet conduct of
people inside a parlour, while knowing that the very men are outside the
door whose word can blast it all with tragedy. And this is worse, for the
men are not talking, but writhing and bleeding and dropping dead for a
thing that is already settled — and settled against them. The great grey
masses of men still toil and tug and sway hither and thither around the
great grey tower; and the tower is still motionless, as it will always be
motionless. These men will be crushed before the sun is set; and new
men will arise and be crushed, and new wrongs done, and tyranny will
always rise again like the sun, and injustice will always be as fresh as the
flowers of spring. And the stone tower will always look down on it.
Matter, in its brutal beauty, will always look down on those who are mad
enough to consent to die, and yet more mad, since they consent to live.”
Thus ended abruptly the first and last contribution of the Special
Correspondent of the Court Journal to that valued periodical.
The Correspondent himself, as has been said, was simply sick and
gloomy at the last news of the triumph of Buck. He slouched sadly down
the steep Aubrey Road, up which he had the night before run in so
unusual an excitement, and strolled out into the empty dawn-lit main
road, looking vaguely for a cab. He saw nothing in the vacant space
except a blue-and-gold glittering thing, running very fast, which looked
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at first like a very tall beetle, but turned out, to his great astonishment, to
be Barker.
“Yes,” said Quin, with a measured voice. “I have heard the glad tidings of
great joy. Shall we take a hansom down to Kensington? I see one over
there.”
They took the cab, and were, in four minutes, fronting the ranks of the
multitudinous and invincible army. Quin had not spoken a word all the
way, and something about him had prevented the essentially
impressionable Barker from speaking either.
“The facts of the case are quite sufficient,” rejoined Buck. “It is the facts
of the case that make an army surrender. Let us simply say that our army
that is fighting their army, and their army that is fighting our army,
amount altogether to about a thousand men. Say that we have four
thousand. It is very simple. Of the thousand fighting, they have at the
very most, three hundred, so that, with those three hundred, they have
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The herald who was despatched up Church Street in all the pomp of the
South Kensington blue and gold, with the Three Birds on his tabard, was
attended by two trumpeters.
“What will they do when they consent?” asked Barker, for the sake of
saying something in the sudden stillness of that immense army.
The King, who had strolled up to the head of the line, broke silence for
the first time.
“I shouldn’t wonder,” he said, “if he defied you, and didn’t send the
herald after all. I don’t think you do know your Wayne quite so well as
you think.”
“All right, your Majesty,” said Buck, easily; “if it isn’t disrespectful, I’ll
put my political calculations in a very simple form. I’ll lay you ten
pounds to a shilling the herald comes with the surrender.”
“All right,” said Auberon. “I may be wrong, but it’s my notion of Adam
Wayne that he’ll die in his city, and that, till he is dead, it will not be a
safe property.”
Another long silence ensued, in the course of which Barker alone, amid
the motionless army, strolled and stamped in his restless way.
“It’s taking your money, your Majesty,” he said. “I knew it was. There
comes the herald from Adam Wayne.”
“It’s not,” cried the King, peering forward also. “You brute, it’s a red
omnibus.”
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“It’s not,” said Buck, calmly; and the King did not answer, for down the
centre of the spacious and silent Church Street was walking, beyond
question, the herald of the Red Lion, with two trumpeters.
“General Barker,” he said, bowing, “do you propose now to receive the
message from the besieged?”
“Has your master, Mr. Adam Wayne, received our request for
surrender?” he asked.
“My message is this. Adam Wayne, Lord High Provost of Notting Hill,
under the charter of King Auberon and the laws of God and all mankind,
free and of a free city, greets James Barker, Lord High Provost of South
Kensington, by the same rights free and honourable, leader of the army
of the South. With all friendly reverence, and with all constitutional
consideration, he desires James Barker to lay down his arms, and the
whole army under his command to lay down their arms also.”
Before the words were ended the King had run forward into the open
space with shining eyes. The rest of the staff and the forefront of the
army were literally struck breathless. When they recovered they began to
laugh beyond restraint; the revulsion was too sudden.
“The Lord High Provost of Notting Hill,” continued the herald, “does not
propose, in the event of your surrender, to use his victory for any of those
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“The King must have had something to do with this humour,” said Buck,
slapping his thigh. “It’s too deliciously insolent. Barker, have a glass of
wine.”
When the laughter had died down, the herald continued quite
monotonously —
“In the event of your surrendering your arms and dispersing under the
superintendence of our forces, these local rights of yours shall be
carefully observed. In the event of your not doing so, the Lord High
Provost of Notting Hill desires to announce that he has just captured the
Waterworks Tower, just above you, on Campden Hill, and that within ten
minutes from now, that is, on the reception through me of your refusal,
he will open the great reservoir and flood the whole valley where you
stand in thirty feet of water. God save King Auberon!”
Buck had dropped his glass and sent a great splash of wine over the road.
“But — but —” he said; and then by a last and splendid effort of his great
sanity, looked the facts in the face.
In this way the vast army of South Kensington surrendered and the
Empire of Notting Hill began. One further fact in this connection is
perhaps worth mentioning — the fact that, after his victory, Adam Wayne
caused the great tower on Campden Hill to be plated with gold and
inscribed with a great epitaph, saying that it was the monument of
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Wilfrid Lambert, the heroic defender of the place, and surmounted with
a statue, in which his large nose was done something less than justice to.
137
BOOK 5
138
On the evening of the third of October, twenty years after the great
victory of Notting Hill, which gave it the dominion of London, King
Auberon came, as of old, out of Kensington Palace.
He had changed little, save for a streak or two of grey in his hair, for his
face had always been old, and his step slow, and, as it were, decrepit.
The King, cultivating the walk attributed to the oldest inhabitant (“Gaffer
Auberon” his friends were now confidentially desired to call him), went
toddling northward. He paused, with reminiscence in his eye, at the
Southern Gate of Notting Hill, one of those nine great gates of bronze
and steel, wrought with reliefs of the old battles, by the hand of Chiffy
himself.
“Ah!” he said, shaking his head and assuming an unnecessary air of age,
and a provincialism of accent —“Ah! I mind when there warn’t none of
this here.”
It was about sunset, and the lamps were being lit. Auberon paused to
look at them, for they were Chiffy’s finest work, and his artistic eye never
failed to feast on them. In memory of the Great Battle of the Lamps, each
great iron lamp was surmounted by a veiled figure, sword in hand,
holding over the flame an iron hood or extinguisher, as if ready to let it
fall if the armies of the South and West should again show their flags in
the city. Thus no child in Notting Hill could play about the streets
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“Old Wayne was right in a way,” commented the King. “The sword does
make things beautiful. It has made the whole world romantic by now.
And to think people once thought me a buffoon for suggesting a
romantic Notting Hill. Deary me, deary me! (I think that is the
expression)— it seems like a previous existence.”
“Mr. Mead,” he said, “Notting Hill, whether in giving or taking, can deal
in nothing but honour. Do you happen to sell liquorice?”
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“Liquorice, sire,” said Mr. Mead, “is not the least important of our
benefits out of the dark heart of Arabia.”
And going reverently towards a green and silver canister, made in the
form of an Arabian mosque, he proceeded to serve his customer.
“I was just thinking, Mr. Mead,” said the King, reflectively, “I don’t know
why I should think about it just now, but I was just thinking of twenty
years ago. Do you remember the times before the war?”
“Oh yes, your Majesty,” he said. “I remember these streets before the
Lord Provost began to rule us. I can’t remember how we felt very well.
All the great songs and the fighting change one so; and I don’t think we
can really estimate all we owe to the Provost; but I can remember his
coming into this very shop twenty-two years ago, and I remember the
things he said. The singular thing is that, as far as I remember, I thought
the things he said odd at that time. Now it’s the things that I said, as far
as I can recall them, that seem to me odd — as odd as a madman’s
antics.”
“Ah!” said the King; and looked at him with an unfathomable quietness.
The King turned also, and stared out into the dark, where the great
lamps that commemorated the battle were already flaming.
“And is this the end of poor old Wayne?” he said, half to himself. “To
inflame every one so much that he is lost himself in the blaze. Is this his
victory that he, my incomparable Wayne, is now only one in a world of
Waynes? Has he conquered and become by conquest commonplace?
Must Mr. Mead, the grocer, talk as high as he? Lord! what a strange
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world in which a man cannot remain unique even by taking the trouble
to go mad!”
He paused outside the next one almost precisely as the Provost had done
two decades before.
“How uncommonly creepy this shop looks!” he said. “But yet somehow
encouragingly creepy, invitingly creepy. It looks like something in a jolly
old nursery story in which you are frightened out of your skin, and yet
know that things always end well. The way those low sharp gables are
carved like great black bat’s wings folded down, and the way those queer-
coloured bowls underneath are made to shine like giants eye-balls. It
looks like a benevolent warlock’s hut. It is apparently a chemist’s .”
Almost as he spoke, Mr. Bowles, the chemist, came to his shop door in a
long black velvet gown and hood, monastic as it were, but yet with a
touch of the diabolic. His hair was still quite black, and his face even
paler than of old. The only spot of colour he carried was a red star cut in
some precious stone of strong tint, hung on his breast. He belonged to
the Society of the Red Star of Charity, founded on the lamps displayed by
doctors and chemists.
“A fine evening, sir,” said the chemist. “Why, I can scarcely be mistaken
in supposing it to be your Majesty. Pray step inside and share a bottle of
sal-volatile, or anything that may take your fancy. As it happens, there is
an old acquaintance of your Majesty’s in my shop carousing (if I may be
permitted the term) upon that beverage at this moment.”
The King entered the shop, which was an Aladdin’s garden of shades and
hues, for as the chemist’s scheme of colour was more brilliant than the
grocer’s scheme, so it was arranged with even more delicacy and fancy.
Never, if the phrase may be employed, had such a nosegay of medicines
been presented to the artistic eye.
But even the solemn rainbow of that evening interior was rivalled or
even eclipsed by the figure standing in the centre of the shop. His form,
which was a large and stately one, was clad in a brilliant blue velvet, cut
in the richest Renaissance fashion, and slashed so as to show gleams and
gaps of a wonderful lemon or pale yellow. He had several chains round
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his neck, and his plumes, which were of several tints of bronze and gold,
hung down to the great gold hilt of his long sword. He was drinking a
dose of sal-volatile, and admiring its opal tint. The King advanced with a
slight mystification towards the tall figure, whose face was in shadow;
then he said —
The figure removed his plumed cap, showing the same dark head and
long, almost equine face which the King had so often seen rising out of
the high collar of Bond Street. Except for a grey patch on each temple, it
was totally unchanged.
“I am delighted to see you again, Barker,” said the King. “It is indeed
long since we met. What with my travels in Asia Minor, and my book
having to be written (you have read my ‘Life of Prince Albert for
Children,’ of course?), we have scarcely met twice since the Great War.
That is twenty years ago.”
“Well,” said Auberon, “it’s rather late in the day to start speaking
respectfully. Flap away, my bird of freedom.”
“Well, your Majesty,” replied Barker, lowering his voice, “I don’t think it
will be so long to the next war.”
“We will stand this insolence no longer,” burst out Barker, fiercely. “We
are not slaves because Adam Wayne twenty years ago cheated us with a
water-pipe. Notting Hill is Notting Hill; it is not the world. We in South
Kensington, we also have memories — ay, and hopes. If they fought for
these trumpery shops and a few lamp-posts, shall we not fight for the
great High Street and the sacred Natural History Museum?”
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“It is not from Wayne himself altogether that the evil comes,” answered
Barker. “He, indeed, is now mostly wrapped in dreams, and sits with his
old sword beside the fire. But Notting Hill is the tyrant, your Majesty. Its
Council and its crowds have been so intoxicated by the spreading over
the whole city of Wayne’s old ways and visions, that they try to meddle
with every one, and rule every one, and civilise every one, and tell every
one what is good for him. I do not deny the great impulse which his old
war, wild as it seemed, gave to the civic life of our time. It came when I
was still a young man, and I admit it enlarged my career. But we are not
going to see our own cities flouted and thwarted from day to day because
of something Wayne did for us all nearly a quarter of a century ago. I am
just waiting here for news upon this very matter. It is rumoured that
Notting Hill has vetoed the statue of General Wilson they are putting up
opposite Chepstow Place. If that is so, it is a black and white shameless
breach of the terms on which we surrendered to Turnbull after the battle
of the Tower. We were to keep our own customs and self-government. If
that is so —”
“It is so,” said a deep voice; and both men turned round.
A burly figure in purple robes, with a silver eagle hung round his neck
and moustaches almost as florid as his plumes, stood in the doorway.
Buck did so, and stood rolling his eyes up and down the lamp-lit street.
His voice ended in a cry, and he reeled back a step, with his hands to his
eyes, as he had done in those streets twenty years before.
For in truth every lamp in the street had gone out, so that they could not
see even each other’s outline, except faintly. The voice of the chemist
came with startling cheerfulness out of the density.
“Oh, don’t you know?” he said. “Did they never tell you this is the Feast
of the Lamps, the anniversary of the great battle that almost lost and just
saved Notting Hill? Don’t you know, your Majesty, that on this night
twenty-one years ago we saw Wilson’s green uniforms charging down
this street, and driving Wayne and Turnbull back upon the gas-works,
fighting with their handful like fiends from hell? And that then, in that
great hour, Wayne sprang through a window of the gas-works, with one
blow of his hand brought darkness on the whole city, and then with a cry
like a lion’s, that was heard through four streets, flew at Wilson’s men,
sword in hand, and swept them, bewildered as they were, and ignorant of
the map, clear out of the sacred street again? And don’t you know that
upon that night every year all lights are turned out for half an hour while
we sing the Notting Hill anthem in the darkness? Hark! there it begins.”
Through the night came a crash of drums, and then a strong swell of
human voices —
“When the world was in the balance, there was night on Notting Hill,
(There was night on Notting Hill): it was nobler than the day;
On the cities where the lights are and the firesides glow,
From the seas and from the deserts came the thing we did not know,
Came the darkness, came the darkness, came the darkness on the foe,
And the stars fall down before it ere its banners fall to-day:
When falling was the citadel and broken was the sword,
The darkness came upon them like the Dragon of the Lord,
The voices were just uplifting themselves in a second verse when they
were stopped by a scurry and a yell. Barker had bounded into the street
with a cry of “South Kensington!” and a drawn dagger. In less time than
a man could blink, the whole packed street was full of curses and
struggling. Barker was flung back against the shop-front, but used the
second only to draw his sword as well as his dagger, and calling out,
“This is not the first time I’ve come through the thick of you,” flung
himself again into the press. It was evident that he had drawn blood at
last, for a more violent outcry arose, and many other knives and swords
were discernible in the faint light. Barker, after having wounded more
than one man, seemed on the point of being flung back again, when Buck
suddenly stepped out into the street. He had no weapon, for he affected
rather the peaceful magnificence of the great burgher, than the
pugnacious dandyism which had replaced the old sombre dandyism in
Barker. But with a blow of his clenched fist he broke the pane of the next
shop, which was the old curiosity shop, and, plunging in his hand,
snatched a kind of Japanese scimitar, and calling out, “Kensington!
Kensington!” rushed to Barker’s assistance.
Barker’s sword was broken, but he was laying about him with his dagger.
Just as Buck ran up, a man of Notting Hill struck Barker down, but Buck
struck the man down on top of him, and Barker sprang up again, the
blood running down his face.
Suddenly all these cries were cloven by a great voice, that seemed to fall
out of heaven. It was terrible to Buck and Barker and the King, from its
seeming to come out the empty skies; but it was more terrible because it
was a familiar voice, and one which at the same time they had not heard
for so long.
“Turn up the lights,” said the voice from above them, and for a moment
there was no reply, but only a tumult.
“In the name of Notting Hill and of the great Council of the City, turn up
the lights.”
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There was again a tumult and a vagueness for a moment, then the whole
street and every object in it sprang suddenly out of the darkness, as every
lamp sprang into life. And looking up they saw, standing upon a balcony
near the roof of one of the highest houses, the figure and the face of
Adam Wayne, his red hair blowing behind him, a little streaked with
grey.
come? Has Athens asked every one to wear the chlamys? Are all
followers of the Nazarene compelled to wear turbans. No! but the soul of
Athens went forth and made men drink hemlock, and the soul of
Nazareth went forth and made men consent to be crucified. So has the
soul of Notting Hill gone forth and made men realise what it is to live in
a city. Just as we inaugurated our symbols and ceremonies, so they have
inaugurated theirs; and are you so mad as to contend against them?
Notting Hill is right; it has always been right. It has moulded itself on its
own necessities, its own sine quâ non; it has accepted its own ultimatum.
Because it is a nation it has created itself; and because it is a nation it can
destroy itself. Notting Hill shall always be the judge. If it is your will
because of this matter of General Wilson’s statue to make war upon
Bayswater —”
A roar of cheers broke in upon his words, and further speech was
impossible. Pale to the lips, the great patriot tried again and again to
speak; but even his authority could not keep down the dark and roaring
masses in the street below him. He said something further, but it was not
audible. He descended at last sadly from the garret in which he lived, and
mingled with the crowd at the foot of the houses. Finding General
Turnbull, he put his hand on his shoulder with a queer affection and
gravity, and said —
“I don’t mind so much about being dead,” he said, “but why should you
say that we shall be defeated?”
As Wayne spoke he started a little, for both men became aware that a
third figure was listening to them — a small figure with wondering eyes.
“Is it really true, my dear Wayne,” said the King, interrupting, “that you
think you will be beaten to-morrow?”
“Then,” cried the King, flinging out his arms, “give me a halberd! Give
me a halberd, somebody! I desire all men to witness that I, Auberon,
King of England, do here and now abdicate, and implore the Provost of
Notting Hill to permit me to enlist in his army. Give me a halberd!”
He seized one from some passing guard, and, shouldering it, stamped
solemnly after the shouting columns of halberdiers which were, by this
time, parading the streets. He had, however, nothing to do with the
wrecking of the statue of General Wilson, which took place before
morning.
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The day was cloudy when Wayne went down to die with all his army in
Kensington Gardens; it was cloudy again when that army had been
swallowed up by the vast armies of a new world. There had been an
almost uncanny interval of sunshine, in which the Provost of Notting
Hill, with all the placidity of an onlooker, had gazed across to the hostile
armies on the great spaces of verdure opposite; the long strips of green
and blue and gold lay across the park in squares and oblongs like a
proposition in Euclid wrought in a rich embroidery. But the sunlight was
a weak and, as it were, a wet sunlight, and was soon swallowed up.
Wayne spoke to the King, with a queer sort of coldness and languor, as to
the military operations. It was as he had said the night before — that
being deprived of his sense of an impracticable rectitude, he was, in
effect, being deprived of everything. He was out of date, and at sea in a
mere world of compromise and competition, of Empire against Empire,
of the tolerably right and the tolerably wrong. When his eye fell on the
King, however, who was marching very gravely with a top hat and a
halberd, it brightened slightly.
“See how splendidly,” cried Wayne, “the new cities come on — the new
cities from across the river. See where Battersea advances over there —
under the flag of the Lost Dog; and Putney — don’t you see the Man on
the White Boar shining on their standard as the sun catches it? It is the
coming of a new age, your Majesty. Notting Hill is not a common empire;
it is a thing like Athens, the mother of a mode of life, of a manner of
living, which shall renew the youth of the world — a thing like Nazareth.
When I was young I remember, in the old dreary days, wiseacres used to
write books about how trains would get faster, and all the world be one
empire, and tram-cars go to the moon. And even as a child I used to say
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Even as he spoke there came a crash of steel from the left, and he turned
his head.
“Wilson!” he cried, with a kind of joy. “Red Wilson has charged our left.
No one can hold him in; he eats swords. He is as keen a soldier as
Turnbull, but less patient — less really great. Ha! and Barker is moving.
How Barker has improved; how handsome he looks! It is not all having
plumes; it is also having a soul in one’s daily life. Ha!”
And another crash of steel on the right showed that Barker had closed
with Notting Hill on the other side.
“Turnbull is there!” cried Wayne. “See him hurl them back! Barker is
checked! Turnbull charges — wins! But our left is broken. Wilson has
smashed Bowles and Mead, and may turn our flank. Forward, the
Provost’s Guard!”
And the whole centre moved forward, Wayne’s face and hair and sword
flaming in the van.
The next instant a great jar that went through it told that it had met the
enemy. And right over against them through the wood of their own
weapons Auberon saw the Purple Eagle of Buck of North Kensington.
On the left Red Wilson was storming the broken ranks, his little green
figure conspicuous even in the tangle of men and weapons, with the
flaming red moustaches and the crown of laurel. Bowles slashed at his
head and tore away some of the wreath, leaving the rest bloody, and,
with a roar like a bull’s, Wilson sprang at him, and, after a rattle of
fencing, plunged his point into the chemist, who fell, crying, “Notting
Hill!” Then the Notting Hillers wavered, and Bayswater swept them back
in confusion. Wilson had carried everything before him.
On the right, however, Turnbull had carried the Red Lion banner with a
rush against Barker’s men, and the banner of the Golden Birds bore up
with difficulty against it. Barker’s men fell fast. In the centre Wayne and
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Buck were engaged, stubborn and confused. So far as the fighting went,
it was precisely equal. But the fighting was a farce. For behind the three
small armies with which Wayne’s small army was engaged lay the great
sea of the allied armies, which looked on as yet as scornful spectators,
but could have broken all four armies by moving a finger.
Suddenly they did move. Some of the front contingents, the pastoral
chiefs from Shepherd’s Bush, with their spears and fleeces, were seen
advancing, and the rude clans from Paddington Green. They were
advancing for a very good reason. Buck, of North Kensington, was
signalling wildly; he was surrounded, and totally cut off. His regiments
were a struggling mass of people, islanded in a red sea of Notting Hill.
The allies had been too careless and confident. They had allowed
Barker’s force to be broken to pieces by Turnbull, and the moment that
was done, the astute old leader of Notting Hill swung his men round and
attacked Buck behind and on both sides. At the same moment Wayne
cried, “Charge!” and struck him in front like a thunderbolt.
Two-thirds of Buck’s men were cut to pieces before their allies could
reach them. Then the sea of cities came on with their banners like
breakers, and swallowed Notting Hill for ever. The battle was not over,
for not one of Wayne’s men would surrender, and it lasted till sundown,
and long after. But it was decided; the story of Notting Hill was ended.
When Turnbull saw it, he ceased a moment from fighting, and looked
round him. The evening sunlight struck his face; it looked like a child’s .
Wayne was standing by a tree alone after the battle. Several men
approached him with axes. One struck at him. His foot seemed partly to
slip; but he flung his hand out, and steadied himself against the tree.
Barker sprang after him, sword in hand, and shaking with excitement.
“How large now, my lord,” he cried, “is the Empire of Notting Hill?”
Barker dropped, wounded in the neck; and Wilson sprang over his body
like a tiger-cat, rushing at Wayne. At the same moment there came
behind the Lord of the Red Lion a cry and a flare of yellow, and a mass of
the West Kensington halberdiers ploughed up the slope, knee-deep in
grass, bearing the yellow banner of the city before them, and shouting
aloud.
At the same second Wilson went down under Wayne’s sword, seemingly
smashed like a fly. The great sword rose again like a bird, but Wilson
seemed to rise with it, and, his sword being broken, sprang at Wayne’s
throat like a dog. The foremost of the yellow halberdiers had reached the
tree and swung his axe above the struggling Wayne. With a curse the
King whirled up his own halberd, and dashed the blade in the man’s face.
He reeled and rolled down the slope, just as the furious Wilson was flung
on his back again. And again he was on his feet, and again at Wayne’s
throat. Then he was flung again, but this time laughing triumphantly.
Grasped in his hand was the red and yellow favour that Wayne wore as
Provost of Notting Hill. He had torn it from the place where it had been
carried for twenty-five years.
With a shout the West Kensington men closed round Wayne, the great
yellow banner flapping over his head.
“Where is your favour now, Provost?” cried the West Kensington leader.
“Here is one colour!” he cried, pushing the yellow into his belt; “and
here!” he cried, pointing to his own blood —“here is the other.”
At the same instant the shock of a sudden and heavy halberd laid the
King stunned or dead. In the wild visions of vanishing consciousness, he
saw again something that belonged to an utterly forgotten time,
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Quin did not see the end. Wilson, wild with joy, sprang again at Adam
Wayne, and the great sword of Notting Hill was whirled above once
more. Then men ducked instinctively at the rushing noise of the sword
coming down out of the sky, and Wilson of Bayswater was smashed and
wiped down upon the floor like a fly. Nothing was left of him but a
wreck; but the blade that had broken him was broken. In dying he had
snapped the great sword and the spell of it; the sword of Wayne was
broken at the hilt. One rush of the enemy carried Wayne by force against
the tree. They were too close to use halberd or even sword; they were
breast to breast, even nostrils to nostrils. But Buck got his dagger free.
“Kill him!” he cried, in a strange stifled voice. “Kill him! Good or bad, he
is none of us! Do not be blinded by the face! . . . God! have we not been
blinded all along!” and he drew his arm back for a stab, and seemed to
close his eyes.
Wayne did not drop the hand that hung on to the tree-branch. But a
mighty heave went over his breast and his whole huge figure, like an
earthquake over great hills. And with that convulsion of effort he rent the
branch out of the tree, with tongues of torn wood; and, swaying it once
only, he let the splintered club fall on Buck, breaking his neck. The
planner of the Great Road fell face foremost dead, with his dagger in a
grip of steel.
“For you and me, and for all brave men, my brother,” said Wayne, in his
strange chant, “there is good wine poured in the inn at the end of the
world.”
The packed men made another lurch or heave towards him; it was
almost too dark to fight clearly. He caught hold of the oak again, this
time getting his hand into a wide crevice and grasping, as it were, the
bowels of the tree.
The whole crowd, numbering some thirty men, made a rush to tear him
away from it; they hung on with all their weight and numbers, and
nothing stirred.
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A solitude could not have been stiller than that group of straining men.
Then there was a faint sound.
“You don’t know much of him,” said another, grimly (a man of the old
war). “More likely his bone cracks.”
“As the tree falleth, so shall it lie,” said Wayne’s voice out of the
darkness, and it had the same sweet and yet horrible air that it had had
throughout, of coming from a great distance, from before or after the
event. Even when he was struggling like an eel or battering like a
madman, he spoke like a spectator. “As the tree falleth, so shall it lie,” he
said. “Men have called that a gloomy text. It is the essence of all
exultation. I am doing now what I have done all my life, what is the only
happiness, what is the only universality. I am clinging to something. Let
it fall, and there let it lie. Fools, you go about and see the kingdoms of the
earth, and are liberal and wise and cosmopolitan, which is all that the
devil can give you — all that he could offer to Christ, only to be spurned
away. I am doing what the truly wise do. When a child goes out into the
garden and takes hold of a tree, saying, ‘Let this tree be all I have,’ that
moment its roots take hold on hell and its branches on the stars. The joy
I have is what the lover knows when a woman is everything. It is what a
savage knows when his idol is everything. It is what I know when Notting
Hill is everything. I have a city. Let it stand or fall.”
As he spoke, the turf lifted itself like a living thing, and out of it rose
slowly, like crested serpents, the roots of the oak. Then the great head of
the tree, that seemed a green cloud among grey ones, swept the sky
suddenly like a broom, and the whole tree heeled over like a ship,
smashing every one in its fall.
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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 —
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
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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 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 débris in
the half-darkness.
The other voice came after a long pause, and as it were hoarsely.
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“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.”
“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.”
“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.
“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.
“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?”
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“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 débris 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.”
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.