The Napoleon of Notting Hill
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?"
"Splendid!" cried Adam Wayne. "It has the splendour of God."
"Bowled out again," said the King. "You will keep up the pose.
Funnily, of course, it is serious. But seriously, isn't it funny?"
"What?" asked Wayne, with the eyes of a baby.
"Hang it all, don't play any more. The whole business--the Charter of
the Cities. Isn't it immense?"
"Immense is no unworthy word for that glorious design."
"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 dais, 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.
"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."
The kneeling figure sprang to his feet with a fierce stagger.
"Ludicrous!" he cried, with a fiery face.
"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?"
Adam Wayne looked down like a boy, and answered in a constrained
voice--
"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."
King Auberon dropped the hand and stood without stirring,
thunderstruck.
"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?"
"And my God in Heaven!" said Wayne passionately; "is it possible that
there is within the four seas of Britain a man who does not take it
seriously?"
The King said nothing, but merely went back up the steps of the dais,
like a man dazed. He fell back in his chair again and kicked his
heels.
"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?"
"Are they so terrible?" asked Wayne, scornfully.
The King continued to stare at him as if he were a human curiosity.
"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?"
"If they have blood they will," said the Provost.
"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?"
"Where," asked the King, leaning forward--"where in Heaven's name did
you get this miraculously inane idea?"
"You have been my tutor, Sire," said the Provost, "in all that is high
and honourable."
"Eh?" said the King.
"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 wandered in a noble secrecy, watching over your people's
welfare. But I need have had no fear. Then was I taught to understand
Kingliness. You neither shrank nor frowned. You summoned no guards.
You invoked no punishments. But in august and burning words, which are
written in my soul, never to be erased, you told me ever to turn my
sword against the enemies of my inviolate city. Like a priest pointing
to the altar, you pointed to the hill of Notting. 'So long,' you said,
'as you are ready to die for the sacred mountain, even if it were
ringed with all the armies of Bayswater.' I have not forgotten the
words, and I have reason now to remember them, for the hour is come
and the crown of your prophecy. The sacred hill is ringed with the
armies of Bayswater, and I am ready to die."
The King was lying back in his chair, a kind of wreck.
"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!"
Suddenly he pulled himself upright.
"Don't you really think the sacred Notting Hill at all absurd?"
"Absurd?" asked Wayne, blankly. "Why should I?"
The King stared back equally blankly.
"I beg your pardon," he said.
"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 smiled.
"Because, my Leonidas--" he began, then suddenly, he knew not how,
found his mind was a total blank. After all, why was it absurd? Why
was it absurd? He felt as if the floor of his mind had given way. He
felt as all men feel when their first principles are hit hard with a
question. Barker always felt so when the King said, "Why trouble about
politics?"
The King's thoughts were in a kind of rout; he could not collect them.
"It is generally felt to be a little funny," he said vaguely.
"I suppose," said Adam, turning on him with a fierce suddenness--"I
suppose you fancy crucifixion was a serious affair?"
"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?"
The King made no answer.
Adam went on, his voice ringing in the roof.
"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."
King Auberon got up absently.
"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.
"I know," he said, in a strange, almost sleepy voice, "there is truth
in what you say, too. It is hard not to laugh at the common names--I
only say we should not. I have thought of a remedy; but such thoughts
are rather terrible."
"What thoughts?" asked Auberon.
The Provost of Notting Hill seemed to have fallen into a kind of
trance; in his eyes was an elvish light.
"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.
"It has made mean landscapes magnificent, and hovels outlast
cathedrals," went on the madman. "Why should it not make lamp-posts
fairer than Greek lamps; and an omnibus-ride like a painted ship? The