The Napoleon of Notting Hill
"What a nice fellow he is!" he said. "It's odd how often they are
nice. Much nicer than those as are all right."
Meanwhile Adam Wayne stood outside the glowing chemist's shop,
unmistakably wavering.
"What a weakness it is!" he muttered. "I have never got rid of it from
childhood--the fear of this magic shop. The grocer is rich, he is
romantic, he is poetical in the truest sense, but he is not--no, he is
not supernatural. But the chemist! All the other shops stand in
Notting Hill, but this stands in Elf-land. Look at those great burning
bowls of colour. It must be from them that God paints the sunsets. It
is superhuman, and the superhuman is all the more uncanny when it is
beneficent. That is the root of the fear of God. I am afraid. But I
must be a man and enter."
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.
"A fine evening, sir," he said.
"Fine indeed, strange Father," said Adam, stretching his hands
somewhat forward. "It is on such clear and mellow nights that your
shop is most itself. Then they appear most perfect, those moons of
green and gold and crimson, which from afar oft guide the pilgrim of
pain and sickness to this house of merciful witchcraft."
"Can I get you anything?" asked the chemist.
"Let me see," said Wayne, in a friendly but vague manner. "Let me have
some sal volatile."
"Eightpence, tenpence, or one and sixpence a bottle?" said the young
man, genially.
"One and six--one and six," replied Wayne, with a wild submissiveness.
"I come to ask you, Mr. Bowles, a terrible question."
He paused and collected himself.
"It is necessary," he muttered--"it is necessary to be tactful, and to
suit the appeal to each profession in turn."
"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.
Meeting with no answer, he continued with animation--
"In Notting Hill we have felt to its core the elfish mystery of your
profession. And now Notting Hill itself is threatened."
"Anything more, sir?" asked the chemist.
"Oh," said Wayne, somewhat disturbed--"oh, what is it chemists sell?
Quinine, I think. Thank you. Shall it be destroyed? I have met these
men of Bayswater and North Kensington--Mr. Bowles, they are
materialists. They see no witchery in your work, even when it is
wrought within their own borders. They think the chemist is
commonplace. They think him human."
The chemist appeared to pause, only a moment, to take in the insult,
and immediately said--
"And the next article, please?"
"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."
"Anything more, sir?" asked Mr. Bowles, with unbroken cheerfulness.
"Oh yes, jujubes--Gregory powder--magnesia. The danger is imminent. In
all this matter I have felt that I fought not merely for my own city
(though to that I owe all my blood), but for all places in which these
great ideas could prevail. I am fighting not merely for Notting Hill,
but for Bayswater itself; for North Kensington itself. For if the
gold-hunters prevail, these also will lose all their ancient
sentiments and all the mystery of their national soul. I know I can
count upon you."
"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 the world-old necromancy of the chemist. Where should I be
without tact?"
CHAPTER II--_The Remarkable Mr. Turnbull_
After two more interviews with shopmen, however, the patriot's
confidence in his own psychological diplomacy began vaguely to wane.
Despite the care with which he considered the peculiar rationale and
the peculiar glory of each separate shop, there seemed to be something
unresponsive about the shopmen. Whether it was a dark resentment
against the uninitiate for peeping into their masonic magnificence, he
could not quite conjecture.
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."
Wayne's eyes shone suddenly.
"A great saying," he said, "worthy of a man whose merchandise is human
history. Terribly quiet; that is in two words the spirit of this age,
as I have felt it from my cradle. I sometimes wondered how many other
people felt the oppression of this union between quietude and terror.
I see blank well-ordered streets and men in black moving about
inoffensively, sullenly. It goes on day after day, day after day, and
nothing happens; but to me it is like a dream from which I might wake
screaming. To me the straightness of our life is the straightness of a
thin cord stretched tight. Its stillness is terrible. It might snap
with a noise like thunder. And you who sit, amid the _debris_ of the
great wars, you who sit, as it were, upon a battlefield, you know that
war was less terrible than this evil peace; you know that the idle
lads who carried those swords under Francis or Elizabeth, the rude
Squire or Baron who swung that mace about in Picardy or Northumberland
battles, may have been terribly noisy, but were not like us, terribly
quiet."
Whether it was a faint embarrassment of conscience as to the original
source and date of the weapons referred to, or merely an engrained
depression, the guardian of the past looked, if anything, a little
more worried.
"But I do not think," continued Wayne, "that this horrible silence of
modernity will last, though I think for the present it will increase.
What a farce is this modern liberality! Freedom of speech means
practically, in our modern civilisation, that we must only talk about
unimportant things. We must not talk about religion, for that is
illiberal; we must not talk about bread and cheese, for that is
talking shop; we must not talk about death, for that is depressing; we
must not talk about birth, for that is indelicate. It cannot last.
Something must break this strange indifference, this strange dreamy
egoism, this strange loneliness of millions in a crowd. Something must
break it. Why should it not be you and I? Can you do nothing else but
guard relics?"
The shopman wore a gradually clearing expression, which would have led
those unsympathetic with the cause of the Red Lion to think that the
last sentence was the only one to which he had attached any meaning.
"I am rather old to go into a new business," he said, "and I don't
quite know what to be, either."
"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.
That melancholy was completed at the barber's.
"Shaving, sir?" inquired that artist from inside his shop.
"War!" replied Wayne, standing on the threshold.
"I beg your pardon," said the other, sharply.
"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."
And he came forward with the desperate annoyance of a mild person when
enraged.
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.
"I am afraid," said Wayne, as he entered, "that I am not getting on
with these tradesmen as I should. Is it that I have neglected to rise
to the full meaning of their work? Is there some secret buried in each
of these shops which no mere poet can discover?"
He stepped to the counter with a depression which he rapidly conquered
as he addressed the man on the other side of it,--a man of short
stature, and hair prematurely white, and the look of a large baby.
"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 the other end of nowhere. Is it
thoughtlessly, do you think, that I strike the dark old drum of peril
in the paradise of children? But consider a moment; do not condemn me
hastily. Even that paradise itself contains the rumour or beginning of
that danger, just as the Eden that was made for perfection contained
the terrible tree. For judge childhood, even by your own arsenal of
its pleasures. You keep bricks; you make yourself thus, doubtless,
the witness of the constructive instinct older than the destructive.
You keep dolls; you make yourself the priest of that divine idolatry.
You keep Noah's Arks; you perpetuate the memory of the salvation of
all life as a precious, an irreplaceable thing. But do you keep only,
sir, the symbols of this prehistoric sanity, this childish rationality
of the earth? Do you not keep more terrible things? What are those
boxes, seemingly of lead soldiers, that I see in that glass case? Are
they not witnesses to that terror and beauty, that desire for a lovely
death, which could not be excluded even from the immortality of Eden?
Do not despise the lead soldiers, Mr. Turnbull."
"I don't," said Mr. Turnbull, of the toy-shop, shortly, but with great
emphasis.
"I am glad to hear it," replied Wayne. "I confess that I feared for my
military schemes the awful innocence of your profession. How, I