The Napoleon of Notting Hill
thought to myself, will this man, used only to the wooden swords that
give pleasure, think of the steel swords that give pain? But I am at
least partly reassured. Your tone suggests to me that I have at least
the entry of a gate of your fairyland--the gate through which the
soldiers enter, for it cannot be denied--I ought, sir, no longer to
deny, that it is of soldiers that I come to speak. Let your gentle
employment make you merciful towards the troubles of the world. Let
your own silvery experience tone down our sanguine sorrows. For there
is war in Notting Hill."
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!"
Wayne was almost taken aback by this outburst.
"I am delighted," he stammered. "I had no notion--"
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.
"You look here, sir," he said; "you just look here."
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.
Wayne bent over them, and read on one--
"LAST FIGHTING.
REDUCTION OF THE CENTRAL DERVISH CITY.
REMARKABLE, ETC."
On the other he read--
"LAST SMALL REPUBLIC ANNEXED.
NICARAGUAN CAPITAL SURRENDERS AFTER A
MONTH'S FIGHTING.
GREAT SLAUGHTER."
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."
Wayne lifted his large blue eyes with an infantile wonder.
"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.
"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.
"I am afraid not," said Wayne. "I--"
"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.
"You seem," said Wayne, "to be interested in military matters."
"I am interested in nothing else," answered the toy-shop keeper,
simply.
Wayne appeared convulsed with a singular, suppressed excitement.
"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."
"If it were ever attacked," repeated Wayne, awed into an almost
mechanical enunciation. "Mr. Turnbull, it is attacked. Thank Heaven, I
am bringing to at least one human being the news that is at bottom the
only good news to any son of Adam. Your life has not been useless.
Your work has not been play. Now, when the hair is already grey on
your head, Turnbull, you shall have your youth. God has not destroyed,
He has only deferred it. Let us sit down here, and you shall explain
to me this military map of Notting Hill. For you and I have to defend
Notting Hill together."
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.
* * * * *
The headquarters of Provost Adam Wayne and his Commander-in-Chief
consisted of a small and somewhat unsuccessful milk-shop at the corner
of Pump Street. The blank white morning had only just begun to break
over the blank London buildings when Wayne and Turnbull were to be
found seated in the cheerless and unswept shop. Wayne had something
feminine in his character; he belonged to that class of persons who
forget their meals when anything interesting is in hand. He had had
nothing for sixteen hours but hurried glasses of milk, and, with a
glass standing empty beside him, he was writing and sketching and
dotting and crossing out with inconceivable rapidity with a pencil and
a piece of paper. Turnbull was of that more masculine type in which a
sense of responsibility increases the appetite, and with his
sketch-map beside him he was dealing strenuously with a pile of
sandwiches in a paper packet, and a tankard of ale from the tavern
opposite, whose shutters had just been taken down. Neither of them
spoke, and there was no sound in the living stillness except the
scratching of Wayne's pencil and the squealing of an aimless-looking
cat. At length Wayne broke the silence by saying--
"Seventeen pounds eight shillings and ninepence."
Turnbull nodded and put his head in the tankard.
"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."
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."
"Are you insane?" asked the Provost.
"It is only my light touch," returned Turnbull. "These hansom-cab
rides will raise the tone--raise the tone, my dear fellow--of our
London youths, widen their horizon, brace their nervous system, make
them acquainted with the various public monuments of our great city.
Education, Wayne, education. How many excellent thinkers have pointed
out that political reform is useless until we produce a cultured
populace. So that twenty years hence, when these boys are grown up--"
"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."
And he walked out of the milk-shop, leaving the Provost staring.
A minute or two afterwards, the Provost laughed. He only laughed once
or twice in his life, and then he did it in a queer way as if it were
an art he had not mastered. Even he saw something funny in the
preposterous coup of the half-crowns and the little boys. He did not
see the monstrous absurdity of the whole policy and the whole war. He
enjoyed it seriously as a crusade, that is, he enjoyed it far more
than any joke can be enjoyed. Turnbull enjoyed it partly as a joke,
even more perhaps as a reversion from the things he hated--modernity
and monotony and civilisation. To break up the vast machinery of
modern life and use the fragments as engines of war, to make the
barricade of omnibuses and points of vantage of chimney-pots, was to
him a game worth infinite risk and trouble. He had that rational and
deliberate preference which will always to the end trouble the peace
of the world, the rational and deliberate preference for a short life
and a merry one.
CHAPTER III--_The Experiment of Mr. Buck_
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.
"Your Majesty," he said, quite good-humouredly, "there is only one
thing I can't understand, and that is why this affair is not settled
in five minutes. Here's a small property which is worth a thousand to
us and is not worth a hundred to any one else. We offer the thousand.
It's not business-like, I know, for we ought to get it for less, and
it's not reasonable and it's not fair on us, but I'm damned if I can
see why it's difficult."
"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