The Napoleon of Notting Hill
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?"
"My dear Barker, your proposals are as damnable as your manners. I
want to have nothing to do with them. Suppose I stopped them
altogether. What would happen?"
Barker answered in a very low voice--
"Revolution."
The King glanced quickly at the men round the table. They were all
looking down silently: their brows were red.
He rose with a startling suddenness, and an unusual pallor.
"Gentlemen," he said, "you have overruled me. Therefore I can speak
plainly. I think Adam Wayne, who is as mad as a hatter, worth more
than a million of you. But you have the force, and, I admit, the
common sense, and he is lost. Take your eight hundred halberdiers and
smash him. It would be more sportsmanlike to take two hundred."
"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."
"Well," said the King, wearily, "the conference is at an end at last."
And he went out of the room before any one else could stir.
* * * * *
Forty workmen, a hundred Bayswater Halberdiers, two hundred from
South, and three from North Kensington, assembled at the foot of
Holland Walk and marched up it, under the general direction of Barker,
who looked flushed and happy in full dress. At the end of the
procession a small and sulky figure lingered like an urchin. It was
the King.
"Barker," he said at length, appealingly, "you are an old friend of
mine--you understand my hobbies as I understand yours. Why can't you
let it alone? I hoped that such fun might come out of this Wayne
business. Why can't you let it alone? It doesn't really so much matter
to you--what's a road or so? For me it's the one joke that may save me
from pessimism. Take fewer men and give me an hour's fun. Really and
truly, James, if you collected coins or humming-birds, and I could buy
one with the price of your road, I would buy it. I collect
incidents--those rare, those precious things. Let me have one. Pay a
few pounds for it. Give these Notting Hillers a chance. Let them
alone."
"Auberon," said Barker, kindly, forgetting all royal titles in a rare
moment of sincerity, "I do feel what you mean. I have had moments when
these hobbies have hit me. I have had moments when I have sympathised
with your humours. I have had moments, though you may not easily
believe it, when I have sympathised with the madness of Adam Wayne.
But the world, Auberon, the real world, is not run on these hobbies.
It goes on great brutal wheels of facts--wheels on which you are the
butterfly; and Wayne is the fly on the wheel."
Auberon's eyes looked frankly at the other's.
"Thank you, James; what you say is true. It is only a parenthetical
consolation to me to compare the intelligence of flies somewhat
favourably with the intelligence of wheels. But it is the nature of
flies to die soon, and the nature of wheels to go on for ever. Go on
with the wheel. Good-bye, old man."
And James Barker went on, laughing, with a high colour, slapping his
bamboo on his leg.
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."
It took about an hour to erect in Holland Lane the monarch's simple
repast, during which time he walked up and down and whistled, but
still with an unaffected air of gloom. He had really been done out of
a pleasure he had promised himself, and had that empty and sickened
feeling which a child has when disappointed of a pantomime. When he
and the equerry had sat down, however, and consumed a fair amount of
dry champagne, his spirits began mildly to revive.
"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
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--
"Yesterday I thought that something next door to a really entertaining
miracle might happen to me before I went to amuse the worms. To see
that red-haired maniac waving a great sword, and making speeches to
his incomparable followers, would have been a glimpse of that Land of
Youth from which the Fates shut us out. I had planned some quite
delightful things. A Congress of Knightsbridge with a treaty, and
myself in the chair, and perhaps a Roman triumph, with jolly old
Barker led in chains. And now these wretched prigs have gone and
stamped out the exquisite Mr. Wayne altogether, and I suppose they
will put him in a private asylum somewhere in their damned humane way.
Think of the treasures daily poured out to his unappreciative keeper!
I wonder whether they would let me be his keeper. But life is a vale.
Never forget at any moment of your existence to regard it in the light
of a vale. This graceful habit, if not acquired in youth--"
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 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 _debris_
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.
"Barker," he said, "what is all this?"
"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
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.
BOOK IV
CHAPTER I--_The Battle of the Lamps_
Mr. Buck, who, though retired, frequently went down to his big drapery
stores in Kensington High Street, was locking up those premises, being