The Napoleon of Notting Hill
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."
"Oh, don't chatter," cried Barker, stamping. "We've been beaten."
"Beaten--by what?" asked Buck, mystified.
"By Wayne."
Buck looked at Barker's fierce white face for the first time, as it
gleamed in the lamplight.
"Come and have a drink," he said.
They adjourned to a cushioned and glaring buffet, and Buck established
himself slowly and lazily in a seat, and pulled out his cigar-case.
"Have a smoke," he said.
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 damned poleaxes of Auberon's--the only weapons we've got. We
marched two abreast. We went up Holland Walk, between the high palings
which seemed to me to go straight as an arrow for Pump Street. I was
near the tail of the line, and it was a long one. When the end of it
was still between the high palings, the head of the line was already
crossing Holland Park Avenue. Then the head plunged into the
network of narrow streets on the other side, and the tail and myself
came out on the great crossing. When we also had reached the northern
side and turned up a small street that points, crookedly as it were,
towards Pump Street, the whole thing felt different. The streets
dodged and bent so much that the head of our line seemed lost
altogether: it might as well have been in North America. And all this
time we hadn't seen a soul."
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."
"Nothing ever happened!" said Buck, staring. "What do you mean?"
"Nothing has ever happened," repeated Barker, with a morbid obstinacy.
"You don't know what a thing happening means? You sit in your office
expecting customers, and customers come; you walk in the street
expecting friends, and friends meet you; you want a drink, and get it;
you feel inclined for a bet, and make it. You expect either to win or
lose, and you do either one or the other. But things happening!" and
he shuddered ungovernably.
"Go on," said Buck, shortly. "Get on."
"As we walked wearily round the corners, something happened. When
something happens, it happens first, and you see it afterwards. It
happens of itself, and you have nothing to do with it. It proves a
dreadful thing--that there are other things besides one's self. I can
only put it in this way. We went round one turning, two turnings,
three turnings, four turnings, five. Then I lifted myself slowly up
from the gutter where I had been shot half senseless, and was beaten
down again by living men crashing on top of me, and the world was full
of roaring, and big men rolling about like nine-pins."
Buck looked at his map with knitted brows.
"Was that Portobello Road?" he asked.
"Yes," said Barker--"yes; Portobello Road. I saw it afterwards; but,
my God, what a place it was! Buck, have you ever stood and let a six
foot of man lash and lash at your head with six feet of pole with six
pounds of steel at the end? Because, when you have had that
experience, as Walt Whitman says, 'you re-examine philosophies and
religions.'"
"I have no doubt," said Buck. "If that was Portobello Road, don't you
see what happened?"
"I know what happened exceedingly well. I was knocked down four times;
an experience which, as I say, has an effect on the mental attitude.
And another thing happened, too. I knocked down two men. After the
fourth fall (there was not much bloodshed--more brutal rushing and
throwing--for nobody could use their weapons), after the fourth fall,
I say, I got up like a devil, and I tore a poleaxe out of a man's hand
and 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?"
Barker bit his lip.
"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.
"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."
"What is the object of streets?" asked Barker.
"What is the object of supper?" cried Buck, furiously. "Isn't it
obvious? This military science is mere common sense. The object of a
street is to lead from one place to another; therefore all streets
join; therefore street fighting is quite a peculiar thing. You
advanced into that hive of streets as if you were advancing into an
open plain where you could see everything. Instead of that, you were
advancing into the bowels of a fortress, with streets pointing at you,
streets turning on you, streets jumping out at you, and all in the
hands of the enemy. Do you know what Portobello Road is? It is the
only point on your journey where two side streets run up opposite each
other. Wayne massed his men on the two sides, and when he had let
enough of your line go past, cut it in two like a worm. Don't you see
what would have saved you?"
Barker shook his head.
"Can't your 'atmosphere' help you?" asked Buck, bitterly. "Must I
attempt explanations in the romantic manner? Suppose that, as you were
fighting blindly with the red Notting Hillers who imprisoned you on
both sides, you had heard a shout from behind them. Suppose, oh,
romantic Barker! that behind the red tunics you had seen the blue and
gold of South Kensington taking them in the rear, surrounding them in
their turn and hurling them on to your halberds."
"If the thing had been possible," began Barker, cursing.
"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."
"You think that is certain?" said Barker, anxious, but dominated
delightfully.
"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