The Napoleon of Notting Hill
beaten. Hold all the approaches, and with our force we must have him.
When shall we open the next campaign?"
"Now," said Buck, and walked out of the bar.
"Now!" cried Barker, following him eagerly. "Do you mean now? It is so
late."
Buck turned on him, stamping.
"Do you think fighting is under the Factory Acts?" he said; and he
called a cab. "Notting Hill Gate Station," he said; and the two drove
off.
* * * * *
A genuine reputation can sometimes be made in an hour. Buck, in the
next sixty or eighty minutes, showed himself a really great man of
action. His cab carried him like a thunderbolt from the King to
Wilson, from Wilson to Swindon, from Swindon to Barker again; if his
course was jagged, it had the jaggedness of the lightning. Only two
things he carried with him--his inevitable cigar and the map of North
Kensington and Notting Hill. There were, as he again and again pointed
out, with every variety of persuasion and violence, only nine possible
ways of approaching Pump Street within a quarter of a mile round it;
three out of Westbourne Grove, two out of Ladbroke Grove, and four out
of Notting Hill High Street. And he had detachments of two hundred
each, stationed at every one of the entrances before the last green of
that strange sunset had sunk out of the black sky.
The sky was particularly black, and on this alone was one false
protest raised against the triumphant optimism of the Provost of North
Kensington. He overruled it with his infectious common sense.
"There is no such thing," he said, "as night in London. You have only
to follow the line of street lamps. Look, here is the map. Two hundred
purple North Kensington soldiers under myself march up Ossington
Street, two hundred more under Captain Bruce, of the North Kensington
Guard, up Clanricarde Gardens.[1] Two hundred yellow West Kensingtons
under Provost Swindon attack from Pembridge Road. Two hundred more of
my men from the eastern streets, leading away from Queen's Road. Two
detachments of yellows enter by two roads from Westbourne Grove.
Lastly, two hundred green Bayswaters come down from the North through
Chepstow Place, and two hundred more under Provost Wilson himself,
through the upper part of Pembridge Road. Gentlemen, it is mate in two
moves. The enemy must either mass in Pump Street and be cut to pieces;
or they must retreat past the Gaslight & Coke Co., and rush on my four
hundred; or they must retreat past St. Luke's Church, and rush on the
six hundred from the West. Unless we are all mad, it's plain. Come on.
To your quarters and await Captain Brace's signal to advance. Then you
have only to walk up a line of gas-lamps and smash this nonsense by
pure mathematics. To-morrow we shall all be civilians again."
[Footnote 1: Clanricarde Gardens at this time was no longer a
_cul-de-sac_, but was connected by Pump Street to Pembridge Square.
See map.]
His optimism glowed like a great fire in the night, and ran round the
terrible ring in which Wayne was now held helpless. The fight was
already over. One man's energy for one hour had saved the city from
war.
For the next ten minutes Buck walked up and down silently beside the
motionless clump of his two hundred. He had not changed his appearance
in any way, except to sling across his yellow overcoat a case with a
revolver in it. So that his light-clad modern figure showed up oddly
beside the pompous purple uniforms of his halberdiers, which darkly
but richly coloured the black night.
At length a shrill trumpet rang from some way up the street; it was
the signal of advance. Buck briefly gave the word, and the whole
purple line, with its dimly shining steel, moved up the side alley.
Before it was a slope of street, long, straight, and shining in the
dark. It was a sword pointed at Pump Street, the heart at which nine
other swords were pointed that night.
A quarter of an hour's silent marching brought them almost within
earshot of any tumult in the doomed citadel. But still there was no
sound and no sign of the enemy. This time, at any rate, they knew that
they were closing in on it mechanically, and they marched on under the
lamplight and the dark without any of that eerie sense of ignorance
which Barker had felt when entering the hostile country by one avenue
alone.
"Halt--point arms!" cried Buck, suddenly, and as he spoke there came a
clatter of feet tumbling along the stones. But the halberds were
levelled in vain. The figure that rushed up was a messenger from the
contingent of the North.
"Victory, Mr. Buck!" he cried, panting; "they are ousted. Provost
Wilson of Bayswater has taken Pump Street."
Buck ran forward in his excitement.
"Then, which way are they retreating? It must be either by St. Luke's
to meet Swindon, or by the Gas Company to meet us. Run like mad to
Swindon, and see that the yellows are holding the St. Luke's Road. We
will hold this, never fear. We have them in an iron trap. Run!"
As the messenger dashed away into the darkness, the great guard of
North Kensington swung on with the certainty of a machine. Yet
scarcely a hundred yards further their halberd-points again fell in
line gleaming in the gaslight; for again a clatter of feet was heard
on the stones, and again it proved to be only the messenger.
"Mr. Provost," he said, "the yellow West Kensingtons have been
holding the road by St. Luke's for twenty minutes since the capture of
Pump Street. Pump Street is not two hundred yards away; they cannot be
retreating down that road."
"Then they are retreating down this," said Provost Buck, with a final
cheerfulness, "and by good fortune down a well-lighted road, though it
twists about. Forward!"
As they moved along the last three hundred yards of their journey,
Buck fell, for the first time in his life, perhaps, into a kind of
philosophical reverie, for men of his type are always made kindly, and
as it were melancholy, by success.
"I am sorry for poor old Wayne, I really am," he thought. "He spoke up
splendidly for me at that Council. And he blacked old Barker's eye
with considerable spirit. But I don't see what a man can expect when
he fights against arithmetic, to say nothing of civilisation. And what
a wonderful hoax all this military genius is! I suspect I've just
discovered what Cromwell discovered, that a sensible tradesman is the
best general, and that a man who can buy men and sell men can lead and
kill them. The thing's simply like adding up a column in a ledger. If
Wayne has two hundred men, he can't put two hundred men in nine
places at once. If they're ousted from Pump Street they're flying
somewhere. If they're not flying past the church they're flying past
the Works. And so we have them. We business men should have no chance
at all except that cleverer people than we get bees in their bonnets
that prevent them from reasoning properly--so we reason alone. And so
I, who am comparatively stupid, see things as God sees them, as a vast
machine. My God, what's this?" and he clapped his hands to his eyes
and staggered back.
Then through the darkness he cried in a dreadful voice--
"Did I blaspheme God? I am struck blind."
"What?" wailed another voice behind him, the voice of a certain
Wilfred Jarvis of North Kensington.
"Blind!" cried Buck; "blind!"
"I'm blind too!" cried Jarvis, in an agony.
"Fools, all of you," said a gross voice behind them; "we're all blind.
The lamps have gone out."
"The lamps! But why? where?" cried Buck, turning furiously in the
darkness. "How are we to get on? How are we to chase the enemy? Where
have they gone?"
"The enemy went--" said the rough voice behind, and then stopped
doubtfully.
"Where?" shouted Buck, stamping like a madman.
"They went," said the gruff voice, "past the Gas Works, and they've
used their chance."
"Great God!" thundered Buck, and snatched at his revolver; "do you
mean they've turned out--"
But almost before he had spoken the words, he was hurled like a stone
from catapult into the midst of his own men.
"Notting Hill! Notting Hill!" cried frightful voices out of the
darkness, and they seemed to come from all sides, for the men of North
Kensington, unacquainted with the road, had lost all their bearings in
the black world of blindness.
"Notting Hill! Notting Hill!" cried the invisible people, and the
invaders were hewn down horribly with black steel, with steel that
gave no glint against any light.
* * * * *
Buck, though badly maimed with the blow of a halberd, kept an angry
but splendid sanity. He groped madly for the wall and found it.
Struggling with crawling fingers along it, he found a side opening and
retreated into it with the remnants of his men. Their adventures
during that prodigious night are not to be described. They did not
know whether they were going towards or away from the enemy. Not
knowing where they themselves were, or where their opponents were, it
was mere irony to ask where was the rest of their army. For a thing
had descended upon them which London does not know--darkness, which
was before the stars were made, and they were as much lost in it as if
they had been made before the stars. Every now and then, as those
frightful hours wore on, they buffeted in the darkness against living
men, who struck at them and at whom they struck, with an idiot fury.
When at last the grey dawn came, they found they had wandered back to
the edge of the Uxbridge Road. They found that in those horrible
eyeless encounters, the North Kensingtons and the Bayswaters and the
West Kensingtons had again and again met and butchered each other, and
they heard that Adam Wayne was barricaded in Pump Street.
CHAPTER II--_The Correspondent of the Court Journal_
Journalism had become, like most other such things in England under
the cautious government and philosophy represented by James Barker,
somewhat sleepy and much diminished in importance. This was partly due
to the disappearance of party government and public speaking, partly
to the compromise or dead-lock which had made foreign wars impossible,
but mostly, of course, to the temper of the whole nation which was
that of a people in a kind of back-water. Perhaps the most well known
of the remaining newspapers was the _Court Journal_, which was
published in a dusty but genteel-looking office just out of Kensington
High Street. For when all the papers of a people have been for years
growing more and more dim and decorous and optimistic, the dimmest and
most decorous and most optimistic is very likely to win. In the
journalistic competition which was still going on at the beginning of
the twentieth century, the final victor was the _Court Journal_.
For some mysterious reason the King had a great affection for hanging
about in the _Court Journal_ office, smoking a morning cigarette and
looking over files. Like all ingrainedly idle men, he was very fond of
lounging and chatting in places where other people were doing work.
But one would have thought that, even in the prosaic England of his
day, he might have found a more bustling centre.
On this particular morning, however, he came out of Kensington Palace
with a more alert step and a busier air than usual. He wore an
extravagantly long frock-coat, a pale-green waistcoat, a very full and
_degage_ black tie, and curious yellow gloves. This was his uniform as
Colonel of a regiment of his own creation, the 1st Decadents Green. It
was a beautiful sight to see him drilling them. He walked quickly
across the Park and the High Street, lighting his cigarette as he
went, and flung open the door of the _Court Journal_ office.
"You've heard the news, Pally--you've heard the news?" he said.
The Editor's name was Hoskins, but the King called him Pally, which