The Napoleon of Notting Hill
went round as they would have done if a road were being mended, and
the omnibus on which the correspondent of the _Court Journal_ was
sitting swept round the corner of Queen's Road, Bayswater.
The King was alone on the top of the vehicle, and was enjoying the
speed at which it was going.
"Forward, my beauty, my Arab," he said, patting the omnibus
encouragingly, "fleetest of all thy bounding tribe. Are thy relations
with thy driver, I wonder, those of the Bedouin and his steed? Does he
sleep side by side with thee--"
His meditations were broken by a sudden and jarring stoppage. Looking
over the edge, he saw that the heads of the horses were being held
by men in the uniform of Wayne's army, and heard the voice of an
officer calling out orders.
King Auberon descended from the omnibus with dignity. The guard or
picket of red halberdiers who had stopped the vehicle did not number
more than twenty, and they were under the command of a short, dark,
clever-looking young man, conspicuous among the rest as being clad in
an ordinary frock-coat, but girt round the waist with a red sash and a
long seventeenth-century sword. A shiny silk hat and spectacles
completed the outfit in a pleasing manner.
"To whom have I the honour of speaking?" said the King, endeavouring
to look like Charles I., in spite of personal difficulties.
The dark man in spectacles lifted his hat with equal gravity.
"My name is Bowles," he said. "I am a chemist. I am also a captain of
O company of the army of Notting Hill. I am distressed at having to
incommode you by stopping the omnibus, but this area is covered by our
proclamation, and we intercept all traffic. May I ask to whom I have
the honour--Why, good gracious, I beg your Majesty's pardon. I am
quite overwhelmed at finding myself concerned with the King."
Auberon put up his hand with indescribable grandeur.
"Not with the King," he said; "with the special war correspondent of
the _Court Journal_."
"I beg your Majesty's pardon," began Mr. Bowles, doubtfully.
"Do you call me Majesty? I repeat," said Auberon, firmly, "I am a
representative of the press. I have chosen, with a deep sense of
responsibility, the name of Pinker. I should desire a veil to be drawn
over the past."
"Very well, sir," said Mr. Bowles, with an air of submission, "in our
eyes the sanctity of the press is at least as great as that of the
throne. We desire nothing better than that our wrongs and our glories
should be widely known. May I ask, Mr. Pinker, if you have any
objection to being presented to the Provost and to General Turnbull?"
"The Provost I have had the honour of meeting," said Auberon, easily.
"We old journalists, you know, meet everybody. I should be most
delighted to have the same honour again. General Turnbull, also, it
would be a gratification to know. The younger men are so interesting.
We of the old Fleet Street gang lose touch with them."
"Will you be so good as to step this way?" said the leader of O
company.
"I am always good," said Mr. Pinker. "Lead on."
CHAPTER III--_The Great Army of South Kensington_
The article from the special correspondent of the _Court Journal_
arrived in due course, written on very coarse copy-paper in the King's
arabesque of handwriting, in which three words filled a page, and yet
were illegible. Moreover, the contribution was the more perplexing at
first, as it opened with a succession of erased paragraphs. The writer
appeared to have attempted the article once or twice in several
journalistic styles. At the side of one experiment was written, "Try
American style," and the fragment began--
"The King must go. We want gritty men. Flapdoodle is all very ...;"
and then broke off, followed by the note, "Good sound journalism
safer. Try it."
The experiment in good sound journalism appeared to begin--
"The greatest of English poets has said that a rose by any ..."
This also stopped abruptly. The next annotation at the side was almost
undecipherable, but seemed to be something like--
"How about old Steevens and the _mot juste_? E.g...."
"Morning winked a little wearily at me over the curt edge of Campden
Hill and its houses with their sharp shadows. Under the abrupt black
cardboard of the outline, it took some little time to detect colours;
but at length I saw a brownish yellow shifting in the obscurity, and I
knew that it was the guard of Swindon's West Kensington army. They are
being held as a reserve, and lining the whole ridge above the
Bayswater Road. Their camp and their main force is under the great
Waterworks Tower on Campden Hill. I forgot to say that the Waterworks
Tower looked swart.
"As I passed them and came over the curve of Silver Street, I saw the
blue cloudy masses of Barker's men blocking the entrance to the
high-road like a sapphire smoke (good). The disposition of the allied
troops, under the general management of Mr. Wilson, appears to be as
follows: The Yellow army (if I may so describe the West
Kensingtonians) lies, as I have said, in a strip along the ridge, its
furthest point westward being the west side of Campden Hill Road, its
furthest point eastward the beginning of Kensington Gardens. The Green
army of Wilson lines the Notting Hill High Road itself from Queen's
Road to the corner of Pembridge Road, curving round the latter, and
extending some three hundred yards up towards Westbourne Grove.
Westbourne Grove itself is occupied by Barker of South Kensington. The
fourth side of this rough square, the Queen's Road side, is held by
some of Buck's Purple warriors.
"The whole resembles some ancient and dainty Dutch flower-bed. Along
the crest of Campden Hill lie the golden crocuses of West Kensington.
They are, as it were, the first fiery fringe of the whole. Northward
lies our hyacinth Barker, with all his blue hyacinths. Round to the
south-west run the green rushes of Wilson of Bayswater, and a line of
violet irises (aptly symbolised by Mr. Buck) complete the whole. The
argent exterior ... (I am losing the style. I should have said
'Curving with a whisk' instead of merely 'Curving.' Also I should have
called the hyacinths 'sudden.' I cannot keep this up. War is too rapid
for this style of writing. Please ask office-boy to insert _mots
justes_.)
"The truth is that there is nothing to report. That commonplace
element which is always ready to devour all beautiful things (as the
Black Pig in the Irish Mythology will finally devour the stars and
gods); that commonplace element, as I say, has in its Black Piggish
way devoured finally the chances of any romance in this affair; that
which once consisted of absurd but thrilling combats in the streets,
has degenerated into something which is the very prose of warfare--it
has degenerated into a siege. A siege may be defined as a peace plus
the inconvenience of war. Of course Wayne cannot hold out. There is no
more chance of help from anywhere else than of ships from the moon.
And if old Wayne had stocked his street with tinned meats till all his
garrison had to sit on them, he couldn't hold out for more than a
month or two. As a matter of melancholy fact, he has done something
rather like this. He has stocked his street with food until there must
be uncommonly little room to turn round. But what is the good? To hold
out for all that time and then to give in of necessity, what does it
mean? It means waiting until your victories are forgotten, and then
taking the trouble to be defeated. I cannot understand how Wayne can
be so inartistic.
"And how odd it is that one views a thing quite differently when one
knows it is defeated! I always thought Wayne was rather fine. But now,
when I know that he is done for, there seem to be nothing else but
Wayne. All the streets seem to point at him, all the chimneys seem to
lean towards him. I suppose it is a morbid feeling; but Pump Street
seems to be the only part of London that I feel physically. I suppose,
I say, that it is morbid. I suppose it is exactly how a man feels
about his heart when his heart is weak. 'Pump Street'--the heart is a
pump. And I am drivelling.
"Our finest leader at the front is, beyond all question, General
Wilson. He has adopted alone among the other Provosts the uniform of
his own halberdiers, although that fine old sixteenth-century garb was
not originally intended to go with red side-whiskers. It was he who,
against a most admirable and desperate defence, broke last night into
Pump Street and held it for at least half an hour. He was afterwards
expelled from it by General Turnbull, of Notting Hill, but only after
desperate fighting and the sudden descent of that terrible darkness
which proved so much more fatal to the forces of General Buck and
General Swindon.
"Provost Wayne himself, with whom I had, with great good fortune, a
most interesting interview, bore the most eloquent testimony to the
conduct of General Wilson and his men. His precise words are as
follows: 'I have bought sweets at his funny little shop when I was
four years old, and ever since. I never noticed anything, I am ashamed
to say, except that he talked through his nose, and didn't wash
himself particularly. And he came over our barricade like a devil from
hell.' I repeated this speech to General Wilson himself, with some
delicate improvements, and he seemed pleased with it. He does not,
however, seem pleased with anything so much just now as he is with the
wearing of a sword. I have it from the front on the best authority
that General Wilson was not completely shaved yesterday. It is
believed in military circles that he is growing a moustache....
"As I have said, there is nothing to report. I walk wearily to the
pillar-box at the corner of Pembridge Road to post my copy. Nothing
whatever has happened, except the preparations for a particularly long
and feeble siege, during which I trust I shall not be required to be
at the Front. As I glance up Pembridge Road in the growing dusk, the
aspect of that road reminds me that there is one note worth adding.
General Buck has suggested, with characteristic acumen, to General
Wilson that, in order to obviate the possibility of such a catastrophe
as overwhelmed the allied forces in the last advance on Notting Hill
(the catastrophe, I mean, of the extinguished lamps), each soldier
should have a lighted lantern round his neck. This is one of the
things which I really admire about General Buck. He possesses what
people used to mean by 'the humility of the man of science,' that is,
he learns steadily from his mistakes. Wayne may score off him in some
other way, but not in that way. The lanterns look like fairy lights as
they curve round the end of Pembridge Road.
* * * * *
"_Later_.--I write with some difficulty, because the blood will run
down my face and make patterns on the paper. Blood is a very beautiful
thing; that is why it is concealed. If you ask why blood runs down my
face, I can only reply that I was kicked by a horse. If you ask me
what horse, I can reply with some pride that it was a war-horse. If
you ask me how a war-horse came on the scene in our simple pedestrian
warfare, I am reduced to the necessity, so painful to a special
correspondent, of recounting my experiences.
"I was, as I have said, in the very act of posting my copy at the
pillar-box, and of glancing as I did so up the glittering curve of
Pembridge Road, studded with the lights of Wilson's men. I don't know
what made me pause to examine the matter, but I had a fancy that the
line of lights, where it melted into the indistinct brown twilight,
was more indistinct than usual. I was almost certain that in a certain
stretch of the road where there had been five lights there were now