The Napoleon of Notting Hill
only four. I strained my eyes; I counted them again, and there were
only three. A moment after there were only two; an instant after only
one; and an instant after that the lanterns near to me swung like
jangled bells, as if struck suddenly. They flared and fell; and for
the moment the fall of them was like the fall of the sun and stars out
of heaven. It left everything in a primal blindness. As a matter of
fact, the road was not yet legitimately dark. There were still red
rays of a sunset in the sky, and the brown gloaming was still warmed,
as it were, with a feeling as of firelight. But for three seconds
after the lanterns swung and sank, I saw in front of me a blackness
blocking the sky. And with the fourth second I knew that this
blackness which blocked the sky was a man on a great horse; and I was
trampled and tossed aside as a swirl of horsemen swept round the
corner. As they turned I saw that they were not black, but scarlet;
they were a sortie of the besieged, Wayne riding ahead.
"I lifted myself from the gutter, blinded with blood from a very
slight skin-wound, and, queerly enough, not caring either for the
blindness or for the slightness of the wound. For one mortal minute
after that amazing cavalcade had spun past, there was dead stillness
on the empty road. And then came Barker and all his halberdiers
running like devils in the track of them. It had been their business
to guard the gate by which the sortie had broken out; but they had not
reckoned, and small blame to them, on cavalry. As it was, Barker and
his men made a perfectly splendid run after them, almost catching
Wayne's horses by the tails.
"Nobody can understand the sortie. It consists only of a small number
of Wayne's garrison. Turnbull himself, with the vast mass of it, is
undoubtedly still barricaded in Pump Street. Sorties of this kind are
natural enough in the majority of historical sieges, such as the siege
of Paris in 1870, because in such cases the besieged are certain of
some support outside. But what can be the object of it in this case?
Wayne knows (or if he is too mad to know anything, at least Turnbull
knows) that there is not, and never has been, the smallest chance of
support for him outside; that the mass of the sane modern inhabitants
of London regard his farcical patriotism with as much contempt as they
do the original idiotcy that gave it birth--the folly of our miserable
King. What Wayne and his horsemen are doing nobody can even
conjecture. The general theory round here is that he is simply a
traitor, and has abandoned the besieged. But all such larger but yet
more soluble riddles are as nothing compared to the one small but
unanswerable riddle: Where did they get the horses?
* * * * *
"_Later_.--I have heard a most extraordinary account of the origin of
the appearance of the horses. It appears that that amazing person,
General Turnbull, who is now ruling Pump Street in the absence of
Wayne, sent out, on the morning of the declaration of war, a vast
number of little boys (or cherubs of the gutter, as we pressmen say),
with half-crowns in their pockets, to take cabs all over London. No
less than a hundred and sixty cabs met at Pump Street; were
commandeered by the garrison. The men were set free, the cabs used to
make barricades, and the horses kept in Pump Street, where they were
fed and exercised for several days, until they were sufficiently
rapid and efficient to be used for this wild ride out of the town. If
this is so, and I have it on the best possible authority, the method
of the sortie is explained. But we have no explanation of its object.
Just as Barker's Blues were swinging round the corner after them, they
were stopped, but not by an enemy; only by the voice of one man, and
he a friend. Red Wilson of Bayswater ran alone along the main road
like a madman, waving them back with a halberd snatched from a
sentinel. He was in supreme command, and Barker stopped at the corner,
staring and bewildered. We could hear Wilson's voice loud and distinct
out of the dusk, so that it seemed strange that the great voice should
come out of the little body. 'Halt, South Kensington! Guard this
entry, and prevent them returning. I will pursue. Forward, the Green
Guards!'
"A wall of dark blue uniforms and a wood of pole-axes was between me
and Wilson, for Barker's men blocked the mouth of the road in two
rigid lines. But through them and through the dusk I could hear the
clear orders and the clank of arms, and see the green army of Wilson
marching by towards the west. They were our great fighting-men. Wilson
had filled them with his own fire; in a few days they had become
veterans. Each of them wore a silver medal of a pump, to boast that
they alone of all the allied armies had stood victorious in Pump
Street.
"I managed to slip past the detachment of Barker's Blues, who are
guarding the end of Pembridge Road, and a sharp spell of running
brought me to the tail of Wilson's green army as it swung down the
road in pursuit of the flying Wayne. The dusk had deepened into almost
total darkness; for some time I only heard the throb of the marching
pace. Then suddenly there was a cry, and the tall fighting men were
flung back on me, almost crushing me, and again the lanterns swung and
jingled, and the cold nozzles of great horses pushed into the press of
us. They had turned and charged us.
"'You fools!' came the voice of Wilson, cleaving our panic with a
splendid cold anger. 'Don't you see? the horses have no riders!'
"It was true. We were being plunged at by a stampede of horses with
empty saddles. What could it mean? Had Wayne met some of our men and
been defeated? Or had he flung these horses at us as some kind of ruse
or mad new mode of warfare, such as he seemed bent on inventing? Or
did he and his men want to get away in disguise? Or did they want to
hide in houses somewhere?
"Never did I admire any man's intellect (even my own) so much as I did
Wilson's at that moment. Without a word, he simply pointed the halberd
(which he still grasped) to the southern side of the road. As you
know, the streets running up to the ridge of Campden Hill from the
main road are peculiarly steep, they are more like sudden flights of
stairs. We were just opposite Aubrey Road, the steepest of all; up
that it would have been far more difficult to urge half-trained horses
than to run up on one's feet.
"'Left wheel!' hallooed Wilson. 'They have gone up here,' he added to
me, who happened to be at his elbow.
"'Why?' I ventured to ask.
"'Can't say for certain,' replied the Bayswater General. 'They've gone
up here in a great hurry, anyhow. They've simply turned their horses
loose, because they couldn't take them up. I fancy I know. I fancy
they're trying to get over the ridge to Kensingston or Hammersmith, or
somewhere, and are striking up here because it's just beyond the end
of our line. Damned fools, not to have gone further along the road,
though. They've only just shaved our last outpost. Lambert is hardly
four hundred yards from here. And I've sent him word.'
"'Lambert!' I said. 'Not young Wilfrid Lambert--my old friend.'
"'Wilfrid Lambert's his name,' said the General; 'used to be a "man
about town;" silly fellow with a big nose. That kind of man always
volunteers for some war or other; and what's funnier, he generally
isn't half bad at it. Lambert is distinctly good. The yellow West
Kensingtons I always reckoned the weakest part of the army; but he has
pulled them together uncommonly well, though he's subordinate to
Swindon, who's a donkey. In the attack from Pembridge Road the other
night he showed great pluck.'
"'He has shown greater pluck than that,' I said. 'He has criticised my
sense of humour. That was his first engagement.'
"This remark was, I am sorry to say, lost on the admirable commander
of the allied forces. We were in the act of climbing the last half of
Aubrey Road, which is so abrupt a slope that it looks like an
old-fashioned map leaning up against the wall. There are lines of
little trees, one above the other, as in the old-fashioned map.
"We reached the top of it, panting somewhat, and were just about to
turn the corner by a place called (in chivalrous anticipation of our
wars of sword and axe) Tower Crecy, when we were suddenly knocked in
the stomach (I can use no other term) by a horde of men hurled back
upon us. They wore the red uniform of Wayne; their halberds were
broken; their foreheads bleeding; but the mere impetus of their
retreat staggered us as we stood at the last ridge of the slope.
"'Good old Lambert!' yelled out suddenly the stolid Mr. Wilson of
Bayswater, in an uncontrollable excitement. 'Damned jolly old Lambert!
He's got there already! He's driving them back on us! Hurrah! hurrah!
Forward, the Green Guards!'
"We swung round the corner eastwards, Wilson running first,
brandishing the halberd--
"Will you pardon a little egotism? Every one likes a little egotism,
when it takes the form, as mine does in this case, of a disgraceful
confession. The thing is really a little interesting, because it shows
how the merely artistic habit has bitten into men like me. It was the
most intensely exciting occurrence that had ever come to me in my
life; and I was really intensely excited about it. And yet, as we
turned that corner, the first impression I had was of something that
had nothing to do with the fight at all. I was stricken from the sky
as by a thunderbolt, by the height of the Waterworks Tower on Campden
Hill. I don't know whether Londoners generally realise how high it
looks when one comes out, in this way, almost immediately under it.
For the second it seemed to me that at the foot of it even human war
was a triviality. For the second I felt as if I had been drunk with
some trivial orgie, and that I had been sobered by the shock of that
shadow. A moment afterwards, I realised that under it was going on
something more enduring than stone, and something wilder than the
dizziest height--the agony of man. And I knew that, compared to that,
this overwhelming tower was itself a triviality; it was a mere stalk
of stone which humanity could snap like a stick.
"I don't know why I have talked so much about this silly old
Waterworks Tower, which at the very best was only a tremendous
background. It was that, certainly, a sombre and awful landscape,
against which our figures were relieved. But I think the real reason
was, that there was in my own mind so sharp a transition from the
tower of stone to the man of flesh. For what I saw first when I had
shaken off, as it were, the shadow of the tower, was a man, and a man
I knew.
"Lambert stood at the further corner of the street that curved round
the tower, his figure outlined in some degree by the beginning of
moonrise. He looked magnificent, a hero; but he looked something much
more interesting than that. He was, as it happened, in almost
precisely the same swaggering attitude in which he had stood nearly
fifteen years ago, when he swung his walking-stick and struck it into
the ground, and told me that all my subtlety was drivel. And, upon my
soul, I think he required more courage to say that than to fight as he
does now. For then he was fighting against something that was in the
ascendant, fashionable, and victorious. And now he is fighting (at the
risk of his life, no doubt) merely against something which is already
dead, which is impossible, futile; of which nothing has been more
impossible and futile than this very sortie which has brought him into
contact with it. People nowadays allow infinitely too little for the
psychological sense of victory as a factor in affairs. Then he was
attacking the degraded but undoubtedly victorious Quin; now he is