The Napoleon of Notting Hill
"Where is your favour now, Provost?" cried the West Kensington leader.
And a laugh went up.
Adam struck at the standard-bearer and brought him reeling forward. As
the banner stooped, he grasped the yellow folds and tore off a shred.
A halberdier struck him on the shoulder, wounding bloodily.
"Here is one colour!" he cried, pushing the yellow into his belt; "and
here!" he cried, pointing to his own blood--"here is the other."
At the same instant the shock of a sudden and heavy halberd laid the
King stunned or dead. In the wild visions of vanishing consciousness,
he saw again something that belonged to an utterly forgotten time,
something that he had seen somewhere long ago in a restaurant. He saw,
with his swimming eyes, red and yellow, the colours of Nicaragua.
Quin did not see the end. Wilson, wild with joy, sprang again at Adam
Wayne, and the great sword of Notting Hill was whirled above once
more. Then men ducked instinctively at the rushing noise of the sword
coming down out of the sky, and Wilson of Bayswater was smashed and
wiped down upon the floor like a fly. Nothing was left of him but a
wreck; but the blade that had broken him was broken. In dying he had
snapped the great sword and the spell of it; the sword of Wayne was
broken at the hilt. One rush of the enemy carried Wayne by force
against the tree. They were too close to use halberd or even sword;
they were breast to breast, even nostrils to nostrils. But Buck got
his dagger free.
"Kill him!" he cried, in a strange stifled voice. "Kill him! Good or
bad, he is none of us! Do not be blinded by the face!... God! have we
not been blinded all along!" and he drew his arm back for a stab, and
seemed to close his eyes.
Wayne did not drop the hand that hung on to the tree-branch. But a
mighty heave went over his breast and his whole huge figure, like an
earthquake over great hills. And with that convulsion of effort he
rent the branch out of the tree, with tongues of torn wood; and,
swaying it once only, he let the splintered club fall on Buck,
breaking his neck. The planner of the Great Road fell face foremost
dead, with his dagger in a grip of steel.
"For you and me, and for all brave men, my brother," said Wayne, in
his strange chant, "there is good wine poured in the inn at the end of
the world."
The packed men made another lurch or heave towards him; it was almost
too dark to fight clearly. He caught hold of the oak again, this time
getting his hand into a wide crevice and grasping, as it were, the
bowels of the tree. The whole crowd, numbering some thirty men, made a
rush to tear him away from it; they hung on with all their weight and
numbers, and nothing stirred. A solitude could not have been stiller
than that group of straining men. Then there was a faint sound.
"His hand is slipping," cried two men in exultation.
"You don't know much of him," said another, grimly (a man of the old
war). "More likely his bone cracks."
"It is neither--by God, it is neither!" said one of the first two.
"What is it, then?" asked the second.
"The tree is falling," he replied.
"As the tree falleth, so shall it lie," said Wayne's voice out of the
darkness, and it had the same sweet and yet horrible air that it had
had throughout, of coming from a great distance, from before or after
the event. Even when he was struggling like an eel or battering like a
madman, he spoke like a spectator. "As the tree falleth, so shall it
lie," he said. "Men have called that a gloomy text. It is the essence
of all exultation. I am doing now what I have done all my life, what
is the only happiness, what is the only universality. I am clinging to
something. Let it fall, and there let it lie. Fools, you go about and
see the kingdoms of the earth, and are liberal and wise and
cosmopolitan, which is all that the devil can give you--all that he
could offer to Christ, only to be spurned away. I am doing what the
truly wise do. When a child goes out into the garden and takes hold of
a tree, saying, 'Let this tree be all I have,' that moment its roots
take hold on hell and its branches on the stars. The joy I have is
what the lover knows when a woman is everything. It is what a savage
knows when his idol is everything. It is what I know when Notting Hill
is everything. I have a city. Let it stand or fall."
As he spoke, the turf lifted itself like a living thing, and out of it
rose slowly, like crested serpents, the roots of the oak. Then the
great head of the tree, that seemed a green cloud among grey ones,
swept the sky suddenly like a broom, and the whole tree heeled over
like a ship, smashing every one in its fall.
CHAPTER III--_Two Voices_
In a place in which there was total darkness for hours, there was also
for hours total silence. Then a voice spoke out of the darkness, no
one could have told from where, and said aloud--
"So ends the Empire of Notting Hill. As it began in blood, so it ended
in blood, and all things are always the same."
And there was silence again, and then again there was a voice, but it
had not the same tone; it seemed that it was not the same voice.
"If all things are always the same, it is because they are always
heroic. If all things are always the same, it is because they are
always new. To each man one soul only is given; to each soul only is
given a little power--the power at some moments to outgrow and swallow
up the stars. If age after age that power comes upon men, whatever
gives it to them is great. Whatever makes men feel old is mean--an
empire or a skin-flint shop. Whatever makes men feel young is great--a
great war or a love-story. And in the darkest of the books of God
there is written a truth that is also a riddle. It is of the new
things that men tire--of fashions and proposals and improvements and
change. It is the old things that startle and intoxicate. It is the
old things that are young. There is no sceptic who does not feel that
many have doubted before. There is no rich and fickle man who does not
feel that all his novelties are ancient. There is no worshipper of
change who does not feel upon his neck the vast weight of the
weariness of the universe. But we who do the old things are fed by
nature with a perpetual infancy. No man who is in love thinks that any
one has been in love before. No woman who has a child thinks that
there have been such things as children. No people that fight for
their own city are haunted with the burden of the broken empires. Yes,
O dark voice, the world is always the same, for it is always
unexpected."
A little gust of wind blew through the night, and then the first voice
answered--
"But in this world there are some, be they wise or foolish, whom
nothing intoxicates. There are some who see all your disturbances like
a cloud of flies. They know that while men will laugh at your Notting
Hill, and will study and rehearse and sing of Athens and Jerusalem,
Athens and Jerusalem were silly suburbs like your Notting Hill. They
know that the earth itself is a suburb, and can feel only drearily
and respectably amused as they move upon it."
"They are philosophers or they are fools," said the other voice. "They
are not men. Men live, as I say, rejoicing from age to age in
something fresher than progress--in the fact that with every baby a
new sun and a new moon are made. If our ancient humanity were a single
man, it might perhaps be that he would break down under the memory of
so many loyalties, under the burden of so many diverse heroisms, under
the load and terror of all the goodness of men. But it has pleased God
so to isolate the individual soul that it can only learn of all other
souls by hearsay, and to each one goodness and happiness come with the
youth and violence of lightning, as momentary and as pure. And the
doom of failure that lies on all human systems does not in real fact
affect them any more than the worms of the inevitable grave affect a
children's game in a meadow. Notting Hill has fallen; Notting Hill has
died. But that is not the tremendous issue. Notting Hill has lived."
"But if," answered the other voice, "if what is achieved by all these
efforts be only the common contentment of humanity, why do men so
extravagantly toil and die in them? Has nothing been done by Notting
Hill than any chance clump of farmers or clan of savages would not
have done without it? What might have been done to Notting Hill if the
world had been different may be a deep question; but there is a
deeper. What could have happened to the world if Notting Hill had
never been?"
The other voice replied--
"The same that would have happened to the world and all the starry
systems if an apple-tree grew six apples instead of seven; something
would have been eternally lost. There has never been anything in the
world absolutely like Notting Hill. There will never be anything quite
like it to the crack of doom. I cannot believe anything but that God
loved it as He must surely love anything that is itself and
unreplaceable. But even for that I do not care. If God, with all His
thunders, hated it, I loved it."
And with the voice a tall, strange figure lifted itself out of the
_debris_ in the half-darkness.
The other voice came after a long pause, and as it were hoarsely.
"But suppose the whole matter were really a hocus-pocus. Suppose that
whatever meaning you may choose in your fancy to give to it, the real
meaning of the whole was mockery. Suppose it was all folly. Suppose--"
"I have been in it," answered the voice from the tall and strange
figure, "and I know it was not."
A smaller figure seemed half to rise in the dark.
"Suppose I am God," said the voice, "and suppose I made the world in
idleness. Suppose the stars, that you think eternal, are only the
idiot fireworks of an everlasting schoolboy. Suppose the sun and the
moon, to which you sing alternately, are only the two eyes of one vast
and sneering giant, opened alternately in a never-ending wink. Suppose
the trees, in my eyes, are as foolish as enormous toad-stools. Suppose
Socrates and Charlemagne are to me only beasts, made funnier by
walking on their hind legs. Suppose I am God, and having made things,
laugh at them."
"And suppose I am man," answered the other. "And suppose that I give
the answer that shatters even a laugh. Suppose I do not laugh back at
you, do not blaspheme you, do not curse you. But suppose, standing up
straight under the sky, with every power of my being, I thank you for
the fools' paradise you have made. Suppose I praise you, with a
literal pain of ecstasy, for the jest that has brought me so terrible
a joy. If we have taken the child's games, and given them the
seriousness of a Crusade, if we have drenched your grotesque Dutch
garden with the blood of martyrs, we have turned a nursery into a
temple. I ask you, in the name of Heaven, who wins?"
The sky close about the crests of the hills and trees was beginning to
turn from black to grey, with a random suggestion of the morning. The
slight figure seemed to crawl towards the larger one, and the voice
was more human.
"But suppose, friend," it said, "suppose that, in a bitterer and more
real sense, it was all a mockery. Suppose that there had been, from
the beginning of these great wars, one who watched them with a sense
that is beyond expression, a sense of detachment, of responsibility,
of irony, of agony. Suppose that there were one who knew it was all a
joke."
The tall figure answered--
"He could not know it. For it was not all a joke."
And a gust of wind blew away some clouds that sealed the sky-line, and
showed a strip of silver behind his great dark legs. Then the other
voice came, having crept nearer still.