The Napoleon of Notting Hill
Honourable James Barker, one of the most powerful officials in the
English Government (by this time a rigidly official one), was a lean
and elegant young man, with a blank handsome face and bleak blue eyes.
He had a great amount of intellectual capacity, of that peculiar kind
which raises a man from throne to throne and lets him die loaded with
honours without having either amused or enlightened the mind of a
single man. Wilfrid Lambert, the youth with the nose which appeared to
impoverish the rest of his face, had also contributed little to the
enlargement of the human spirit, but he had the honourable excuse of
being a fool.
Lambert would have been called a silly man; Barker, with all his
cleverness, might have been called a stupid man. But mere silliness
and stupidity sank into insignificance in the presence of the awful
and mysterious treasures of foolishness apparently stored up in the
small figure that stood waiting for them outside Cicconani's. The
little man, whose name was Auberon Quin, had an appearance compounded
of a baby and an owl. His round head, round eyes, seemed to have been
designed by nature playfully with a pair of compasses. His flat dark
hair and preposterously long frock-coat gave him something of the look
of a child's "Noah." When he entered a room of strangers, they mistook
him for a small boy, and wanted to take him on their knees, until he
spoke, when they perceived that a boy would have been more
intelligent.
"I have been waiting quite a long time," said Quin, mildly. "It's
awfully funny I should see you coming up the street at last."
"Why?" asked Lambert, staring. "You told us to come here yourself."
"My mother used to tell people to come to places," said the sage.
They were about to turn into the restaurant with a resigned air, when
their eyes were caught by something in the street. The weather, though
cold and blank, was now quite clear, and across the dull brown of the
wood pavement and between the dull grey terraces was moving something
not to be seen for miles round--not to be seen perhaps at that time in
England--a man dressed in bright colours. A small crowd hung on the
man's heels.
He was a tall stately man, clad in a military uniform of brilliant
green, splashed with great silver facings. From the shoulder swung a
short green furred cloak, somewhat like that of a Hussar, the lining
of which gleamed every now and then with a kind of tawny crimson. His
breast glittered with medals; round his neck was the red ribbon and
star of some foreign order; and a long straight sword, with a blazing
hilt, trailed and clattered along the pavement. At this time the
pacific and utilitarian development of Europe had relegated all such
customs to the Museums. The only remaining force, the small but
well-organised police, were attired in a sombre and hygienic manner.
But even those who remembered the last Life Guards and Lancers who
disappeared in 1912 must have known at a glance that this was not, and
never had been, an English uniform; and this conviction would have
been heightened by the yellow aquiline face, like Dante carved in
bronze, which rose, crowned with white hair, out of the green military
collar, a keen and distinguished, but not an English face.
The magnificence with which the green-clad gentleman walked down the
centre of the road would be something difficult to express in human
language. For it was an ingrained simplicity and arrogance, something
in the mere carriage of the head and body, which made ordinary moderns
in the street stare after him; but it had comparatively little to do
with actual conscious gestures or expression. In the matter of these
merely temporary movements, the man appeared to be rather worried and
inquisitive, but he was inquisitive with the inquisitiveness of a
despot and worried as with the responsibilities of a god. The men who
lounged and wondered behind him followed partly with an astonishment
at his brilliant uniform, that is to say, partly because of that
instinct which makes us all follow one who looks like a madman, but
far more because of that instinct which makes all men follow (and
worship) any one who chooses to behave like a king. He had to so
sublime an extent that great quality of royalty--an almost imbecile
unconsciousness of everybody, that people went after him as they do
after kings--to see what would be the first thing or person he would
take notice of. And all the time, as we have said, in spite of his
quiet splendour, there was an air about him as if he were looking for
somebody; an expression of inquiry.
Suddenly that expression of inquiry vanished, none could tell why, and
was replaced by an expression of contentment. Amid the rapt attention
of the mob of idlers, the magnificent green gentleman deflected
himself from his direct course down the centre of the road and walked
to one side of it. He came to a halt opposite to a large poster of
Colman's Mustard erected on a wooden hoarding. His spectators almost
held their breath.
He took from a small pocket in his uniform a little penknife; with
this he made a slash at the stretched paper. Completing the rest of
the operation with his fingers, he tore off a strip or rag of paper,
yellow in colour and wholly irregular in outline. Then for the first
time the great being addressed his adoring onlookers--
"Can any one," he said, with a pleasing foreign accent, "lend me a
pin?"
Mr. Lambert, who happened to be nearest, and who carried innumerable
pins for the purpose of attaching innumerable buttonholes, lent him
one, which was received with extravagant but dignified bows, and
hyperboles of thanks.
The gentleman in green, then, with every appearance of being
gratified, and even puffed up, pinned the piece of yellow paper to
the green silk and silver-lace adornments of his breast. Then he
turned his eyes round again, searching and unsatisfied.
"Anything else I can do, sir?" asked Lambert, with the absurd
politeness of the Englishman when once embarrassed.
"Red," said the stranger, vaguely, "red."
"I beg your pardon?"
"I beg yours also, Senor," said the stranger, bowing. "I was wondering
whether any of you had any red about you."
"Any red about us?--well really--no, I don't think I have--I used to
carry a red bandanna once, but--"
"Barker," asked Auberon Quin, suddenly, "where's your red cockatoo?
Where's your red cockatoo?"
"What do you mean?" asked Barker, desperately. "What cockatoo? You've
never seen me with any cockatoo!"
"I know," said Auberon, vaguely mollified. "Where's it been all the
time?"
Barker swung round, not without resentment.
"I am sorry, sir," he said, shortly but civilly, "none of us seem to
have anything red to lend you. But why, if one may ask--"
"I thank you, Senor, it is nothing. I can, since there is nothing
else, fulfil my own requirements."
And standing for a second of thought with the penknife in his hand, he
stabbed his left palm. The blood fell with so full a stream that it
struck the stones without dripping. The foreigner pulled out his
handkerchief and tore a piece from it with his teeth. The rag was
immediately soaked in scarlet.
"Since you are so generous, Senor," he said, "another pin, perhaps."
Lambert held one out, with eyes protruding like a frog's.
The red linen was pinned beside the yellow paper, and the foreigner
took off his hat.
"I have to thank you all, gentlemen," he said; and wrapping the
remainder of the handkerchief round his bleeding hand, he resumed his
walk with an overwhelming stateliness.
While all the rest paused, in some disorder, little Mr. Auberon Quin
ran after the stranger and stopped him, with hat in hand. Considerably
to everybody's astonishment, he addressed him in the purest Spanish--
"Senor," he said in that language, "pardon a hospitality, perhaps
indiscreet, towards one who appears to be a distinguished, but a
solitary guest in London. Will you do me and my friends, with whom
you have held some conversation, the honour of lunching with us at the
adjoining restaurant?"
The man in the green uniform had turned a fiery colour of pleasure at
the mere sound of his own language, and he accepted the invitation
with that profusion of bows which so often shows, in the case of the
Southern races, the falsehood of the notion that ceremony has nothing
to do with feeling.
"Senor," he said, "your language is my own; but all my love for my
people shall not lead me to deny to yours the possession of so
chivalrous an entertainer. Let me say that the tongue is Spanish but
the heart English." And he passed with the rest into Cicconani's.
"Now, perhaps," said Barker, over the fish and sherry, intensely
polite, but burning with curiosity, "perhaps it would be rude of me to
ask why you did that?"
"Did what, Senor?" asked the guest, who spoke English quite well,
though in a manner indefinably American.
"Well," said the Englishman, in some confusion, "I mean tore a strip
off a hoarding and ... er ... cut yourself ... and...."
"To tell you that, Senor," answered the other, with a certain sad
pride, "involves merely telling you who I am. I am Juan del Fuego,
President of Nicaragua."
The manner with which the President of Nicaragua leant back and drank
his sherry showed that to him this explanation covered all the facts
observed and a great deal more. Barker's brow, however, was still a
little clouded.
"And the yellow paper," he began, with anxious friendliness, "and the
red rag...."
"The yellow paper and the red rag," said Fuego, with indescribable
grandeur, "are the colours of Nicaragua."
"But Nicaragua ..." began Barker, with great hesitation, "Nicaragua is
no longer a...."
"Nicaragua has been conquered like Athens. Nicaragua has been annexed
like Jerusalem," cried the old man, with amazing fire. "The Yankee and
the German and the brute powers of modernity have trampled it with the
hoofs of oxen. But Nicaragua is not dead. Nicaragua is an idea."
Auberon Quin suggested timidly, "A brilliant idea."
"Yes," said the foreigner, snatching at the word. "You are right,
generous Englishman. An idea _brillant_, a burning thought. Senor,
you asked me why, in my desire to see the colours of my country, I
snatched at paper and blood. Can you not understand the ancient
sanctity of colours? The Church has her symbolic colours. And think of
what colours mean to us--think of the position of one like myself, who
can see nothing but those two colours, nothing but the red and the
yellow. To me all shapes are equal, all common and noble things are in
a democracy of combination. Wherever there is a field of marigolds and
the red cloak of an old woman, there is Nicaragua. Wherever there is a
field of poppies and a yellow patch of sand, there is Nicaragua.
Wherever there is a lemon and a red sunset, there is my country.
Wherever I see a red pillar-box and a yellow sunset, there my heart
beats. Blood and a splash of mustard can be my heraldry. If there be
yellow mud and red mud in the same ditch, it is better to me than
white stars."
"And if," said Quin, with equal enthusiasm, "there should happen to be
yellow wine and red wine at the same lunch, you could not confine
yourself to sherry. Let me order some Burgundy, and complete, as it
were, a sort of Nicaraguan heraldry in your inside."
Barker was fiddling with his knife, and was evidently making up his
mind to say something, with the intense nervousness of the amiable
Englishman.
"I am to understand, then," he said at last, with a cough, "that you,
ahem, were the President of Nicaragua when it made its--er--one must,
of course, agree--its quite heroic resistance to--er--"
The ex-President of Nicaragua waved his hand.
"You need not hesitate in speaking to me," he said. "I'm quite fully