The Napoleon of Notting Hill

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[Illustration: IN THE DARK ENTRANCE THERE APPEARED A FLAMING
FIGURE.]

The Napoleon of
Notting Hill

THE NAPOLEON
_of_
NOTTING HILL

_By_
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON

_With Seven Full-Page Illustrations by
W. GRAHAM ROBERTSON
and a Map of the Seat of War_

REV. WILLIAM J. GORMLEY, C. M.

JOHN LANE: THE BODLEY HEAD
LONDON & NEW YORK. MDCCCCIV

_Copyright in
U.S.A., 1904_

William Clowes & Sons, Limited, London and Beccles.

_TO HILAIRE BELLOC_

_For every tiny town or place
God made the stars especially;
Babies look up with owlish face
And see them tangled in a tree:
You saw a moon from Sussex Downs,
A Sussex moon, untravelled still,
I saw a moon that was the town's,
The largest lamp on Campden Hill._

_Yea; Heaven is everywhere at home
The big blue cap that always fits,
And so it is (be calm; they come
To goal at last, my wandering wits),
So is it with the heroic thing;
This shall not end for the world's end,
And though the sullen engines swing,
Be you not much afraid, my friend._

_This did not end by Nelson's urn
Where an immortal England sits--
Nor where your tall young men in turn
Drank death like wine at Austerlitz.
And when the pedants bade us mark
What cold mechanic happenings
Must come; our souls said in the dark,
"Belike; but there are likelier things."_

_Likelier across these flats afar
These sulky levels smooth and free
The drums shall crash a waltz of war
And Death shall dance with Liberty;
Likelier the barricades shall blare
Slaughter below and smoke above,
And death and hate and hell declare
That men have found a thing to love._

_Far from your sunny uplands set
I saw the dream; the streets I trod
The lit straight streets shot out and met
The starry streets that point to God.
This legend of an epic hour
A child I dreamed, and dream it still,
Under the great grey water-tower
That strikes the stars on Campden Hill._

G. K. C.

_CONTENTS_

BOOK I

_Chapter_ _Page_

I. INTRODUCTORY REMARKS ON THE ART OF PROPHECY 13

II. THE MAN IN GREEN 21

III. THE HILL OF HUMOUR 49

BOOK II

I. THE CHARTER OF THE CITIES 65

II. THE COUNCIL OF THE PROVOSTS 82

III. ENTER A LUNATIC 102

BOOK III

I. THE MENTAL CONDITION OF ADAM WAYNE 125

II. THE REMARKABLE MR. TURNBULL 147

III. THE EXPERIMENT OF MR. BUCK 163

BOOK IV

I. THE BATTLE OF THE LAMPS 189

II. THE CORRESPONDENT OF THE "COURT JOURNAL" 208

III. THE GREAT ARMY OF SOUTH KENSINGTON 224

BOOK V

I. THE EMPIRE OF NOTTING HILL 259

II. THE LAST BATTLE 279

III. TWO VOICES 291

_ILLUSTRATIONS_

IN THE DARK ENTRANCE THERE APPEARED A FLAMING FIGURE _Frontispiece_

_To face page_

CITY MEN OUT ON ALL FOURS IN A FIELD COVERED WITH
VEAL CUTLETS 16

"I'M THE KING OF THE CASTLE" 70

"I BRING HOMAGE TO MY KING" 104

MAP OF THE SEAT OF WAR 190

KING AUBERON DESCENDED FROM THE OMNIBUS WITH DIGNITY 220

"A FINE EVENING, SIR," SAID THE CHEMIST 264

"WAYNE, IT WAS ALL A JOKE!" 296

BOOK I

_THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL_

CHAPTER I--_Introductory Remarks on the Art of Prophecy_

The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been
playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do
it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.
And one of the games to which it is most attached is called "Keep
to-morrow dark," and which is also named (by the rustics in
Shropshire, I have no doubt) "Cheat the Prophet." The players listen
very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say
about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait
until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go
and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes,
however, it is great fun.

For human beings, being children, have the childish wilfulness and the
childish secrecy. And they never have from the beginning of the world
done what the wise men have seen to be inevitable. They stoned the
false prophets, it is said; but they could have stoned true prophets
with a greater and juster enjoyment. Individually, men may present a
more or less rational appearance, eating, sleeping, and scheming. But
humanity as a whole is changeful, mystical, fickle, delightful. Men
are men, but Man is a woman.

But in the beginning of the twentieth century the game of Cheat the
Prophet was made far more difficult than it had ever been before. The
reason was, that there were so many prophets and so many prophecies,
that it was difficult to elude all their ingenuities. When a man did
something free and frantic and entirely his own, a horrible thought
struck him afterwards; it might have been predicted. Whenever a duke
climbed a lamp-post, when a dean got drunk, he could not be really
happy, he could not be certain that he was not fulfilling some
prophecy. In the beginning of the twentieth century you could not see
the ground for clever men. They were so common that a stupid man was
quite exceptional, and when they found him, they followed him in
crowds down the street and treasured him up and gave him some high
post in the State. And all these clever men were at work giving
accounts of what would happen in the next age, all quite clear, all
quite keen-sighted and ruthless, and all quite different. And it
seemed that the good old game of hoodwinking your ancestors could not
really be managed this time, because the ancestors neglected meat and
sleep and practical politics, so that they might meditate day and
night on what their descendants would be likely to do.

But the way the prophets of the twentieth century went to work was
this. They took something or other that was certainly going on in
their time, and then said that it would go on more and more until
something extraordinary happened. And very often they added that in
some odd place that extraordinary thing had happened, and that it
showed the signs of the times.

Thus, for instance, there were Mr. H. G. Wells and others, who thought
that science would take charge of the future; and just as the
motor-car was quicker than the coach, so some lovely thing would be
quicker than the motor-car; and so on for ever. And there arose from
their ashes Dr. Quilp, who said that a man could be sent on his
machine so fast round the world that he could keep up a long, chatty
conversation in some old-world village by saying a word of a sentence
each time he came round. And it was said that the experiment had been
tried on an apoplectic old major, who was sent round the world so fast
that there seemed to be (to the inhabitants of some other star) a
continuous band round the earth of white whiskers, red complexion and
tweeds--a thing like the ring of Saturn.

Then there was the opposite school. There was Mr. Edward Carpenter,
who thought we should in a very short time return to Nature, and live
simply and slowly as the animals do. And Edward Carpenter was followed
by James Pickie, D.D. (of Pocohontas College), who said that men were
immensely improved by grazing, or taking their food slowly and
continuously, after the manner of cows. And he said that he had, with
the most encouraging results, turned city men out on all fours in a
field covered with veal cutlets. Then Tolstoy and the Humanitarians
said that the world was growing more merciful, and therefore no one
would ever desire to kill. And Mr. Mick not only became a vegetarian,
but at length declared vegetarianism doomed ("shedding," as he called
it finely, "the green blood of the silent animals"), and predicted
that men in a better age would live on nothing but salt. And then
came the pamphlet from Oregon (where the thing was tried), the
pamphlet called "Why should Salt suffer?" and there was more trouble.

[Illustration: CITY MEN OUT ON ALL FOURS IN A FIELD COVERED WITH VEAL
CUTLETS.]

And on the other hand, some people were predicting that the lines of
kinship would become narrower and sterner. There was Mr. Cecil Rhodes,
who thought that the one thing of the future was the British Empire,
and that there would be a gulf between those who were of the Empire
and those who were not, between the Chinaman in Hong Kong and the
Chinaman outside, between the Spaniard on the Rock of Gibraltar and
the Spaniard off it, similar to the gulf between man and the lower
animals. And in the same way his impetuous friend, Dr. Zoppi ("the
Paul of Anglo-Saxonism"), carried it yet further, and held that, as a
result of this view, cannibalism should be held to mean eating a
member of the Empire, not eating one of the subject peoples, who
should, he said, be killed without needless pain. His horror at the
idea of eating a man in British Guiana showed how they misunderstood
his stoicism who thought him devoid of feeling. He was, however, in a
hard position; as it was said that he had attempted the experiment,
and, living in London, had to subsist entirely on Italian
organ-grinders. And his end was terrible, for just when he had begun,
Sir Paul Swiller read his great paper at the Royal Society, proving
that the savages were not only quite right in eating their enemies,
but right on moral and hygienic grounds, since it was true that the
qualities of the enemy, when eaten, passed into the eater. The notion
that the nature of an Italian organ-man was irrevocably growing and
burgeoning inside him was almost more than the kindly old professor
could bear.

There was Mr. Benjamin Kidd, who said that the growing note of our
race would be the care for and knowledge of the future. His idea was
developed more powerfully by William Borker, who wrote that passage
which every schoolboy knows by heart, about men in future ages weeping
by the graves of their descendants, and tourists being shown over the
scene of the historic battle which was to take place some centuries
afterwards.

And Mr. Stead, too, was prominent, who thought that England would in
the twentieth century be united to America; and his young lieutenant,
Graham Podge, who included the states of France, Germany, and Russia
in the American Union, the State of Russia being abbreviated to Ra.

There was Mr. Sidney Webb, also, who said that the future would see a
continuously increasing order and neatness in the life of the people,
and his poor friend Fipps, who went mad and ran about the country with
an axe, hacking branches off the trees whenever there were not the
same number on both sides.

All these clever men were prophesying with every variety of ingenuity
what would happen soon, and they all did it in the same way, by taking
something they saw "going strong," as the saying is, and carrying it
as far as ever their imagination could stretch. This, they said, was
the true and simple way of anticipating the future. "Just as," said
Dr. Pellkins, in a fine passage,--"just as when we see a pig in a
litter larger than the other pigs, we know that by an unalterable law
of the Inscrutable it will some day be larger than an elephant,--just
as we know, when we see weeds and dandelions growing more and more
thickly in a garden, that they must, in spite of all our efforts, grow
taller than the chimney-pots and swallow the house from sight, so we
know and reverently acknowledge, that when any power in human politics
has shown for any period of time any considerable activity, it will go
on until it reaches to the sky."

And it did certainly appear that the prophets had put the people
(engaged in the old game of Cheat the Prophet) in a quite
unprecedented difficulty. It seemed really hard to do anything without
fulfilling some of their prophecies.

But there was, nevertheless, in the eyes of labourers in the streets,
of peasants in the fields, of sailors and children, and especially
women, a strange look that kept the wise men in a perfect fever of
doubt. They could not fathom the motionless mirth in their eyes. They
still had something up their sleeve; they were still playing the game
of Cheat the Prophet.

Then the wise men grew like wild things, and swayed hither and
thither, crying, "What can it be? What can it be? What will London be
like a century hence? Is there anything we have not thought of? Houses
upside down--more hygienic, perhaps? Men walking on hands--make feet
flexible, don't you know? Moon ... motor-cars ... no heads...." And so
they swayed and wondered until they died and were buried nicely.

Then the people went and did what they liked. Let me no longer conceal
the painful truth. The people had cheated the prophets of the
twentieth century. When the curtain goes up on this story, eighty
years after the present date, London is almost exactly like what it is
now.

CHAPTER II--_The Man in Green_

Very few words are needed to explain why London, a hundred years
hence, will be very like it is now, or rather, since I must slip into
a prophetic past, why London, when my story opens, was very like it
was in those enviable days when I was still alive.

The reason can be stated in one sentence. The people had absolutely
lost faith in revolutions. All revolutions are doctrinal--such as the
French one, or the one that introduced Christianity. For it stands to
common sense that you cannot upset all existing things, customs, and
compromises, unless you believe in something outside them, something
positive and divine. Now, England, during this century, lost all
belief in this. It believed in a thing called Evolution. And it said,
"All theoretic changes have ended in blood and ennui. If we change, we
must change slowly and safely, as the animals do. Nature's revolutions
are the only successful ones. There has been no conservative reaction
in favour of tails."

And some things did change. Things that were not much thought of
dropped out of sight. Things that had not often happened did not
happen at all. Thus, for instance, the actual physical force ruling
the country, the soldiers and police, grew smaller and smaller, and at
last vanished almost to a point. The people combined could have swept
the few policemen away in ten minutes: they did not, because they did
not believe it would do them the least good. They had lost faith in
revolutions.

Democracy was dead; for no one minded the governing class governing.
England was now practically a despotism, but not an hereditary one.
Some one in the official class was made King. No one cared how: no one
cared who. He was merely an universal secretary.

In this manner it happened that everything in London was very quiet.
That vague and somewhat depressed reliance upon things happening as
they have always happened, which is with all Londoners a mood, had
become an assumed condition. There was really no reason for any man
doing anything but the thing he had done the day before.

There was therefore no reason whatever why the three young men who had
always walked up to their Government office together should not walk
up to it together on this particular wintry and cloudy morning.
Everything in that age had become mechanical, and Government clerks
especially. All those clerks assembled regularly at their posts. Three
of those clerks always walked into town together. All the
neighbourhood knew them: two of them were tall and one short. And on
this particular morning the short clerk was only a few seconds late to
join the other two as they passed his gate: he could have overtaken
them in three strides; he could have called after them easily. But he
did not.

For some reason that will never be understood until all souls are
judged (if they are ever judged; the idea was at this time classed
with fetish worship) he did not join his two companions, but walked
steadily behind them. The day was dull, their dress was dull,
everything was dull; but in some odd impulse he walked through street
after street, through district after district, looking at the backs of
the two men, who would have swung round at the sound of his voice.
Now, there is a law written in the darkest of the Books of Life, and
it is this: If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times,
you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you
are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time.

So the short Government official looked at the coat-tails of the tall
Government officials, and through street after street, and round
corner after corner, saw only coat-tails, coat-tails, and again
coat-tails--when, he did not in the least know why, something happened
to his eyes.

Two black dragons were walking backwards in front of him. Two black
dragons were looking at him with evil eyes. The dragons were walking
backwards it was true, but they kept their eyes fixed on him none the
less. The eyes which he saw were, in truth, only the two buttons at
the back of a frock-coat: perhaps some traditional memory of their
meaningless character gave this half-witted prominence to their gaze.
The slit between the tails was the nose-line of the monster: whenever
the tails flapped in the winter wind the dragons licked their lips. It
was only a momentary fancy, but the small clerk found it imbedded in
his soul ever afterwards. He never could again think of men in
frock-coats except as dragons walking backwards. He explained
afterwards, quite tactfully and nicely, to his two official friends,
that (while feeling an inexpressible regard for each of them) he could
not seriously regard the face of either of them as anything but a
kind of tail. It was, he admitted, a handsome tail--a tail elevated in
the air. But if, he said, any true friend of theirs wished to see
their faces, to look into the eyes of their soul, that friend must be
allowed to walk reverently round behind them, so as to see them from
the rear. There he would see the two black dragons with the blind
eyes.

But when first the two black dragons sprang out of the fog upon the
small clerk, they had merely the effect of all miracles--they changed
the universe. He discovered the fact that all romantics know--that
adventures happen on dull days, and not on sunny ones. When the chord
of monotony is stretched most tight, then it breaks with a sound like
song. He had scarcely noticed the weather before, but with the four
dead eyes glaring at him he looked round and realised the strange dead
day.

The morning was wintry and dim, not misty, but darkened with that
shadow of cloud or snow which steeps everything in a green or copper
twilight. The light there is on such a day seems not so much to come
from the clear heavens as to be a phosphorescence clinging to the
shapes themselves. The load of heaven and the clouds is like a load of
waters, and the men move like fishes, feeling that they are on the
floor of a sea. Everything in a London street completes the fantasy;
the carriages and cabs themselves resemble deep-sea creatures with
eyes of flame. He had been startled at first to meet two dragons. Now
he found he was among deep-sea dragons possessing the deep sea.

The two young men in front were like the small young man himself,
well-dressed. The lines of their frock-coats and silk hats had that
luxuriant severity which makes the modern fop, hideous as he is, a
favourite exercise of the modern draughtsman; that element which Mr.
Max Beerbohm has admirably expressed in speaking of "certain
congruities of dark cloth and the rigid perfection of linen."

They walked with the gait of an affected snail, and they spoke at the
longest intervals, dropping a sentence at about every sixth lamp-post.

They crawled on past the lamp-posts; their mien was so immovable that
a fanciful description might almost say, that the lamp-posts crawled
past the men, as in a dream. Then the small man suddenly ran after
them and said--

"I want to get my hair cut. I say, do you know a little shop anywhere
where they cut your hair properly? I keep on having my hair cut, but
it keeps on growing again."

One of the tall men looked at him with the air of a pained naturalist.

"Why, here is a little place," cried the small man, with a sort of
imbecile cheerfulness, as the bright bulging window of a fashionable
toilet-saloon glowed abruptly out of the foggy twilight. "Do you know,
I often find hair-dressers when I walk about London. I'll lunch with
you at Cicconani's. You know, I'm awfully fond of hair-dressers'
shops. They're miles better than those nasty butchers'." And he
disappeared into the doorway.

The man called James continued to gaze after him, a monocle screwed
into his eye.

"What the devil do you make of that fellow?" he asked his companion, a
pale young man with a high nose.

The pale young man reflected conscientiously for some minutes, and
then said--

"Had a knock on his head when he was a kid, I should think."

"No, I don't think it's that," replied the Honourable James Barker.
"I've sometimes fancied he was a sort of artist, Lambert."

"Bosh!" cried Mr. Lambert, briefly.

"I admit I can't make him out," resumed Barker, abstractedly; "he
never opens his mouth without saying something so indescribably
half-witted that to call him a fool seems the very feeblest attempt at
characterisation. But there's another thing about him that's rather
funny. Do you know that he has the one collection of Japanese lacquer
in Europe? Have you ever seen his books? All Greek poets and mediaeval
French and that sort of thing. Have you ever been in his rooms? It's
like being inside an amethyst. And he moves about in all that and
talks like--like a turnip."

"Well, damn all books. Your blue books as well," said the ingenuous
Mr. Lambert, with a friendly simplicity. "You ought to understand such
things. What do you make of him?"

"He's beyond me," returned Barker. "But if you asked me for my
opinion, I should say he was a man with a taste for nonsense, as they
call it--artistic fooling, and all that kind of thing. And I seriously
believe that he has talked nonsense so much that he has half
bewildered his own mind and doesn't know the difference between sanity
and insanity. He has gone round the mental world, so to speak, and
found the place where the East and the West are one, and extreme
idiocy is as good as sense. But I can't explain these psychological
games."

"You can't explain them to me," replied Mr. Wilfrid Lambert, with
candour.

As they passed up the long streets towards their restaurant the copper
twilight cleared slowly to a pale yellow, and by the time they reached
it they stood discernible in a tolerable winter daylight. The
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.

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