The Napoleon of Notting Hill

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'Old unhappy far-off things
And battles long ago'

--to quote the words of a little-known poet who was a friend of my
youth? I have resolved, as I have said, so far as possible, to
preserve the eyes of policemen and omnibus conductors in their present
dreamy state. For what is a state without dreams? And the remedy I
propose is as follows:--

"To-morrow morning at twenty-five minutes past ten, if Heaven spares
my life, I purpose to issue a Proclamation. It has been the work of my
life, and is about half finished. With the assistance of a whisky and
soda, I shall conclude the other half to-night, and my people will
receive it to-morrow. All these boroughs where you were born, and hope
to lay your bones, shall be reinstated in their ancient
magnificence,--Hammersmith, Kensington, Bayswater, Chelsea, Battersea,
Clapham, Balham, and a hundred others. Each shall immediately build a
city wall with gates to be closed at sunset. Each shall have a city
guard, armed to the teeth. Each shall have a banner, a coat-of-arms,
and, if convenient, a gathering cry. I will not enter into the details
now, my heart is too full. They will be found in the proclamation
itself. You will all, however, be subject to enrolment in the local
city guards, to be summoned together by a thing called the Tocsin, the
meaning of which I am studying in my researches into history.
Personally, I believe a tocsin to be some kind of highly paid
official. If, therefore, any of you happen to have such a thing as a
halberd in the house, I should advise you to practise with it in the
garden."

Here the King buried his face in his handkerchief and hurriedly left
the platform, overcome by emotions.

The members of the Society for the Recovery of London Antiquities rose
in an indescribable state of vagueness. Some were purple with
indignation; an intellectual few were purple with laughter; the great
majority found their minds a blank. There remains a tradition that one
pale face with burning blue eyes remained fixed upon the lecturer, and
after the lecture a red-haired boy ran out of the room.

CHAPTER II--_The Council of the Provosts_

The King got up early next morning and came down three steps at a time
like a schoolboy. Having eaten his breakfast hurriedly, but with an
appetite, he summoned one of the highest officials of the Palace, and
presented him with a shilling. "Go and buy me," he said, "a shilling
paint-box, which you will get, unless the mists of time mislead me, in
a shop at the corner of the second and dirtier street that leads out
of Rochester Row. I have already requested the Master of the
Buckhounds to provide me with cardboard. It seemed to me (I know not
why) that it fell within his department."

The King was happy all that morning with his cardboard and his
paint-box. He was engaged in designing the uniforms and coats-of-arms
for the various municipalities of London. They gave him deep and no
inconsiderable thought. He felt the responsibility.

"I cannot think," he said, "why people should think the names of
places in the country more poetical than those in London. Shallow
romanticists go away in trains and stop in places called
Hugmy-in-the-Hole, or Bumps-on-the-Puddle. And all the time they
could, if they liked, go and live at a place with the dim, divine name
of St. John's Wood. I have never been to St. John's Wood. I dare not.
I should be afraid of the innumerable night of fir trees, afraid to
come upon a blood-red cup and the beating of the wings of the Eagle.
But all these things can be imagined by remaining reverently in the
Harrow train."

And he thoughtfully retouched his design for the head-dress of the
halberdier of St. John's Wood, a design in black and red, compounded
of a pine tree and the plumage of an eagle. Then he turned to another
card. "Let us think of milder matters," he said. "Lavender Hill! Could
any of your glebes and combes and all the rest of it produce so
fragrant an idea? Think of a mountain of lavender lifting itself in
purple poignancy into the silver skies and filling men's nostrils with
a new breath of life--a purple hill of incense. It is true that upon
my few excursions of discovery on a halfpenny tram I have failed to
hit the precise spot. But it must be there; some poet called it by
its name. There is at least warrant enough for the solemn purple
plumes (following the botanical formation of lavender) which I have
required people to wear in the neighbourhood of Clapham Junction. It
is so everywhere, after all. I have never been actually to
Southfields, but I suppose a scheme of lemons and olives represent
their austral instincts. I have never visited Parson's Green, or seen
either the Green or the Parson, but surely the pale-green shovel-hats
I have designed must be more or less in the spirit. I must work in the
dark and let my instincts guide me. The great love I bear to my people
will certainly save me from distressing their noble spirit or
violating their great traditions."

As he was reflecting in this vein, the door was flung open, and an
official announced Mr. Barker and Mr. Lambert.

Mr. Barker and Mr. Lambert were not particularly surprised to find the
King sitting on the floor amid a litter of water-colour sketches. They
were not particularly surprised because the last time they had called
on him they had found him sitting on the floor, surrounded by a litter
of children's bricks, and the time before surrounded by a litter of
wholly unsuccessful attempts to make paper darts. But the trend of
the royal infant's remarks, uttered from amid this infantile chaos,
was not quite the same affair.

For some time they let him babble on, conscious that his remarks meant
nothing. And then a horrible thought began to steal over the mind of
James Barker. He began to think that the King's remarks did not mean
nothing.

"In God's name, Auberon," he suddenly volleyed out, startling the
quiet hall, "you don't mean that you are really going to have these
city guards and city walls and things?"

"I am, indeed," said the infant, in a quiet voice. "Why shouldn't I
have them? I have modelled them precisely on your political
principles. Do you know what I've done, Barker? I've behaved like a
true Barkerian. I've ... but perhaps it won't interest you, the
account of my Barkerian conduct."

"Oh, go on, go on," cried Barker.

"The account of my Barkerian conduct," said Auberon, calmly, "seems
not only to interest, but to alarm you. Yet it is very simple. It
merely consists in choosing all the provosts under any new scheme by
the same principle by which you have caused the central despot to be
appointed. Each provost, of each city, under my charter, is to be
appointed by rotation. Sleep, therefore, my Barker, a rosy sleep."

Barker's wild eyes flared.

"But, in God's name, don't you see, Quin, that the thing is quite
different? In the centre it doesn't matter so much, just because the
whole object of despotism is to get some sort of unity. But if any
damned parish can go to any damned man--"

"I see your difficulty," said King Auberon, calmly. "You feel that
your talents may be neglected. Listen!" And he rose with immense
magnificence. "I solemnly give to my liege subject, James Barker, my
special and splendid favour, the right to override the obvious text of
the Charter of the Cities, and to be, in his own right, Lord High
Provost of South Kensington. And now, my dear James, you are all
right. Good day."

"But--" began Barker.

"The audience is at an end, Provost," said the King, smiling.

How far his confidence was justified, it would require a somewhat
complicated description to explain. "The Great Proclamation of the
Charter of the Free Cities" appeared in due course that morning, and
was posted by bill-stickers all over the front of the Palace, the King
assisting them with animated directions, and standing in the middle of
the road, with his head on one side, contemplating the result. It was
also carried up and down the main thoroughfares by sandwichmen, and
the King was, with difficulty, restrained from going out in that
capacity himself, being, in fact, found by the Groom of the Stole and
Captain Bowler, struggling between two boards. His excitement had
positively to be quieted like that of a child.

The reception which the Charter of the Cities met at the hands of the
public may mildly be described as mixed. In one sense it was popular
enough. In many happy homes that remarkable legal document was read
aloud on winter evenings amid uproarious appreciation, when everything
had been learnt by heart from that quaint but immortal old classic,
Mr. W. W. Jacobs. But when it was discovered that the King had every
intention of seriously requiring the provisions to be carried out, of
insisting that the grotesque cities, with their tocsins and city
guards, should really come into existence, things were thrown into a
far angrier confusion. Londoners had no particular objection to the
King making a fool of himself, but they became indignant when it
became evident that he wished to make fools of them; and protests
began to come in.

The Lord High Provost of the Good and Valiant City of West Kensington
wrote a respectful letter to the King, explaining that upon State
occasions it would, of course, be his duty to observe what formalities
the King thought proper, but that it was really awkward for a decent
householder not to be allowed to go out and put a post-card in a
pillar-box without being escorted by five heralds, who announced, with
formal cries and blasts of a trumpet, that the Lord High Provost
desired to catch the post.

The Lord High Provost of North Kensington, who was a prosperous
draper, wrote a curt business note, like a man complaining of a
railway company, stating that definite inconvenience had been caused
him by the presence of the halberdiers, whom he had to take with him
everywhere. When attempting to catch an omnibus to the City, he had
found that while room could have been found for himself, the
halberdiers had a difficulty in getting in to the vehicle--believe
him, theirs faithfully.

The Lord High Provost of Shepherd's Bush said his wife did not like
men hanging round the kitchen.

The King was always delighted to listen to these grievances,
delivering lenient and kingly answers, but as he always insisted, as
the absolute _sine qua non_, that verbal complaints should be
presented to him with the fullest pomp of trumpets, plumes, and
halberds, only a few resolute spirits were prepared to run the
gauntlet of the little boys in the street.

Among these, however, was prominent the abrupt and business-like
gentleman who ruled North Kensington. And he had before long, occasion
to interview the King about a matter wider and even more urgent than
the problem of the halberdiers and the omnibus. This was the great
question which then and for long afterwards brought a stir to the
blood and a flush to the cheek of all the speculative builders and
house agents from Shepherd's Bush to the Marble Arch, and from
Westbourne Grove to High Street, Kensington. I refer to the great
affair of the improvements in Notting Hill. The scheme was conducted
chiefly by Mr. Buck, the abrupt North Kensington magnate, and by Mr.
Wilson, the Provost of Bayswater. A great thoroughfare was to be
driven through three boroughs, through West Kensington, North
Kensington and Notting Hill, opening at one end into Hammersmith
Broadway, and at the other into Westbourne Grove. The negotiations,
buyings, sellings, bullying and bribing took ten years, and by the end
of it Buck, who had conducted them almost single-handed, had proved
himself a man of the strongest type of material energy and material
diplomacy. And just as his splendid patience and more splendid
impatience had finally brought him victory, when workmen were already
demolishing houses and walls along the great line from Hammersmith, a
sudden obstacle appeared that had neither been reckoned with nor
dreamed of, a small and strange obstacle, which, like a speck of grit
in a great machine, jarred the whole vast scheme and brought it to a
stand-still, and Mr. Buck, the draper, getting with great impatience
into his robes of office and summoning with indescribable disgust his
halberdiers, hurried over to speak to the King.

Ten years had not tired the King of his joke. There were still new
faces to be seen looking out from the symbolic head-gears he had
designed, gazing at him from amid the pastoral ribbons of Shepherd's
Bush or from under the sombre hoods of the Blackfriars Road. And the
interview which was promised him with the Provost of North Kensington
he anticipated with a particular pleasure, for "he never really
enjoyed," he said, "the full richness of the mediaeval garments unless
the people compelled to wear them were very angry and business-like."

Mr. Buck was both. At the King's command the door of the
audience-chamber was thrown open and a herald appeared in the purple
colours of Mr. Buck's commonwealth emblazoned with the Great Eagle
which the King had attributed to North Kensington, in vague
reminiscence of Russia, for he always insisted on regarding North
Kensington as some kind of semi-arctic neighbourhood. The herald
announced that the Provost of that city desired audience of the King.

"From North Kensington?" said the King, rising graciously. "What news
does he bring from that land of high hills and fair women? He is
welcome."

The herald advanced into the room, and was immediately followed by
twelve guards clad in purple, who were followed by an attendant
bearing the banner of the Eagle, who was followed by another attendant
bearing the keys of the city upon a cushion, who was followed by Mr.
Buck in a great hurry. When the King saw his strong animal face and
steady eyes, he knew that he was in the presence of a great man of
business, and consciously braced himself.

"Well, well," he said, cheerily coming down two or three steps from a
dais, and striking his hands lightly together, "I am glad to see you.
Never mind, never mind. Ceremony is not everything."

"I don't understand your Majesty," said the Provost, stolidly.

"Never mind, never mind," said the King, gaily. "A knowledge of Courts
is by no means an unmixed merit; you will do it next time, no doubt."

The man of business looked at him sulkily from under his black brows
and said again without show of civility--

"I don't follow you."

"Well, well," replied the King, good-naturedly, "if you ask me I don't
mind telling you, not because I myself attach any importance to these
forms in comparison with the Honest Heart. But it is usual--it is
usual--that is all, for a man when entering the presence of Royalty to
lie down on his back on the floor and elevating his feet towards
heaven (as the source of Royal power) to say three times 'Monarchical
institutions improve the manners.' But there, there--such pomp is far
less truly dignified than your simple kindliness."

The Provost's face was red with anger, and he maintained silence.

"And now," said the King, lightly, and with the exasperating air of a
man softening a snub; "what delightful weather we are having! You must
find your official robes warm, my Lord. I designed them for your own
snow-bound land."

"They're as hot as hell," said Buck, briefly. "I came here on
business."

"Right," said the King, nodding a great number of times with quite
unmeaning solemnity; "right, right, right. Business, as the sad glad
old Persian said, is business. Be punctual. Rise early. Point the pen
to the shoulder. Point the pen to the shoulder, for you know not
whence you come nor why. Point the pen to the shoulder, for you know
not when you go nor where."

The Provost pulled a number of papers from his pocket and savagely
flapped them open.

"Your Majesty may have heard," he began, sarcastically, "of
Hammersmith and a thing called a road. We have been at work ten years
buying property and getting compulsory powers and fixing compensation
and squaring vested interests, and now at the very end, the thing is
stopped by a fool. Old Prout, who was Provost of Notting Hill, was a
business man, and we dealt with him quite satisfactorily. But he's
dead, and the cursed lot has fallen on a young man named Wayne, who's
up to some game that's perfectly incomprehensible to me. We offer him
a better price than any one ever dreamt of, but he won't let the road
go through. And his Council seems to be backing him up. It's midsummer
madness."

The King, who was rather inattentively engaged in drawing the
Provost's nose with his finger on the window-pane, heard the last two
words.

"What a perfect phrase that is!" he said. "'Midsummer madness'!"

"The chief point is," continued Buck, doggedly, "that the only part
that is really in question is one dirty little street--Pump Street--a
street with nothing in it but a public-house and a penny toy-shop, and
that sort of thing. All the respectable people of Notting Hill have
accepted our compensation. But the ineffable Wayne sticks out over
Pump Street. Says he's Provost of Notting Hill. He's only Provost of
Pump Street."

"A good thought," replied Auberon. "I like the idea of a Provost of
Pump Street. Why not let him alone?"

"And drop the whole scheme!" cried out Buck, with a burst of brutal
spirit. "I'll be damned if we do. No. I'm for sending in workmen to
pull down without more ado."

"Strike for the purple Eagle!" cried the King, hot with historical
associations.

"I'll tell you what it is," said Buck, losing his temper altogether.
"If your Majesty would spend less time in insulting respectable people
with your silly coats-of-arms, and more time over the business of the
nation--"

The King's brow wrinkled thoughtfully.

"The situation is not bad," he said; "the haughty burgher defying the
King in his own Palace. The burgher's head should be thrown back and
the right arm extended; the left may be lifted towards Heaven, but
that I leave to your private religious sentiment. I have sunk back in
this chair, stricken with baffled fury. Now again, please."

Buck's mouth opened like a dog's, but before he could speak another
herald appeared at the door.

"The Lord High Provost of Bayswater," he said, "desires an audience."

"Admit him," said Auberon. "This _is_ a jolly day."

The halberdiers of Bayswater wore a prevailing uniform of green, and
the banner which was borne after them was emblazoned with a green
bay-wreath on a silver ground, which the King, in the course of his
researches into a bottle of champagne, had discovered to be the quaint
old punning cognisance of the city of Bayswater.

"It is a fit symbol," said the King, "your immortal bay-wreath. Fulham
may seek for wealth, and Kensington for art, but when did the men of
Bayswater care for anything but glory?"

Immediately behind the banner, and almost completely hidden by it,
came the Provost of the city, clad in splendid robes of green and
silver with white fur and crowned with bay. He was an anxious little
man with red whiskers, originally the owner of a small sweet-stuff
shop.

"Our cousin of Bayswater," said the King, with delight; "what can we
get for you?" The King was heard also distinctly to mutter, "Cold
beef, cold 'am, cold chicken," his voice dying into silence.

"I came to see your Majesty," said the Provost of Bayswater, whose
name was Wilson, "about that Pump Street affair."

"I have just been explaining the situation to his Majesty," said Buck,
curtly, but recovering his civility. "I am not sure, however, whether
his Majesty knows how much the matter affects you also."

"It affects both of us, yer see, yer Majesty, as this scheme was
started for the benefit of the 'ole neighbourhood. So Mr. Buck and me
we put our 'eads together--"

The King clasped his hands.

"Perfect!" he cried in ecstacy. "Your heads together! I can see it!
Can't you do it now? Oh, do do it now!"

A smothered sound of amusement appeared to come from the halberdiers,
but Mr. Wilson looked merely bewildered, and Mr. Buck merely
diabolical.

"I suppose," he began bitterly, but the King stopped him with a
gesture of listening.

"Hush," he said, "I think I hear some one else coming. I seem to hear
another herald, a herald whose boots creak."

As he spoke another voice cried from the doorway--

"The Lord High Provost of South Kensington desires an audience."

"The Lord High Provost of South Kensington!" cried the King. "Why,
that is my old friend James Barker! What does he want, I wonder? If
the tender memories of friendship have not grown misty, I fancy he
wants something for himself, probably money. How are you, James?"

Mr. James Barker, whose guard was attired in a splendid blue, and
whose blue banner bore three gold birds singing, rushed, in his blue
and gold robes, into the room. Despite the absurdity of all the
dresses, it was worth noticing that he carried his better than the
rest, though he loathed it as much as any of them. He was a gentleman,
and a very handsome man, and could not help unconsciously wearing even
his preposterous robe as it should be worn. He spoke quickly, but with
the slight initial hesitation he always showed in addressing the King,
due to suppressing an impulse to address his old acquaintance in the
old way.

"Your Majesty--pray forgive my intrusion. It is about this man in Pump
Street. I see you have Buck here, so you have probably heard what is
necessary. I--"

The King swept his eyes anxiously round the room, which now blazed
with the trappings of three cities.

"There is one thing necessary," he said.

"Yes, your Majesty," said Mr. Wilson of Bayswater, a little eagerly.
"What does yer Majesty think necessary?"

"A little yellow," said the King, firmly. "Send for the Provost of
West Kensington."

Amid some materialistic protests he was sent for, and arrived with his
yellow halberdiers in his saffron robes, wiping his forehead with a
handkerchief. After all, placed as he was, he had a good deal to say
on the matter.

"Welcome, West Kensington," said the King. "I have long wished to see
you touching that matter of the Hammersmith land to the south of the
Rowton House. Will you hold it feudally from the Provost of
Hammersmith? You have only to do him homage by putting his left arm
in his overcoat and then marching home in state."

"No, your Majesty; I'd rather not," said the Provost of West
Kensington, who was a pale young man with a fair moustache and
whiskers, who kept a successful dairy.

The King struck him heartily on the shoulder.

"The fierce old West Kensington blood," he said; "they are not wise
who ask it to do homage."

Then he glanced again round the room. It was full of a roaring sunset
of colour, and he enjoyed the sight, possible to so few artists--the
sight of his own dreams moving and blazing before him. In the
foreground the yellow of the West Kensington liveries outlined itself
against the dark blue draperies of South Kensington. The crests of
these again brightened suddenly into green as the almost woodland
colours of Bayswater rose behind them. And over and behind all, the
great purple plumes of North Kensington showed almost funereal and
black.

"There is something lacking," said the King--"something lacking. What
can--Ah, there it is! there it is!"

In the doorway had appeared a new figure, a herald in flaming red. He
cried in a loud but unemotional voice--

"The Lord High Provost of Notting Hill desires an audience."

CHAPTER III--_Enter a Lunatic_

The King of the Fairies, who was, it is to be presumed, the godfather
of King Auberon, must have been very favourable on this particular day
to his fantastic godchild, for with the entrance of the guard of the
Provost of Notting Hill there was a certain more or less inexplicable
addition to his delight. The wretched navvies and sandwich-men who
carried the colours of Bayswater or South Kensington, engaged merely
for the day to satisfy the Royal hobby, slouched into the room with a
comparatively hang-dog air, and a great part of the King's
intellectual pleasure consisted in the contrast between the arrogance
of their swords and feathers and the meek misery of their faces. But
these Notting Hill halberdiers in their red tunics belted with gold
had the air rather of an absurd gravity. They seemed, so to speak, to
be taking part in the joke. They marched and wheeled into position
with an almost startling dignity and discipline.

They carried a yellow banner with a great red lion, named by the King
as the Notting Hill emblem, after a small public-house in the
neighbourhood, which he once frequented.

Between the two lines of his followers there advanced towards the King
a tall, red-haired young man, with high features and bold blue eyes.
He would have been called handsome, but that a certain indefinable air
of his nose being too big for his face, and his feet for his legs,
gave him a look of awkwardness and extreme youth. His robes were red,
according to the King's heraldry, and, alone among the Provosts, he
was girt with a great sword. This was Adam Wayne, the intractable
Provost of Notting Hill.

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