The Napoleon of Notting Hill

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Mr. Wayne's little volume of verse was a complete failure; and he
submitted to the decision of fate with a quite rational humility, went
back to his work, which was that of a draper's assistant, and wrote no
more. He still retained his feeling about the town of Notting Hill,
because he could not possibly have any other feeling, because it was
the back and base of his brain. But he does not seem to have made any
particular attempt to express it or insist upon it.

He was a genuine natural mystic, one of those who live on the border
of fairyland. But he was perhaps the first to realise how often the
boundary of fairyland runs through a crowded city. Twenty feet from
him (for he was very short-sighted) the red and white and yellow suns
of the gas-lights thronged and melted into each other like an orchard
of fiery trees, the beginning of the woods of elf-land.

But, oddly enough, it was because he was a small poet that he came to
his strange and isolated triumph. It was because he was a failure in
literature that he became a portent in English history. He was one of
those to whom nature has given the desire without the power of
artistic expression. He had been a dumb poet from his cradle. He might
have been so to his grave, and carried unuttered into the darkness a
treasure of new and sensational song. But he was born under the lucky
star of a single coincidence. He happened to be at the head of his
dingy municipality at the time of the King's jest, at the time when
all municipalities were suddenly commanded to break out into banners
and flowers. Out of the long procession of the silent poets, who have
been passing since the beginning of the world, this one man found
himself in the midst of an heraldic vision, in which he could act and
speak and live lyrically. While the author and the victims alike
treated the whole matter as a silly public charade, this one man, by
taking it seriously, sprang suddenly into a throne of artistic
omnipotence. Armour, music, standards, watch-fires, the noise of
drums, all the theatrical properties were thrown before him. This one
poor rhymster, having burnt his own rhymes, began to live that life of
open air and acted poetry of which all the poets of the earth have
dreamed in vain; the life for which the Iliad is only a cheap
substitute.

Upwards from his abstracted childhood, Adam Wayne had grown strongly
and silently in a certain quality or capacity which is in modern
cities almost entirely artificial, but which can be natural, and was
primarily almost brutally natural in him, the quality or capacity of
patriotism. It exists, like other virtues and vices, in a certain
undiluted reality. It is not confused with all kinds of other things.
A child speaking of his country or his village may make every mistake
in Mandeville or tell every lie in Munchausen, but in his statement
there will be no psychological lies any more than there can be in a
good song. Adam Wayne, as a boy, had for his dull streets in Notting
Hill the ultimate and ancient sentiment that went out to Athens or
Jerusalem. He knew the secret of the passion, those secrets which make
real old national songs sound so strange to our civilisation. He knew
that real patriotism tends to sing about sorrows and forlorn hopes
much more than about victory. He knew that in proper names themselves
is half the poetry of all national poems. Above all, he knew the
supreme psychological fact about patriotism, as certain in connection
with it as that a fine shame comes to all lovers, the fact that the
patriot never under any circumstances boasts of the largeness of his
country, but always, and of necessity, boasts of the smallness of it.

All this he knew, not because he was a philosopher or a genius, but
because he was a child. Any one who cares to walk up a side slum like
Pump Street, can see a little Adam claiming to be king of a
paving-stone. And he will always be proudest if the stone is almost
too narrow for him to keep his feet inside it.

It was while he was in such a dream of defensive battle, marking out
some strip of street or fortress of steps as the limit of his haughty
claim, that the King had met him, and, with a few words flung in
mockery, ratified for ever the strange boundaries of his soul.
Thenceforward the fanciful idea of the defence of Notting Hill in war
became to him a thing as solid as eating or drinking or lighting a
pipe. He disposed his meals for it, altered his plans for it, lay
awake in the night and went over it again. Two or three shops were to
him an arsenal; an area was to him a moat; corners of balconies and
turns of stone steps were points for the location of a culverin or an
archer. It is almost impossible to convey to any ordinary imagination
the degree to which he had transmitted the leaden London landscape to
a romantic gold. The process began almost in babyhood, and became
habitual like a literal madness. It was felt most keenly at night,
when London is really herself, when her lights shine in the dark like
the eyes of innumerable cats, and the outline of the dark houses has
the bold simplicity of blue hills. But for him the night revealed
instead of concealing, and he read all the blank hours of morning and
afternoon, by a contradictory phrase, in the light of that darkness.
To this man, at any rate, the inconceivable had happened. The
artificial city had become to him nature, and he felt the curbstones
and gas-lamps as things as ancient as the sky.

One instance may suffice. Walking along Pump Street with a friend, he
said, as he gazed dreamily at the iron fence of a little front garden,
"How those railings stir one's blood!"

His friend, who was also a great intellectual admirer, looked at them
painfully, but without any particular emotion. He was so troubled
about it that he went back quite a large number of times on quiet
evenings and stared at the railings, waiting for something to happen
to his blood, but without success. At last he took refuge in asking
Wayne himself. He discovered that the ecstacy lay in the one point he
had never noticed about the railings even after his six visits--the
fact that they were, like the great majority of others--in London,
shaped at the top after the manner of a spear. As a child, Wayne had
half unconsciously compared them with the spears in pictures of
Lancelot and St. George, and had grown up under the shadow of the
graphic association. Now, whenever he looked at them, they were simply
the serried weapons that made a hedge of steel round the sacred homes
of Notting Hill. He could not have cleansed his mind of that meaning
even if he tried. It was not a fanciful comparison, or anything like
it. It would not have been true to say that the familiar railings
reminded him of spears; it would have been far truer to say that the
familiar spears occasionally reminded him of railings.

A couple of days after his interview with the King, Adam Wayne was
pacing like a caged lion in front of five shops that occupied the
upper end of the disputed street. They were a grocer's, a chemist's, a
barber's, an old curiosity shop and a toy-shop that sold also
newspapers. It was these five shops which his childish fastidiousness
had first selected as the essentials of the Notting Hill campaign, the
citadel of the city. If Notting Hill was the heart of the universe,
and Pump Street was the heart of Notting Hill, this was the heart of
Pump Street. The fact that they were all small and side by side
realised that feeling for a formidable comfort and compactness which,
as we have said, was the heart of his patriotism, and of all
patriotism. The grocer (who had a wine and spirit licence) was
included because he could provision the garrison; the old curiosity
shop because it contained enough swords, pistols, partisans,
cross-bows, and blunderbusses to arm a whole irregular regiment; the
toy and paper shop because Wayne thought a free press an essential
centre for the soul of Pump Street; the chemist's to cope with
outbreaks of disease among the besieged; and the barber's because it
was in the middle of all the rest, and the barber's son was an
intimate friend and spiritual affinity.

It was a cloudless October evening settling down through purple into
pure silver around the roofs and chimneys of the steep little street,
which looked black and sharp and dramatic. In the deep shadows the
gas-lit shop fronts gleamed like five fires in a row, and before them,
darkly outlined like a ghost against some purgatorial furnaces, passed
to and fro the tall bird-like figure and eagle nose of Adam Wayne.

He swung his stick restlessly, and seemed fitfully talking to himself.

"There are, after all, enigmas," he said "even to the man who has
faith. There are doubts that remain even after the true philosophy is
completed in every rung and rivet. And here is one of them. Is the
normal human need, the normal human condition, higher or lower than
those special states of the soul which call out a doubtful and
dangerous glory? those special powers of knowledge or sacrifice which
are made possible only by the existence of evil? Which should come
first to our affections, the enduring sanities of peace or the
half-maniacal virtues of battle? Which should come first, the man
great in the daily round or the man great in emergency? Which should
come first, to return to the enigma before me, the grocer or the
chemist? Which is more certainly the stay of the city, the swift
chivalrous chemist or the benignant all-providing grocer? In such
ultimate spiritual doubts it is only possible to choose a side by the
higher instincts, and to abide the issue. In any case, I have made my
choice. May I be pardoned if I choose wrongly, but I choose the
grocer."

"Good morning, sir," said the grocer, who was a middle-aged man,
partially bald, with harsh red whiskers and beard, and forehead lined
with all the cares of the small tradesman. "What can I do for you,
sir?"

Wayne removed his hat on entering the shop, with a ceremonious
gesture, which, slight as it was, made the tradesman eye him with the
beginnings of wonder.

"I come, sir," he said soberly, "to appeal to your patriotism."

"Why, sir," said the grocer, "that sounds like the times when I was a
boy and we used to have elections."

"You will have them again," said Wayne, firmly, "and far greater
things. Listen, Mr. Mead. I know the temptations which a grocer has to
a too cosmopolitan philosophy. I can imagine what it must be to sit
all day as you do surrounded with wares from all the ends of the
earth, from strange seas that we have never sailed and strange forests
that we could not even picture. No Eastern king ever had such
argosies or such cargoes coming from the sunrise and the sunset, and
Solomon in all his glory was not enriched like one of you. India is at
your elbow," he cried, lifting his voice and pointing his stick at a
drawer of rice, the grocer making a movement of some alarm, "China is
before you, Demerara is behind you, America is above your head, and at
this very moment, like some old Spanish admiral, you hold Tunis in
your hands."

Mr. Mead dropped the box of dates which he was just lifting, and then
picked it up again vaguely.

Wayne went on with a heightened colour, but a lowered voice,

"I know, I say, the temptations of so international, so universal a
vision of wealth. I know that it must be your danger not to fall like
many tradesmen into too dusty and mechanical a narrowness, but rather
to be too broad, to be too general, too liberal. If a narrow
nationalism be the danger of the pastry-cook, who makes his own wares
under his own heavens, no less is cosmopolitanism the danger of the
grocer. But I come to you in the name of that patriotism which no
wanderings or enlightenments should ever wholly extinguish, and I ask
you to remember Notting Hill. For, after all, in this cosmopolitan
magnificence, she has played no small part. Your dates may come from
the tall palms of Barbary, your sugar from the strange islands of the
tropics, your tea from the secret villages of the Empire of the
Dragon. That this room might be furnished, forests may have been
spoiled under the Southern Cross, and leviathans speared under the
Polar Star. But you yourself--surely no inconsiderable treasure--you
yourself, the brain that wields these vast interests--you yourself, at
least, have grown to strength and wisdom between these grey houses and
under this rainy sky. This city which made you, and thus made your
fortunes, is threatened with war. Come forth and tell to the ends of
the earth this lesson. Oil is from the North and fruits from the
South; rices are from India and spices from Ceylon; sheep are from New
Zealand and men from Notting Hill."

The grocer sat for some little while, with dim eyes and his mouth
open, looking rather like a fish. Then he scratched the back of his
head, and said nothing. Then he said--

"Anything out of the shop, sir?"

Wayne looked round in a dazed way. Seeing a pile of tins of pine-apple
chunks, he waved his stick generally towards them.

"Yes," he said; "I'll take those."

"All those, sir?" said the grocer, with greatly increased interest.

"Yes, yes; all those," replied Wayne, still a little bewildered, like
a man splashed with cold water.

"Very good, sir; thank you, sir," said the grocer with animation. "You
may count upon my patriotism, sir."

"I count upon it already," said Wayne, and passed out into the
gathering night.

The grocer put the box of dates back in its place.

"What a nice fellow he is!" he said. "It's odd how often they are
nice. Much nicer than those as are all right."

Meanwhile Adam Wayne stood outside the glowing chemist's shop,
unmistakably wavering.

"What a weakness it is!" he muttered. "I have never got rid of it from
childhood--the fear of this magic shop. The grocer is rich, he is
romantic, he is poetical in the truest sense, but he is not--no, he is
not supernatural. But the chemist! All the other shops stand in
Notting Hill, but this stands in Elf-land. Look at those great burning
bowls of colour. It must be from them that God paints the sunsets. It
is superhuman, and the superhuman is all the more uncanny when it is
beneficent. That is the root of the fear of God. I am afraid. But I
must be a man and enter."

He was a man, and entered. A short, dark young man was behind the
counter with spectacles, and greeted him with a bright but entirely
business-like smile.

"A fine evening, sir," he said.

"Fine indeed, strange Father," said Adam, stretching his hands
somewhat forward. "It is on such clear and mellow nights that your
shop is most itself. Then they appear most perfect, those moons of
green and gold and crimson, which from afar oft guide the pilgrim of
pain and sickness to this house of merciful witchcraft."

"Can I get you anything?" asked the chemist.

"Let me see," said Wayne, in a friendly but vague manner. "Let me have
some sal volatile."

"Eightpence, tenpence, or one and sixpence a bottle?" said the young
man, genially.

"One and six--one and six," replied Wayne, with a wild submissiveness.
"I come to ask you, Mr. Bowles, a terrible question."

He paused and collected himself.

"It is necessary," he muttered--"it is necessary to be tactful, and to
suit the appeal to each profession in turn."

"I come," he resumed aloud, "to ask you a question which goes to the
roots of your miraculous toils. Mr. Bowles, shall all this witchery
cease?" And he waved his stick around the shop.

Meeting with no answer, he continued with animation--

"In Notting Hill we have felt to its core the elfish mystery of your
profession. And now Notting Hill itself is threatened."

"Anything more, sir?" asked the chemist.

"Oh," said Wayne, somewhat disturbed--"oh, what is it chemists sell?
Quinine, I think. Thank you. Shall it be destroyed? I have met these
men of Bayswater and North Kensington--Mr. Bowles, they are
materialists. They see no witchery in your work, even when it is
wrought within their own borders. They think the chemist is
commonplace. They think him human."

The chemist appeared to pause, only a moment, to take in the insult,
and immediately said--

"And the next article, please?"

"Alum," said the Provost, wildly. "I resume. It is in this sacred
town alone that your priesthood is reverenced. Therefore, when you
fight for us you fight not only for yourself, but for everything you
typify. You fight not only for Notting Hill, but for Fairyland, for as
surely as Buck and Barker and such men hold sway, the sense of
Fairyland in some strange manner diminishes."

"Anything more, sir?" asked Mr. Bowles, with unbroken cheerfulness.

"Oh yes, jujubes--Gregory powder--magnesia. The danger is imminent. In
all this matter I have felt that I fought not merely for my own city
(though to that I owe all my blood), but for all places in which these
great ideas could prevail. I am fighting not merely for Notting Hill,
but for Bayswater itself; for North Kensington itself. For if the
gold-hunters prevail, these also will lose all their ancient
sentiments and all the mystery of their national soul. I know I can
count upon you."

"Oh yes, sir," said the chemist, with great animation; "we are always
glad to oblige a good customer."

Adam Wayne went out of the shop with a deep sense of fulfilment of
soul.

"It is so fortunate," he said, "to have tact, to be able to play upon
the peculiar talents and specialities, the cosmopolitanism of the
grocer and the world-old necromancy of the chemist. Where should I be
without tact?"

CHAPTER II--_The Remarkable Mr. Turnbull_

After two more interviews with shopmen, however, the patriot's
confidence in his own psychological diplomacy began vaguely to wane.
Despite the care with which he considered the peculiar rationale and
the peculiar glory of each separate shop, there seemed to be something
unresponsive about the shopmen. Whether it was a dark resentment
against the uninitiate for peeping into their masonic magnificence, he
could not quite conjecture.

His conversation with the man who kept the shop of curiosities had
begun encouragingly. The man who kept the shop of curiosities had,
indeed, enchanted him with a phrase. He was standing drearily at the
door of his shop, a wrinkled man with a grey pointed beard, evidently
a gentleman who had come down in the world.

"And how does your commerce go, you strange guardian of the past?"
said Wayne, affably.

"Well, sir, not very well," replied the man, with that patient voice
of his class which is one of the most heart-breaking things in the
world. "Things are terribly quiet."

Wayne's eyes shone suddenly.

"A great saying," he said, "worthy of a man whose merchandise is human
history. Terribly quiet; that is in two words the spirit of this age,
as I have felt it from my cradle. I sometimes wondered how many other
people felt the oppression of this union between quietude and terror.
I see blank well-ordered streets and men in black moving about
inoffensively, sullenly. It goes on day after day, day after day, and
nothing happens; but to me it is like a dream from which I might wake
screaming. To me the straightness of our life is the straightness of a
thin cord stretched tight. Its stillness is terrible. It might snap
with a noise like thunder. And you who sit, amid the _debris_ of the
great wars, you who sit, as it were, upon a battlefield, you know that
war was less terrible than this evil peace; you know that the idle
lads who carried those swords under Francis or Elizabeth, the rude
Squire or Baron who swung that mace about in Picardy or Northumberland
battles, may have been terribly noisy, but were not like us, terribly
quiet."

Whether it was a faint embarrassment of conscience as to the original
source and date of the weapons referred to, or merely an engrained
depression, the guardian of the past looked, if anything, a little
more worried.

"But I do not think," continued Wayne, "that this horrible silence of
modernity will last, though I think for the present it will increase.
What a farce is this modern liberality! Freedom of speech means
practically, in our modern civilisation, that we must only talk about
unimportant things. We must not talk about religion, for that is
illiberal; we must not talk about bread and cheese, for that is
talking shop; we must not talk about death, for that is depressing; we
must not talk about birth, for that is indelicate. It cannot last.
Something must break this strange indifference, this strange dreamy
egoism, this strange loneliness of millions in a crowd. Something must
break it. Why should it not be you and I? Can you do nothing else but
guard relics?"

The shopman wore a gradually clearing expression, which would have led
those unsympathetic with the cause of the Red Lion to think that the
last sentence was the only one to which he had attached any meaning.

"I am rather old to go into a new business," he said, "and I don't
quite know what to be, either."

"Why not," said Wayne, gently having reached the crisis of his
delicate persuasion--"why not be a colonel?"

It was at this point, in all probability, that the interview began to
yield more disappointing results. The man appeared inclined at first
to regard the suggestion of becoming a colonel as outside the sphere
of immediate and relevant discussion. A long exposition of the
inevitable war of independence, coupled with the purchase of a
doubtful sixteenth-century sword for an exaggerated price, seemed to
resettle matters. Wayne left the shop, however, somewhat infected with
the melancholy of its owner.

That melancholy was completed at the barber's.

"Shaving, sir?" inquired that artist from inside his shop.

"War!" replied Wayne, standing on the threshold.

"I beg your pardon," said the other, sharply.

"War!" said Wayne, warmly. "But not for anything inconsistent with the
beautiful and the civilised arts. War for beauty. War for society. War
for peace. A great chance is offered you of repelling that slander
which, in defiance of the lives of so many artists, attributes
poltroonery to those who beautify and polish the surface of our lives.
Why should not hairdressers be heroes? Why should not--"

"Now, you get out," said the barber, irascibly. "We don't want any of
your sort here. You get out."

And he came forward with the desperate annoyance of a mild person when
enraged.

Adam Wayne laid his hand for a moment on the sword, then dropped it.

"Notting Hill," he said, "will need her bolder sons;" and he turned
gloomily to the toy-shop.

It was one of those queer little shops so constantly seen in the side
streets of London, which must be called toy-shops only because toys
upon the whole predominate; for the remainder of goods seem to consist
of almost everything else in the world--tobacco, exercise-books,
sweet-stuff, novelettes, halfpenny paper clips, halfpenny pencil
sharpeners, bootlaces, and cheap fireworks. It also sold newspapers,
and a row of dirty-looking posters hung along the front of it.

"I am afraid," said Wayne, as he entered, "that I am not getting on
with these tradesmen as I should. Is it that I have neglected to rise
to the full meaning of their work? Is there some secret buried in each
of these shops which no mere poet can discover?"

He stepped to the counter with a depression which he rapidly conquered
as he addressed the man on the other side of it,--a man of short
stature, and hair prematurely white, and the look of a large baby.

"Sir," said Wayne, "I am going from house to house in this street of
ours, seeking to stir up some sense of the danger which now threatens
our city. Nowhere have I felt my duty so difficult as here. For the
toy-shop keeper has to do with all that remains to us of Eden before
the first wars began. You sit here meditating continually upon the
wants of that wonderful time when every staircase leads to the stars,
and every garden-path to the other end of nowhere. Is it
thoughtlessly, do you think, that I strike the dark old drum of peril
in the paradise of children? But consider a moment; do not condemn me
hastily. Even that paradise itself contains the rumour or beginning of
that danger, just as the Eden that was made for perfection contained
the terrible tree. For judge childhood, even by your own arsenal of
its pleasures. You keep bricks; you make yourself thus, doubtless,
the witness of the constructive instinct older than the destructive.
You keep dolls; you make yourself the priest of that divine idolatry.
You keep Noah's Arks; you perpetuate the memory of the salvation of
all life as a precious, an irreplaceable thing. But do you keep only,
sir, the symbols of this prehistoric sanity, this childish rationality
of the earth? Do you not keep more terrible things? What are those
boxes, seemingly of lead soldiers, that I see in that glass case? Are
they not witnesses to that terror and beauty, that desire for a lovely
death, which could not be excluded even from the immortality of Eden?
Do not despise the lead soldiers, Mr. Turnbull."

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