The Napoleon of Notting Hill

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And he went out of the room before any one else could stir.

* * * * *

Forty workmen, a hundred Bayswater Halberdiers, two hundred from
South, and three from North Kensington, assembled at the foot of
Holland Walk and marched up it, under the general direction of Barker,
who looked flushed and happy in full dress. At the end of the
procession a small and sulky figure lingered like an urchin. It was
the King.

"Barker," he said at length, appealingly, "you are an old friend of
mine--you understand my hobbies as I understand yours. Why can't you
let it alone? I hoped that such fun might come out of this Wayne
business. Why can't you let it alone? It doesn't really so much matter
to you--what's a road or so? For me it's the one joke that may save me
from pessimism. Take fewer men and give me an hour's fun. Really and
truly, James, if you collected coins or humming-birds, and I could buy
one with the price of your road, I would buy it. I collect
incidents--those rare, those precious things. Let me have one. Pay a
few pounds for it. Give these Notting Hillers a chance. Let them
alone."

"Auberon," said Barker, kindly, forgetting all royal titles in a rare
moment of sincerity, "I do feel what you mean. I have had moments when
these hobbies have hit me. I have had moments when I have sympathised
with your humours. I have had moments, though you may not easily
believe it, when I have sympathised with the madness of Adam Wayne.
But the world, Auberon, the real world, is not run on these hobbies.
It goes on great brutal wheels of facts--wheels on which you are the
butterfly; and Wayne is the fly on the wheel."

Auberon's eyes looked frankly at the other's.

"Thank you, James; what you say is true. It is only a parenthetical
consolation to me to compare the intelligence of flies somewhat
favourably with the intelligence of wheels. But it is the nature of
flies to die soon, and the nature of wheels to go on for ever. Go on
with the wheel. Good-bye, old man."

And James Barker went on, laughing, with a high colour, slapping his
bamboo on his leg.

The King watched the tail of the retreating regiment with a look of
genuine depression, which made him seem more like a baby than ever.
Then he swung round and struck his hands together.

"In a world without humour," he said, "the only thing to do is to eat.
And how perfect an exception! How can these people strike dignified
attitudes, and pretend that things matter, when the total
ludicrousness of life is proved by the very method by which it is
supported? A man strikes the lyre, and says, 'Life is real, life is
earnest,' and then goes into a room and stuffs alien substances into a
hole in his head. I think Nature was indeed a little broad in her
humour in these matters. But we all fall back on the pantomime, as I
have in this municipal affair. Nature has her farces, like the act of
eating or the shape of the kangaroo, for the more brutal appetite. She
keeps her stars and mountains for those who can appreciate something
more subtly ridiculous." He turned to his equerry. "But, as I said
'eating,' let us have a picnic like two nice little children. Just run
and bring me a table and a dozen courses or so, and plenty of
champagne, and under these swinging boughs, Bowler, we will return to
Nature."

It took about an hour to erect in Holland Lane the monarch's simple
repast, during which time he walked up and down and whistled, but
still with an unaffected air of gloom. He had really been done out of
a pleasure he had promised himself, and had that empty and sickened
feeling which a child has when disappointed of a pantomime. When he
and the equerry had sat down, however, and consumed a fair amount of
dry champagne, his spirits began mildly to revive.

"Things take too long in this world," he said. "I detest all this
Barkerian business about evolution and the gradual modification of
things. I wish the world had been made in six days, and knocked to
pieces again in six more. And I wish I had done it. The joke's good
enough in a broad way, sun and moon and the image of God, and all
that, but they keep it up so damnably long. Did you ever long for a
miracle, Bowler?"

"No, sir," said Bowler, who was an evolutionist, and had been
carefully brought up.

"Then I have," answered the King. "I have walked along a street with
the best cigar in the cosmos in my mouth, and more Burgundy inside me
than you ever saw in your life, and longed that the lamp-post would
turn into an elephant to save me from the hell of blank existence.
Take my word for it, my evolutionary Bowler, don't you believe people
when they tell you that people sought for a sign, and believed in
miracles because they were ignorant. They did it because they were
wise, filthily, vilely wise--too wise to eat or sleep or put on their
boots with patience. This seems delightfully like a new theory of the
origin of Christianity, which would itself be a thing of no mean
absurdity. Take some more wine."

The wind blew round them as they sat at their little table, with its
white cloth and bright wine-cups, and flung the tree-tops of Holland
Park against each other, but the sun was in that strong temper which
turns green into gold. The King pushed away his plate, lit a cigar
slowly, and went on--

"Yesterday I thought that something next door to a really entertaining
miracle might happen to me before I went to amuse the worms. To see
that red-haired maniac waving a great sword, and making speeches to
his incomparable followers, would have been a glimpse of that Land of
Youth from which the Fates shut us out. I had planned some quite
delightful things. A Congress of Knightsbridge with a treaty, and
myself in the chair, and perhaps a Roman triumph, with jolly old
Barker led in chains. And now these wretched prigs have gone and
stamped out the exquisite Mr. Wayne altogether, and I suppose they
will put him in a private asylum somewhere in their damned humane way.
Think of the treasures daily poured out to his unappreciative keeper!
I wonder whether they would let me be his keeper. But life is a vale.
Never forget at any moment of your existence to regard it in the light
of a vale. This graceful habit, if not acquired in youth--"

The King stopped, with his cigar lifted, for there had slid into his
eyes the startled look of a man listening. He did not move for a few
moments; then he turned his head sharply towards the high, thin, and
lath-like paling which fenced certain long gardens and similar spaces
from the lane. From behind it there was coming a curious scrambling
and scraping noise, as of a desperate thing imprisoned in this box of
thin wood. The King threw away his cigar, and jumped on to the table.
From this position he saw a pair of hands hanging with a hungry clutch
on the top of the fence. Then the hands quivered with a convulsive
effort, and a head shot up between them--the head of one of the
Bayswater Town Council, his eyes and whiskers wild with fear. He swung
himself over, and fell on the other side on his face, and groaned
openly and without ceasing. The next moment the thin, taut wood of the
fence was struck as by a bullet, so that it reverberated like a drum,
and over it came tearing and cursing, with torn clothes and broken
nails and bleeding faces, twenty men at one rush. The King sprang five
feet clear off the table on to the ground. The moment after the table
was flung over, sending bottles and glasses flying, and the _debris_
was literally swept along the ground by that stream of men pouring
past, and Bowler was borne along with them, as the King said in his
famous newspaper article, "like a captured bride." The great fence
swung and split under the load of climbers that still scaled and
cleared it. Tremendous gaps were torn in it by this living artillery;
and through them the King could see more and more frantic faces, as in
a dream, and more and more men running. They were as miscellaneous as
if some one had taken the lid off a human dustbin. Some were
untouched, some were slashed and battered and bloody, some were
splendidly dressed, some tattered and half naked, some were in the
fantastic garb of the burlesque cities, some in the dullest modern
dress. The King stared at all of them, but none of them looked at the
King. Suddenly he stepped forward.

"Barker," he said, "what is all this?"

"Beaten," said the politician--"beaten all to hell!" And he plunged
past with nostrils shaking like a horse's, and more and more men
plunged after him.

Almost as he spoke, the last standing strip of fence bowed and
snapped, flinging, as from a catapult, a new figure upon the road. He
wore the flaming red of the halberdiers of Notting Hill, and on his
weapon there was blood, and in his face victory. In another moment
masses of red glowed through the gaps of the fence, and the pursuers,
with their halberds, came pouring down the lane. Pursued and pursuers
alike swept by the little figure with the owlish eyes, who had not
taken his hands out of his pockets.

The King had still little beyond the confused sense of a man caught in
a torrent--the feeling of men eddying by. Then something happened
which he was never able afterwards to describe, and which we cannot
describe for him. Suddenly in the dark entrance, between the broken
gates of a garden, there appeared framed a flaming figure.

Adam Wayne, the conqueror, with his face flung back, and his mane like
a lion's, stood with his great sword point upwards, the red raiment of
his office flapping round him like the red wings of an archangel. And
the King saw, he knew not how, something new and overwhelming. The
great green trees and the great red robes swung together in the wind.
The sword seemed made for the sunlight. The preposterous masquerade,
born of his own mockery, towered over him and embraced the world. This
was the normal, this was sanity, this was nature; and he himself,
with his rationality and his detachment and his black frock-coat, he
was the exception and the accident--a blot of black upon a world of
crimson and gold.

BOOK IV

CHAPTER I--_The Battle of the Lamps_

Mr. Buck, who, though retired, frequently went down to his big drapery
stores in Kensington High Street, was locking up those premises, being
the last to leave. It was a wonderful evening of green and gold, but
that did not trouble him very much. If you had pointed it out, he
would have agreed seriously, for the rich always desire to be
artistic.

He stepped out into the cool air, buttoning up his light yellow coat,
and blowing great clouds from his cigar, when a figure dashed up to
him in another yellow overcoat, but unbuttoned and flying behind him.

"Hullo, Barker!" said the draper. "Any of our summer articles? You're
too late. Factory Acts, Barker. Humanity and progress, my boy."

"Oh, don't chatter," cried Barker, stamping. "We've been beaten."

"Beaten--by what?" asked Buck, mystified.

"By Wayne."

Buck looked at Barker's fierce white face for the first time, as it
gleamed in the lamplight.

"Come and have a drink," he said.

They adjourned to a cushioned and glaring buffet, and Buck established
himself slowly and lazily in a seat, and pulled out his cigar-case.

"Have a smoke," he said.

Barker was still standing, and on the fret, but after a moment's
hesitation, he sat down as if he might spring up again the next
minute. They ordered drinks in silence.

"How did it happen?" asked Buck, turning his big bold eyes on him.

"How the devil do I know?" cried Barker. "It happened like--like a
dream. How can two hundred men beat six hundred? How can they?"

"Well," said Buck, coolly, "how did they? You ought to know."

"I don't know; I can't describe," said the other, drumming on the
table. "It seemed like this. We were six hundred, and marched with
those damned poleaxes of Auberon's--the only weapons we've got. We
marched two abreast. We went up Holland Walk, between the high palings
which seemed to me to go straight as an arrow for Pump Street. I was
near the tail of the line, and it was a long one. When the end of it
was still between the high palings, the head of the line was already
crossing Holland Park Avenue. Then the head plunged into the
network of narrow streets on the other side, and the tail and myself
came out on the great crossing. When we also had reached the northern
side and turned up a small street that points, crookedly as it were,
towards Pump Street, the whole thing felt different. The streets
dodged and bent so much that the head of our line seemed lost
altogether: it might as well have been in North America. And all this
time we hadn't seen a soul."

[Illustration: Map of the SEAT of WAR.]

Buck, who was idly dabbing the ash of his cigar on the ash-tray, began
to move it deliberately over the table, making feathery grey lines, a
kind of map.

"But though the little streets were all deserted (which got a trifle
on my nerves), as we got deeper and deeper into them, a thing began to
happen that I couldn't understand. Sometimes a long way ahead--three
turns or corners ahead, as it were--there broke suddenly a sort of
noise, clattering, and confused cries, and then stopped. Then, when it
happened, something, I can't describe it--a kind of shake or stagger
went down the line, as if the line were a live thing, whose head had
been struck, or had been an electric cord. None of us knew why we were
moving, but we moved and jostled. Then we recovered, and went on
through the little dirty streets, round corners, and up twisted ways.
The little crooked streets began to give me a feeling I can't
explain--as if it were a dream. I felt as if things had lost their
reason, and we should never get out of the maze. Odd to hear me talk
like that, isn't it? The streets were quite well-known streets, all
down on the map. But the fact remains. I wasn't afraid of something
happening. I was afraid of nothing ever happening--nothing ever
happening for all God's eternity."

He drained his glass and called for more whisky. He drank it, and went
on.

"And then something did happen. Buck, it's the solemn truth, that
nothing has ever happened to you in your life. Nothing had ever
happened to me in my life."

"Nothing ever happened!" said Buck, staring. "What do you mean?"

"Nothing has ever happened," repeated Barker, with a morbid obstinacy.
"You don't know what a thing happening means? You sit in your office
expecting customers, and customers come; you walk in the street
expecting friends, and friends meet you; you want a drink, and get it;
you feel inclined for a bet, and make it. You expect either to win or
lose, and you do either one or the other. But things happening!" and
he shuddered ungovernably.

"Go on," said Buck, shortly. "Get on."

"As we walked wearily round the corners, something happened. When
something happens, it happens first, and you see it afterwards. It
happens of itself, and you have nothing to do with it. It proves a
dreadful thing--that there are other things besides one's self. I can
only put it in this way. We went round one turning, two turnings,
three turnings, four turnings, five. Then I lifted myself slowly up
from the gutter where I had been shot half senseless, and was beaten
down again by living men crashing on top of me, and the world was full
of roaring, and big men rolling about like nine-pins."

Buck looked at his map with knitted brows.

"Was that Portobello Road?" he asked.

"Yes," said Barker--"yes; Portobello Road. I saw it afterwards; but,
my God, what a place it was! Buck, have you ever stood and let a six
foot of man lash and lash at your head with six feet of pole with six
pounds of steel at the end? Because, when you have had that
experience, as Walt Whitman says, 'you re-examine philosophies and
religions.'"

"I have no doubt," said Buck. "If that was Portobello Road, don't you
see what happened?"

"I know what happened exceedingly well. I was knocked down four times;
an experience which, as I say, has an effect on the mental attitude.
And another thing happened, too. I knocked down two men. After the
fourth fall (there was not much bloodshed--more brutal rushing and
throwing--for nobody could use their weapons), after the fourth fall,
I say, I got up like a devil, and I tore a poleaxe out of a man's hand
and struck where I saw the scarlet of Wayne's fellows, struck again
and again. Two of them went over, bleeding on the stones, thank God;
and I laughed and found myself sprawling in the gutter again, and got
up again, and struck again, and broke my halberd to pieces. I hurt a
man's head, though."

Buck set down his glass with a bang, and spat out curses through his
thick moustache.

"What is the matter?" asked Barker, stopping, for the man had been
calm up to now, and now his agitation was far more violent than his
own.

"The matter?" said Buck, bitterly; "don't you see how these maniacs
have got us? Why should two idiots, one a clown and the other a
screaming lunatic, make sane men so different from themselves? Look
here, Barker; I will give you a picture. A very well-bred young man of
this century is dancing about in a frock-coat. He has in his hands a
nonsensical seventeenth-century halberd, with which he is trying to
kill men in a street in Notting Hill. Damn it! don't you see how
they've got us? Never mind how you felt--that is how you looked. The
King would put his cursed head on one side and call it exquisite. The
Provost of Notting Hill would put his cursed nose in the air and call
it heroic. But in Heaven's name what would you have called it--two
days before?"

Barker bit his lip.

"You haven't been through it, Buck," he said. "You don't understand
fighting--the atmosphere."

"I don't deny the atmosphere," said Buck, striking the table. "I only
say it's their atmosphere. It's Adam Wayne's atmosphere. It's the
atmosphere which you and I thought had vanished from an educated world
for ever."

"Well, it hasn't," said Barker; "and if you have any lingering doubts,
lend me a poleaxe, and I'll show you."

There was a long silence, and then Buck turned to his neighbour and
spoke in that good-tempered tone that comes of a power of looking
facts in the face--the tone in which he concluded great bargains.

"Barker," he said, "you are right. This old thing--this fighting, has
come back. It has come back suddenly and taken us by surprise. So it
is first blood to Adam Wayne. But, unless reason and arithmetic and
everything else have gone crazy, it must be next and last blood to us.
But when an issue has really arisen, there is only one thing to do--to
study that issue as such and win in it. Barker, since it is fighting,
we must understand fighting. I must understand fighting as coolly and
completely as I understand drapery; you must understand fighting as
coolly and completely as you understand politics. Now, look at the
facts. I stick without hesitation to my original formula. Fighting,
when we have the stronger force, is only a matter of arithmetic. It
must be. You asked me just now how two hundred men could defeat six
hundred. I can tell you. Two hundred men can defeat six hundred when
the six hundred behave like fools. When they forget the very
conditions they are fighting in; when they fight in a swamp as if it
were a mountain; when they fight in a forest as if it were a plain;
when they fight in streets without remembering the object of streets."

"What is the object of streets?" asked Barker.

"What is the object of supper?" cried Buck, furiously. "Isn't it
obvious? This military science is mere common sense. The object of a
street is to lead from one place to another; therefore all streets
join; therefore street fighting is quite a peculiar thing. You
advanced into that hive of streets as if you were advancing into an
open plain where you could see everything. Instead of that, you were
advancing into the bowels of a fortress, with streets pointing at you,
streets turning on you, streets jumping out at you, and all in the
hands of the enemy. Do you know what Portobello Road is? It is the
only point on your journey where two side streets run up opposite each
other. Wayne massed his men on the two sides, and when he had let
enough of your line go past, cut it in two like a worm. Don't you see
what would have saved you?"

Barker shook his head.

"Can't your 'atmosphere' help you?" asked Buck, bitterly. "Must I
attempt explanations in the romantic manner? Suppose that, as you were
fighting blindly with the red Notting Hillers who imprisoned you on
both sides, you had heard a shout from behind them. Suppose, oh,
romantic Barker! that behind the red tunics you had seen the blue and
gold of South Kensington taking them in the rear, surrounding them in
their turn and hurling them on to your halberds."

"If the thing had been possible," began Barker, cursing.

"The thing would have been as possible," said Buck, simply, "as simple
as arithmetic. There are a certain number of street entries that lead
to Pump Street. There are not nine hundred; there are not nine
million. They do not grow in the night. They do not increase like
mushrooms. It must be possible, with such an overwhelming force as we
have, to advance by all of them at once. In every one of the arteries,
or approaches, we can put almost as many men as Wayne can put into the
field altogether. Once do that, and we have him to demonstration. It
is like a proposition of Euclid."

"You think that is certain?" said Barker, anxious, but dominated
delightfully.

"I'll tell you what I think," said Buck, getting up jovially. "I
think Adam Wayne made an uncommonly spirited little fight; and I think
I am confoundedly sorry for him."

"Buck, you are a great man!" cried Barker, rising also. "You've
knocked me sensible again. I am ashamed to say it, but I was getting
romantic. Of course, what you say is adamantine sense. Fighting, being
physical, must be mathematical. We were beaten because we were neither
mathematical nor physical nor anything else--because we deserved to be
beaten. Hold all the approaches, and with our force we must have him.
When shall we open the next campaign?"

"Now," said Buck, and walked out of the bar.

"Now!" cried Barker, following him eagerly. "Do you mean now? It is so
late."

Buck turned on him, stamping.

"Do you think fighting is under the Factory Acts?" he said; and he
called a cab. "Notting Hill Gate Station," he said; and the two drove
off.

* * * * *

A genuine reputation can sometimes be made in an hour. Buck, in the
next sixty or eighty minutes, showed himself a really great man of
action. His cab carried him like a thunderbolt from the King to
Wilson, from Wilson to Swindon, from Swindon to Barker again; if his
course was jagged, it had the jaggedness of the lightning. Only two
things he carried with him--his inevitable cigar and the map of North
Kensington and Notting Hill. There were, as he again and again pointed
out, with every variety of persuasion and violence, only nine possible
ways of approaching Pump Street within a quarter of a mile round it;
three out of Westbourne Grove, two out of Ladbroke Grove, and four out
of Notting Hill High Street. And he had detachments of two hundred
each, stationed at every one of the entrances before the last green of
that strange sunset had sunk out of the black sky.

The sky was particularly black, and on this alone was one false
protest raised against the triumphant optimism of the Provost of North
Kensington. He overruled it with his infectious common sense.

"There is no such thing," he said, "as night in London. You have only
to follow the line of street lamps. Look, here is the map. Two hundred
purple North Kensington soldiers under myself march up Ossington
Street, two hundred more under Captain Bruce, of the North Kensington
Guard, up Clanricarde Gardens.[1] Two hundred yellow West Kensingtons
under Provost Swindon attack from Pembridge Road. Two hundred more of
my men from the eastern streets, leading away from Queen's Road. Two
detachments of yellows enter by two roads from Westbourne Grove.
Lastly, two hundred green Bayswaters come down from the North through
Chepstow Place, and two hundred more under Provost Wilson himself,
through the upper part of Pembridge Road. Gentlemen, it is mate in two
moves. The enemy must either mass in Pump Street and be cut to pieces;
or they must retreat past the Gaslight & Coke Co., and rush on my four
hundred; or they must retreat past St. Luke's Church, and rush on the
six hundred from the West. Unless we are all mad, it's plain. Come on.
To your quarters and await Captain Brace's signal to advance. Then you
have only to walk up a line of gas-lamps and smash this nonsense by
pure mathematics. To-morrow we shall all be civilians again."

[Footnote 1: Clanricarde Gardens at this time was no longer a
_cul-de-sac_, but was connected by Pump Street to Pembridge Square.
See map.]

His optimism glowed like a great fire in the night, and ran round the
terrible ring in which Wayne was now held helpless. The fight was
already over. One man's energy for one hour had saved the city from
war.

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