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.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill

Book I

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 To­mor­row 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 lamp­post, 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 mo­tor­car was quicker than the coach, so some lovely thing would be quicker than the mo­tor­car; and so on forever. 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, DD (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.

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 … mo­tor­cars … 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.

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. Someone 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 coat­tails of the tall gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials, and through street after street, and round corner after corner, saw only coat­tails, coat­tails, and again coat­tails—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 lamp­post.

They crawled on past the lamp­posts; their mien was so im­mov­able that a fanci­ful de­scrip­tion might al­most say, that the lamp­posts 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 hairdress­ers when I walk about Lon­don. I’ll lunch with you at Cic­con­ani’s. You know, I’m aw­fully fond of hairdress­ers’ 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 me­di­eval 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.

They were about to turn into the res­taur­ant with a resigned air, when their eyes were caught by some­thing in the street. The weather, though cold and blank, was now quite clear, and across the dull brown of the wood pave­ment and between the dull grey ter­races was mov­ing some­thing not to be seen for miles round—not to be seen per­haps at that time in Eng­land—a man dressed in bright col­ours. A small crowd hung on the man’s heels.

He was a tall stately man, clad in a mil­it­ary uni­form of bril­liant green, splashed with great sil­ver fa­cings. From the shoulder swung a short green furred cloak, some­what like that of a Hus­sar, the lin­ing of which gleamed every now and then with a kind of tawny crim­son. His breast glittered with medals; round his neck was the red rib­bon and star of some for­eign or­der; and a long straight sword, with a blaz­ing hilt, trailed and clattered along the pave­ment. At this time the pa­cific and util­it­arian de­vel­op­ment of Europe had re­leg­ated all such cus­toms to the Mu­seums. The only re­main­ing force, the small but well-or­gan­ised po­lice, were at­tired in a sombre and hy­gienic man­ner. But even those who re­membered the last Life Guards and Lan­cers who dis­ap­peared in 1912 must have known at a glance that this was not, and never had been, an Eng­lish uni­form; and this con­vic­tion would have been heightened by the yel­low aquil­ine face, like Dante carved in bronze, which rose, crowned with white hair, out of the green mil­it­ary col­lar, a keen and dis­tin­guished, but not an Eng­lish face.

The mag­ni­fi­cence with which the green-clad gen­tle­man walked down the centre of the road would be some­thing dif­fi­cult to ex­press in hu­man lan­guage. For it was an in­grained sim­pli­city and ar­rog­ance, some­thing in the mere car­riage of the head and body, which made or­din­ary mod­erns in the street stare after him; but it had com­par­at­ively little to do with ac­tual con­scious ges­tures or ex­pres­sion. In the mat­ter of these merely tem­por­ary move­ments, the man ap­peared to be rather wor­ried and in­quis­it­ive, but he was in­quis­it­ive with the in­quis­it­ive­ness of a des­pot and wor­ried as with the re­spons­ib­il­it­ies of a god. The men who lounged and wondered be­hind him fol­lowed partly with an as­ton­ish­ment at his bril­liant uni­form, that is to say, partly be­cause of that in­stinct which makes us all fol­low one who looks like a mad­man, but far more be­cause of that in­stinct which makes all men fol­low (and wor­ship) any­one who chooses to be­have like a king. He had to so sub­lime an ex­tent that great qual­ity of roy­alty—an al­most im­be­cile un­con­scious­ness of every­body, that people went after him as they do after kings—to see what would be the first thing or per­son he would take no­tice of. And all the time, as we have said, in spite of his quiet splend­our, there was an air about him as if he were look­ing for some­body; an ex­pres­sion of in­quiry.

Sud­denly that ex­pres­sion of in­quiry van­ished, none could tell why, and was re­placed by an ex­pres­sion of con­tent­ment. Amid the rapt at­ten­tion of the mob of idlers, the mag­ni­fi­cent green gen­tle­man de­flec­ted him­self from his dir­ect course down the centre of the road and walked to one side of it. He came to a halt op­pos­ite to a large poster of Col­man’s Mus­tard erec­ted on a wooden hoard­ing. His spec­tat­ors al­most held their breath.

He took from a small pocket in his uni­form a little pen­knife; with this he made a slash at the stretched pa­per. Com­plet­ing the rest of the op­er­a­tion with his fin­gers, he tore off a strip or rag of pa­per, yel­low in col­our and wholly ir­reg­u­lar in out­line. Then for the first time the great be­ing ad­dressed his ad­or­ing on­look­ers—

“Can any­one,” he said, with a pleas­ing for­eign ac­cent, “lend me a pin?”

Mr. Lam­bert, who happened to be nearest, and who car­ried in­nu­mer­able pins for the pur­pose of at­tach­ing in­nu­mer­able but­ton­holes, lent him one, which was re­ceived with ex­tra­vag­ant but dig­ni­fied bows, and hy­per­boles of thanks.

The gen­tle­man in green, then, with every ap­pear­ance of be­ing grat­i­fied, and even puffed up, pinned the piece of yel­low pa­per to the green silk and sil­ver-lace ad­orn­ments of his breast. Then he turned his eyes round again, search­ing and un­sat­is­fied.

“Anything else I can do, sir?” asked Lam­bert, with the ab­surd po­lite­ness of the Eng­lish­man when once em­bar­rassed.

“Red,” said the stranger, vaguely, “red.”

“I beg your par­don?”

“I beg yours also, Señor,” said the stranger, bow­ing. “I was won­der­ing whether any of you had any red about you.”

“Any red about us?—well really—no, I don’t think I have—I used to carry a red bandanna once, but—”

“Barker,” asked Auberon Quin, sud­denly, “where’s your red cock­a­too? Where’s your red cock­a­too?”

“What do you mean?” asked Barker, des­per­ately. “What cock­a­too? You’ve never seen me with any cock­a­too!”

“I know,” said Auberon, vaguely mol­li­fied. “Where’s it been all the time?”

Barker swung round, not without re­sent­ment.

“I am sorry, sir,” he said, shortly but civilly, “none of us seem to have any­thing red to lend you. But why, if one may ask—”

“I thank you, Señor, it is noth­ing. I can, since there is noth­ing else, ful­fil my own re­quire­ments.”

And stand­ing for a second of thought with the pen­knife in his hand, he stabbed his left palm. The blood fell with so full a stream that it struck the stones without drip­ping. The for­eigner pulled out his handker­chief and tore a piece from it with his teeth. The rag was im­me­di­ately soaked in scar­let.

“Since you are so gen­er­ous, Señor,” he said, “an­other pin, per­haps.”

Lam­bert held one out, with eyes pro­trud­ing like a frog’s.

The red linen was pinned be­side the yel­low pa­per, and the for­eigner took off his hat.

“I have to thank you all, gen­tle­men,” he said; and wrap­ping the re­mainder of the handker­chief round his bleed­ing hand, he re­sumed his walk with an over­whelm­ing stateli­ness.

While all the rest paused, in some dis­order, little Mr. Auberon Quin ran after the stranger and stopped him, with hat in hand. Con­sid­er­ably to every­body’s as­ton­ish­ment, he ad­dressed him in the purest Span­ish—

“Señor,” he said in that lan­guage, “par­don a hos­pit­al­ity, per­haps in­dis­creet, to­wards one who ap­pears to be a dis­tin­guished, but a sol­it­ary guest in Lon­don. Will you do me and my friends, with whom you have held some con­ver­sa­tion, the hon­our of lunch­ing with us at the ad­join­ing res­taur­ant?”

The man in the green uni­form had turned a fiery col­our of pleas­ure at the mere sound of his own lan­guage, and he ac­cep­ted the in­vit­a­tion with that pro­fu­sion of bows which so of­ten shows, in the case of the South­ern races, the false­hood of the no­tion that ce­re­mony has noth­ing to do with feel­ing.

“Señor,” he said, “your lan­guage is my own; but all my love for my people shall not lead me to deny to yours the pos­ses­sion of so chiv­al­rous an en­ter­tainer. Let me say that the tongue is Span­ish but the heart Eng­lish.” And he passed with the rest into Cic­con­ani’s.

“Now, per­haps,” said Barker, over the fish and sherry, in­tensely po­lite, but burn­ing with curi­os­ity, “per­haps it would be rude of me to ask why you did that?”

“Did what, Señor?” asked the guest, who spoke Eng­lish quite well, though in a man­ner in­defin­ably Amer­ican.

“Well,” said the Eng­lish­man, in some con­fu­sion, “I mean tore a strip off a hoard­ing and … er … cut your­self … and. …”

“To tell you that, Señor,” answered the other, with a cer­tain sad pride, “in­volves merely telling you who I am. I am Juan del Fuego, Pres­id­ent of Ni­caragua.”

The man­ner with which the Pres­id­ent of Ni­caragua leant back and drank his sherry showed that to him this ex­plan­a­tion covered all the facts ob­served and a great deal more. Barker’s brow, how­ever, was still a little clouded.

“And the yel­low pa­per,” he began, with anxious friend­li­ness, “and the red rag. …”

“The yel­low pa­per and the red rag,” said Fuego, with in­des­crib­able grandeur, “are the col­ours of Ni­caragua.”

“But Ni­caragua …” began Barker, with great hes­it­a­tion, “Ni­caragua is no longer a. …”

“Ni­caragua has been conquered like Athens. Ni­caragua has been an­nexed like Jer­u­s­alem,” cried the old man, with amaz­ing fire. “The Yan­kee and the Ger­man and the brute powers of mod­ern­ity have trampled it with the hoofs of oxen. But Ni­caragua is not dead. Ni­caragua is an idea.”

Auberon Quin sug­ges­ted tim­idly, “A bril­liant idea.”

“Yes,” said the for­eigner, snatch­ing at the word. “You are right, gen­er­ous Eng­lish­man. An idea bril­lant, a burn­ing thought. Señor, you asked me why, in my de­sire to see the col­ours of my coun­try, I snatched at pa­per and blood. Can you not un­der­stand the an­cient sanc­tity of col­ours? The Church has her sym­bolic col­ours. And think of what col­ours mean to us—think of the po­s­i­tion of one like my­self, who can see noth­ing but those two col­ours, noth­ing but the red and the yel­low. To me all shapes are equal, all com­mon and noble things are in a demo­cracy of com­bin­a­tion. Wherever there is a field of marigolds and the red cloak of an old wo­man, there is Ni­caragua. Wherever there is a field of pop­pies and a yel­low patch of sand, there is Ni­caragua. Wherever there is a lemon and a red sun­set, there is my coun­try. Wherever I see a red pil­lar-box and a yel­low sun­set, there my heart beats. Blood and a splash of mus­tard can be my her­aldry. If there be yel­low mud and red mud in the same ditch, it is bet­ter to me than white stars.”

“And if,” said Quin, with equal en­thu­si­asm, “there should hap­pen to be yel­low wine and red wine at the same lunch, you could not con­fine your­self to sherry. Let me or­der some Bur­gundy, and com­plete, as it were, a sort of Ni­cara­guan her­aldry in your in­side.”

Barker was fid­dling with his knife, and was evid­ently mak­ing up his mind to say some­thing, with the in­tense nervous­ness of the ami­able Eng­lish­man.

“I am to un­der­stand, then,” he said at last, with a cough, “that you, ahem, were the Pres­id­ent of Ni­caragua when it made its—er—one must, of course, agree—its quite heroic res­ist­ance to—er—”

The ex-Pres­id­ent of Ni­caragua waved his hand.

“You need not hes­it­ate in speak­ing to me,” he said. “I’m quite fully aware that the whole tend­ency of the world of today is against Ni­caragua and against me. I shall not con­sider it any di­minu­tion of your evid­ent cour­tesy if you say what you think of the mis­for­tunes that have laid my re­pub­lic in ru­ins.”

Barker looked im­meas­ur­ably re­lieved and grat­i­fied.

“You are most gen­er­ous, Pres­id­ent,” he said, with some hes­it­a­tion over the title, “and I will take ad­vant­age of your gen­er­os­ity to ex­press the doubts which, I must con­fess, we mod­erns have about such things as—er—the Ni­cara­guan in­de­pend­ence.”

“So your sym­path­ies are,” said Del Fuego, quite calmly, “with the big na­tion which—”

“Par­don me, par­don me, Pres­id­ent,” said Barker, warmly; “my sym­path­ies are with no na­tion. You mis­un­der­stand, I think, the mod­ern in­tel­lect. We do not dis­ap­prove of the fire and ex­tra­vag­ance of such com­mon­wealths as yours only to be­come more ex­tra­vag­ant on a lar­ger scale. We do not con­demn Ni­caragua be­cause we think Bri­tain ought to be more Ni­cara­guan. We do not dis­cour­age small na­tion­al­it­ies be­cause we wish large na­tion­al­it­ies to have all their small­ness, all their uni­form­ity of out­look, all their ex­ag­ger­a­tion of spirit. If I dif­fer with the greatest re­spect from your Ni­cara­guan en­thu­si­asm, it is not be­cause a na­tion or ten na­tions were against you; it is be­cause civil­isa­tion was against you. We mod­erns be­lieve in a great cos­mo­pol­itan civil­isa­tion, one which shall in­clude all the tal­ents of all the ab­sorbed peoples—”

“The Señor will for­give me,” said the Pres­id­ent. “May I ask the Señor how, un­der or­din­ary cir­cum­stances, he catches a wild horse?”

“I never catch a wild horse,” replied Barker, with dig­nity.

“Pre­cisely,” said the other; “and there ends your ab­sorp­tion of the tal­ents. That is what I com­plain of your cos­mo­pol­it­an­ism. When you say you want all peoples to unite, you really mean that you want all peoples to unite to learn the tricks of your people. If the Be­douin Arab does not know how to read, some Eng­lish mis­sion­ary or school­mas­ter must be sent to teach him to read, but no one ever says, ‘This school­mas­ter does not know how to ride on a camel; let us pay a Be­douin to teach him.’ You say your civil­isa­tion will in­clude all tal­ents. Will it? Do you really mean to say that at the mo­ment when the Esquimaux has learnt to vote for a County Coun­cil, you will have learnt to spear a wal­rus? I re­cur to the ex­ample I gave. In Ni­caragua we had a way of catch­ing wild horses—by las­soo­ing the fore feet—which was sup­posed to be the best in South Amer­ica. If you are go­ing to in­clude all the tal­ents, go and do it. If not, per­mit me to say what I have al­ways said, that some­thing went from the world when Ni­caragua was civ­il­ised.”

“So­mething, per­haps,” replied Barker, “but that some­thing a mere bar­bar­ian dex­ter­ity. I do not know that I could chip flints as well as a primeval man, but I know that civil­isa­tion can make these knives which are bet­ter, and I trust to civil­isa­tion.”

“You have good au­thor­ity,” answered the Ni­cara­guan. “Many clever men like you have trus­ted to civil­isa­tion. Many clever Baby­lo­ni­ans, many clever Egyp­tians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flag­rant with the fail­ures of civil­isa­tion, what there is par­tic­u­larly im­mor­tal about yours?”

“I think you do not quite un­der­stand, Pres­id­ent, what ours is,” answered Barker. “You judge it rather as if Eng­land was still a poor and pug­na­cious is­land; you have been long out of Europe. Many things have happened.”

“And what,” asked the other, “would you call the sum­mary of those things?”

“The sum­mary of those things,” answered Barker, with great an­im­a­tion, “is that we are rid of the su­per­sti­tions, and in be­com­ing so we have not merely be­come rid of the su­per­sti­tions which have been most fre­quently and most en­thu­si­ast­ic­ally so de­scribed. The su­per­sti­tion of big na­tion­al­it­ies is bad, but the su­per­sti­tion of small na­tion­al­it­ies is worse. The su­per­sti­tion of rev­er­en­cing our own coun­try is bad, but the su­per­sti­tion of rev­er­en­cing other people’s coun­tries is worse. It is so every­where, and in a hun­dred ways. The su­per­sti­tion of mon­archy is bad, and the su­per­sti­tion of ar­is­to­cracy is bad, but the su­per­sti­tion of demo­cracy is the worst of all.”

The old gen­tle­man opened his eyes with some sur­prise.

“Are you, then,” he said, “no longer a demo­cracy in Eng­land?”

Barker laughed.

“The situ­ation in­vites para­dox,” he said. “We are, in a sense, the purest demo­cracy. We have be­come a des­pot­ism. Have you not no­ticed how con­tinu­ally in his­tory demo­cracy be­comes des­pot­ism? People call it the de­cay of demo­cracy. It is simply its ful­fil­ment. Why take the trouble to num­ber and re­gister and en­fran­chise all the in­nu­mer­able John Robin­sons, when you can take one John Robin­son with the same in­tel­lect or lack of in­tel­lect as all the rest, and have done with it? The old ideal­istic re­pub­lic­ans used to found demo­cracy on the idea that all men were equally in­tel­li­gent. Be­lieve me, the sane and en­dur­ing demo­cracy is foun­ded on the fact that all men are equally idi­otic. Why should we not choose out of them one as much as an­other. All that we want for gov­ern­ment is a man not crim­inal and in­sane, who can rap­idly look over some pe­ti­tions and sign some pro­clam­a­tions. To think what time was wasted in ar­guing about the House of Lords, Tor­ies say­ing it ought to be pre­served be­cause it was clever, and Rad­ic­als say­ing it ought to be des­troyed be­cause it was stu­pid, and all the time no one saw that it was right be­cause it was stu­pid, be­cause that chance mob of or­din­ary men thrown there by ac­ci­dent of blood, were a great demo­cratic protest against the Lower House, against the eternal in­solence of the ar­is­to­cracy of tal­ents. We have es­tab­lished now in Eng­land, the thing to­wards which all sys­tems have dimly groped, the dull pop­u­lar des­pot­ism without il­lu­sions. We want one man at the head of our State, not be­cause he is bril­liant or vir­tu­ous, but be­cause he is one man and not a chat­ter­ing crowd. To avoid the pos­sible chance of hered­it­ary dis­eases or such things, we have aban­doned hered­it­ary mon­archy. The King of Eng­land is chosen like a jury­man upon an of­fi­cial ro­ta­tion list. Bey­ond that the whole sys­tem is quietly des­potic, and we have not found it raise a mur­mur.”

“Do you really mean,” asked the Pres­id­ent, in­cred­u­lously, “that you choose any or­din­ary man that comes to hand and make him des­pot—that you trust to the chance of some al­pha­bet­ical list. …”

“And why not?” cried Barker. “Did not half the his­tor­ical na­tions trust to the chance of the eld­est sons of eld­est sons, and did not half of them get on tol­er­ably well? To have a per­fect sys­tem is im­possible; to have a sys­tem is in­dis­pens­able. All hered­it­ary mon­arch­ies were a mat­ter of luck: so are al­pha­bet­ical mon­arch­ies. Can you find a deep philo­soph­ical mean­ing in the dif­fer­ence between the Stu­arts and the Han­overi­ans? Be­lieve me, I will un­der­take to find a deep philo­soph­ical mean­ing in the con­trast between the dark tragedy of the A’s, and the solid suc­cess of the B’s.”

“And you risk it?” asked the other. “Though the man may be a tyr­ant or a cynic or a crim­inal.”

“We risk it,” answered Barker, with a per­fect pla­cid­ity. “Sup­pose he is a tyr­ant—he is still a check on a hun­dred tyr­ants. Sup­pose he is a cynic, it is to his in­terest to gov­ern well. Sup­pose he is a crim­inal—by re­mov­ing poverty and sub­sti­tut­ing power, we put a check on his crimin­al­ity. In short, by sub­sti­tut­ing des­pot­ism we have put a total check on one crim­inal and a par­tial check on all the rest.”

The Ni­cara­guan old gen­tle­man leaned over with a queer ex­pres­sion in his eyes.

“My church, sir,” he said, “has taught me to re­spect faith. I do not wish to speak with any dis­respect of yours, how­ever fant­astic. But do you really mean that you will trust to the or­din­ary man, the man who may hap­pen to come next, as a good des­pot?”

“I do,” said Barker, simply. “He may not be a good man. But he will be a good des­pot. For when he comes to a mere busi­ness routine of gov­ern­ment he will en­deav­our to do or­din­ary justice. Do we not as­sume the same thing in a jury?”

The old Pres­id­ent smiled.

“I don’t know,” he said, “that I have any par­tic­u­lar ob­jec­tion in de­tail to your ex­cel­lent scheme of gov­ern­ment. My only ob­jec­tion is a quite per­sonal one. It is, that if I were asked whether I would be­long to it, I should ask first of all, if I was not per­mit­ted, as an al­tern­at­ive, to be a toad in a ditch. That is all. You can­not ar­gue with the choice of the soul.”

“Of the soul,” said Barker, knit­ting his brows, “I can­not pre­tend to say any­thing, but speak­ing in the in­terests of the pub­lic—”

Mr. Auberon Quin rose sud­denly to his feet.

“If you’ll ex­cuse me, gen­tle­men,” he said, “I will step out for a mo­ment into the air.”

“I’m so sorry, Auberon,” said Lam­bert, good-naturedly; “do you feel bad?”

“Not bad ex­actly,” said Auberon, with self-re­straint; “rather good, if any­thing. Strangely and richly good. The fact is, I want to re­flect a little on those beau­ti­ful words that have just been uttered. ‘Speak­ing,’ yes, that was the phrase, ‘speak­ing in the in­terests of the pub­lic.’ One can­not get the honey from such things without be­ing alone for a little.”

“Is he really off his chump, do you think?” asked Lam­bert.

The old Pres­id­ent looked after him with queerly vi­gil­ant eyes.

“He is a man, I think,” he said, “who cares for noth­ing but a joke. He is a dan­ger­ous man.”

Lam­bert laughed in the act of lift­ing some mac­car­oni to his mouth.

“Dan­ger­ous!” he said. “You don’t know little Quin, sir!”

“Every man is dan­ger­ous,” said the old man without mov­ing, “who cares only for one thing. I was once dan­ger­ous my­self.”

And with a pleas­ant smile he fin­ished his cof­fee and rose, bow­ing pro­foundly, passed out into the fog, which had again grown dense and sombre. Three days af­ter­wards they heard that he had died quietly in lodgings in Soho.

Drowned some­where else in the dark sea of fog was a little fig­ure shak­ing and quak­ing, with what might at first sight have seemed ter­ror or ague: but which was really that strange mal­ady, a lonely laughter. He was re­peat­ing over and over to him­self with a rich ac­cent—“But speak­ing in the in­terests of the pub­lic. …”

III The Hill of Humour

“In a little square garden of yel­low roses, be­side the sea,” said Auberon Quin, “there was a Non­con­form­ist min­is­ter who had never been to Wimble­don. His fam­ily did not un­der­stand his sor­row or the strange look in his eyes. But one day they re­pen­ted their neg­lect, for they heard that a body had been found on the shore, battered, but wear­ing pat­ent leather boots. As it happened, it turned out not to be the min­is­ter at all. But in the dead man’s pocket there was a re­turn ticket to Maid­stone.”

There was a short pause as Quin and his friends Barker and Lam­bert went swinging on through the slushy grass of Kens­ing­ton Gar­dens. Then Auberon re­sumed.

“That story,” he said rev­er­ently, “is the test of hu­mour.”

They walked on fur­ther and faster, wad­ing through higher grass as they began to climb a slope.

“I per­ceive,” con­tin­ued Auberon, “that you have passed the test, and con­sider the an­ec­dote ex­cru­ci­at­ingly funny; since you say noth­ing. Only coarse hu­mour is re­ceived with pot­house ap­plause. The great an­ec­dote is re­ceived in si­lence, like a be­ne­dic­tion. You felt pretty be­ne­dicted, didn’t you, Barker?”

“I saw the point,” said Barker, some­what loftily.

“Do you know,” said Quin, with a sort of idiot gaiety, “I have lots of stor­ies as good as that. Listen to this one.”

And he slightly cleared his throat.

“Dr. Polycarp was, as you all know, an un­usu­ally sal­low bi­met­al­list. ‘There,’ people of wide ex­per­i­ence would say, ‘There goes the sal­low­est bi­met­al­list in Cheshire.’ Once this was said so that he over­heard it: it was said by an ac­tu­ary, un­der a sun­set of mauve and grey. Polycarp turned upon him. ‘Sal­low!’ he cried fiercely, ‘sal­low! Quis tulerit Grac­chos de sedi­tione quer­entes.’ It was said that no ac­tu­ary ever made game of Dr. Polycarp again.”

Barker nod­ded with a simple saga­city. Lam­bert only grunted.

“Here is an­other,” con­tin­ued the in­sa­ti­able Quin. “In a hol­low of the grey-green hills of rainy Ire­land, lived an old, old wo­man, whose uncle was al­ways Cam­bridge at the Boat Race. But in her grey-green hol­lows, she knew noth­ing of this: she didn’t know that there was a Boat Race. Also she did not know that she had an uncle. She had heard of nobody at all, ex­cept of Ge­orge the First, of whom she had heard (I know not why), and in whose his­tor­ical memory she put her simple trust. And by and by in God’s good time, it was dis­covered that this uncle of hers was not really her uncle, and they came and told her so. She smiled through her tears, and said only, ‘Vir­tue is its own re­ward.’ ”

Again there was a si­lence, and then Lam­bert said—

“It seems a bit mys­ter­i­ous.”

“Mys­ter­i­ous!” cried the other. “The true hu­mour is mys­ter­i­ous. Do you not real­ise the chief in­cid­ent of the nine­teenth and twen­ti­eth cen­tur­ies?”

“And what’s that?” asked Lam­bert, shortly.

“It is very simple,” replied the other. “Hitherto it was the ruin of a joke that people did not see it. Now it is the sub­lime vic­tory of a joke that people do not see it. Hu­mour, my friends, is the one sanc­tity re­main­ing to man­kind. It is the one thing you are thor­oughly afraid of. Look at that tree.”

His in­ter­locutors looked vaguely to­wards a beech that leant out to­wards them from the ridge of the hill.

“If,” said Mr. Quin, “I were to say that you did not see the great truths of sci­ence ex­hib­ited by that tree, though they stared any man of in­tel­lect in the face, what would you think or say? You would merely re­gard me as a ped­ant with some un­im­port­ant the­ory about ve­get­able cells. If I were to say that you did not see in that tree the vile mis­man­age­ment of local polit­ics, you would dis­miss me as a So­cial­ist crank with some par­tic­u­lar fad about pub­lic parks. If I were to say that you were guilty of the su­preme blas­phemy of look­ing at that tree and not see­ing in it a new re­li­gion, a spe­cial rev­el­a­tion of God, you would simply say I was a mys­tic, and think no more about me. But if”—and he lif­ted a pon­ti­fical hand—“if I say that you can­not see the hu­mour of that tree, and that I see the hu­mour of it—my God! you will roll about at my feet.”

He paused a mo­ment, and then re­sumed.

“Yes; a sense of hu­mour, a weird and del­ic­ate sense of hu­mour, is the new re­li­gion of man­kind! It is to­wards that men will strain them­selves with the as­ceti­cism of saints. Ex­er­cises, spir­itual ex­er­cises, will be set in it. It will be asked, ‘Can you see the hu­mour of this iron rail­ing?’ or ‘Can you see the hu­mour of this field of corn? Can you see the hu­mour of the stars? Can you see the hu­mour of the sun­sets?’ How of­ten I have laughed my­self to sleep over a vi­olet sun­set.”

“Quite so,” said Mr. Barker, with an in­tel­li­gent em­bar­rass­ment.

“Let me tell you an­other story. How of­ten it hap­pens that the MP’s for Es­sex are less punc­tual than one would sup­pose. The least punc­tual Es­sex MP, per­haps, was James Wilson, who said, in the very act of pluck­ing a poppy—”

Lam­bert sud­denly faced round and struck his stick into the ground in a de­fi­ant at­ti­tude.

“Auberon,” he said, “chuck it. I won’t stand it. It’s all bosh.”

Both men stared at him, for there was some­thing very ex­plos­ive about the words, as if they had been corked up pain­fully for a long time.

“You have,” began Quin, “no—”

“I don’t care a curse,” said Lam­bert, vi­ol­ently, “whether I have ‘a del­ic­ate sense of hu­mour’ or not. I won’t stand it. It’s all a con­foun­ded fraud. There’s no joke in those in­fernal tales at all. You know there isn’t as well as I do.”

“Well,” replied Quin, slowly, “it is true that I, with my rather gradual men­tal pro­cesses, did not see any joke in them. But the finer sense of Barker per­ceived it.”

Barker turned a fierce red, but con­tin­ued to stare at the ho­ri­zon.

“You ass,” said Lam­bert; “why can’t you be like other people? Why can’t you say some­thing really funny, or hold your tongue? The man who sits on his hat in a pan­to­mime is a long sight fun­nier than you are.”

Quin re­garded him stead­ily. They had reached the top of the ridge and the wind struck their faces.

“Lam­bert,” said Auberon, “you are a great and good man, though I’m hanged if you look it. You are more. You are a great re­volu­tion­ist or de­liverer of the world, and I look for­ward to see­ing you carved in marble between Luther and Dan­ton, if pos­sible in your present at­ti­tude, the hat slightly on one side. I said as I came up the hill that the new hu­mour was the last of the re­li­gions. You have made it the last of the su­per­sti­tions. But let me give you a very ser­i­ous warn­ing. Be care­ful how you ask me to do any­thing outré, to im­it­ate the man in the pan­to­mime, and to sit on my hat. Be­cause I am a man whose soul has been emp­tied of all pleas­ures but folly. And for two­pence I’d do it.”

“Do it, then,” said Lam­bert, swinging his stick im­pa­tiently. “It would be fun­nier than the bosh you and Barker talk.”

Quin, stand­ing on the top of the hill, stretched his hand out to­wards the main av­enue of Kens­ing­ton Gar­dens.

“Two hun­dred yards away,” he said, “are all your fash­ion­able ac­quaint­ances with noth­ing on earth to do but to stare at each other and at us. We are stand­ing upon an el­ev­a­tion un­der the open sky, a peak as it were of fantasy, a Sinai of hu­mour. We are in a great pul­pit or plat­form, lit up with sun­light, and half Lon­don can see us. Be care­ful how you sug­gest things to me. For there is in me a mad­ness which goes bey­ond mar­tyr­dom, the mad­ness of an ut­terly idle man.”

“I don’t know what you are talk­ing about,” said Lam­bert, con­temp­tu­ously. “I only know I’d rather you stood on your silly head, than talked so much.”

“Auberon! for good­ness’ sake. …” cried Barker, spring­ing for­ward; but he was too late. Faces from all the benches and av­en­ues were turned in their dir­ec­tion. Groups stopped and small crowds col­lec­ted; and the sharp sun­light picked out the whole scene in blue, green and black, like a pic­ture in a child’s toy-book. And on the top of the small hill Mr. Auberon Quin stood with con­sid­er­able ath­letic neat­ness upon his head, and waved his pat­ent-leather boots in the air.

“For God’s sake, Quin, get up, and don’t be an idiot,” cried Barker, wringing his hands; “we shall have the whole town here.”

“Yes, get up, get up, man,” said Lam­bert, amused and an­noyed. “I was only fool­ing; get up.”

Auberon did so with a bound, and fling­ing his hat higher than the trees, pro­ceeded to hop about on one leg with a ser­i­ous ex­pres­sion. Barker stamped wildly.

“Oh, let’s get home, Barker, and leave him,” said Lam­bert; “some of your proper and cor­rect po­lice will look after him. Here they come!”

Two grave-look­ing men in quiet uni­forms came up the hill to­wards them. One held a pa­per in his hand.

“There he is, of­ficer,” said Lam­bert, cheer­fully; “we ain’t re­spons­ible for him.”

The of­ficer looked at the caper­ing Mr. Quin with a quiet eye.

“We have not come, gen­tle­men,” he said, “about what I think you are al­lud­ing to. We have come from headquar­ters to an­nounce the se­lec­tion of His Majesty the King. It is the rule, in­her­ited from the old re­gime, that the news should be brought to the new Sover­eign im­me­di­ately, wherever he is; so we have fol­lowed you across Kens­ing­ton Gar­dens.”

Barker’s eyes were blaz­ing in his pale face. He was con­sumed with am­bi­tion through­out his life. With a cer­tain dull mag­nan­im­ity of the in­tel­lect he had really be­lieved in the chance method of se­lect­ing des­pots. But this sud­den sug­ges­tion, that the se­lec­tion might have fallen upon him, un­nerved him with pleas­ure.

“Which of us,” he began, and the re­spect­ful of­fi­cial in­ter­rup­ted him.

“Not you, sir, I am sorry to say. If I may be per­mit­ted to say so, we know your ser­vices to the gov­ern­ment, and should be very thank­ful if it were. The choice has fallen. …”

“God bless my soul!” said Lam­bert, jump­ing back two paces. “Not me. Don’t say I’m auto­crat of all the Rus­sias.”

“No, sir,” said the of­ficer, with a slight cough and a glance to­wards Auberon, who was at that mo­ment put­ting his head between his legs and mak­ing a noise like a cow; “the gen­tle­man whom we have to con­grat­u­late seems at the mo­ment—er—er—oc­cu­pied.”

“Not Quin!” shrieked Barker, rush­ing up to him; “it can’t be. Auberon, for God’s sake pull your­self to­gether. You’ve been made King!”

With his head still up­side down between his legs, Mr. Quin answered mod­estly—

“I am not worthy. I can­not reas­on­ably claim to equal the great men who have pre­vi­ously swayed the sceptre of Bri­tain. Per­haps the only pe­cu­li­ar­ity that I can claim is that I am prob­ably the first mon­arch that ever spoke out his soul to the people of Eng­land with his head and body in this po­s­i­tion. This may in some sense give me, to quote a poem that I wrote in my youth—

A no­bler of­fice on the Earth
Than valour, power of brain, or birth
Could give the war­rior kings of old.

The in­tel­lect cla­ri­fied by this pos­ture—”

Lam­bert and Barker made a kind of rush at him.

“Don’t you un­der­stand?” cried Lam­bert. “It’s not a joke. They’ve really made you King. By gosh! they must have rum taste.”

“The great Bish­ops of the Middle Ages,” said Quin, kick­ing his legs in the air, as he was dragged up more or less up­side down, “were in the habit of re­fus­ing the hon­our of elec­tion three times and then ac­cept­ing it. A mere mat­ter of de­tail sep­ar­ates me from those great men. I will ac­cept the post three times and re­fuse it af­ter­wards. Oh! I will toil for you, my faith­ful people! You shall have a ban­quet of hu­mour.”

By this time he had been landed the right way up, and the two men were still try­ing in vain to im­press him with the grav­ity of the situ­ation.

“Did you not tell me, Wil­frid Lam­bert,” he said, “that I should be of more pub­lic value if I ad­op­ted a more pop­u­lar form of hu­mour? And when should a pop­u­lar form of hu­mour be more firmly riv­eted upon me than now, when I have be­come the darling of a whole people? Of­ficer,” he con­tin­ued, ad­dress­ing the startled mes­sen­ger, “are there no ce­re­mon­ies to cel­eb­rate my entry into the city?”

“Cere­mon­ies,” began the of­fi­cial, with em­bar­rass­ment, “have been more or less neg­lected for some little time, and—”

Auberon Quin began gradu­ally to take off his coat.

“All ce­re­mony,” he said, “con­sists in the re­versal of the ob­vi­ous. Thus men, when they wish to be priests or judges, dress up like wo­men. Kindly help me on with this coat.” And he held it out.

“But, your Majesty,” said the of­ficer, after a mo­ment’s be­wil­der­ment and ma­nip­u­la­tion, “you’re put­ting it on with the tails in front.”

“The re­versal of the ob­vi­ous,” said the King, calmly, “is as near as we can come to ritual with our im­per­fect ap­par­atus. Lead on.”

The rest of that af­ter­noon and even­ing was to Barker and Lam­bert a night­mare, which they could not prop­erly real­ise or re­call. The King, with his coat on the wrong way, went to­wards the streets that were await­ing him, and the old Kens­ing­ton Palace which was the Royal res­id­ence. As he passed small groups of men, the groups turned into crowds, and gave forth sounds which seemed strange in wel­com­ing an auto­crat. Barker walked be­hind, his brain reel­ing, and, as the crowds grew thicker and thicker, the sounds be­came more and more un­usual. And when he had reached the great mar­ket­place op­pos­ite the church, Barker knew that he had reached it, though he was roods be­hind, be­cause a cry went up such as had never be­fore greeted any of the kings of the Earth.

Book II

I The Charter of the Cities

Lam­bert was stand­ing be­wildered out­side the door of the King’s apart­ments amid the scurry of as­ton­ish­ment and ri­dicule. He was just passing out into the street, in a dazed man­ner, when James Barker dashed by him.

“Where are you go­ing?” he asked.

“To stop all this fool­ery, of course,” replied Barker; and he dis­ap­peared into the room.

He entered it head­long, slam­ming the door, and slap­ping his in­com­par­able silk hat on the table. His mouth opened, but be­fore he could speak, the King said—

“Your hat, if you please.”

Fid­get­ting with his fin­gers, and scarcely know­ing what he was do­ing, the young politi­cian held it out.

The King placed it on his own chair, and sat on it.

“A quaint old cus­tom,” he ex­plained, smil­ing above the ru­ins. “When the King re­ceives the rep­res­ent­at­ives of the House of Barker, the hat of the lat­ter is im­me­di­ately des­troyed in this man­ner. It rep­res­ents the ab­so­lute fi­nal­ity of the act of homage ex­pressed in the re­moval of it. It de­clares that never un­til that hat shall once more ap­pear upon your head (a con­tin­gency which I firmly be­lieve to be re­mote) shall the House of Barker rebel against the Crown of Eng­land.”

Barker stood with clenched fist, and shak­ing lip.

“Your jokes,” he began, “and my prop­erty—” and then ex­ploded with an oath, and stopped again.

“Continue, con­tinue,” said the King, wav­ing his hands.

“What does it all mean?” cried the other, with a ges­ture of pas­sion­ate ra­tion­al­ity. “Are you mad?”

“Not in the least,” replied the King, pleas­antly. “Mad­men are al­ways ser­i­ous; they go mad from lack of hu­mour. You are look­ing ser­i­ous your­self, James.”

“Why can’t you keep it to your own private life?” ex­pos­tu­lated the other. “You’ve got plenty of money, and plenty of houses now to play the fool in, but in the in­terests of the pub­lic—”

“Epi­gram­matic,” said the King, shak­ing his fin­ger sadly at him. “None of your dar­ing scin­til­la­tions here. As to why I don’t do it in private, I rather fail to un­der­stand your ques­tion. The an­swer is of com­par­at­ive limp­id­ity. I don’t do it in private, be­cause it is fun­nier to do it in pub­lic. You ap­pear to think that it would be amus­ing to be dig­ni­fied in the ban­quet hall and in the street, and at my own fireside (I could pro­cure a fireside) to keep the com­pany in a roar. But that is what every­one does. Every­one is grave in pub­lic, and funny in private. My sense of hu­mour sug­gests the re­versal of this; it sug­gests that one should be funny in pub­lic, and sol­emn in private. I de­sire to make the State func­tions, par­lia­ments, coron­a­tions, and so on, one roar­ing old-fash­ioned pan­to­mime. But, on the other hand, I shut my­self up alone in a small stor­e­room for two hours a day, where I am so dig­ni­fied that I come out quite ill.”

By this time Barker was walk­ing up and down the room, his frock coat flap­ping like the black wings of a bird.

“Well, you will ruin the coun­try, that’s all,” he said shortly.

“It seems to me,” said Auberon, “that the tra­di­tion of ten cen­tur­ies is be­ing broken, and the House of Barker is re­belling against the Crown of Eng­land. It would be with re­gret (for I ad­mire your ap­pear­ance) that I should be ob­liged for­cibly to dec­or­ate your head with the re­mains of this hat, but—”

“What I can’t un­der­stand,” said Barker fling­ing up his fin­gers with a fe­ver­ish Amer­ican move­ment, “is why you don’t care about any­thing else but your games.”

The King stopped sharply in the act of lift­ing the silken rem­nants, dropped them, and walked up to Barker, look­ing at him stead­ily.

“I made a kind of vow,” he said, “that I would not talk ser­i­ously, which al­ways means an­swer­ing silly ques­tions. But the strong man will al­ways be gentle with politi­cians.

‘The shape my scorn­ful looks de­ride
Re­quired a God to form;’

if I may so theo­lo­gic­ally ex­press my­self. And for some reason I can­not in the least un­der­stand, I feel im­pelled to an­swer that ques­tion of yours, and to an­swer it as if there were really such a thing in the world as a ser­i­ous sub­ject. You ask me why I don’t care for any­thing else. Can you tell me, in the name of all the gods you don’t be­lieve in, why I should care for any­thing else?”

“Don’t you real­ise com­mon pub­lic ne­ces­sit­ies?” cried Barker. “Is it pos­sible that a man of your in­tel­li­gence does not know that it is every­one’s in­terest—”

“Don’t you be­lieve in Zoroaster? Is it pos­sible that you neg­lect Mumbo-Jumbo?” re­turned the King, with start­ling an­im­a­tion. “Does a man of your in­tel­li­gence come to me with these damned early Victorian eth­ics? If, on study­ing my fea­tures and man­ner, you de­tect any par­tic­u­lar re­semb­lance to the Prince Con­sort, I as­sure you you are mis­taken. Did Her­bert Spen­cer ever con­vince you—did he ever con­vince any­body—did he ever for one mad mo­ment con­vince him­self—that it must be to the in­terest of the in­di­vidual to feel a pub­lic spirit? Do you be­lieve that, if you rule your de­part­ment badly, you stand any more chance, or one half of the chance, of be­ing guil­lotined, that an angler stands of be­ing pulled into the river by a strong pike? Her­bert Spen­cer re­frained from theft for the same reason that he re­frained from wear­ing feath­ers in his hair, be­cause he was an Eng­lish gen­tle­man with dif­fer­ent tastes. I am an Eng­lish gen­tle­man with dif­fer­ent tastes. He liked philo­sophy. I like art. He liked writ­ing ten books on the nature of hu­man so­ci­ety. I like to see the Lord Cham­ber­lain walk­ing in front of me with a piece of pa­per pinned to his coat­tails. It is my hu­mour. Are you answered? At any rate, I have said my last ser­i­ous word today, and my last ser­i­ous word I trust for the re­mainder of my life in this Paradise of Fools. The re­mainder of my con­ver­sa­tion with you today, which I trust will be long and stim­u­lat­ing, I pro­pose to con­duct in a new lan­guage of my own by means of rapid and sym­bolic move­ments of the left leg.” And he began to pi­rou­ette slowly round the room with a pre­oc­cu­pied ex­pres­sion.

Barker ran round the room after him, bom­bard­ing him with de­mands and en­treat­ies. But he re­ceived no re­sponse ex­cept in the new lan­guage. He came out banging the door again, and sick like a man com­ing on shore. As he strode along the streets he found him­self sud­denly op­pos­ite Cic­con­ani’s res­taur­ant, and for some reason there rose up be­fore him the green fant­astic fig­ure of the Span­ish Gen­eral, stand­ing, as he had seen him last, at the door, with the words on his lips, “You can­not ar­gue with the choice of the soul.”

The King came out from his dan­cing with the air of a man of busi­ness le­git­im­ately tired. He put on an over­coat, lit a ci­gar, and went out into the purple night.

“I will go,” he said, “and mingle with the people.”

He passed swiftly up a street in the neigh­bour­hood of Not­ting Hill, when sud­denly he felt a hard ob­ject driven into his waist­coat. He paused, put up his single eye­glass, and be­held a boy with a wooden sword and a pa­per cocked hat, wear­ing that ex­pres­sion of awed sat­is­fac­tion with which a child con­tem­plates his work when he has hit someone very hard. The King gazed thought­fully for some time at his as­sail­ant, and slowly took a note­book from his breast-pocket.

“I have a few notes,” he said, “for my dy­ing speech;” and he turned over the leaves. “Dy­ing speech for polit­ical as­sas­sin­a­tion; ditto, if by former friend—h’m, h’m. Dy­ing speech for death at hands of in­jured hus­band (re­pent­ant). Dy­ing speech for same (cyn­ical). I am not quite sure which meets the present. …”

“I’m the King of the Castle,” said the boy, truc­u­lently, and very pleased with noth­ing in par­tic­u­lar.

The King was a kind­hearted man, and very fond of chil­dren, like all people who are fond of the ri­dicu­lous.

“In­fant,” he said, “I’m glad you are so stal­wart a de­fender of your old in­vi­ol­ate Not­ting Hill. Look up nightly to that peak, my child, where it lifts it­self among the stars so an­cient, so lonely, so un­ut­ter­ably Not­ting. So long as you are ready to die for the sac­red moun­tain, even if it were ringed with all the armies of Bayswa­ter—”

The King stopped sud­denly, and his eyes shone.

“Per­haps,” he said, “per­haps the noblest of all my con­cep­tions. A re­vival of the ar­rog­ance of the old me­di­eval cit­ies ap­plied to our glor­i­ous sub­urbs. Clapham with a city guard. Wimble­don with a city wall. Sur­biton tolling a bell to raise its cit­izens. West Hamp­stead go­ing into battle with its own ban­ner. It shall be done. I, the King, have said it.” And, hast­ily present­ing the boy with half a crown, re­mark­ing, “For the war-chest of Not­ting Hill,” he ran vi­ol­ently home at such a rate of speed that crowds fol­lowed him for miles. On reach­ing his study, he ordered a cup of cof­fee, and plunged into pro­found med­it­a­tion upon the pro­ject. At length he called his fa­vour­ite equerry, Cap­tain Bowler, for whom he had a deep af­fec­tion, foun­ded prin­cip­ally upon the shape of his whiskers.

“Bowler,” he said, “isn’t there some so­ci­ety of his­tor­ical re­search, or some­thing of which I am an hon­or­ary mem­ber?”

“Yes, sir,” said Cap­tain Bowler, rub­bing his nose, “you are a mem­ber of the En­cour­agers of Egyp­tian Renais­sance, and the Teutonic Tombs Club, and the So­ci­ety for the Re­cov­ery of Lon­don Antiquit­ies, and—”

“That is ad­mir­able,” said the King. “The Lon­don Antiquit­ies does my trick. Go to the So­ci­ety for the Re­cov­ery of Lon­don Antiquit­ies and speak to their sec­ret­ary, and their sub-sec­ret­ary, and their pres­id­ent, and their vice-pres­id­ent, say­ing, ‘The King of Eng­land is proud, but the hon­or­ary mem­ber of the So­ci­ety for the Re­cov­ery of Lon­don Antiquit­ies is prouder than kings. I should like to tell you of cer­tain dis­cov­er­ies I have made touch­ing the neg­lected tra­di­tions of the Lon­don bor­oughs. The rev­el­a­tions may cause some ex­cite­ment, stir­ring burn­ing memor­ies and touch­ing old wounds in Shep­herd’s Bush and Bayswa­ter, in Pim­lico and South Kens­ing­ton. The King hes­it­ates, but the hon­or­ary mem­ber is firm. I ap­proach you in­vok­ing the vows of my ini­ti­ation, the Sacred Seven Cats, the Poker of Per­fec­tion, and the Ordeal of the In­des­crib­able In­stant (for­give me if I mix you up with the Clan-na-Gael or some other club I be­long to), and ask you to per­mit me to read a pa­per at your next meet­ing on the “Wars of the Lon­don Bor­oughs.” ’ Say all this to the So­ci­ety, Bowler. Re­mem­ber it very care­fully, for it is most im­port­ant, and I have for­got­ten it al­to­gether, and send me an­other cup of cof­fee and some of the ci­gars that we keep for vul­gar and suc­cess­ful people. I am go­ing to write my pa­per.”

The So­ci­ety for the Re­cov­ery of Lon­don Antiquit­ies met a month after in a cor­rug­ated iron hall on the out­skirts of one of the south­ern sub­urbs of Lon­don. A large num­ber of people had col­lec­ted there un­der the coarse and flar­ing gas-jets when the King ar­rived, per­spir­ing and gen­ial. On tak­ing off his great­coat, he was per­ceived to be in even­ing dress, wear­ing the Garter. His ap­pear­ance at the small table, ad­orned only with a glass of wa­ter, was re­ceived with re­spect­ful cheer­ing.

The chair­man (Mr. Hug­gins) said that he was sure that they had all been pleased to listen to such dis­tin­guished lec­tur­ers as they had heard for some time past (hear, hear). Mr. Bur­ton (hear, hear), Mr. Cam­bridge, Pro­fessor King (loud and con­tin­ued cheers), our old friend Peter Jessop, Sir Wil­liam White (loud laughter), and other em­in­ent men, had done hon­our to their little ven­ture (cheers). But there were other cir­cum­stances which lent a cer­tain unique qual­ity to the present oc­ca­sion (hear, hear). So far as his re­col­lec­tion went, and in con­nec­tion with the So­ci­ety for the Re­cov­ery of Lon­don Antiquit­ies it went very far (loud cheers), he did not re­mem­ber that any of their lec­tur­ers had borne the title of King. He would there­fore call upon King Auberon briefly to ad­dress the meet­ing.

The King began by say­ing that this speech might be re­garded as the first de­clar­a­tion of his new policy for the na­tion. “At this su­preme hour of my life I feel that to no one but the mem­bers of the So­ci­ety for the Re­cov­ery of Lon­don Antiquit­ies can I open my heart (cheers). If the world turns upon my policy, and the storms of pop­u­lar hos­til­ity be­gin to rise (no, no), I feel that it is here, with my brave Re­cover­ers around me, that I can best meet them, sword in hand” (loud cheers).

His Majesty then went on to ex­plain that, now old age was creep­ing upon him, he pro­posed to de­vote his re­main­ing strength to bring­ing about a keener sense of local pat­ri­ot­ism in the vari­ous mu­ni­cip­al­it­ies of Lon­don. How few of them knew the le­gends of their own bor­oughs! How many there were who had never heard of the true ori­gin of the Wink of Wandsworth! What a large pro­por­tion of the younger gen­er­a­tion in Chelsea neg­lected to per­form the old Chelsea Chuff! Pim­lico no longer pumped the Pim­lies. Bat­ter­sea had for­got­ten the name of Blick.

There was a short si­lence, and then a voice said “Shame!”

The King con­tin­ued: “Be­ing called, how­ever un­wor­thily, to this high es­tate, I have re­solved that, so far as pos­sible, this neg­lect shall cease. I de­sire no mil­it­ary glory. I lay claim to no con­sti­tu­tional equal­ity with Justinian or Al­fred. If I can go down to his­tory as the man who saved from ex­tinc­tion a few old Eng­lish cus­toms, if our des­cend­ants can say it was through this man, humble as he was, that the Ten Turnips are still eaten in Ful­ham, and the Put­ney par­ish coun­cil­lor still shaves one half of his head, I shall look my great fath­ers rev­er­ently but not fear­fully in the face when I go down to the last house of Kings.”

The King paused, vis­ibly af­fected, but col­lect­ing him­self, re­sumed once more.

“I trust that to very few of you, at least, I need dwell on the sub­lime ori­gins of these le­gends. The very names of your bor­oughs bear wit­ness to them. So long as Ham­mer­smith is called Ham­mer­smith, its people will live in the shadow of that primal hero, the Black­smith, who led the demo­cracy of the Broad­way into battle till he drove the chiv­alry of Kens­ing­ton be­fore him and over­threw them at that place which in hon­our of the best blood of the de­feated ar­is­to­cracy is still called Kens­ing­ton Gore. Men of Ham­mer­smith will not fail to re­mem­ber that the very name of Kens­ing­ton ori­gin­ated from the lips of their hero. For at the great ban­quet of re­con­cili­ation held after the war, when the dis­dain­ful ol­ig­archs de­clined to join in the songs of the men of the Broad­way (which are to this day of a rude and pop­u­lar char­ac­ter), the great Re­pub­lican leader, with his rough hu­mour, said the words which are writ­ten in gold upon his monu­ment, ‘Little birds that can sing and won’t sing, must be made to sing.’ So that the Eastern Knights were called Cans­ings or Kens­ings ever af­ter­wards. But you also have great memor­ies, O men of Kens­ing­ton! You showed that you could sing, and sing great war-songs. Even after the dark day of Kens­ing­ton Gore, his­tory will not for­get those three Knights who guarded your dis­ordered re­treat from Hyde Park (so called from your hid­ing there), those three Knights after whom Knights­bridge is named. Nor will it for­get the day of your re-emer­gence, purged in the fire of calam­ity, cleansed of your ol­ig­archic cor­rup­tions, when, sword in hand, you drove the Em­pire of Ham­mer­smith back mile by mile, swept it past its own Broad­way, and broke it at last in a battle so long and bloody that the birds of prey have left their name upon it. Men have called it, with aus­tere irony, the Ravenscourt. I shall not, I trust, wound the pat­ri­ot­ism of Bayswa­ter, or the lone­lier pride of Bromp­ton, or that of any other his­toric town­ship, by tak­ing these two spe­cial ex­amples. I se­lect them, not be­cause they are more glor­i­ous than the rest, but partly from per­sonal as­so­ci­ation (I am my­self des­cen­ded from one of the three her­oes of Knights­bridge), and partly from the con­scious­ness that I am an am­a­teur an­ti­quar­ian, and can­not pre­sume to deal with times and places more re­mote and more mys­ter­i­ous. It is not for me to settle the ques­tion between two such men as Pro­fessor Hugg and Sir Wil­liam Whisky as to whether Not­ting Hill means Nut­ting Hill (in al­lu­sion to the rich woods which no longer cover it), or whether it is a cor­rup­tion of Noth­ing-ill, re­fer­ring to its repu­ta­tion among the an­cients as an Earthly Paradise. When a Podkins and a Jossy con­fess them­selves doubt­ful about the bound­ar­ies of West Kens­ing­ton (said to have been traced in the blood of Oxen), I need not be ashamed to con­fess a sim­ilar doubt. I will ask you to ex­cuse me from fur­ther his­tory, and to as­sist me with your en­cour­age­ment in deal­ing with the prob­lem which faces us today. Is this an­cient spirit of the Lon­don town­ships to die out? Are our om­ni­bus con­duct­ors and po­lice­men to lose al­to­gether that light which we see so of­ten in their eyes, the dreamy light of

‘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:—

“To­mor­row 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 to­night, and my people will re­ceive it to­mor­row. 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.

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 paint­box, 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 paint­box. 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 he­ad­dress 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 wa­ter­col­our 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 post­card 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 busi­ness­like 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 stand­still, 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 me­di­eval gar­ments un­less the people com­pelled to wear them were very angry and busi­ness­like.”

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 snow­bound 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 any­one 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 win­dowpane, 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 toy­shop, 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 someone 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.”

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 hang­dog 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.

The King flung him­self back in his chair, and rubbed his hands.

“What a day, what a day!” he said to him­self. “Now there’ll be a row. I’d no idea it would be such fun as it is. These Prov­osts are so very in­dig­nant, so very reas­on­able, so very right. This fel­low, by the look in his eyes, is even more in­dig­nant than the rest. No sign in those large blue eyes, at any rate, of ever hav­ing heard of a joke. He’ll re­mon­strate with the oth­ers, and they’ll re­mon­strate with him, and they’ll all make them­selves sump­tu­ously happy re­mon­strat­ing with me.”

“Wel­come, my Lord,” he said aloud. “What news from the Hill of a Hun­dred Le­gends? What have you for the ear of your King? I know that troubles have arisen between you and these oth­ers, our cous­ins, but these troubles it shall be our pride to com­pose. And I doubt not, and can­not doubt, that your love for me is not less tender, no less ar­dent, than theirs.”

Mr. Buck made a bit­ter face, and James Barker’s nos­trils curled; Wilson began to giggle faintly, and the Prov­ost of West Kens­ing­ton fol­lowed in a smothered way. But the big blue eyes of Adam Wayne never changed, and he called out in an odd, boy­ish voice down the hall—

“I bring homage to my King. I bring him the only thing I have—my sword.”

And with a great ges­ture he flung it down on the ground, and knelt on one knee be­hind it.

There was a dead si­lence.

“I beg your par­don,” said the King, blankly.

“You speak well, sire,” said Adam Wayne, “as you ever speak, when you say that my love is not less than the love of these. Small would it be if it were not more. For I am the heir of your scheme—the child of the great Charter. I stand here for the rights the Charter gave me, and I swear, by your sac­red crown, that where I stand, I stand fast.”

The eyes of all five men stood out of their heads.

Then Buck said, in his jolly, jar­ring voice: “Is the whole world mad?”

The King sprang to his feet, and his eyes blazed.

“Yes,” he cried, in a voice of ex­ulta­tion, “the whole world is mad, but Adam Wayne and me. It is true as death what I told you long ago, James Barker, ser­i­ous­ness sends men mad. You are mad, be­cause you care for polit­ics, as mad as a man who col­lects tram tick­ets. Buck is mad, be­cause he cares for money, as mad as a man who lives on opium. Wilson is mad, be­cause he thinks him­self right, as mad as a man who thinks him­self God Almighty. The Prov­ost of West Kens­ing­ton is mad, be­cause he thinks he is re­spect­able, as mad as a man who thinks he is a chicken. All men are mad but the hu­mor­ist, who cares for noth­ing and pos­sesses everything. I thought that there was only one hu­mor­ist in Eng­land. Fools!—dolts!—open your cows’ eyes; there are two! In Not­ting Hill—in that un­prom­ising el­ev­a­tion—there has been born an artist! You thought to spoil my joke, and bully me out of it, by be­com­ing more and more mod­ern, more and more prac­tical, more and more bust­ling and ra­tional. Oh, what a feast it was to an­swer you by be­com­ing more and more au­gust, more and more gra­cious, more and more an­cient and mel­low! But this lad has seen how to bowl me out. He has answered me back, vaunt for vaunt, rhet­oric for rhet­oric. He has lif­ted the only shield I can­not break, the shield of an im­pen­et­rable pom­pos­ity. Listen to him. You have come, my Lord, about Pump Street?”

“About the city of Not­ting Hill,” answered Wayne, proudly, “of which Pump Street is a liv­ing and re­joicing part.”

“Not a very large part,” said Barker, con­temp­tu­ously.

“That which is large enough for the rich to covet,” said Wayne, draw­ing up his head, “is large enough for the poor to de­fend.”

The King slapped both his legs, and waved his feet for a second in the air.

“Every re­spect­able per­son in Not­ting Hill,” cut in Buck, with his cold, coarse voice, “is for us and against you. I have plenty of friends in Not­ting Hill.”

“Your friends are those who have taken your gold for other men’s hearth­stones, my Lord Buck,” said Prov­ost Wayne. “I can well be­lieve they are your friends.”

“They’ve never sold dirty toys, any­how,” said Buck, laugh­ing shortly.

“They’ve sold dirtier things,” said Wayne, calmly: “they have sold them­selves.”

“It’s no good, my Buck­ling,” said the King, rolling about on his chair. “You can’t cope with this chiv­al­rous elo­quence. You can’t cope with an artist. You can’t cope with the hu­mor­ist of Not­ting Hill. Oh, Nunc di­mit­tis—that I have lived to see this day! Prov­ost Wayne, you stand firm?”

“Let them wait and see,” said Wayne. “If I stood firm be­fore, do you think I shall weaken now that I have seen the face of the King? For I fight for some­thing greater, if greater there can be, than the hearth­stones of my people and the Lord­ship of the Lion. I fight for your royal vis­ion, for the great dream you dreamt of the League of the Free Cit­ies. You have given me this liberty. If I had been a beg­gar and you had flung me a coin, if I had been a peas­ant in a dance and you had flung me a fa­vour, do you think I would have let it be taken by any ruf­fi­ans on the road? This lead­er­ship and liberty of Not­ting Hill is a gift from your Majesty, and if it is taken from me, by God! it shall be taken in battle, and the noise of that battle shall be heard in the flats of Chelsea and in the stu­dios of St. John’s Wood.”

“It is too much—it is too much,” said the King. “Nature is weak. I must speak to you, brother artist, without fur­ther dis­guise. Let me ask you a sol­emn ques­tion. Adam Wayne, Lord High Prov­ost of Not­ting Hill, don’t you think it splen­did?”

“Splen­did!” cried Adam Wayne. “It has the splend­our of God.”

“Bowled out again,” said the King. “You will keep up the pose. Fun­nily, of course, it is ser­i­ous. But ser­i­ously, isn’t it funny?”

“What?” asked Wayne, with the eyes of a baby.

“Hang it all, don’t play any more. The whole busi­ness—the Charter of the Cit­ies. Isn’t it im­mense?”

“Im­mense is no un­worthy word for that glor­i­ous design.”

“Oh, hang you! But, of course, I see. You want me to clear the room of these reas­on­able sows. You want the two hu­mor­ists alone to­gether. Leave us, gen­tle­men.”

Buck threw a sour look at Barker, and at a sul­len sig­nal the whole pa­geant of blue and green, of red, gold, and purple, rolled out of the room, leav­ing only two in the great hall, the King sit­ting in his seat on the dais, and the red-clad fig­ure still kneel­ing on the floor be­fore his fallen sword.

The King bounded down the steps and smacked Prov­ost Wayne on the back.

“Be­fore the stars were made,” he cried, “we were made for each other. It is too beau­ti­ful. Think of the vali­ant in­de­pend­ence of Pump Street. That is the real thing. It is the dei­fic­a­tion of the ludicrous.”

The kneel­ing fig­ure sprang to his feet with a fierce stag­ger.

“Ludicrous!” he cried, with a fiery face.

“Oh, come, come,” said the King, im­pa­tiently, “you needn’t keep it up with me. The au­gurs must wink some­times from sheer fa­tigue of the eye­lids. Let us en­joy this for half an hour, not as act­ors, but as dra­matic crit­ics. Isn’t it a joke?”

Adam Wayne looked down like a boy, and answered in a con­strained voice—

“I do not un­der­stand your Majesty. I can­not be­lieve that while I fight for your royal charter your Majesty deserts me for these dogs of the gold hunt.”

“Oh, damn your—But what’s this? What the devil’s this?”

The King stared into the young Prov­ost’s face, and in the twi­light of the room began to see that his face was quite white and his lip shak­ing.

“What in God’s name is the mat­ter?” cried Auberon, hold­ing his wrist.

Wayne flung back his face, and the tears were shin­ing on it.

“I am only a boy,” he said, “but it’s true. I would paint the Red Lion on my shield if I had only my blood.”

King Auberon dropped the hand and stood without stir­ring, thun­der­struck.

“My God in Heaven!” he said; “is it pos­sible that there is within the four seas of Bri­tain a man who takes Not­ting Hill ser­i­ously?”

“And my God in Heaven!” said Wayne pas­sion­ately; “is it pos­sible that there is within the four seas of Bri­tain a man who does not take it ser­i­ously?”

The King said noth­ing, but merely went back up the steps of the dais, like a man dazed. He fell back in his chair again and kicked his heels.

“If this sort of thing is to go on,” he said weakly, “I shall be­gin to doubt the su­peri­or­ity of art to life. In Heaven’s name, do not play with me. Do you really mean that you are—God help me!—a Not­ting Hill pat­riot; that you are—?”

Wayne made a vi­ol­ent ges­ture, and the King soothed him wildly.

“All right—all right—I see you are; but let me take it in. You do really pro­pose to fight these mod­ern im­provers with their boards and in­spect­ors and sur­vey­ors and all the rest of it?”

“Are they so ter­rible?” asked Wayne, scorn­fully.

The King con­tin­ued to stare at him as if he were a hu­man curi­os­ity.

“And I sup­pose,” he said, “that you think that the dent­ists and small trades­men and maiden ladies who in­habit Not­ting Hill, will rally with war-hymns to your stand­ard?”

“If they have blood they will,” said the Prov­ost.

“And I sup­pose,” said the King, with his head back among the cush­ions, “that it never crossed your mind that”—his voice seemed to lose it­self lux­uri­antly—“never crossed your mind that any­one ever thought that the idea of a Not­ting Hill ideal­ism was—er—slightly—slightly ri­dicu­lous?”

“Of course they think so,” said Wayne. “What was the mean­ing of mock­ing the proph­ets?”

“Where,” asked the King, lean­ing for­ward—“where in Heaven’s name did you get this mi­ra­cu­lously in­ane idea?”

“You have been my tu­tor, Sire,” said the Prov­ost, “in all that is high and hon­our­able.”

“Eh?” said the King.

“It was your Majesty who first stirred my dim pat­ri­ot­ism into flame. Ten years ago, when I was a boy (I am only nine­teen), I was play­ing on the slope of Pump Street, with a wooden sword and a pa­per hel­met, dream­ing of great wars. In an angry trance I struck out with my sword, and stood pet­ri­fied, for I saw that I had struck you, Sire, my King, as you wandered in a noble secrecy, watch­ing over your people’s wel­fare. But I need have had no fear. Then was I taught to un­der­stand Kingli­ness. You neither shrank nor frowned. You summoned no guards. You in­voked no pun­ish­ments. But in au­gust and burn­ing words, which are writ­ten in my soul, never to be erased, you told me ever to turn my sword against the en­emies of my in­vi­ol­ate city. Like a priest point­ing to the al­tar, you poin­ted to the hill of Not­ting. ‘So long,’ you said, ‘as you are ready to die for the sac­red moun­tain, even if it were ringed with all the armies of Bayswa­ter.’ I have not for­got­ten the words, and I have reason now to re­mem­ber them, for the hour is come and the crown of your proph­ecy. The sac­red hill is ringed with the armies of Bayswa­ter, and I am ready to die.”

The King was ly­ing back in his chair, a kind of wreck.

“Oh, Lord, Lord, Lord,” he mur­mured, “what a life! what a life! All my work! I seem to have done it all. So you’re the red-haired boy that hit me in the waist­coat. What have I done? God, what have I done? I thought I would have a joke, and I have cre­ated a pas­sion. I tried to com­pose a bur­lesque, and it seems to be turn­ing halfway through into an epic. What is to be done with such a world? In the Lord’s name, wasn’t the joke broad and bold enough? I aban­doned my subtle hu­mour to amuse you, and I seem to have brought tears to your eyes. What’s to be done with people when you write a pan­to­mime for them—call the saus­ages clas­sic fes­toons, and the po­lice­man cut in two a tragedy of pub­lic duty? But why am I talk­ing? Why am I ask­ing ques­tions of a nice young gen­tle­man who is totally mad? What is the good of it? What is the good of any­thing? Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord!”

Sud­denly he pulled him­self up­right.

“Don’t you really think the sac­red Not­ting Hill at all ab­surd?”

“Ab­surd?” asked Wayne, blankly. “Why should I?”

The King stared back equally blankly.

“I beg your par­don,” he said.

“Not­ting Hill,” said the Prov­ost, simply, “is a rise or high ground of the com­mon earth, on which men have built houses to live, in which they are born, fall in love, pray, marry, and die. Why should I think it ab­surd?”

The King smiled.

“Be­cause, my Leoni­das—” he began, then sud­denly, he knew not how, found his mind was a total blank. After all, why was it ab­surd? Why was it ab­surd? He felt as if the floor of his mind had given way. He felt as all men feel when their first prin­ciples are hit hard with a ques­tion. Barker al­ways felt so when the King said, “Why trouble about polit­ics?”

The King’s thoughts were in a kind of rout; he could not col­lect them.

“It is gen­er­ally felt to be a little funny,” he said vaguely.

“I sup­pose,” said Adam, turn­ing on him with a fierce sud­den­ness—“I sup­pose you fancy cru­ci­fix­ion was a ser­i­ous af­fair?”

“Well, I—” began Auberon—“I ad­mit I have gen­er­ally thought it had its graver side.”

“Then you are wrong,” said Wayne, with in­cred­ible vi­ol­ence. “Cru­ci­fix­ion is comic. It is ex­quis­itely di­vert­ing. It was an ab­surd and ob­scene kind of im­pal­ing re­served for people who were made to be laughed at—for slaves and pro­vin­cials, for dent­ists and small trades­men, as you would say. I have seen the grot­esque gal­lows-shape, which the little Ro­man gut­ter-boys scribbled on walls as a vul­gar joke, blaz­ing on the pin­nacles of the temples of the world. And shall I turn back?”

The King made no an­swer.

Adam went on, his voice ringing in the roof.

“This laughter with which men tyr­an­nise is not the great power you think it. Peter was cru­ci­fied, and cru­ci­fied head down­wards. What could be fun­nier than the idea of a re­spect­able old Apostle up­side down? What could be more in the style of your mod­ern hu­mour? But what was the good of it? Up­side down or right side up, Peter was Peter to man­kind. Up­side down he stills hangs over Europe, and mil­lions move and breathe only in the life of his Church.”

King Auberon got up ab­sently.

“There is some­thing in what you say,” he said. “You seem to have been think­ing, young man.”

“Only feel­ing, sire,” answered the Prov­ost. “I was born, like other men, in a spot of the earth which I loved be­cause I had played boys’ games there, and fallen in love, and talked with my friends through nights that were nights of the gods. And I feel the riddle. These little gar­dens where we told our loves. These streets where we brought out our dead. Why should they be com­mon­place? Why should they be ab­surd? Why should it be grot­esque to say that a pil­lar-box is po­etic when for a year I could not see a red pil­lar-box against the yel­low even­ing in a cer­tain street without be­ing wracked with some­thing of which God keeps the secret, but which is stronger than sor­row or joy? Why should any­one be able to raise a laugh by say­ing ‘the Cause of Not­ting Hill’?—Not­ting Hill where thou­sands of im­mor­tal spir­its blaze with al­tern­ate hope and fear.”

Auberon was flick­ing dust off his sleeve with quite a new ser­i­ous­ness on his face, dis­tinct from the owl­ish solem­nity which was the pose of his hu­mour.

“It is very dif­fi­cult,” he said at last. “It is a damned dif­fi­cult thing. I see what you mean; I agree with you even up to a point—or I should like to agree with you, if I were young enough to be a prophet and poet. I feel a truth in everything you say un­til you come to the words ‘Not­ting Hill.’ And then I re­gret to say that the old Adam awakes roar­ing with laughter and makes short work of the new Adam, whose name is Wayne.”

For the first time Prov­ost Wayne was si­lent, and stood gaz­ing dream­ily at the floor. Even­ing was clos­ing in, and the room had grown darker.

“I know,” he said, in a strange, al­most sleepy voice, “there is truth in what you say, too. It is hard not to laugh at the com­mon names—I only say we should not. I have thought of a rem­edy; but such thoughts are rather ter­rible.”

“What thoughts?” asked Auberon.

The Prov­ost of Not­ting Hill seemed to have fallen into a kind of trance; in his eyes was an elvish light.

“I know of a ma­gic wand, but it is a wand that only one or two may rightly use, and only sel­dom. It is a fairy wand of great fear, stronger than those who use it—of­ten fright­ful, of­ten wicked to use. But whatever is touched with it is never again wholly com­mon; whatever is touched with it takes a ma­gic from out­side the world. If I touch, with this fairy wand, the rail­ways and the roads of Not­ting Hill, men will love them, and be afraid of them forever.”

“What the devil are you talk­ing about?” asked the King.

“It has made mean land­scapes mag­ni­fi­cent, and hov­els out­last cathed­rals,” went on the mad­man. “Why should it not make lamp­posts fairer than Greek lamps; and an om­ni­bus-ride like a painted ship? The touch of it is the fin­ger of a strange per­fec­tion.”

“What is your wand?” cried the King, im­pa­tiently.

“There it is,” said Wayne; and poin­ted to the floor, where his sword lay flat and shin­ing.

“The sword!” cried the King; and sprang up straight on the dais.

“Yes, yes,” cried Wayne, hoarsely. “The things touched by that are not vul­gar; the things touched by that—”

King Auberon made a ges­ture of hor­ror.

“You will shed blood for that!” he cried. “For a cursed point of view—”

“Oh, you kings, you kings!” cried out Adam, in a burst of scorn. “How hu­mane you are, how tender, how con­sid­er­ate! You will make war for a fron­tier, or the im­ports of a for­eign har­bour; you will shed blood for the pre­cise duty on lace, or the sa­lute to an ad­miral. But for the things that make life it­self worthy or miser­able—how hu­mane you are! I say here, and I know well what I speak of, there were never any ne­ces­sary wars but the re­li­gious wars. There were never any just wars but the re­li­gious wars. There were never any hu­mane wars but the re­li­gious wars. For these men were fight­ing for some­thing that claimed, at least, to be the hap­pi­ness of a man, the vir­tue of a man. A Cru­sader thought, at least, that Islam hurt the soul of every man, king or tinker, that it could really cap­ture. I think Buck and Barker and these rich vul­tures hurt the soul of every man, hurt every inch of the ground, hurt every brick of the houses, that they can really cap­ture. Do you think I have no right to fight for Not­ting Hill, you whose Eng­lish gov­ern­ment has so of­ten fought for tom­fool­er­ies? If, as your rich friends say, there are no gods, and the skies are dark above us, what should a man fight for, but the place where he had the Eden of child­hood and the short heaven of first love? If no temples and no scrip­tures are sac­red, what is sac­red if a man’s own youth is not sac­red?”

The King walked a little rest­lessly up and down the dais.

“It is hard,” he said, bit­ing his lips, “to as­sent to a view so des­per­ate—so re­spons­ible. …”

As he spoke, the door of the audi­ence cham­ber fell ajar, and through the aper­ture came, like the sud­den chat­ter of a bird, the high, nasal, but well-bred voice of Barker.

“I said to him quite plainly—the pub­lic in­terests—”

Auberon turned on Wayne with vi­ol­ence.

“What the devil is all this? What am I say­ing? What are you say­ing? Have you hyp­not­ised me? Curse your un­canny blue eyes! Let me go. Give me back my sense of hu­mour. Give it me back—give it me back, I say!”

“I sol­emnly as­sure you,” said Wayne, un­eas­ily, with a ges­ture, as if feel­ing all over him­self, “that I haven’t got it.”

The King fell back in his chair, and went into a roar of Ra­belaisian laughter.

“I don’t think you have,” he cried.

Book III

I The Mental Condition of Adam Wayne

A little while after the King’s ac­ces­sion a small book of poems ap­peared, called Hymns on the Hill. They were not good poems, nor was the book suc­cess­ful, but it at­trac­ted a cer­tain amount of at­ten­tion from one par­tic­u­lar school of crit­ics. The King him­self, who was a mem­ber of the school, re­viewed it in his ca­pa­city of lit­er­ary critic to Straight From the St­ables, a sport­ing journal. They were known as the Ham­mock School, be­cause it had been cal­cu­lated ma­lig­nantly by an en­emy that no less than thir­teen of their del­ic­ate cri­ti­cisms had be­gun with the words, “I read this book in a ham­mock: half asleep in the sleepy sun­light, I …”; after that there were im­port­ant dif­fer­ences. Under these con­di­tions they liked everything, but es­pe­cially everything silly. “Next to au­then­tic good­ness in a book,” they said—“next to au­then­tic good­ness in a book (and that, alas! we never find) we de­sire a rich bad­ness.” Thus it happened that their praise (as in­dic­at­ing the pres­ence of a rich bad­ness) was not uni­ver­sally sought after, and au­thors be­came a little dis­quieted when they found the eye of the Ham­mock School fixed upon them with pe­cu­liar fa­vour.

The pe­cu­li­ar­ity of Hymns on the Hill was the cel­eb­ra­tion of the po­etry of Lon­don as dis­tinct from the po­etry of the coun­try. This sen­ti­ment or af­fect­a­tion was, of course, not un­com­mon in the twen­ti­eth cen­tury, nor was it, al­though some­times ex­ag­ger­ated, and some­times ar­ti­fi­cial, by any means without a great truth at its root, for there is one re­spect in which a town must be more po­et­ical than the coun­try, since it is closer to the spirit of man; for Lon­don, if it be not one of the mas­ter­pieces of man, is at least one of his sins. A street is really more po­et­ical than a meadow, be­cause a street has a secret. A street is go­ing some­where, and a meadow nowhere. But, in the case of the book called Hymns on the Hill, there was an­other pe­cu­li­ar­ity, which the King poin­ted out with great acu­men in his re­view. He was nat­ur­ally in­ter­ested in the mat­ter, for he had him­self pub­lished a volume of lyr­ics about Lon­don un­der his pseud­onym of “Daisy Day­dream.”

This dif­fer­ence, as the King poin­ted out, con­sisted in the fact that, while mere ar­ti­ficers like “Daisy Day­dream” (on whose elab­or­ate style the King, over his sig­na­ture of “Thun­der­bolt,” was per­haps some­what too severe) thought to praise Lon­don by com­par­ing it to the coun­try—us­ing nature, that is, as a back­ground from which all po­et­ical im­ages had to be drawn—the more ro­bust au­thor of Hymns on the Hill praised the coun­try, or nature, by com­par­ing it to the town, and used the town it­self as a back­ground. “Take,” said the critic, “the typ­ic­ally fem­in­ine lines, ‘To the In­ventor of The Hansom Cab’—

‘Poet, whose cun­ning carved this amor­ous shell,
Where twain may dwell.’ ”

“Surely,” wrote the King, “no one but a wo­man could have writ­ten those lines. A wo­man has al­ways a weak­ness for nature; with her art is only beau­ti­ful as an echo or shadow of it. She is prais­ing the hansom cab by theme and the­ory, but her soul is still a child by the sea, pick­ing up shells. She can never be ut­terly of the town, as a man can; in­deed, do we not speak (with sac­red pro­pri­ety) of ‘a man about town’? Who ever spoke of a wo­man about town? However much, phys­ic­ally, ‘about town’ a wo­man may be, she still mod­els her­self on nature; she tries to carry nature with her; she bids grasses to grow on her head, and furry beasts to bite her about the throat. In the heart of a dim city, she mod­els her hat on a flar­ing cot­tage garden of flowers. We, with our no­bler civic sen­ti­ment, model ours on a chim­ney pot; the en­sign of civil­isa­tion. And rather than be without birds, she will com­mit mas­sacre, that she may turn her head into a tree, with dead birds to sing on it.”

This kind of thing went on for sev­eral pages, and then the critic re­membered his sub­ject, and re­turned to it.

“Poet, whose cun­ning carved this amor­ous shell,
Where twain may dwell.”

“The pe­cu­li­ar­ity of these fine though fem­in­ine lines,” con­tin­ued “Thun­der­bolt,” “is, as we have said, that they praise the hansom cab by com­par­ing it to the shell, to a nat­ural thing. Now, hear the au­thor of Hymns on the Hill, and how he deals with the same sub­ject. In his fine noc­turne, en­titled ‘The Last Om­nibus’ he re­lieves the rich and poignant mel­an­choly of the theme by a sud­den sense of rush­ing at the end—

‘The wind round the old street corner
Swung sud­den and quick as a cab.’

“Here the dis­tinc­tion is ob­vi­ous. ‘Daisy Day­dream’ thinks it a great com­pli­ment to a hansom cab to be com­pared to one of the spiral cham­bers of the sea. And the au­thor of Hymns on the Hill thinks it a great com­pli­ment to the im­mor­tal whirl­wind to be com­pared to a hack­ney coach. He surely is the real ad­mirer of Lon­don. We have no space to speak of all his per­fect ap­plic­a­tions of the idea; of the poem in which, for in­stance, a lady’s eyes are com­pared, not to stars, but to two per­fect street-lamps guid­ing the wan­derer. We have no space to speak of the fine lyric, re­call­ing the El­iza­bethan spirit, in which the poet, in­stead of say­ing that the rose and the lily con­tend in her com­plex­ion, says, with a purer mod­ern­ism, that the red om­ni­bus of Ham­mer­smith and the white om­ni­bus of Ful­ham fight there for the mas­tery. How per­fect the im­age of two con­tend­ing om­ni­buses!”

Here, some­what ab­ruptly, the re­view con­cluded, prob­ably be­cause the King had to send off his copy at that mo­ment, as he was in some want of money. But the King was a very good critic, whatever he may have been as King, and he had, to a con­sid­er­able ex­tent, hit the right nail on the head. Hymns on the Hill was not at all like the poems ori­gin­ally pub­lished in praise of the po­etry of Lon­don. And the reason was that it was really writ­ten by a man who had seen noth­ing else but Lon­don, and who re­garded it, there­fore, as the uni­verse. It was writ­ten by a raw, red­headed lad of sev­en­teen, named Adam Wayne, who had been born in Not­ting Hill. An ac­ci­dent in his sev­enth year pre­ven­ted his be­ing taken away to the sea­side, and thus his whole life had been passed in his own Pump Street, and in its neigh­bour­hood. And the con­sequence was, that he saw the street-lamps as things quite as eternal as the stars; the two fires were mingled. He saw the houses as things en­dur­ing, like the moun­tains, and so he wrote about them as one would write about moun­tains. Nature puts on a dis­guise when she speaks to every man; to this man she put on the dis­guise of Not­ting Hill. Nature would mean to a poet born in the Cum­ber­land hills, a stormy sky­line and sud­den rocks. Nature would mean to a poet born in the Es­sex flats, a waste of splen­did wa­ters and splen­did sun­sets. So nature meant to this man Wayne a line of vi­olet roofs and lemon lamps, the chiaroscuro of the town. He did not think it clever or funny to praise the shad­ows and col­ours of the town; he had seen no other shad­ows or col­ours, and so he praised them—be­cause they were shad­ows and col­ours. He saw all this be­cause he was a poet, though in prac­tice a bad poet. It is too of­ten for­got­ten that just as a bad man is nev­er­the­less a man, so a bad poet is nev­er­the­less a poet.

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 short­sighted) the red and white and yel­low suns of the gas­lights 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. Anyone 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 forever 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 toy­shop 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, cross­bows, 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 pine­apple 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 busi­ness­like 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?”

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 heart­break­ing 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 toy­shop.

It was one of those queer little shops so con­stantly seen in the side streets of Lon­don, which must be called toy­shops 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 toy­shop 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.”

“I don’t,” said Mr. Turn­bull, of the toy­shop, shortly, but with great em­phasis.

“I am glad to hear it,” replied Wayne. “I con­fess that I feared for my mil­it­ary schemes the aw­ful in­no­cence of your pro­fes­sion. How, I thought to my­self, will this man, used only to the wooden swords that give pleas­ure, think of the steel swords that give pain? But I am at least partly re­as­sured. Your tone sug­gests to me that I have at least the entry of a gate of your fairy­land—the gate through which the sol­diers enter, for it can­not be denied—I ought, sir, no longer to deny, that it is of sol­diers that I come to speak. Let your gentle em­ploy­ment make you mer­ci­ful to­wards the troubles of the world. Let your own sil­very ex­per­i­ence tone down our san­guine sor­rows. For there is war in Not­ting Hill.”

The little toy­shop keeper sprang up sud­denly, slap­ping his fat hands like two fans on the counter.

“War?” he cried. “Not really, sir? Is it true? Oh, what a joke! Oh, what a sight for sore eyes!”

Wayne was al­most taken aback by this out­burst.

“I am de­lighted,” he stammered. “I had no no­tion—”

He sprang out of the way just in time to avoid Mr. Turn­bull, who took a fly­ing leap over the counter and dashed to the front of the shop.

“You look here, sir,” he said; “you just look here.”

He came back with two of the torn posters in his hand which were flap­ping out­side his shop.

“Look at those, sir,” he said, and flung them down on the counter.

Wayne bent over them, and read on one—

“Last fight­ing.
Re­duc­tion of the cent­ral Der­vish city.
Re­mark­able, etc.”

On the other he read—

“Last small re­pub­lic an­nexed.
Ni­cara­guan cap­ital sur­renders after a month’s fight­ing.
Great slaughter.”

Wayne bent over them again, evid­ently puzzled; then he looked at the dates. They were both dated in August fif­teen years be­fore.

“Why do you keep these old things?” he said, startled en­tirely out of his ab­surd tact of mys­ti­cism. “Why do you hang them out­side your shop?”

“Be­cause,” said the other, simply, “they are the re­cords of the last war. You men­tioned war just now. It hap­pens to be my hobby.”

Wayne lif­ted his large blue eyes with an in­fant­ile won­der.

“Come with me,” said Turn­bull, shortly, and led him into a par­lour at the back of the shop.

In the centre of the par­lour stood a large deal table. On it were set rows and rows of the tin and lead sol­diers which were part of the shop­keeper’s stock. The vis­itor would have thought noth­ing of it if it had not been for a cer­tain odd group­ing of them, which did not seem either en­tirely com­mer­cial or en­tirely haphaz­ard.

“You are ac­quain­ted, no doubt,” said Turn­bull, turn­ing his big eyes upon Wayne—“you are ac­quain­ted, no doubt, with the ar­range­ment of the Amer­ican and Ni­cara­guan troops in the last battle;” and he waved his hand to­wards the table.

“I am afraid not,” said Wayne. “I—”

“Ah! you were at that time oc­cu­pied too much, per­haps, with the Der­vish af­fair. You will find it in this corner.” And he poin­ted to a part of the floor where there was an­other ar­range­ment of chil­dren’s sol­diers grouped here and there.

“You seem,” said Wayne, “to be in­ter­ested in mil­it­ary mat­ters.”

“I am in­ter­ested in noth­ing else,” answered the toy­shop keeper, simply.

Wayne ap­peared con­vulsed with a sin­gu­lar, sup­pressed ex­cite­ment.

“In that case,” he said, “I may ap­proach you with an un­usual de­gree of con­fid­ence. Touch­ing the mat­ter of the de­fence of Not­ting Hill, I—”

“De­fence of Not­ting Hill? Yes, sir. This way, sir,” said Turn­bull, with great per­turb­a­tion. “Just step into this side room;” and he led Wayne into an­other apart­ment, in which the table was en­tirely covered with an ar­range­ment of chil­dren’s bricks. A second glance at it told Wayne that the bricks were ar­ranged in the form of a pre­cise and per­fect plan of Not­ting Hill. “Sir,” said Turn­bull, im­press­ively, “you have, by a kind of ac­ci­dent, hit upon the whole secret of my life. As a boy, I grew up among the last wars of the world, when Ni­caragua was taken and the dervishes wiped out. And I ad­op­ted it as a hobby, sir, as you might ad­opt as­tro­nomy or bird-stuff­ing. I had no ill-will to any­one, but I was in­ter­ested in war as a sci­ence, as a game. And sud­denly I was bowled out. The big Powers of the world, hav­ing swal­lowed up all the small ones, came to that con­foun­ded agree­ment, and there was no more war. There was noth­ing more for me to do but to do what I do now—to read the old cam­paigns in dirty old news­pa­pers, and to work them out with tin sol­diers. One other thing had oc­curred to me. I thought it an amus­ing fancy to make a plan of how this dis­trict or ours ought to be de­fen­ded if it were ever at­tacked. It seems to in­terest you too.”

“If it were ever at­tacked,” re­peated Wayne, awed into an al­most mech­an­ical enun­ci­ation. “Mr. Turn­bull, it is at­tacked. Thank Heaven, I am bring­ing to at least one hu­man be­ing the news that is at bot­tom the only good news to any son of Adam. Your life has not been use­less. Your work has not been play. Now, when the hair is already grey on your head, Turn­bull, you shall have your youth. God has not des­troyed, He has only de­ferred it. Let us sit down here, and you shall ex­plain to me this mil­it­ary map of Not­ting Hill. For you and I have to de­fend Not­ting Hill to­gether.”

Mr. Turn­bull looked at the other for a mo­ment, then hes­it­ated, and then sat down be­side the bricks and the stranger. He did not rise again for seven hours, when the dawn broke.

The headquar­ters of Prov­ost Adam Wayne and his Com­mander-in-Chief con­sisted of a small and some­what un­suc­cess­ful milk-shop at the corner of Pump Street. The blank white morn­ing had only just be­gun to break over the blank Lon­don build­ings when Wayne and Turn­bull were to be found seated in the cheer­less and un­swept shop. Wayne had some­thing fem­in­ine in his char­ac­ter; he be­longed to that class of per­sons who for­get their meals when any­thing in­ter­est­ing is in hand. He had had noth­ing for six­teen hours but hur­ried glasses of milk, and, with a glass stand­ing empty be­side him, he was writ­ing and sketch­ing and dotting and cross­ing out with in­con­ceiv­able rapid­ity with a pen­cil and a piece of pa­per. Turn­bull was of that more mas­cu­line type in which a sense of re­spons­ib­il­ity in­creases the ap­pet­ite, and with his sketch-map be­side him he was deal­ing strenu­ously with a pile of sand­wiches in a pa­per packet, and a tank­ard of ale from the tav­ern op­pos­ite, whose shut­ters had just been taken down. Neither of them spoke, and there was no sound in the liv­ing still­ness ex­cept the scratch­ing of Wayne’s pen­cil and the squeal­ing of an aim­less-look­ing cat. At length Wayne broke the si­lence by say­ing—

“Seven­teen pounds eight shil­lings and nine­pence.”

Turn­bull nod­ded and put his head in the tank­ard.

“That,” said Wayne, “is not count­ing the five pounds you took yes­ter­day. What did you do with it?”

“Ah, that is rather in­ter­est­ing!” replied Turn­bull, with his mouth full. “I used that five pounds in a kindly and phil­an­thropic act.”

Wayne was gaz­ing with mys­ti­fic­a­tion in his queer and in­no­cent eyes.

“I used that five pounds,” con­tin­ued the other, “in giv­ing no less than forty little Lon­don boys rides in hansom cabs.”

“Are you in­sane?” asked the Prov­ost.

“It is only my light touch,” re­turned Turn­bull. “These hansom-cab rides will raise the tone—raise the tone, my dear fel­low—of our Lon­don youths, widen their ho­ri­zon, brace their nervous sys­tem, make them ac­quain­ted with the vari­ous pub­lic monu­ments of our great city. Edu­ca­tion, Wayne, edu­ca­tion. How many ex­cel­lent thinkers have poin­ted out that polit­ical re­form is use­less un­til we pro­duce a cul­tured popu­lace. So that twenty years hence, when these boys are grown up—”

“Mad!” said Wayne, lay­ing down his pen­cil; “and five pounds gone!”

“You are in er­ror,” ex­plained Turn­bull. “You grave creatures can never be brought to un­der­stand how much quicker work really goes with the as­sist­ance of non­sense and good meals. Stripped of its dec­or­at­ive beau­ties, my state­ment was strictly ac­cur­ate. Last night I gave forty half-crowns to forty little boys, and sent them all over Lon­don to take hansom cabs. I told them in every case to tell the cab­man to bring them to this spot. In half an hour from now the de­clar­a­tion of war will be pos­ted up. At the same time the cabs will have be­gun to come in, you will have ordered out the guard, the little boys will drive up in state, we shall com­mand­eer the horses for cav­alry, use the cabs for bar­ri­cade, and give the men the choice between serving in our ranks and de­ten­tion in our base­ments and cel­lars. The little boys we can use as scouts. The main thing is that we start the war with an ad­vant­age un­known in all the other armies—horses. And now,” he said, fin­ish­ing his beer, “I will go and drill the troops.”

And he walked out of the milk-shop, leav­ing the Prov­ost star­ing.

A minute or two af­ter­wards, the Prov­ost laughed. He only laughed once or twice in his life, and then he did it in a queer way as if it were an art he had not mastered. Even he saw some­thing funny in the pre­pos­ter­ous coup of the half-crowns and the little boys. He did not see the mon­strous ab­surdity of the whole policy and the whole war. He en­joyed it ser­i­ously as a cru­sade, that is, he en­joyed it far more than any joke can be en­joyed. Turn­bull en­joyed it partly as a joke, even more per­haps as a re­ver­sion from the things he hated—mod­ern­ity and mono­tony and civil­isa­tion. To break up the vast ma­chinery of mod­ern life and use the frag­ments as en­gines of war, to make the bar­ri­cade of om­ni­buses and points of vant­age of chim­ney-pots, was to him a game worth in­fin­ite risk and trouble. He had that ra­tional and de­lib­er­ate pref­er­ence which will al­ways to the end trouble the peace of the world, the ra­tional and de­lib­er­ate pref­er­ence for a short life and a merry one.

III The Experiment of Mr. Buck

An earn­est and elo­quent pe­ti­tion was sent up to the King signed with the names of Wilson, Barker, Buck, Swin­don, and oth­ers. It urged that at the forth­com­ing con­fer­ence to be held in his Majesty’s pres­ence touch­ing the fi­nal dis­pos­i­tion of the prop­erty in Pump Street, it might be held not in­con­sist­ent with polit­ical de­corum and with the un­ut­ter­able re­spect they en­ter­tained for his Majesty if they ap­peared in or­din­ary morn­ing dress, without the cos­tume de­creed for them as Prov­osts. So it happened that the com­pany ap­peared at that coun­cil in frock-coats and that the King him­self lim­ited his love of ce­re­mony to ap­pear­ing (after his not un­usual man­ner), in even­ing dress with one or­der—in this case not the Garter, but the but­ton of the Club of Old Clip­per’s Best Pals, a dec­or­a­tion ob­tained (with dif­fi­culty) from a half­penny boy’s pa­per. Thus also it happened that the only spot of col­our in the room was Adam Wayne, who entered in great dig­nity with the great red robes and the great sword.

“We have met,” said Auberon, “to de­cide the most ar­du­ous of mod­ern prob­lems. May we be suc­cess­ful.” And he sat down gravely.

Buck turned his chair a little, and flung one leg over the other.

“Your Majesty,” he said, quite good-hu­mouredly, “there is only one thing I can’t un­der­stand, and that is why this af­fair is not settled in five minutes. Here’s a small prop­erty which is worth a thou­sand to us and is not worth a hun­dred to any­one else. We of­fer the thou­sand. It’s not busi­ness­like, I know, for we ought to get it for less, and it’s not reas­on­able and it’s not fair on us, but I’m damned if I can see why it’s dif­fi­cult.”

“The dif­fi­culty may be very simply stated,” said Wayne. “You may of­fer a mil­lion and it will be very dif­fi­cult for you to get Pump Street.”

“But look here, Mr. Wayne,” cried Barker, strik­ing in with a kind of cold ex­cite­ment. “Just look here. You’ve no right to take up a po­s­i­tion like that. You’ve a right to stand out for a big­ger price, but you aren’t do­ing that. You’re re­fus­ing what you and every sane man knows to be a splen­did of­fer simply from malice or spite—it must be malice or spite. And that kind of thing is really crim­inal; it’s against the pub­lic good. The King’s gov­ern­ment would be jus­ti­fied in for­cing you.”

With his lean fin­gers spread on the table, he stared anxiously at Wayne’s face, which did not move.

“In for­cing you … it would,” he re­peated.

“It shall,” said Buck, shortly, turn­ing to the table with a jerk. “We have done our best to be de­cent.”

Wayne lif­ted his large eyes slowly.

“Was it my Lord Buck,” he in­quired, “who said that the King of Eng­land ‘shall’ do some­thing?”

Buck flushed and said testily—

“I mean it must—it ought to. As I say, we’ve done our best to be gen­er­ous; I defy any­one to deny it. As it is, Mr. Wayne, I don’t want to say a word that’s un­civil. I hope it’s not un­civil to say that you can be, and ought to be, in gaol. It is crim­inal to stop pub­lic works for a whim. A man might as well burn ten thou­sand onions in his front garden or bring up his chil­dren to run na­ked in the street, as do what you say you have a right to do. People have been com­pelled to sell be­fore now. The King could com­pel you, and I hope he will.”

“Until he does,” said Wayne, calmly, “the power and gov­ern­ment of this great na­tion is on my side and not yours, and I defy you to defy it.”

“In what sense,” cried Barker, with his fe­ver­ish eyes and hands, “is the gov­ern­ment on your side?”

With one ringing move­ment Wayne un­rolled a great parch­ment on the table. It was dec­or­ated down the sides with wild wa­ter­col­our sketches of vestry­men in crowns and wreaths.

“The Charter of the Cit­ies,” he began.

Buck ex­ploded in a bru­tal oath and laughed.

“That tom­fool’s joke. Haven’t we had enough—”

“And there you sit,” cried Wayne, spring­ing erect and with a voice like a trum­pet, “with no ar­gu­ment but to in­sult the King be­fore his face.”

Buck rose also with blaz­ing eyes.

“I am hard to bully,” he began—and the slow tones of the King struck in with in­com­par­able grav­ity—

“My Lord Buck, I must ask you to re­mem­ber that your King is present. It is not of­ten that he needs to pro­tect him­self among his sub­jects.”

Barker turned to him with frantic ges­tures.

“For God’s sake don’t back up the mad­man now,” he im­plored. “Have your joke an­other time. Oh, for Heaven’s sake—”

“My Lord Prov­ost of South Kens­ing­ton,” said King Auberon, stead­ily, “I do not fol­low your re­marks, which are uttered with a rapid­ity un­usual at Court. Nor do your well-meant ef­forts to con­vey the rest with your fin­gers ma­ter­i­ally as­sist me. I say that my Lord Prov­ost of North Kens­ing­ton, to whom I spoke, ought not in the pres­ence of his Sover­eign to speak dis­respect­fully of his Sover­eign’s or­din­ances. Do you dis­agree?”

Barker turned rest­lessly in his chair, and Buck cursed without speak­ing. The King went on in a com­fort­able voice—

“My Lord Prov­ost of Not­ting Hill, pro­ceed.”

Wayne turned his blue eyes on the King, and to every­one’s sur­prise there was a look in them not of tri­umph, but of a cer­tain child­ish dis­tress.

“I am sorry, your Majesty,” he said; “I fear I was more than equally to blame with the Lord Prov­ost of North Kens­ing­ton. We were de­bat­ing some­what eagerly, and we both rose to our feet. I did so first, I am ashamed to say. The Prov­ost of North Kens­ing­ton is, there­fore, com­par­at­ively in­no­cent. I be­seech your Majesty to ad­dress your re­buke chiefly, at least, to me. Mr. Buck is not in­no­cent, for he did no doubt, in the heat of the mo­ment, speak dis­respect­fully. But the rest of the dis­cus­sion he seems to me to have con­duc­ted with great good tem­per.”

Buck looked genu­inely pleased, for busi­ness men are all simple-minded, and have there­fore that de­gree of com­mu­nion with fan­at­ics. The King, for some reason, looked, for the first time in his life, ashamed.

“This very kind speech of the Prov­ost of Not­ting Hill,” began Buck, pleas­antly, “seems to me to show that we have at least got on to a friendly foot­ing. Now come, Mr. Wayne. Five hun­dred pounds have been offered to you for a prop­erty you ad­mit not to be worth a hun­dred. Well, I am a rich man and I won’t be out­done in gen­er­os­ity. Let us say fif­teen hun­dred pounds, and have done with it. And let us shake hands;” and he rose, glow­ing and laugh­ing.

“Fif­teen hun­dred pounds,” whispered Mr. Wilson of Bayswa­ter; “can we do fif­teen hun­dred pounds?”

“I’ll stand the racket,” said Buck, heart­ily. “Mr. Wayne is a gen­tle­man and has spoken up for me. So I sup­pose the ne­go­ti­ations are at an end.”

Wayne bowed.

“They are in­deed at an end. I am sorry I can­not sell you the prop­erty.”

“What?” cried Mr. Barker, start­ing to his feet.

“Mr. Buck has spoken cor­rectly,” said the King.

“I have, I have,” cried Buck, spring­ing up also; “I said—”

“Mr. Buck has spoken cor­rectly,” said the King; “the ne­go­ti­ations are at an end.”

All the men at the table rose to their feet; Wayne alone rose without ex­cite­ment.

“Have I, then,” he said, “your Majesty’s per­mis­sion to de­part? I have given my last an­swer.”

“You have it,” said Auberon, smil­ing, but not lift­ing his eyes from the table. And amid a dead si­lence the Prov­ost of Not­ting Hill passed out of the room.

“Well?” said Wilson, turn­ing round to Barker—“well?”

Barker shook his head des­per­ately.

“The man ought to be in an asylum,” he said. “But one thing is clear—we need not bother fur­ther about him. The man can be treated as mad.”

“Of course,” said Buck, turn­ing to him with sombre de­cis­ive­ness. “You’re per­fectly right, Barker. He is a good enough fel­low, but he can be treated as mad. Let’s put it in simple form. Go and tell any twelve men in any town, go and tell any doc­tor in any town, that there is a man offered fif­teen hun­dred pounds for a thing he could sell com­monly for four hun­dred, and that when asked for a reason for not ac­cept­ing it he pleads the in­vi­ol­ate sanc­tity of Not­ting Hill and calls it the Holy Moun­tain. What would they say? What more can we have on our side than the com­mon sense of every­body? On what else do all laws rest? I’ll tell you, Barker, what’s bet­ter than any fur­ther dis­cus­sion. Let’s send in work­men on the spot to pull down Pump Street. And if old Wayne says a word, ar­rest him as a lun­atic. That’s all.”

Barker’s eyes kindled.

“I al­ways re­garded you, Buck, if you don’t mind my say­ing so, as a very strong man. I’ll fol­low you.”

“So, of course, will I,” said Wilson.

Buck rose again im­puls­ively.

“Your Majesty,” he said, glow­ing with pop­ular­ity, “I be­seech your Majesty to con­sider fa­vour­ably the pro­posal to which we have com­mit­ted ourselves. Your Majesty’s le­ni­ency, our own of­fers, have fallen in vain on that ex­traordin­ary man. He may be right. He may be God. He may be the devil. But we think it, for prac­tical pur­poses, more prob­able that he is off his head. Un­less that as­sump­tion were ac­ted on, all hu­man af­fairs would go to pieces. We act on it, and we pro­pose to start op­er­a­tions in Not­ting Hill at once.”

The King leaned back in his chair.

“The Charter of the Cit­ies … ,” he said with a rich in­ton­a­tion.

But Buck, be­ing fi­nally ser­i­ous, was also cau­tious, and did not again make the mis­take of dis­respect.

“Your Majesty,” he said, bow­ing, “I am not here to say a word against any­thing your Majesty has said or done. You are a far bet­ter edu­cated man than I, and no doubt there were reas­ons, upon in­tel­lec­tual grounds, for those pro­ceed­ings. But may I ask you and ap­peal to your com­mon good-nature for a sin­cere an­swer? When you drew up the Charter of the Cit­ies, did you con­tem­plate the rise of a man like Adam Wayne? Did you ex­pect that the Charter—whether it was an ex­per­i­ment, or a scheme of dec­or­a­tion, or a joke—could ever really come to this—to stop­ping a vast scheme of or­din­ary busi­ness, to shut­ting up a road, to spoil­ing the chances of cabs, om­ni­buses, rail­way sta­tions, to dis­or­gan­ising half a city, to risk­ing a kind of civil war? Whatever were your ob­jects, were they that?”

Barker and Wilson looked at him ad­mir­ingly; the King more ad­mir­ingly still.

“Prov­ost Buck,” said Auberon, “you speak in pub­lic un­com­monly well. I give you your point with the mag­nan­im­ity of an artist. My scheme did not in­clude the ap­pear­ance of Mr. Wayne. Alas! would that my po­etic power had been great enough.”

“I thank your Majesty,” said Buck, cour­teously, but quickly. “Your Majesty’s state­ments are al­ways clear and stud­ied; there­fore I may draw a de­duc­tion. As the scheme, whatever it was, on which you set your heart did not in­clude the ap­pear­ance of Mr. Wayne, it will sur­vive his re­moval. Why not let us clear away this par­tic­u­lar Pump Street, which does in­ter­fere with our plans, and which does not, by your Majesty’s own state­ment, in­ter­fere with yours.”

“Caught out!” said the King, en­thu­si­ast­ic­ally and quite im­per­son­ally, as if he were watch­ing a cricket match.

“This man Wayne,” con­tin­ued Buck, “would be shut up by any doc­tors in Eng­land. But we only ask to have it put be­fore them. Mean­while no one’s in­terests, not even in all prob­ab­il­ity his own, can be really dam­aged by go­ing on with the im­prove­ments in Not­ting Hill. Not our in­terests, of course, for it has been the hard and quiet work of ten years. Not the in­terests of Not­ting Hill, for nearly all its edu­cated in­hab­it­ants de­sire the change. Not the in­terests of your Majesty, for you say, with char­ac­ter­istic sense, that you never con­tem­plated the rise of the lun­atic at all. Not, as I say, his own in­terests, for the man has a kind heart and many tal­ents, and a couple of good doc­tors would prob­ably put him righter than all the free cit­ies and sac­red moun­tains in cre­ation. I there­fore as­sume, if I may use so bold a word, that your Majesty will not of­fer any obstacle to our pro­ceed­ing with the im­prove­ments.”

And Mr. Buck sat down amid sub­dued but ex­cited ap­plause among the al­lies.

“Mr. Buck,” said the King, “I beg your par­don, for a num­ber of beau­ti­ful and sac­red thoughts, in which you were gen­er­ally clas­si­fied as a fool. But there is an­other thing to be con­sidered. Sup­pose you send in your work­men, and Mr. Wayne does a thing re­gret­table in­deed, but of which, I am sorry to say, I think him quite cap­able—knocks their teeth out?”

“I have thought of that, your Majesty,” said Mr. Buck, eas­ily, “and I think it can simply be guarded against. Let us send in a strong guard of, say, a hun­dred men—a hun­dred of the North Kens­ing­ton Hal­berdiers” (he smiled grimly), “of whom your Majesty is so fond. Or say a hun­dred and fifty. The whole pop­u­la­tion of Pump Street, I fancy, is only about a hun­dred.”

“Still they might stand to­gether and lick you,” said the King, du­bi­ously.

“Then say two hun­dred,” said Buck, gaily.

“It might hap­pen,” said the King, rest­lessly, “that one Not­ting Hiller fought bet­ter than two North Kens­ing­tons.”

“It might,” said Buck, coolly; “then say two hun­dred and fifty.”

The King bit his lip.

“And if they are beaten too?” he said vi­ciously.

“Your Majesty,” said Buck, and leaned back eas­ily in his chair, “sup­pose they are. If any­thing be clear, it is clear that all fight­ing mat­ters are mere mat­ters of arith­metic. Here we have a hun­dred and fifty, say, of Not­ting Hill sol­diers. Or say two hun­dred. If one of them can fight two of us—we can send in, not four hun­dred, but six hun­dred, and smash him. That is all. It is out of all im­me­di­ate prob­ab­il­ity that one of them could fight four of us. So what I say is this. Run no risks. Fin­ish it at once. Send in eight hun­dred men and smash him—smash him al­most without see­ing him. And go on with the im­prove­ments.”

And Mr. Buck pulled out a bandanna and blew his nose.

“Do you know, Mr. Buck,” said the King, star­ing gloomily at the table, “the ad­mir­able clear­ness of your reason pro­duces in my mind a sen­ti­ment which I trust I shall not of­fend you by de­scrib­ing as an as­pir­a­tion to punch your head. You ir­rit­ate me sub­limely. What can it be in me? Is it the relic of a moral sense?”

“But your Majesty,” said Barker, eagerly and suavely, “does not re­fuse our pro­pos­als?”

“My dear Barker, your pro­pos­als are as dam­nable as your man­ners. I want to have noth­ing to do with them. Sup­pose I stopped them al­to­gether. What would hap­pen?”

Barker answered in a very low voice—

“Re­volu­tion.”

The King glanced quickly at the men round the table. They were all look­ing down si­lently: their brows were red.

He rose with a start­ling sud­den­ness, and an un­usual pal­lor.

“Gen­tle­men,” he said, “you have over­ruled me. There­fore I can speak plainly. I think Adam Wayne, who is as mad as a hat­ter, worth more than a mil­lion of you. But you have the force, and, I ad­mit, the com­mon sense, and he is lost. Take your eight hun­dred hal­berdiers and smash him. It would be more sports­man­like to take two hun­dred.”

“More sports­man­like,” said Buck, grimly, “but a great deal less hu­mane. We are not artists, and streets purple with gore do not catch our eye in the right way.”

“It is pi­ti­ful,” said Auberon. “With five or six times their num­ber, there will be no fight at all.”

“I hope not,” said Buck, rising and ad­just­ing his gloves. “We de­sire no fight, your Majesty. We are peace­able busi­ness men.”

“Well,” said the King, wear­ily, “the con­fer­ence is at an end at last.”

And he went out of the room be­fore any­one 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 hum­ming­birds, 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 forever. Go on with the wheel. Good­bye, 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 lamp­post 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 tree­tops 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 someone 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

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.”

Buck, who was idly dab­bing the ash of his ci­gar on the ash­tray, 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 nine­pins.”

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 reex­am­ine 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 forever.”

“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. To­mor­row we shall all be ci­vil­ians again.”

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.

For the next ten minutes Buck walked up and down si­lently be­side the mo­tion­less clump of his two hun­dred. He had not changed his ap­pear­ance in any way, ex­cept to sling across his yel­low over­coat a case with a re­volver in it. So that his light-clad mod­ern fig­ure showed up oddly be­side the pom­pous purple uni­forms of his hal­berdiers, which darkly but richly col­oured the black night.

At length a shrill trum­pet rang from some way up the street; it was the sig­nal of ad­vance. Buck briefly gave the word, and the whole purple line, with its dimly shin­ing steel, moved up the side al­ley. Be­fore it was a slope of street, long, straight, and shin­ing in the dark. It was a sword poin­ted at Pump Street, the heart at which nine other swords were poin­ted that night.

A quarter of an hour’s si­lent march­ing brought them al­most within earshot of any tu­mult in the doomed cit­adel. But still there was no sound and no sign of the en­emy. This time, at any rate, they knew that they were clos­ing in on it mech­an­ic­ally, and they marched on un­der the lamp­light and the dark without any of that eerie sense of ig­nor­ance which Barker had felt when en­ter­ing the hos­tile coun­try by one av­enue alone.

“Halt—point arms!” cried Buck, sud­denly, and as he spoke there came a clat­ter of feet tum­bling along the stones. But the hal­berds were lev­elled in vain. The fig­ure that rushed up was a mes­sen­ger from the con­tin­gent of the North.

“Vict­ory, Mr. Buck!” he cried, pant­ing; “they are ous­ted. Prov­ost Wilson of Bayswa­ter has taken Pump Street.”

Buck ran for­ward in his ex­cite­ment.

“Then, which way are they re­treat­ing? It must be either by St. Luke’s to meet Swin­don, or by the Gas Com­pany to meet us. Run like mad to Swin­don, and see that the yel­lows are hold­ing the St. Luke’s Road. We will hold this, never fear. We have them in an iron trap. Run!”

As the mes­sen­ger dashed away into the dark­ness, the great guard of North Kens­ing­ton swung on with the cer­tainty of a ma­chine. Yet scarcely a hun­dred yards fur­ther their hal­berd-points again fell in line gleam­ing in the gas­light; for again a clat­ter of feet was heard on the stones, and again it proved to be only the mes­sen­ger.

“Mr. Prov­ost,” he said, “the yel­low West Kens­ing­tons have been hold­ing the road by St. Luke’s for twenty minutes since the cap­ture of Pump Street. Pump Street is not two hun­dred yards away; they can­not be re­treat­ing down that road.”

“Then they are re­treat­ing down this,” said Prov­ost Buck, with a fi­nal cheer­ful­ness, “and by good for­tune down a well-lighted road, though it twists about. For­ward!”

As they moved along the last three hun­dred yards of their jour­ney, Buck fell, for the first time in his life, per­haps, into a kind of philo­soph­ical rev­erie, for men of his type are al­ways made kindly, and as it were mel­an­choly, by suc­cess.

“I am sorry for poor old Wayne, I really am,” he thought. “He spoke up splen­didly for me at that Coun­cil. And he blacked old Barker’s eye with con­sid­er­able spirit. But I don’t see what a man can ex­pect when he fights against arith­metic, to say noth­ing of civil­isa­tion. And what a won­der­ful hoax all this mil­it­ary genius is! I sus­pect I’ve just dis­covered what Crom­well dis­covered, that a sens­ible trades­man is the best gen­eral, and that a man who can buy men and sell men can lead and kill them. The thing’s simply like adding up a column in a ledger. If Wayne has two hun­dred men, he can’t put two hun­dred men in nine places at once. If they’re ous­ted from Pump Street they’re fly­ing some­where. If they’re not fly­ing past the church they’re fly­ing past the Works. And so we have them. We busi­ness men should have no chance at all ex­cept that cleverer people than we get bees in their bon­nets that pre­vent them from reas­on­ing prop­erly—so we reason alone. And so I, who am com­par­at­ively stu­pid, see things as God sees them, as a vast ma­chine. My God, what’s this?” and he clapped his hands to his eyes and staggered back.

Then through the dark­ness he cried in a dread­ful voice—

“Did I blas­pheme God? I am struck blind.”

“What?” wailed an­other voice be­hind him, the voice of a cer­tain Wil­fred Jar­vis of North Kens­ing­ton.

“Blind!” cried Buck; “blind!”

“I’m blind too!” cried Jar­vis, in an agony.

“Fools, all of you,” said a gross voice be­hind them; “we’re all blind. The lamps have gone out.”

“The lamps! But why? where?” cried Buck, turn­ing furi­ously in the dark­ness. “How are we to get on? How are we to chase the en­emy? Where have they gone?”

“The en­emy went—” said the rough voice be­hind, and then stopped doubt­fully.

“Where?” shouted Buck, stamp­ing like a mad­man.

“They went,” said the gruff voice, “past the Gas Works, and they’ve used their chance.”

“Great God!” thundered Buck, and snatched at his re­volver; “do you mean they’ve turned out—”

But al­most be­fore he had spoken the words, he was hurled like a stone from cata­pult into the midst of his own men.

“Not­ting Hill! Not­ting Hill!” cried fright­ful voices out of the dark­ness, and they seemed to come from all sides, for the men of North Kens­ing­ton, un­ac­quain­ted with the road, had lost all their bear­ings in the black world of blind­ness.

“Not­ting Hill! Not­ting Hill!” cried the in­vis­ible people, and the in­vaders were hewn down hor­ribly with black steel, with steel that gave no glint against any light.

Buck, though badly maimed with the blow of a hal­berd, kept an angry but splen­did san­ity. He groped madly for the wall and found it. Strug­gling with crawl­ing fin­gers along it, he found a side open­ing and re­treated into it with the rem­nants of his men. Their ad­ven­tures dur­ing that prodi­gious night are not to be de­scribed. They did not know whether they were go­ing to­wards or away from the en­emy. Not know­ing where they them­selves were, or where their op­pon­ents were, it was mere irony to ask where was the rest of their army. For a thing had des­cen­ded upon them which Lon­don does not know—dark­ness, which was be­fore the stars were made, and they were as much lost in it as if they had been made be­fore the stars. Every now and then, as those fright­ful hours wore on, they buf­feted in the dark­ness against liv­ing men, who struck at them and at whom they struck, with an idiot fury. When at last the grey dawn came, they found they had wandered back to the edge of the Uxbridge Road. They found that in those hor­rible eye­less en­coun­ters, the North Kens­ing­tons and the Bayswa­ters and the West Kens­ing­tons had again and again met and butchered each other, and they heard that Adam Wayne was bar­ri­caded in Pump Street.

II The Correspondent of the Court Journal

Journ­al­ism had be­come, like most other such things in Eng­land un­der the cau­tious gov­ern­ment and philo­sophy rep­res­en­ted by James Barker, some­what sleepy and much di­min­ished in im­port­ance. This was partly due to the dis­ap­pear­ance of party gov­ern­ment and pub­lic speak­ing, partly to the com­prom­ise or dead­lock which had made for­eign wars im­possible, but mostly, of course, to the tem­per of the whole na­tion which was that of a people in a kind of back­wa­ter. Per­haps the most well known of the re­main­ing news­pa­pers was the Court Journal, which was pub­lished in a dusty but gen­teel-look­ing of­fice just out of Kens­ing­ton High Street. For when all the pa­pers of a people have been for years grow­ing more and more dim and dec­or­ous and op­tim­istic, the dim­mest and most dec­or­ous and most op­tim­istic is very likely to win. In the journ­al­istic com­pet­i­tion which was still go­ing on at the be­gin­ning of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury, the fi­nal vic­tor was the Court Journal.

For some mys­ter­i­ous reason the King had a great af­fec­tion for hanging about in the Court Journal of­fice, smoking a morn­ing ci­gar­ette and look­ing over files. Like all in­grainedly idle men, he was very fond of loun­ging and chat­ting in places where other people were do­ing work. But one would have thought that, even in the pro­saic Eng­land of his day, he might have found a more bust­ling centre.

On this par­tic­u­lar morn­ing, how­ever, he came out of Kens­ing­ton Palace with a more alert step and a busier air than usual. He wore an ex­tra­vag­antly long frock-coat, a pale-green waist­coat, a very full and dé­gagé black tie, and curi­ous yel­low gloves. This was his uni­form as Co­l­onel of a re­gi­ment of his own cre­ation, the 1st Dec­ad­ents Green. It was a beau­ti­ful sight to see him drilling them. He walked quickly across the Park and the High Street, light­ing his ci­gar­ette as he went, and flung open the door of the Court Journal of­fice.

“You’ve heard the news, Pally—you’ve heard the news?” he said.

The Ed­itor’s name was Hoskins, but the King called him Pally, which was an ab­bre­vi­ation of Pala­dium of our Liber­ties.

“Well, your Majesty,” said Hoskins, slowly (he was a wor­ried, gen­tle­manly look­ing per­son, with a wan­der­ing brown beard)—“well, your Majesty, I have heard rather curi­ous things, but I—”

“You’ll hear more of them,” said the King, dan­cing a few steps of a kind of negro shuffle. “You’ll hear more of them, my blood-and-thun­der tribune. Do you know what I am go­ing to do for you?”

“No, your Majesty,” replied the Pala­dium, vaguely.

“I’m go­ing to put your pa­per on strong, dash­ing, en­ter­pris­ing lines,” said the King. “Now, where are your posters of last night’s de­feat?”

“I did not pro­pose, your Majesty,” said the Ed­itor, “to have any posters ex­actly—”

“Paper, pa­per!” cried the King, wildly; “bring me pa­per as big as a house. I’ll do you posters. Stop, I must take my coat off.” He began re­mov­ing that gar­ment with an air of set in­tens­ity, flung it play­fully at Mr. Hoskins’ head, en­tirely en­vel­op­ing him, and looked at him­self in the glass. “The coat off,” he said, “and the hat on. That looks like a subed­itor. It is in­deed the very es­sence of subedit­ing. Well,” he con­tin­ued, turn­ing round ab­ruptly, “come along with that pa­per.”

The Pala­dium had only just ex­tric­ated him­self rev­er­ently from the folds of the King’s frock-coat, and said be­wildered—

“I am afraid, your Majesty—”

“Oh, you’ve got no en­ter­prise,” said Auberon. “What’s that roll in the corner? Wall­pa­per? Dec­or­a­tions for your private res­id­ence? Art in the home, Pally? Fling it over here, and I’ll paint such posters on the back of it that when you put it up in your draw­ing-room you’ll paste the ori­ginal pat­tern against the wall.” And the King un­rolled the wall­pa­per, spread­ing it over the whole floor. “Now give me the scis­sors,” he cried, and took them him­self be­fore the other could stir.

He slit the pa­per into about five pieces, each nearly as big as a door. Then he took a big blue pen­cil, and went down on his knees on the dusty oil­cloth and began to write on them, in huge let­ters—

“From the front.
Gen­eral Buck de­feated.
Dark­ness, danger, and death.
Wayne said to be in Pump Street.
Feel­ing in the city.”

He con­tem­plated it for some time, with his head on one side, and got up, with a sigh.

“Not quite in­tense enough,” he said—“not alarm­ing. I want the Court Journal to be feared as well as loved. Let’s try some­thing more hard-hit­ting.” And he went down on his knees again. After suck­ing the blue pen­cil for some time, he began writ­ing again busily. “How will this do?” he said—

“Wayne’s won­der­ful vic­tory.”

“I sup­pose,” he said, look­ing up ap­peal­ingly, and suck­ing the pen­cil—“I sup­pose we couldn’t say ‘wict­ory’—‘Wayne’s won­der­ful wict­ory’? No, no. Refine­ment, Pally, re­fine­ment. I have it.”

“Wayne wins.
Astound­ing fight in the dark.
The gas-lamps in their courses fought against Buck.”

“(Noth­ing like our fine old Eng­lish trans­la­tion.) What else can we say? Well, any­thing to an­noy old Buck;” and he ad­ded, thought­fully, in smal­ler let­ters—

“Ru­moured Court-mar­tial on Gen­eral Buck.”

“Those will do for the present,” he said, and turned them both face down­wards. “Paste, please.”

The Pala­dium, with an air of great ter­ror, brought the paste out of an in­ner room.

The King slabbed it on with the en­joy­ment of a child mess­ing with treacle. Then tak­ing one of his huge com­pos­i­tions flut­ter­ing in each hand, he ran out­side, and began past­ing them up in prom­in­ent po­s­i­tions over the front of the of­fice.

“And now,” said Auberon, en­ter­ing again with un­di­min­ished vi­va­city—“now for the lead­ing art­icle.”

He picked up an­other of the large strips of wall­pa­per, and, lay­ing it across a desk, pulled out a foun­tain-pen and began writ­ing with fe­ver­ish in­tens­ity, read­ing clauses and frag­ments aloud to him­self, and rolling them on his tongue like wine, to see if they had the pure journ­al­istic fla­vour.

“The news of the dis­aster to our forces in Not­ting Hill, aw­ful as it is—aw­ful as it is—(no, dis­tress­ing as it is), may do some good if it draws at­ten­tion to the what’s-his-name in­ef­fi­ciency (scan­dal­ous in­ef­fi­ciency, of course) of the gov­ern­ment’s pre­par­a­tions. In our present state of in­form­a­tion, it would be pre­ma­ture (what a jolly word!)—it would be pre­ma­ture to cast any re­flec­tions upon the con­duct of Gen­eral Buck, whose ser­vices upon so many stricken fields (ha, ha!), and whose hon­our­able scars and laurels, give him a right to have judg­ment upon him at least sus­pen­ded. But there is one mat­ter on which we must speak plainly. We have been si­lent on it too long, from feel­ings, per­haps of mis­taken cau­tion, per­haps of mis­taken loy­alty. This situ­ation would never have arisen but for what we can only call the in­defens­ible con­duct of the King. It pains us to say such things, but, speak­ing as we do in the pub­lic in­terests (I pla­gi­ar­ise from Barker’s fam­ous epi­gram), we shall not shrink be­cause of the dis­tress we may cause to any in­di­vidual, even the most ex­al­ted. At this cru­cial mo­ment of our coun­try, the voice of the People de­mands with a single tongue, ‘Where is the King?’ What is he do­ing while his sub­jects tear each other in pieces in the streets of a great city? Are his amuse­ments and his dis­sip­a­tions (of which we can­not pre­tend to be ig­nor­ant) so en­gross­ing that he can spare no thought for a per­ish­ing na­tion? It is with a deep sense of our re­spons­ib­il­ity that we warn that ex­al­ted per­son that neither his great po­s­i­tion nor his in­com­par­able tal­ents will save him in the hour of de­li­rium from the fate of all those who, in the mad­ness of lux­ury or tyranny, have met the Eng­lish people in the rare day of its wrath.”

“I am now,” said the King, “go­ing to write an ac­count of the battle by an eye­wit­ness.” And he picked up a fourth sheet of wall­pa­per. Al­most at the same mo­ment Buck strode quickly into the of­fice. He had a band­age round his head.

“I was told,” he said, with his usual gruff ci­vil­ity, “that your Majesty was here.”

“And of all things on earth,” cried the King, with de­light, “here is an eye­wit­ness! An eye­wit­ness who, I re­gret to ob­serve, has at present only one eye to wit­ness with. Can you write us the spe­cial art­icle, Buck? Have you a rich style?”

Buck, with a self-re­straint which al­most ap­proached po­lite­ness, took no no­tice whatever of the King’s mad­den­ing gen­i­al­ity.

“I took the liberty, your Majesty,” he said shortly, “of ask­ing Mr. Barker to come here also.”

As he spoke, in­deed, Barker came swinging into the of­fice, with his usual air of hurry.

“What is hap­pen­ing now?” asked Buck, turn­ing to him with a kind of re­lief.

“Fight­ing still go­ing on,” said Barker. “The four hun­dred from West Kens­ing­ton were hardly touched last night. They hardly got near the place. Poor Wilson’s Bayswa­ter men got cut about, though. They fought con­foun­dedly well. They took Pump Street once. What mad things do hap­pen in the world. To think that of all of us it should be little Wilson with the red whiskers who came out best.”

The King made a note on his pa­per—

“Ro­mantic Con­duct of Mr. Wilson.”

“Yes,” said Buck; “it makes one a bit less proud of one’s h’s.”

The King sud­denly fol­ded or crumpled up the pa­per, and put it in his pocket.

“I have an idea,” he said. “I will be an eye­wit­ness. I will write you such let­ters from the Front as will be more gor­geous than the real thing. Give me my coat, Pala­dium. I entered this room a mere King of Eng­land. I leave it, Spe­cial War Cor­res­pond­ent of the Court Journal. It is use­less to stop me, Pally; it is vain to cling to my knees, Buck; it is hope­less, Barker, to weep upon my neck. ‘When duty calls’—the re­mainder of the sen­ti­ment es­capes me. You will re­ceive my first art­icle this even­ing by the eight-o’clock post.”

And, run­ning out of the of­fice, he jumped upon a blue Bayswa­ter om­ni­bus that went swinging by.

“Well,” said Barker, gloomily, “well.”

“Barker,” said Buck, “busi­ness may be lower than polit­ics, but war is, as I dis­covered last night, a long sight more like busi­ness. You politi­cians are such in­grained dem­agogues that even when you have a des­pot­ism you think of noth­ing but pub­lic opin­ion. So you learn to tack and run, and are afraid of the first breeze. Now we stick to a thing and get it. And our mis­takes help us. Look here! at this mo­ment we’ve beaten Wayne.”

“Beaten Wayne,” re­peated Barker.

“Why the dick­ens not?” cried the other, fling­ing out his hands. “Look here. I said last night that we had them by hold­ing the nine en­trances. Well, I was wrong. We should have had them but for a sin­gu­lar event—the lamps went out. But for that it was cer­tain. Has it oc­curred to you, my bril­liant Barker, that an­other sin­gu­lar event has happened since that sin­gu­lar event of the lamps go­ing out?”

“What event?” asked Barker.

“By an astound­ing co­in­cid­ence, the sun has risen,” cried out Buck, with a sav­age air of pa­tience. “Why the hell aren’t we hold­ing all those ap­proaches now, and passing in on them again? It should have been done at sun­rise. The con­foun­ded doc­tor wouldn’t let me go out. You were in com­mand.”

Barker smiled grimly.

“It is a grat­i­fic­a­tion to me, my dear Buck, to be able to say that we an­ti­cip­ated your sug­ges­tions pre­cisely. We went as early as pos­sible to re­con­noitre the nine en­trances. Un­for­tu­nately, while we were fight­ing each other in the dark, like a lot of drunken nav­vies, Mr. Wayne’s friends were work­ing very hard in­deed. Three hun­dred yards from Pump Street, at every one of those en­trances, there is a bar­ri­cade nearly as high as the houses. They were fin­ish­ing the last, in Pem­bridge Road, when we ar­rived. Our mis­takes,” he cried bit­terly, and flung his ci­gar­ette on the ground. “It is not we who learn from them.”

There was a si­lence for a few mo­ments, and Barker lay back wear­ily in a chair. The of­fice clock ticked ex­actly in the still­ness.

At length Barker said sud­denly—

“Buck, does it ever cross your mind what this is all about? The Ham­mer­smith to Maida Vale thor­ough­fare was an un­com­monly good spec­u­la­tion. You and I hoped a great deal from it. But is it worth it? It will cost us thou­sands to crush this ri­dicu­lous riot. Sup­pose we let it alone?”

“And be thrashed in pub­lic by a red-haired mad­man whom any two doc­tors would lock up?” cried out Buck, start­ing to his feet. “What do you pro­pose to do, Mr. Barker? To apo­lo­gise to the ad­mir­able Mr. Wayne? To kneel to the Charter of the Cit­ies? To clasp to your bosom the flag of the Red Lion? To kiss in suc­ces­sion every sac­red lamp­post that saved Not­ting Hill? No, by God! My men fought jolly well—they were beaten by a trick. And they’ll fight again.”

“Buck,” said Barker, “I al­ways ad­mired you. And you were quite right in what you said the other day.”

“In what?”

“In say­ing,” said Barker, rising quietly, “that we had all got into Adam Wayne’s at­mo­sphere and out of our own. My friend, the whole ter­rit­orial king­dom of Adam Wayne ex­tends to about nine streets, with bar­ri­cades at the end of them. But the spir­itual king­dom of Adam Wayne ex­tends, God knows where—it ex­tends to this of­fice, at any rate. The red-haired mad­man whom any two doc­tors would lock up is filling this room with his roar­ing, un­reas­on­able soul. And it was the red-haired mad­man who said the last word you spoke.”

Buck walked to the win­dow without reply­ing. “You un­der­stand, of course,” he said at last, “I do not dream of giv­ing in.”

The King, mean­while, was rat­tling along on the top of his blue om­ni­bus. The traffic of Lon­don as a whole had not, of course, been greatly dis­turbed by these events, for the af­fair was treated as a Not­ting Hill riot, and that area was marked off as if it had been in the hands of a gang of re­cog­nised ri­oters. The blue om­ni­buses simply went round as they would have done if a road were be­ing men­ded, and the om­ni­bus on which the cor­res­pond­ent of the Court Journal was sit­ting swept round the corner of Queen’s Road, Bayswa­ter.

The King was alone on the top of the vehicle, and was en­joy­ing the speed at which it was go­ing.

“For­ward, my beauty, my Arab,” he said, pat­ting the om­ni­bus en­cour­agingly, “fleetest of all thy bound­ing tribe. Are thy re­la­tions with thy driver, I won­der, those of the Be­douin and his steed? Does he sleep side by side with thee—”

His med­it­a­tions were broken by a sud­den and jar­ring stop­page. Look­ing over the edge, he saw that the heads of the horses were be­ing held by men in the uni­form of Wayne’s army, and heard the voice of an of­ficer call­ing out or­ders.

King Auberon des­cen­ded from the om­ni­bus with dig­nity. The guard or picket of red hal­berdiers who had stopped the vehicle did not num­ber more than twenty, and they were un­der the com­mand of a short, dark, clever-look­ing young man, con­spicu­ous among the rest as be­ing clad in an or­din­ary frock-coat, but girt round the waist with a red sash and a long sev­en­teenth-cen­tury sword. A shiny silk hat and spec­tacles com­pleted the out­fit in a pleas­ing man­ner.

“To whom have I the hon­our of speak­ing?” said the King, en­deav­our­ing to look like Charles I, in spite of per­sonal dif­fi­culties.

The dark man in spec­tacles lif­ted his hat with equal grav­ity.

“My name is Bowles,” he said. “I am a chem­ist. I am also a cap­tain of O com­pany of the army of Not­ting Hill. I am dis­tressed at hav­ing to in­com­mode you by stop­ping the om­ni­bus, but this area is covered by our pro­clam­a­tion, and we in­ter­cept all traffic. May I ask to whom I have the hon­our—Why, good gra­cious, I beg your Majesty’s par­don. I am quite over­whelmed at find­ing my­self con­cerned with the King.”

Auberon put up his hand with in­des­crib­able grandeur.

“Not with the King,” he said; “with the spe­cial war cor­res­pond­ent of the Court Journal.”

“I beg your Majesty’s par­don,” began Mr. Bowles, doubt­fully.

“Do you call me Majesty? I re­peat,” said Auberon, firmly, “I am a rep­res­ent­at­ive of the press. I have chosen, with a deep sense of re­spons­ib­il­ity, the name of Pinker. I should de­sire a veil to be drawn over the past.”

“Very well, sir,” said Mr. Bowles, with an air of sub­mis­sion, “in our eyes the sanc­tity of the press is at least as great as that of the throne. We de­sire noth­ing bet­ter than that our wrongs and our glor­ies should be widely known. May I ask, Mr. Pinker, if you have any ob­jec­tion to be­ing presen­ted to the Prov­ost and to Gen­eral Turn­bull?”

“The Prov­ost I have had the hon­our of meet­ing,” said Auberon, eas­ily. “We old journ­al­ists, you know, meet every­body. I should be most de­lighted to have the same hon­our again. Gen­eral Turn­bull, also, it would be a grat­i­fic­a­tion to know. The younger men are so in­ter­est­ing. We of the old Fleet Street gang lose touch with them.”

“Will you be so good as to step this way?” said the leader of O com­pany.

“I am al­ways good,” said Mr. Pinker. “Lead on.”

III The Great Army of South Kensington

The art­icle from the spe­cial cor­res­pond­ent of the Court Journal ar­rived in due course, writ­ten on very coarse copy-pa­per in the King’s ar­abesque of hand­writ­ing, in which three words filled a page, and yet were il­legible. Moreover, the con­tri­bu­tion was the more per­plex­ing at first, as it opened with a suc­ces­sion of erased para­graphs. The writer ap­peared to have at­temp­ted the art­icle once or twice in sev­eral journ­al­istic styles. At the side of one ex­per­i­ment was writ­ten, “Try Amer­ican style,” and the frag­ment began—

“The King must go. We want gritty men. Flap­doodle is all very … ;” and then broke off, fol­lowed by the note, “Good sound journ­al­ism safer. Try it.”

The ex­per­i­ment in good sound journ­al­ism ap­peared to be­gin—

“The greatest of Eng­lish po­ets has said that a rose by any …”

This also stopped ab­ruptly. The next an­nota­tion at the side was al­most un­de­cipher­able, but seemed to be some­thing like—

“How about old Steevens and the mot juste? E.g. …”

“Morn­ing winked a little wear­ily at me over the curt edge of Camp­den Hill and its houses with their sharp shad­ows. Under the ab­rupt black card­board of the out­line, it took some little time to de­tect col­ours; but at length I saw a brown­ish yel­low shift­ing in the ob­scur­ity, and I knew that it was the guard of Swin­don’s West Kens­ing­ton army. They are be­ing held as a re­serve, and lin­ing the whole ridge above the Bayswa­ter Road. Their camp and their main force is un­der the great Water­works Tower on Camp­den Hill. I for­got to say that the Water­works Tower looked swart.

“As I passed them and came over the curve of Sil­ver Street, I saw the blue cloudy masses of Barker’s men block­ing the en­trance to the highroad like a sap­phire smoke (good). The dis­pos­i­tion of the al­lied troops, un­der the gen­eral man­age­ment of Mr. Wilson, ap­pears to be as fol­lows: The Yel­low army (if I may so de­scribe the West Kens­ing­to­ni­ans) lies, as I have said, in a strip along the ridge, its fur­thest point west­ward be­ing the west side of Camp­den Hill Road, its fur­thest point east­ward the be­gin­ning of Kens­ing­ton Gar­dens. The Green army of Wilson lines the Not­ting Hill High Road it­self from Queen’s Road to the corner of Pem­bridge Road, curving round the lat­ter, and ex­tend­ing some three hun­dred yards up to­wards West­bourne Grove. West­bourne Grove it­self is oc­cu­pied by Barker of South Kens­ing­ton. The fourth side of this rough square, the Queen’s Road side, is held by some of Buck’s Purple war­ri­ors.

“The whole re­sembles some an­cient and dainty Dutch flower­bed. Along the crest of Camp­den Hill lie the golden cro­cuses of West Kens­ing­ton. They are, as it were, the first fiery fringe of the whole. North­ward lies our hy­acinth Barker, with all his blue hy­acinths. Round to the south­w­est run the green rushes of Wilson of Bayswa­ter, and a line of vi­olet ir­ises (aptly sym­bol­ised by Mr. Buck) com­plete the whole. The ar­gent ex­ter­ior … (I am los­ing the style. I should have said ‘Curving with a whisk’ in­stead of merely ‘Curving.’ Also I should have called the hy­acinths ‘sud­den.’ I can­not keep this up. War is too rapid for this style of writ­ing. Please ask of­fice-boy to in­sert mots justes.)

“The truth is that there is noth­ing to re­port. That com­mon­place ele­ment which is al­ways ready to de­vour all beau­ti­ful things (as the Black Pig in the Irish Mytho­logy will fi­nally de­vour the stars and gods); that com­mon­place ele­ment, as I say, has in its Black Pig­gish way de­voured fi­nally the chances of any ro­mance in this af­fair; that which once con­sisted of ab­surd but thrill­ing com­bats in the streets, has de­gen­er­ated into some­thing which is the very prose of war­fare—it has de­gen­er­ated into a siege. A siege may be defined as a peace plus the in­con­veni­ence of war. Of course Wayne can­not hold out. There is no more chance of help from any­where else than of ships from the moon. And if old Wayne had stocked his street with tinned meats till all his gar­rison had to sit on them, he couldn’t hold out for more than a month or two. As a mat­ter of mel­an­choly fact, he has done some­thing rather like this. He has stocked his street with food un­til there must be un­com­monly little room to turn round. But what is the good? To hold out for all that time and then to give in of ne­ces­sity, what does it mean? It means wait­ing un­til your vic­tor­ies are for­got­ten, and then tak­ing the trouble to be de­feated. I can­not un­der­stand how Wayne can be so in­ar­tistic.

“And how odd it is that one views a thing quite dif­fer­ently when one knows it is de­feated! I al­ways thought Wayne was rather fine. But now, when I know that he is done for, there seem to be noth­ing else but Wayne. All the streets seem to point at him, all the chim­neys seem to lean to­wards him. I sup­pose it is a mor­bid feel­ing; but Pump Street seems to be the only part of Lon­don that I feel phys­ic­ally. I sup­pose, I say, that it is mor­bid. I sup­pose it is ex­actly how a man feels about his heart when his heart is weak. ‘Pump Street’—the heart is a pump. And I am driv­el­ling.

“Our finest leader at the front is, bey­ond all ques­tion, Gen­eral Wilson. He has ad­op­ted alone among the other Prov­osts the uni­form of his own hal­berdiers, al­though that fine old six­teenth-cen­tury garb was not ori­gin­ally in­ten­ded to go with red side-whiskers. It was he who, against a most ad­mir­able and des­per­ate de­fence, broke last night into Pump Street and held it for at least half an hour. He was af­ter­wards ex­pelled from it by Gen­eral Turn­bull, of Not­ting Hill, but only after des­per­ate fight­ing and the sud­den des­cent of that ter­rible dark­ness which proved so much more fatal to the forces of Gen­eral Buck and Gen­eral Swin­don.

“Prov­ost Wayne him­self, with whom I had, with great good for­tune, a most in­ter­est­ing in­ter­view, bore the most elo­quent testi­mony to the con­duct of Gen­eral Wilson and his men. His pre­cise words are as fol­lows: ‘I have bought sweets at his funny little shop when I was four years old, and ever since. I never no­ticed any­thing, I am ashamed to say, ex­cept that he talked through his nose, and didn’t wash him­self par­tic­u­larly. And he came over our bar­ri­cade like a devil from hell.’ I re­peated this speech to Gen­eral Wilson him­self, with some del­ic­ate im­prove­ments, and he seemed pleased with it. He does not, how­ever, seem pleased with any­thing so much just now as he is with the wear­ing of a sword. I have it from the front on the best au­thor­ity that Gen­eral Wilson was not com­pletely shaved yes­ter­day. It is be­lieved in mil­it­ary circles that he is grow­ing a mous­tache. …

“As I have said, there is noth­ing to re­port. I walk wear­ily to the pil­lar-box at the corner of Pem­bridge Road to post my copy. Noth­ing whatever has happened, ex­cept the pre­par­a­tions for a par­tic­u­larly long and feeble siege, dur­ing which I trust I shall not be re­quired to be at the Front. As I glance up Pem­bridge Road in the grow­ing dusk, the as­pect of that road re­minds me that there is one note worth adding. Gen­eral Buck has sug­ges­ted, with char­ac­ter­istic acu­men, to Gen­eral Wilson that, in or­der to ob­vi­ate the pos­sib­il­ity of such a cata­strophe as over­whelmed the al­lied forces in the last ad­vance on Not­ting Hill (the cata­strophe, I mean, of the ex­tin­guished lamps), each sol­dier should have a lighted lan­tern round his neck. This is one of the things which I really ad­mire about Gen­eral Buck. He pos­sesses what people used to mean by ‘the hu­mil­ity of the man of sci­ence,’ that is, he learns stead­ily from his mis­takes. Wayne may score off him in some other way, but not in that way. The lan­terns look like fairy lights as they curve round the end of Pem­bridge Road.

“Later.—I write with some dif­fi­culty, be­cause the blood will run down my face and make pat­terns on the pa­per. Blood is a very beau­ti­ful thing; that is why it is con­cealed. If you ask why blood runs down my face, I can only reply that I was kicked by a horse. If you ask me what horse, I can reply with some pride that it was a war­horse. If you ask me how a war­horse came on the scene in our simple ped­es­trian war­fare, I am re­duced to the ne­ces­sity, so pain­ful to a spe­cial cor­res­pond­ent, of re­count­ing my ex­per­i­ences.

“I was, as I have said, in the very act of post­ing my copy at the pil­lar-box, and of glan­cing as I did so up the glit­ter­ing curve of Pem­bridge Road, stud­ded with the lights of Wilson’s men. I don’t know what made me pause to ex­am­ine the mat­ter, but I had a fancy that the line of lights, where it melted into the in­dis­tinct brown twi­light, was more in­dis­tinct than usual. I was al­most cer­tain that in a cer­tain stretch of the road where there had been five lights there were now only four. I strained my eyes; I coun­ted them again, and there were only three. A mo­ment after there were only two; an in­stant after only one; and an in­stant after that the lan­terns near to me swung like jangled bells, as if struck sud­denly. They flared and fell; and for the mo­ment the fall of them was like the fall of the sun and stars out of heaven. It left everything in a primal blind­ness. As a mat­ter of fact, the road was not yet le­git­im­ately dark. There were still red rays of a sun­set in the sky, and the brown gloam­ing was still warmed, as it were, with a feel­ing as of fire­light. But for three seconds after the lan­terns swung and sank, I saw in front of me a black­ness block­ing the sky. And with the fourth second I knew that this black­ness which blocked the sky was a man on a great horse; and I was trampled and tossed aside as a swirl of horse­men swept round the corner. As they turned I saw that they were not black, but scar­let; they were a sortie of the be­sieged, Wayne rid­ing ahead.

“I lif­ted my­self from the gut­ter, blinded with blood from a very slight skin-wound, and, queerly enough, not caring either for the blind­ness or for the slight­ness of the wound. For one mor­tal minute after that amaz­ing caval­cade had spun past, there was dead still­ness on the empty road. And then came Barker and all his hal­berdiers run­ning like dev­ils in the track of them. It had been their busi­ness to guard the gate by which the sortie had broken out; but they had not reckoned, and small blame to them, on cav­alry. As it was, Barker and his men made a per­fectly splen­did run after them, al­most catch­ing Wayne’s horses by the tails.

“Nobody can un­der­stand the sortie. It con­sists only of a small num­ber of Wayne’s gar­rison. Turn­bull him­self, with the vast mass of it, is un­doubtedly still bar­ri­caded in Pump Street. Sorties of this kind are nat­ural enough in the ma­jor­ity of his­tor­ical sieges, such as the siege of Paris in 1870, be­cause in such cases the be­sieged are cer­tain of some sup­port out­side. But what can be the ob­ject of it in this case? Wayne knows (or if he is too mad to know any­thing, at least Turn­bull knows) that there is not, and never has been, the smal­lest chance of sup­port for him out­side; that the mass of the sane mod­ern in­hab­it­ants of Lon­don re­gard his far­cical pat­ri­ot­ism with as much con­tempt as they do the ori­ginal idi­otcy that gave it birth—the folly of our miser­able King. What Wayne and his horse­men are do­ing nobody can even con­jec­ture. The gen­eral the­ory round here is that he is simply a traitor, and has aban­doned the be­sieged. But all such lar­ger but yet more sol­uble riddles are as noth­ing com­pared to the one small but un­answer­able riddle: Where did they get the horses?

“Later.—I have heard a most ex­traordin­ary ac­count of the ori­gin of the ap­pear­ance of the horses. It ap­pears that that amaz­ing per­son, Gen­eral Turn­bull, who is now rul­ing Pump Street in the ab­sence of Wayne, sent out, on the morn­ing of the de­clar­a­tion of war, a vast num­ber of little boys (or cher­ubs of the gut­ter, as we press­men say), with half-crowns in their pock­ets, to take cabs all over Lon­don. No less than a hun­dred and sixty cabs met at Pump Street; were com­mand­eered by the gar­rison. The men were set free, the cabs used to make bar­ri­cades, and the horses kept in Pump Street, where they were fed and ex­er­cised for sev­eral days, un­til they were suf­fi­ciently rapid and ef­fi­cient to be used for this wild ride out of the town. If this is so, and I have it on the best pos­sible au­thor­ity, the method of the sortie is ex­plained. But we have no ex­plan­a­tion of its ob­ject. Just as Barker’s Blues were swinging round the corner after them, they were stopped, but not by an en­emy; only by the voice of one man, and he a friend. Red Wilson of Bayswa­ter ran alone along the main road like a mad­man, wav­ing them back with a hal­berd snatched from a sen­tinel. He was in su­preme com­mand, and Barker stopped at the corner, star­ing and be­wildered. We could hear Wilson’s voice loud and dis­tinct out of the dusk, so that it seemed strange that the great voice should come out of the little body. ‘Halt, South Kens­ing­ton! Guard this entry, and pre­vent them re­turn­ing. I will pur­sue. For­ward, the Green Guards!’

“A wall of dark blue uni­forms and a wood of poleaxes was between me and Wilson, for Barker’s men blocked the mouth of the road in two ri­gid lines. But through them and through the dusk I could hear the clear or­ders and the clank of arms, and see the green army of Wilson march­ing by to­wards the west. They were our great fight­ing-men. Wilson had filled them with his own fire; in a few days they had be­come vet­er­ans. Each of them wore a sil­ver medal of a pump, to boast that they alone of all the al­lied armies had stood vic­tori­ous in Pump Street.

“I man­aged to slip past the de­tach­ment of Barker’s Blues, who are guard­ing the end of Pem­bridge Road, and a sharp spell of run­ning brought me to the tail of Wilson’s green army as it swung down the road in pur­suit of the fly­ing Wayne. The dusk had deepened into al­most total dark­ness; for some time I only heard the throb of the march­ing pace. Then sud­denly there was a cry, and the tall fight­ing men were flung back on me, al­most crush­ing me, and again the lan­terns swung and jingled, and the cold nozzles of great horses pushed into the press of us. They had turned and charged us.

“ ‘You fools!’ came the voice of Wilson, cleav­ing our panic with a splen­did cold an­ger. ‘Don’t you see? the horses have no riders!’

“It was true. We were be­ing plunged at by a stam­pede of horses with empty saddles. What could it mean? Had Wayne met some of our men and been de­feated? Or had he flung these horses at us as some kind of ruse or mad new mode of war­fare, such as he seemed bent on in­vent­ing? Or did he and his men want to get away in dis­guise? Or did they want to hide in houses some­where?

“Never did I ad­mire any man’s in­tel­lect (even my own) so much as I did Wilson’s at that mo­ment. Without a word, he simply poin­ted the hal­berd (which he still grasped) to the south­ern side of the road. As you know, the streets run­ning up to the ridge of Camp­den Hill from the main road are pe­cu­li­arly steep, they are more like sud­den flights of stairs. We were just op­pos­ite Aubrey Road, the steep­est of all; up that it would have been far more dif­fi­cult to urge half-trained horses than to run up on one’s feet.

“ ‘Left wheel!’ hal­looed Wilson. ‘They have gone up here,’ he ad­ded to me, who happened to be at his el­bow.

“ ‘Why?’ I ven­tured to ask.

“ ‘Can’t say for cer­tain,’ replied the Bayswa­ter Gen­eral. ‘They’ve gone up here in a great hurry, any­how. They’ve simply turned their horses loose, be­cause they couldn’t take them up. I fancy I know. I fancy they’re try­ing to get over the ridge to Kens­ing­ston or Ham­mer­smith, or some­where, and are strik­ing up here be­cause it’s just bey­ond the end of our line. Damned fools, not to have gone fur­ther along the road, though. They’ve only just shaved our last out­post. Lam­bert is hardly four hun­dred yards from here. And I’ve sent him word.’

“ ‘Lam­bert!’ I said. ‘Not young Wil­frid Lam­bert—my old friend.’

“ ‘Wil­frid Lam­bert’s his name,’ said the Gen­eral; ‘used to be a “man about town;” silly fel­low with a big nose. That kind of man al­ways vo­lun­teers for some war or other; and what’s fun­nier, he gen­er­ally isn’t half bad at it. Lam­bert is dis­tinctly good. The yel­low West Kens­ing­tons I al­ways reckoned the weak­est part of the army; but he has pulled them to­gether un­com­monly well, though he’s sub­or­din­ate to Swin­don, who’s a don­key. In the at­tack from Pem­bridge Road the other night he showed great pluck.’

“ ‘He has shown greater pluck than that,’ I said. ‘He has cri­ti­cised my sense of hu­mour. That was his first en­gage­ment.’

“This re­mark was, I am sorry to say, lost on the ad­mir­able com­mander of the al­lied forces. We were in the act of climb­ing the last half of Aubrey Road, which is so ab­rupt a slope that it looks like an old-fash­ioned map lean­ing up against the wall. There are lines of little trees, one above the other, as in the old-fash­ioned map.

“We reached the top of it, pant­ing some­what, and were just about to turn the corner by a place called (in chiv­al­rous an­ti­cip­a­tion of our wars of sword and axe) Tower Creçy, when we were sud­denly knocked in the stom­ach (I can use no other term) by a horde of men hurled back upon us. They wore the red uni­form of Wayne; their hal­berds were broken; their fore­heads bleed­ing; but the mere im­petus of their re­treat staggered us as we stood at the last ridge of the slope.

“ ‘Good old Lam­bert!’ yelled out sud­denly the stolid Mr. Wilson of Bayswa­ter, in an un­con­trol­lable ex­cite­ment. ‘Damned jolly old Lam­bert! He’s got there already! He’s driv­ing them back on us! Hur­rah! hur­rah! For­ward, the Green Guards!’

“We swung round the corner east­wards, Wilson run­ning first, bran­dish­ing the hal­berd—

“Will you par­don a little egot­ism? Every­one likes a little egot­ism, when it takes the form, as mine does in this case, of a dis­grace­ful con­fes­sion. The thing is really a little in­ter­est­ing, be­cause it shows how the merely artistic habit has bit­ten into men like me. It was the most in­tensely ex­cit­ing oc­cur­rence that had ever come to me in my life; and I was really in­tensely ex­cited about it. And yet, as we turned that corner, the first im­pres­sion I had was of some­thing that had noth­ing to do with the fight at all. I was stricken from the sky as by a thun­der­bolt, by the height of the Water­works Tower on Camp­den Hill. I don’t know whether Lon­don­ers gen­er­ally real­ise how high it looks when one comes out, in this way, al­most im­me­di­ately un­der it. For the second it seemed to me that at the foot of it even hu­man war was a tri­vi­al­ity. For the second I felt as if I had been drunk with some trivial or­gie, and that I had been sobered by the shock of that shadow. A mo­ment af­ter­wards, I real­ised that un­der it was go­ing on some­thing more en­dur­ing than stone, and some­thing wilder than the diz­zi­est height—the agony of man. And I knew that, com­pared to that, this over­whelm­ing tower was it­self a tri­vi­al­ity; it was a mere stalk of stone which hu­man­ity could snap like a stick.

“I don’t know why I have talked so much about this silly old Water­works Tower, which at the very best was only a tre­mend­ous back­ground. It was that, cer­tainly, a sombre and aw­ful land­scape, against which our fig­ures were re­lieved. But I think the real reason was, that there was in my own mind so sharp a trans­ition from the tower of stone to the man of flesh. For what I saw first when I had shaken off, as it were, the shadow of the tower, was a man, and a man I knew.

“Lam­bert stood at the fur­ther corner of the street that curved round the tower, his fig­ure out­lined in some de­gree by the be­gin­ning of moon­rise. He looked mag­ni­fi­cent, a hero; but he looked some­thing much more in­ter­est­ing than that. He was, as it happened, in al­most pre­cisely the same swag­ger­ing at­ti­tude in which he had stood nearly fif­teen years ago, when he swung his walk­ing-stick and struck it into the ground, and told me that all my sub­tlety was drivel. And, upon my soul, I think he re­quired more cour­age to say that than to fight as he does now. For then he was fight­ing against some­thing that was in the as­cend­ant, fash­ion­able, and vic­tori­ous. And now he is fight­ing (at the risk of his life, no doubt) merely against some­thing which is already dead, which is im­possible, fu­tile; of which noth­ing has been more im­possible and fu­tile than this very sortie which has brought him into con­tact with it. People nowadays al­low in­fin­itely too little for the psy­cho­lo­gical sense of vic­tory as a factor in af­fairs. Then he was at­tack­ing the de­graded but un­doubtedly vic­tori­ous Quin; now he is at­tack­ing the in­ter­est­ing but totally ex­tin­guished Wayne.

“His name re­calls me to the de­tails of the scene. The facts were these. A line of red hal­berdiers, headed by Wayne, were march­ing up the street, close un­der the north­ern wall, which is, in fact, the bot­tom of a sort of dyke or for­ti­fic­a­tion of the Water­works. Lam­bert and his yel­low West Kens­ing­tons had that in­stant swept round the corner and had shaken the Waynites heav­ily, hurl­ing back a few of the more timid, as I have just de­scribed, into our very arms. When our force struck the tail of Wayne’s, every­one knew that all was up with him. His fa­vour­ite mil­it­ary barber was struck down. His gro­cer was stunned. He him­self was hurt in the thigh, and reeled back against the wall. We had him in a trap with two jaws. ‘Is that you?’ shouted Lam­bert, gen­i­ally, to Wilson, across the hemmed-in host of Not­ting Hill. ‘That’s about the ticket,’ replied Gen­eral Wilson; ‘keep them un­der the wall.’

“The men of Not­ting Hill were fall­ing fast. Adam Wayne threw up his long arms to the wall above him, and with a spring stood upon it; a gi­gantic fig­ure against the moon. He tore the ban­ner out of the hands of the stand­ard-bearer be­low him, and shook it out sud­denly above our heads, so that it was like thun­der in the heav­ens.

“ ‘Round the Red Lion!’ he cried. ‘Swords round the Red Lion! Hal­berds round the Red Lion! They are the thorns round rose.’

“His voice and the crack of the ban­ner made a mo­ment­ary rally, and Lam­bert, whose idi­otic face was al­most beau­ti­ful with battle, felt it as by an in­stinct, and cried—

“ ‘Drop your pub­lic-house flag, you footler! Drop it!’

“ ‘The ban­ner of the Red Lion sel­dom stoops,’ said Wayne, proudly, let­ting it out lux­uri­antly on the night wind.

“The next mo­ment I knew that poor Adam’s sen­ti­mental the­at­ric­al­ity had cost him much. Lam­bert was on the wall at a bound, his sword in his teeth, and had slashed at Wayne’s head be­fore he had time to draw his sword, his hands be­ing busy with the enorm­ous flag. He stepped back only just in time to avoid the first cut, and let the flag­staff fall, so that the spear-blade at the end of it poin­ted to Lam­bert.

“ ‘The ban­ner stoops,’ cried Wayne, in a voice that must have startled streets. ‘The ban­ner of Not­ting Hill stoops to a hero.’ And with the words he drove the spear-point and half the flag­staff through Lam­bert’s body and dropped him dead upon the road be­low, a stone upon the stones of the street.

“ ‘Not­ting Hill! Not­ting Hill!’ cried Wayne, in a sort of di­vine rage. ‘Her ban­ner is all the ho­lier for the blood of a brave en­emy! Up on the wall, pat­ri­ots! Up on the wall! Not­ting Hill!’

“With his long strong arm he ac­tu­ally dragged a man up on to the wall to be sil­hou­et­ted against the moon, and more and more men climbed up there, pulled them­selves and were pulled, till clusters and crowds of the half-mas­sacred men of Pump Street massed upon the wall above us.

“ ‘Not­ting Hill! Not­ting Hill!’ cried Wayne, un­ceas­ingly.

“ ‘Well, what about Bayswa­ter?’ said a worthy work­ing­man in Wilson’s army, ir­rit­ably. ‘Bayswa­ter forever!’

“ ‘We have won!’ cried Wayne, strik­ing his flag­staff in the ground. ‘Bayswa­ter forever! We have taught our en­emies pat­ri­ot­ism!’

“ ‘Oh, cut these fel­lows up and have done with it!’ cried one of Lam­bert’s lieu­ten­ants, who was re­duced to some­thing bor­der­ing on mad­ness by the re­spons­ib­il­ity of suc­ceed­ing to the com­mand.

“ ‘Let us by all means try,’ said Wilson, grimly; and the two armies closed round the third.

“I simply can­not de­scribe what fol­lowed. I am sorry, but there is such a thing as phys­ical fa­tigue, as phys­ical nausea, and, I may add, as phys­ical ter­ror. Suf­fice it to say that the above para­graph was writ­ten about 11 p.m., and that it is now about 2 a.m., and that the battle is not fin­ished, and is not likely to be. Suf­fice it fur­ther to say that down the steep streets which lead from the Water­works Tower to the Not­ting Hill High Road, blood has been run­ning, and is run­ning, in great red ser­pents, that curl out into the main thor­ough­fare and shine in the moon.

“Later.—The fi­nal touch has been given to all this ter­rible fu­til­ity. Hours have passed; morn­ing has broken; men are still sway­ing and fight­ing at the foot of the tower and round the corner of Aubrey Road; the fight has not fin­ished. But I know it is a farce.

“News has just come to show that Wayne’s amaz­ing sortie, fol­lowed by the amaz­ing res­ist­ance through a whole night on the wall of the Water­works, is as if it had not been. What was the ob­ject of that strange ex­odus we shall prob­ably never know, for the simple reason that every­one who knew will prob­ably be cut to pieces in the course of the next two or three hours.

“I have heard, about three minutes ago, that Buck and Buck’s meth­ods have won after all. He was per­fectly right, of course, when one comes to think of it, in hold­ing that it was phys­ic­ally im­possible for a street to de­feat a city. While we thought he was patrolling the east­ern gates with his Purple army; while we were rush­ing about the streets and wav­ing hal­berds and lan­terns; while poor old Wilson was schem­ing like Moltke and fight­ing like Achilles to en­trap the wild Prov­ost of Not­ting Hill—Mr. Buck, re­tired draper, has simply driven down in a hansom cab and done some­thing about as plain as but­ter and about as use­ful and nasty. He has gone down to South Kens­ing­ton, Bromp­ton, and Ful­ham, and by spend­ing about four thou­sand pounds of his private means, has raised an army of nearly as many men; that is to say, an army big enough to beat, not only Wayne, but Wayne and all his present en­emies put to­gether. The army, I un­der­stand, is en­camped along High Street, Kens­ing­ton, and fills it from the Church to Ad­dison Road Bridge. It is to ad­vance by ten dif­fer­ent roads up­hill to the north.

“I can­not en­dure to re­main here. Everything makes it worse than it need be. The dawn, for in­stance, has broken round Camp­den Hill; splen­did spaces of sil­ver, edged with gold, are torn out of the sky. Worse still, Wayne and his men feel the dawn; their faces, though bloody and pale, are strangely hope­ful … in­sup­port­ably pathetic. Worst of all, for the mo­ment they are win­ning. If it were not for Buck and the new army they might just, and only just, win.

“I re­peat, I can­not stand it. It is like watch­ing that won­der­ful play of old Maeterlinck’s (you know my par­ti­al­ity for the healthy, jolly old au­thors of the nine­teenth cen­tury), in which one has to watch the quiet con­duct of people in­side a par­lour, while know­ing that the very men are out­side the door whose word can blast it all with tragedy. And this is worse, for the men are not talk­ing, but writh­ing and bleed­ing and drop­ping dead for a thing that is already settled—and settled against them. The great grey masses of men still toil and tug and sway hither and thither around the great grey tower; and the tower is still mo­tion­less, as it will al­ways be mo­tion­less. These men will be crushed be­fore the sun is set; and new men will arise and be crushed, and new wrongs done, and tyranny will al­ways rise again like the sun, and in­justice will al­ways be as fresh as the flowers of spring. And the stone tower will al­ways look down on it. Mat­ter, in its bru­tal beauty, will al­ways look down on those who are mad enough to con­sent to die, and yet more mad, since they con­sent to live.”

Thus ended ab­ruptly the first and last con­tri­bu­tion of the Spe­cial Cor­res­pond­ent of the Court Journal to that val­ued peri­od­ical.

The Cor­res­pond­ent him­self, as has been said, was simply sick and gloomy at the last news of the tri­umph of Buck. He slouched sadly down the steep Aubrey Road, up which he had the night be­fore run in so un­usual an ex­cite­ment, and strolled out into the empty dawn-lit main road, look­ing vaguely for a cab. He saw noth­ing in the va­cant space ex­cept a blue-and-gold glit­ter­ing thing, run­ning very fast, which looked at first like a very tall beetle, but turned out, to his great as­ton­ish­ment, to be Barker.

“Have you heard the good news?” asked that gen­tle­man.

“Yes,” said Quin, with a meas­ured voice. “I have heard the glad tid­ings of great joy. Shall we take a hansom down to Kens­ing­ton? I see one over there.”

They took the cab, and were, in four minutes, front­ing the ranks of the mul­ti­tudin­ous and in­vin­cible army. Quin had not spoken a word all the way, and some­thing about him had pre­ven­ted the es­sen­tially im­pres­sion­able Barker from speak­ing either.

The great army, as it moved up Kens­ing­ton High Street, call­ing many heads to the num­ber­less win­dows, for it was long in­deed—longer than the lives of most of the tol­er­ably young—since such an army had been seen in Lon­don. Com­pared with the vast or­gan­isa­tion which was now swal­low­ing up the miles, with Buck at its head as leader, and the King hanging at its tail as journ­al­ist, the whole story of our prob­lem was in­sig­ni­fic­ant. In the pres­ence of that army the red Not­ting Hills and the green Bayswa­ters were alike tiny and strag­gling groups. In its pres­ence the whole struggle round Pump Street was like an ant­hill un­der the hoof of an ox. Every man who felt or looked at that in­fin­ity of men knew that it was the tri­umph of Buck’s bru­tal arith­metic. Whether Wayne was right or wrong, wise or fool­ish, was quite a fair mat­ter for dis­cus­sion. But it was a mat­ter of his­tory. At the foot of Church Street, op­pos­ite Kens­ing­ton Church, they paused in their glow­ing good hu­mour.

“Let us send some kind of mes­sen­ger or her­ald up to them,” said Buck, turn­ing to Barker and the King. “Let us send and ask them to cave in without more muddle.”

“What shall we say to them?” said Barker, doubt­fully.

“The facts of the case are quite suf­fi­cient,” re­joined Buck. “It is the facts of the case that make an army sur­render. Let us simply say that our army that is fight­ing their army, and their army that is fight­ing our army, amount al­to­gether to about a thou­sand men. Say that we have four thou­sand. It is very simple. Of the thou­sand fight­ing, they have at the very most, three hun­dred, so that, with those three hun­dred, they have now to fight four thou­sand seven hun­dred men. Let them do it if it amuses them.”

And the Prov­ost of North Kens­ing­ton laughed.

The her­ald who was des­patched up Church Street in all the pomp of the South Kens­ing­ton blue and gold, with the Three Birds on his tabard, was at­ten­ded by two trum­peters.

“What will they do when they con­sent?” asked Barker, for the sake of say­ing some­thing in the sud­den still­ness of that im­mense army.

“I know my Wayne very well,” said Buck, laugh­ing. “When he sub­mits he will send a red her­ald flam­ing with the Lion of Not­ting Hill. Even de­feat will be de­light­ful to him, since it is formal and ro­mantic.”

The King, who had strolled up to the head of the line, broke si­lence for the first time.

“I shouldn’t won­der,” he said, “if he de­fied you, and didn’t send the her­ald after all. I don’t think you do know your Wayne quite so well as you think.”

“All right, your Majesty,” said Buck, eas­ily; “if it isn’t dis­respect­ful, I’ll put my polit­ical cal­cu­la­tions in a very simple form. I’ll lay you ten pounds to a shil­ling the her­ald comes with the sur­render.”

“All right,” said Auberon. “I may be wrong, but it’s my no­tion of Adam Wayne that he’ll die in his city, and that, till he is dead, it will not be a safe prop­erty.”

“The bet’s made, your Majesty,” said Buck.

Another long si­lence en­sued, in the course of which Barker alone, amid the mo­tion­less army, strolled and stamped in his rest­less way.

Then Buck sud­denly leant for­ward.

“It’s tak­ing your money, your Majesty,” he said. “I knew it was. There comes the her­ald from Adam Wayne.”

“It’s not,” cried the King, peer­ing for­ward also. “You brute, it’s a red om­ni­bus.”

“It’s not,” said Buck, calmly; and the King did not an­swer, for down the centre of the spa­cious and si­lent Church Street was walk­ing, bey­ond ques­tion, the her­ald of the Red Lion, with two trum­peters.

Buck had some­thing in him which taught him how to be mag­nan­im­ous. In his hour of suc­cess he felt mag­nan­im­ous to­wards Wayne, whom he really ad­mired; mag­nan­im­ous to­wards the King, off whom he had scored so pub­licly; and, above all, mag­nan­im­ous to­wards Barker, who was the tit­u­lar leader of this vast South Kens­ing­ton army, which his own tal­ent had evoked.

“Gen­eral Barker,” he said, bow­ing, “do you pro­pose now to re­ceive the mes­sage from the be­sieged?”

Barker bowed also, and ad­vanced to­wards the her­ald.

“Has your mas­ter, Mr. Adam Wayne, re­ceived our re­quest for sur­render?” he asked.

The her­ald con­veyed a sol­emn and re­spect­ful af­firm­at­ive.

Barker re­sumed, cough­ing slightly, but en­cour­aged.

“What an­swer does your mas­ter send?”

The her­ald again in­clined him­self sub­missively, and answered in a kind of mono­tone.

“My mes­sage is this. Adam Wayne, Lord High Prov­ost of Not­ting Hill, un­der the charter of King Auberon and the laws of God and all man­kind, free and of a free city, greets James Barker, Lord High Prov­ost of South Kens­ing­ton, by the same rights free and hon­our­able, leader of the army of the South. With all friendly rev­er­ence, and with all con­sti­tu­tional con­sid­er­a­tion, he de­sires James Barker to lay down his arms, and the whole army un­der his com­mand to lay down their arms also.”

Be­fore the words were ended the King had run for­ward into the open space with shin­ing eyes. The rest of the staff and the fore­front of the army were lit­er­ally struck breath­less. When they re­covered they began to laugh bey­ond re­straint; the re­vul­sion was too sud­den.

“The Lord High Prov­ost of Not­ting Hill,” con­tin­ued the her­ald, “does not pro­pose, in the event of your sur­render, to use his vic­tory for any of those re­press­ive pur­poses which oth­ers have en­ter­tained against him. He will leave you your free laws and your free cit­ies, your flags and your gov­ern­ments. He will not des­troy the re­li­gion of South Kens­ing­ton, or crush the old cus­toms of Bayswa­ter.”

An ir­re­press­ible ex­plo­sion of laughter went up from the fore­front of the great army.

“The King must have had some­thing to do with this hu­mour,” said Buck, slap­ping his thigh. “It’s too de­li­ciously in­solent. Barker, have a glass of wine.”

And in his con­vi­vi­al­ity he ac­tu­ally sent a sol­dier across to the res­taur­ant op­pos­ite the church and brought out two glasses for a toast.

When the laughter had died down, the her­ald con­tin­ued quite mono­ton­ously—

“In the event of your sur­ren­der­ing your arms and dis­pers­ing un­der the su­per­in­tend­ence of our forces, these local rights of yours shall be care­fully ob­served. In the event of your not do­ing so, the Lord High Prov­ost of Not­ting Hill de­sires to an­nounce that he has just cap­tured the Water­works Tower, just above you, on Camp­den Hill, and that within ten minutes from now, that is, on the re­cep­tion through me of your re­fusal, he will open the great reser­voir and flood the whole val­ley where you stand in thirty feet of wa­ter. God save King Auberon!”

Buck had dropped his glass and sent a great splash of wine over the road.

“But—but—” he said; and then by a last and splen­did ef­fort of his great san­ity, looked the facts in the face.

“We must sur­render,” he said. “You could do noth­ing against fifty thou­sand tons of wa­ter com­ing down a steep hill, ten minutes hence. We must sur­render. Our four thou­sand men might as well be four. Vi­cisti Ga­lilæe! Per­kins, you may as well get me an­other glass of wine.”

In this way the vast army of South Kens­ing­ton sur­rendered and the Em­pire of Not­ting Hill began. One fur­ther fact in this con­nec­tion is per­haps worth men­tion­ing—the fact that, after his vic­tory, Adam Wayne caused the great tower on Camp­den Hill to be plated with gold and in­scribed with a great epi­taph, say­ing that it was the monu­ment of Wil­frid Lam­bert, the heroic de­fender of the place, and sur­moun­ted with a statue, in which his large nose was done some­thing less than justice to.

Book V

I The Empire of Notting Hill

On the even­ing of the third of Octo­ber, twenty years after the great vic­tory of Not­ting Hill, which gave it the domin­ion of Lon­don, King Auberon came, as of old, out of Kens­ing­ton Palace.

He had changed little, save for a streak or two of grey in his hair, for his face had al­ways been old, and his step slow, and, as it were, de­crepit.

If he looked old, it was not be­cause of any­thing phys­ical or men­tal. It was be­cause he still wore, with a quaint con­ser­vat­ism, the frock-coat and high hat of the days be­fore the great war. “I have sur­vived the De­luge,” he said. “I am a pyr­amid, and must be­have as such.”

As he passed up the street the Kens­ing­to­ni­ans, in their pic­tur­esque blue smocks, sa­luted him as a King, and then looked after him as a curi­os­ity. It seemed odd to them that men had once worn so elvish an at­tire.

The King, cul­tiv­at­ing the walk at­trib­uted to the old­est in­hab­it­ant (“Gaf­fer Auberon” his friends were now con­fid­en­tially de­sired to call him), went tod­dling north­ward. He paused, with re­min­is­cence in his eye, at the South­ern Gate of Not­ting Hill, one of those nine great gates of bronze and steel, wrought with re­liefs of the old battles, by the hand of Chiffy him­self.

“Ah!” he said, shak­ing his head and as­sum­ing an un­ne­ces­sary air of age, and a pro­vin­cial­ism of ac­cent—“Ah! I mind when there warn’t none of this here.”

He passed through the Oss­ing­ton Gate, sur­moun­ted by a great lion, wrought in red cop­per on yel­low brass, with the motto, “Noth­ing Ill.” The guard in red and gold sa­luted him with his hal­berd.

It was about sun­set, and the lamps were be­ing lit. Auberon paused to look at them, for they were Chiffy’s finest work, and his artistic eye never failed to feast on them. In memory of the Great Battle of the Lamps, each great iron lamp was sur­moun­ted by a veiled fig­ure, sword in hand, hold­ing over the flame an iron hood or ex­tin­guisher, as if ready to let it fall if the armies of the South and West should again show their flags in the city. Thus no child in Not­ting Hill could play about the streets without the very lamp­posts re­mind­ing him of the sal­va­tion of his coun­try in the dread­ful year.

“Old Wayne was right in a way,” com­men­ted the King. “The sword does make things beau­ti­ful. It has made the whole world ro­mantic by now. And to think people once thought me a buf­foon for sug­gest­ing a ro­mantic Not­ting Hill. Deary me, deary me! (I think that is the ex­pres­sion)—it seems like a pre­vi­ous ex­ist­ence.”

Turn­ing a corner, he found him­self in Pump Street, op­pos­ite the four shops which Adam Wayne had stud­ied twenty years be­fore. He entered idly the shop of Mr. Mead, the gro­cer. Mr. Mead was some­what older, like the rest of the world, and his red beard, which he now wore with a mous­tache, and long and full, was partly blanched and dis­col­oured. He was dressed in a long and richly em­broidered robe of blue, brown, and crim­son, in­ter­woven with an Eastern com­plex­ity of pat­tern, and covered with ob­scure sym­bols and pic­tures, rep­res­ent­ing his wares passing from hand to hand and from na­tion to na­tion. Round his neck was the chain with the Blue Ar­gosy cut in tur­quoise, which he wore as Grand Master of the Gro­cers. The whole shop had the sombre and sump­tu­ous look of its owner. The wares were dis­played as prom­in­ently as in the old days, but they were now blen­ded and ar­ranged with a sense of tint and group­ing, too of­ten neg­lected by the dim gro­cers of those for­got­ten days. The wares were shown plainly, but shown not so much as an old gro­cer would have shown his stock, but rather as an edu­cated vir­tu­oso would have shown his treas­ures. The tea was stored in great blue and green vases, in­scribed with the nine in­dis­pens­able say­ings of the wise men of Ch­ina. Other vases of a con­fused or­ange and purple, less ri­gid and dom­in­ant, more humble and dreamy, stored sym­bol­ic­ally the tea of In­dia. A row of cas­kets of a simple sil­very metal con­tained tinned meats. Each was wrought with some rude but rhythmic form, as a shell, a horn, a fish, or an apple, to in­dic­ate what ma­ter­ial had been canned in it.

“Your Majesty,” said Mr. Mead, sweep­ing an Ori­ental rev­er­ence. “This is an hon­our to me, but yet more an hon­our to the city.”

Auberon took off his hat.

“Mr. Mead,” he said, “Not­ting Hill, whether in giv­ing or tak­ing, can deal in noth­ing but hon­our. Do you hap­pen to sell li­quorice?”

“Liquorice, sire,” said Mr. Mead, “is not the least im­port­ant of our be­ne­fits out of the dark heart of Ar­a­bia.”

And go­ing rev­er­ently to­wards a green and sil­ver can­is­ter, made in the form of an Ar­a­bian mosque, he pro­ceeded to serve his cus­tomer.

“I was just think­ing, Mr. Mead,” said the King, re­flect­ively, “I don’t know why I should think about it just now, but I was just think­ing of twenty years ago. Do you re­mem­ber the times be­fore the war?”

The gro­cer, hav­ing wrapped up the li­quorice sticks in a piece of pa­per (in­scribed with some ap­pro­pri­ate sen­ti­ment), lif­ted his large grey eyes dream­ily, and looked at the dark­en­ing sky out­side.

“Oh yes, your Majesty,” he said. “I re­mem­ber these streets be­fore the Lord Prov­ost began to rule us. I can’t re­mem­ber how we felt very well. All the great songs and the fight­ing change one so; and I don’t think we can really es­tim­ate all we owe to the Prov­ost; but I can re­mem­ber his com­ing into this very shop twenty-two years ago, and I re­mem­ber the things he said. The sin­gu­lar thing is that, as far as I re­mem­ber, I thought the things he said odd at that time. Now it’s the things that I said, as far as I can re­call them, that seem to me odd—as odd as a mad­man’s antics.”

“Ah!” said the King; and looked at him with an un­fathom­able quiet­ness.

“I thought noth­ing of be­ing a gro­cer then,” he said. “Isn’t that odd enough for any­body? I thought noth­ing of all the won­der­ful places that my goods come from, and won­der­ful ways that they are made. I did not know that I was for all prac­tical pur­poses a king with slaves spear­ing fishes near the secret pool, and gath­er­ing fruits in the is­lands un­der the world. My mind was a blank on the thing. I was as mad as a hat­ter.”

The King turned also, and stared out into the dark, where the great lamps that com­mem­or­ated the battle were already flam­ing.

“And is this the end of poor old Wayne?” he said, half to him­self. “To in­flame every­one so much that he is lost him­self in the blaze. Is this his vic­tory that he, my in­com­par­able Wayne, is now only one in a world of Waynes? Has he conquered and be­come by con­quest com­mon­place? Must Mr. Mead, the gro­cer, talk as high as he? Lord! what a strange world in which a man can­not re­main unique even by tak­ing the trouble to go mad!”

And he went dream­ily out of the shop.

He paused out­side the next one al­most pre­cisely as the Prov­ost had done two dec­ades be­fore.

“How un­com­monly creepy this shop looks!” he said. “But yet some­how en­cour­agingly creepy, in­vit­ingly creepy. It looks like some­thing in a jolly old nurs­ery story in which you are frightened out of your skin, and yet know that things al­ways end well. The way those low sharp gables are carved like great black bat’s wings fol­ded down, and the way those queer-col­oured bowls un­der­neath are made to shine like gi­ants eye­balls. It looks like a be­ne­vol­ent war­lock’s hut. It is ap­par­ently a chem­ist’s.”

Al­most as he spoke, Mr. Bowles, the chem­ist, came to his shop door in a long black vel­vet gown and hood, mon­astic as it were, but yet with a touch of the diabolic. His hair was still quite black, and his face even paler than of old. The only spot of col­our he car­ried was a red star cut in some pre­cious stone of strong tint, hung on his breast. He be­longed to the So­ci­ety of the Red Star of Char­ity, foun­ded on the lamps dis­played by doc­tors and chem­ists.

“A fine even­ing, sir,” said the chem­ist. “Why, I can scarcely be mis­taken in sup­pos­ing it to be your Majesty. Pray step in­side and share a bottle of sal-volat­ile, or any­thing that may take your fancy. As it hap­pens, there is an old ac­quaint­ance of your Majesty’s in my shop ca­rous­ing (if I may be per­mit­ted the term) upon that bever­age at this mo­ment.”

The King entered the shop, which was an Alad­din’s garden of shades and hues, for as the chem­ist’s scheme of col­our was more bril­liant than the gro­cer’s scheme, so it was ar­ranged with even more del­ic­acy and fancy. Never, if the phrase may be em­ployed, had such a nose­gay of medi­cines been presen­ted to the artistic eye.

But even the sol­emn rain­bow of that even­ing in­terior was ri­valled or even ec­lipsed by the fig­ure stand­ing in the centre of the shop. His form, which was a large and stately one, was clad in a bril­liant blue vel­vet, cut in the richest Renais­sance fash­ion, and slashed so as to show gleams and gaps of a won­der­ful lemon or pale yel­low. He had sev­eral chains round his neck, and his plumes, which were of sev­eral tints of bronze and gold, hung down to the great gold hilt of his long sword. He was drink­ing a dose of sal-volat­ile, and ad­mir­ing its opal tint. The King ad­vanced with a slight mys­ti­fic­a­tion to­wards the tall fig­ure, whose face was in shadow; then he said—

“By the Great Lord of Luck, Barker!”

The fig­ure re­moved his plumed cap, show­ing the same dark head and long, al­most equine face which the King had so of­ten seen rising out of the high col­lar of Bond Street. Ex­cept for a grey patch on each temple, it was totally un­changed.

“Your Majesty,” said Barker, “this is a meet­ing nobly ret­ro­spect­ive, a meet­ing that has about it a cer­tain Octo­ber gold. I drink to old days;” and he fin­ished his sal-volat­ile with simple feel­ing.

“I am de­lighted to see you again, Barker,” said the King. “It is in­deed long since we met. What with my travels in Asia Minor, and my book hav­ing to be writ­ten (you have read my Life of Prince Al­bert for Chil­dren, of course?), we have scarcely met twice since the Great War. That is twenty years ago.”

“I won­der,” said Barker, thought­fully, “if I might speak freely to your Majesty?”

“Well,” said Auberon, “it’s rather late in the day to start speak­ing re­spect­fully. Flap away, my bird of free­dom.”

“Well, your Majesty,” replied Barker, lower­ing his voice, “I don’t think it will be so long to the next war.”

“What do you mean?” asked Auberon.

“We will stand this in­solence no longer,” burst out Barker, fiercely. “We are not slaves be­cause Adam Wayne twenty years ago cheated us with a wa­ter-pipe. Not­ting Hill is Not­ting Hill; it is not the world. We in South Kens­ing­ton, we also have memor­ies—ay, and hopes. If they fought for these trumpery shops and a few lamp­posts, shall we not fight for the great High Street and the sac­red Nat­ural His­tory Mu­seum?”

“Great Heavens!” said the astoun­ded Auberon. “Will won­ders never cease? Have the two greatest mar­vels been achieved? Have you turned al­tru­istic, and has Wayne turned selfish? Are you the pat­riot, and he the tyr­ant?”

“It is not from Wayne him­self al­to­gether that the evil comes,” answered Barker. “He, in­deed, is now mostly wrapped in dreams, and sits with his old sword be­side the fire. But Not­ting Hill is the tyr­ant, your Majesty. Its Coun­cil and its crowds have been so in­tox­ic­ated by the spread­ing over the whole city of Wayne’s old ways and vis­ions, that they try to meddle with every­one, and rule every­one, and civ­il­ise every­one, and tell every­one what is good for him. I do not deny the great im­pulse which his old war, wild as it seemed, gave to the civic life of our time. It came when I was still a young man, and I ad­mit it en­larged my ca­reer. But we are not go­ing to see our own cit­ies flouted and thwarted from day to day be­cause of some­thing Wayne did for us all nearly a quarter of a cen­tury ago. I am just wait­ing here for news upon this very mat­ter. It is ru­moured that Not­ting Hill has ve­toed the statue of Gen­eral Wilson they are put­ting up op­pos­ite Chep­stow Place. If that is so, it is a black and white shame­less breach of the terms on which we sur­rendered to Turn­bull after the battle of the Tower. We were to keep our own cus­toms and self-gov­ern­ment. If that is so—”

“It is so,” said a deep voice; and both men turned round.

A burly fig­ure in purple robes, with a sil­ver eagle hung round his neck and mous­taches al­most as florid as his plumes, stood in the door­way.

“Yes,” he said, ac­know­ledging the King’s start, “I am Prov­ost Buck, and the news is true. These men of the Hill have for­got­ten that we fought round the Tower as well as they, and that it is some­times fool­ish, as well as base, to des­pise the conquered.”

“Let us step out­side,” said Barker, with a grim com­pos­ure.

Buck did so, and stood rolling his eyes up and down the lamp-lit street.

“I would like to have a go at smash­ing all this,” he muttered, “though I am over sixty. I would like—”

His voice ended in a cry, and he reeled back a step, with his hands to his eyes, as he had done in those streets twenty years be­fore.

“Dark­ness!” he cried—“dark­ness again! What does it mean?”

For in truth every lamp in the street had gone out, so that they could not see even each other’s out­line, ex­cept faintly. The voice of the chem­ist came with start­ling cheer­ful­ness out of the dens­ity.

“Oh, don’t you know?” he said. “Did they never tell you this is the Feast of the Lamps, the an­niversary of the great battle that al­most lost and just saved Not­ting Hill? Don’t you know, your Majesty, that on this night twenty-one years ago we saw Wilson’s green uni­forms char­ging down this street, and driv­ing Wayne and Turn­bull back upon the gas­works, fight­ing with their hand­ful like fiends from hell? And that then, in that great hour, Wayne sprang through a win­dow of the gas­works, with one blow of his hand brought dark­ness on the whole city, and then with a cry like a lion’s, that was heard through four streets, flew at Wilson’s men, sword in hand, and swept them, be­wildered as they were, and ig­nor­ant of the map, clear out of the sac­red street again? And don’t you know that upon that night every year all lights are turned out for half an hour while we sing the Not­ting Hill an­them in the dark­ness? Hark! there it be­gins.”

Through the night came a crash of drums, and then a strong swell of hu­man voices—

“When the world was in the bal­ance, there was night on Not­ting Hill,
(There was night on Not­ting Hill): it was no­bler than the day;
On the cit­ies where the lights are and the firesides glow,
From the seas and from the deserts came the thing we did not know,
Came the dark­ness, came the dark­ness, came the dark­ness on the foe,
And the old guard of God turned to bay.
For the old guard of God turns to bay, turns to bay,
And the stars fall down be­fore it ere its ban­ners fall today:
For when armies were around us as a howl­ing and a horde,
When fall­ing was the cit­adel and broken was the sword,
The dark­ness came upon them like the Dragon of the Lord,
When the old guard of God turned to bay.”

The voices were just up­lift­ing them­selves in a second verse when they were stopped by a scurry and a yell. Barker had bounded into the street with a cry of “South Kens­ing­ton!” and a drawn dag­ger. In less time than a man could blink, the whole packed street was full of curses and strug­gling. Barker was flung back against the shop­front, but used the second only to draw his sword as well as his dag­ger, and call­ing out, “This is not the first time I’ve come through the thick of you,” flung him­self again into the press. It was evid­ent that he had drawn blood at last, for a more vi­ol­ent out­cry arose, and many other knives and swords were dis­cern­ible in the faint light. Barker, after hav­ing wounded more than one man, seemed on the point of be­ing flung back again, when Buck sud­denly stepped out into the street. He had no weapon, for he af­fected rather the peace­ful mag­ni­fi­cence of the great burgher, than the pug­na­cious dan­dy­ism which had re­placed the old sombre dan­dy­ism in Barker. But with a blow of his clenched fist he broke the pane of the next shop, which was the old curi­os­ity shop, and, plunging in his hand, snatched a kind of Japan­ese scim­itar, and call­ing out, “Kens­ing­ton! Kens­ing­ton!” rushed to Barker’s as­sist­ance.

Barker’s sword was broken, but he was lay­ing about him with his dag­ger. Just as Buck ran up, a man of Not­ting Hill struck Barker down, but Buck struck the man down on top of him, and Barker sprang up again, the blood run­ning down his face.

Sud­denly all these cries were cloven by a great voice, that seemed to fall out of heaven. It was ter­rible to Buck and Barker and the King, from its seem­ing to come out the empty skies; but it was more ter­rible be­cause it was a fa­mil­iar voice, and one which at the same time they had not heard for so long.

“Turn up the lights,” said the voice from above them, and for a mo­ment there was no reply, but only a tu­mult.

“In the name of Not­ting Hill and of the great Coun­cil of the City, turn up the lights.”

There was again a tu­mult and a vague­ness for a mo­ment, then the whole street and every ob­ject in it sprang sud­denly out of the dark­ness, as every lamp sprang into life. And look­ing up they saw, stand­ing upon a bal­cony near the roof of one of the highest houses, the fig­ure and the face of Adam Wayne, his red hair blow­ing be­hind him, a little streaked with grey.

“What is this, my people?” he said. “Is it al­to­gether im­possible to make a thing good without it im­me­di­ately in­sist­ing on be­ing wicked? The glory of Not­ting Hill in hav­ing achieved its in­de­pend­ence, has been enough for me to dream of for many years, as I sat be­side the fire. Is it really not enough for you, who have had so many other af­fairs to ex­cite and dis­tract you? Not­ting Hill is a na­tion. Why should it con­des­cend to be a mere Em­pire? You wish to pull down the statue of Gen­eral Wilson, which the men of Bayswa­ter have so rightly erec­ted in West­bourne Grove. Fools! Who erec­ted that statue? Did Bayswa­ter erect it? No. Not­ting Hill erec­ted it. Do you not see that it is the glory of our achieve­ment that we have in­fec­ted the other cit­ies with the ideal­ism of Not­ting Hill? It is we who have cre­ated not only our own side, but both sides of this con­tro­versy. O too humble fools, why should you wish to des­troy your en­emies? You have done some­thing more to them. You have cre­ated your en­emies. You wish to pull down that gi­gantic sil­ver ham­mer, which stands, like an ob­elisk, in the centre of the Broad­way of Ham­mer­smith. Fools! Be­fore Not­ting Hill arose, did any per­son passing through Ham­mer­smith Broad­way ex­pect to see there a gi­gantic sil­ver ham­mer? You wish to ab­ol­ish the great bronze fig­ure of a knight stand­ing upon the ar­ti­fi­cial bridge at Knights­bridge. Fools! Who would have thought of it be­fore Not­ting Hill arose? I have even heard, and with deep pain I have heard it, that the evil eye of our im­per­ial envy has been cast to­wards the re­mote ho­ri­zon of the west, and that we have ob­jec­ted to the great black monu­ment of a crowned raven, which com­mem­or­ates the skir­mish of Ravenscourt Park. Who cre­ated all these things? Were they there be­fore we came? Can­not you be con­tent with that des­tiny which was enough for Athens, which was enough for Naz­areth? the des­tiny, the humble pur­pose, of cre­at­ing a new world. Is Athens angry be­cause Ro­mans and Florentines have ad­op­ted her phras­eo­logy for ex­press­ing their own pat­ri­ot­ism? Is Naz­areth angry be­cause as a little vil­lage it has be­come the type of all little vil­lages out of which, as the Snobs say, no good can come? Has Athens asked every­one to wear the chlamys? Are all fol­low­ers of the Naz­arene com­pelled to wear turbans. No! but the soul of Athens went forth and made men drink hem­lock, and the soul of Naz­areth went forth and made men con­sent to be cru­ci­fied. So has the soul of Not­ting Hill gone forth and made men real­ise what it is to live in a city. Just as we in­aug­ur­ated our sym­bols and ce­re­mon­ies, so they have in­aug­ur­ated theirs; and are you so mad as to con­tend against them? Not­ting Hill is right; it has al­ways been right. It has moul­ded it­self on its own ne­ces­sit­ies, its own sine qua non; it has ac­cep­ted its own ul­ti­matum. Be­cause it is a na­tion it has cre­ated it­self; and be­cause it is a na­tion it can des­troy it­self. Not­ting Hill shall al­ways be the judge. If it is your will be­cause of this mat­ter of Gen­eral Wilson’s statue to make war upon Bayswa­ter—”

A roar of cheers broke in upon his words, and fur­ther speech was im­possible. Pale to the lips, the great pat­riot tried again and again to speak; but even his au­thor­ity could not keep down the dark and roar­ing masses in the street be­low him. He said some­thing fur­ther, but it was not aud­ible. He des­cen­ded at last sadly from the gar­ret in which he lived, and mingled with the crowd at the foot of the houses. Find­ing Gen­eral Turn­bull, he put his hand on his shoulder with a queer af­fec­tion and grav­ity, and said—

“To­mor­row, old man, we shall have a new ex­per­i­ence, as fresh as the flowers of spring. We shall be de­feated. You and I have been through three battles to­gether, and have some­how or other missed this pe­cu­liar de­light. It is un­for­tu­nate that we shall not prob­ably be able to ex­change our ex­per­i­ences, be­cause, as it most an­noy­ingly hap­pens, we shall prob­ably both be dead.”

Turn­bull looked dimly sur­prised.

“I don’t mind so much about be­ing dead,” he said, “but why should you say that we shall be de­feated?”

“The an­swer is very simple,” replied Wayne, calmly. “It is be­cause we ought to be de­feated. We have been in the most hor­rible holes be­fore now; but in all those I was per­fectly cer­tain that the stars were on our side, and that we ought to get out. Now I know that we ought not to get out; and that takes away from me everything with which I won.”

As Wayne spoke he star­ted a little, for both men be­came aware that a third fig­ure was listen­ing to them—a small fig­ure with won­der­ing eyes.

“Is it really true, my dear Wayne,” said the King, in­ter­rupt­ing, “that you think you will be beaten to­mor­row?”

“There can be no doubt about it whatever,” replied Adam Wayne; “the real reason is the one of which I have just spoken. But as a con­ces­sion to your ma­ter­i­al­ism, I will add that they have an or­gan­ised army of a hun­dred al­lied cit­ies against our one. That in it­self, how­ever, would be un­im­port­ant.”

Quin, with his round eyes, seemed strangely in­sist­ent.

“You are quite sure,” he said, “that you must be beaten?”

“I am afraid,” said Turn­bull, gloomily, “that there can be no doubt about it.”

“Then,” cried the King, fling­ing out his arms, “give me a hal­berd! Give me a hal­berd, some­body! I de­sire all men to wit­ness that I, Auberon, King of Eng­land, do here and now ab­dic­ate, and im­plore the Prov­ost of Not­ting Hill to per­mit me to en­list in his army. Give me a hal­berd!”

He seized one from some passing guard, and, shoul­der­ing it, stamped sol­emnly after the shout­ing columns of hal­berdiers which were, by this time, parad­ing the streets. He had, how­ever, noth­ing to do with the wreck­ing of the statue of Gen­eral Wilson, which took place be­fore morn­ing.

II The Last Battle

The day was cloudy when Wayne went down to die with all his army in Kens­ing­ton Gar­dens; it was cloudy again when that army had been swal­lowed up by the vast armies of a new world. There had been an al­most un­canny in­ter­val of sun­shine, in which the Prov­ost of Not­ting Hill, with all the pla­cid­ity of an on­looker, had gazed across to the hos­tile armies on the great spaces of ver­dure op­pos­ite; the long strips of green and blue and gold lay across the park in squares and ob­longs like a pro­pos­i­tion in Euc­lid wrought in a rich em­broid­ery. But the sun­light was a weak and, as it were, a wet sun­light, and was soon swal­lowed up. Wayne spoke to the King, with a queer sort of cold­ness and lan­guor, as to the mil­it­ary op­er­a­tions. It was as he had said the night be­fore—that be­ing de­prived of his sense of an im­prac­tic­able rectitude, he was, in ef­fect, be­ing de­prived of everything. He was out of date, and at sea in a mere world of com­prom­ise and com­pet­i­tion, of Em­pire against Em­pire, of the tol­er­ably right and the tol­er­ably wrong. When his eye fell on the King, how­ever, who was march­ing very gravely with a top hat and a hal­berd, it brightened slightly.

“Well, your Majesty,” he said, “you at least ought to be proud today. If your chil­dren are fight­ing each other, at least those who win are your chil­dren. Other kings have dis­trib­uted justice, you have dis­trib­uted life. Other kings have ruled a na­tion, you have cre­ated na­tions. Oth­ers have made king­doms, you have be­got­ten them. Look at your chil­dren, father!” and he stretched his hand out to­wards the en­emy.

Auberon did not raise his eyes.

“See how splen­didly,” cried Wayne, “the new cit­ies come on—the new cit­ies from across the river. See where Bat­ter­sea ad­vances over there—un­der the flag of the Lost Dog; and Put­ney—don’t you see the Man on the White Boar shin­ing on their stand­ard as the sun catches it? It is the com­ing of a new age, your Majesty. Not­ting Hill is not a com­mon em­pire; it is a thing like Athens, the mother of a mode of life, of a man­ner of liv­ing, which shall re­new the youth of the world—a thing like Naz­areth. When I was young I re­mem­ber, in the old dreary days, wiseacres used to write books about how trains would get faster, and all the world be one em­pire, and tram­cars go to the moon. And even as a child I used to say to my­self, ‘Far more likely that we shall go on the cru­sades again, or wor­ship the gods of the city.’ And so it has been. And I am glad, though this is my last battle.”

Even as he spoke there came a crash of steel from the left, and he turned his head.

“Wilson!” he cried, with a kind of joy. “Red Wilson has charged our left. No one can hold him in; he eats swords. He is as keen a sol­dier as Turn­bull, but less pa­tient—less really great. Ha! and Barker is mov­ing. How Barker has im­proved; how hand­some he looks! It is not all hav­ing plumes; it is also hav­ing a soul in one’s daily life. Ha!”

And an­other crash of steel on the right showed that Barker had closed with Not­ting Hill on the other side.

“Turn­bull is there!” cried Wayne. “See him hurl them back! Barker is checked! Turn­bull charges—wins! But our left is broken. Wilson has smashed Bowles and Mead, and may turn our flank. For­ward, the Prov­ost’s Guard!”

And the whole centre moved for­ward, Wayne’s face and hair and sword flam­ing in the van.

The King ran sud­denly for­ward.

The next in­stant a great jar that went through it told that it had met the en­emy. And right over against them through the wood of their own weapons Auberon saw the Purple Eagle of Buck of North Kens­ing­ton.

On the left Red Wilson was storm­ing the broken ranks, his little green fig­ure con­spicu­ous even in the tangle of men and weapons, with the flam­ing red mous­taches and the crown of laurel. Bowles slashed at his head and tore away some of the wreath, leav­ing the rest bloody, and, with a roar like a bull’s, Wilson sprang at him, and, after a rattle of fen­cing, plunged his point into the chem­ist, who fell, cry­ing, “Not­ting Hill!” Then the Not­ting Hillers wavered, and Bayswa­ter swept them back in con­fu­sion. Wilson had car­ried everything be­fore him.

On the right, how­ever, Turn­bull had car­ried the Red Lion ban­ner with a rush against Barker’s men, and the ban­ner of the Golden Birds bore up with dif­fi­culty against it. Barker’s men fell fast. In the centre Wayne and Buck were en­gaged, stub­born and con­fused. So far as the fight­ing went, it was pre­cisely equal. But the fight­ing was a farce. For be­hind the three small armies with which Wayne’s small army was en­gaged lay the great sea of the al­lied armies, which looked on as yet as scorn­ful spec­tat­ors, but could have broken all four armies by mov­ing a fin­ger.

Sud­denly they did move. Some of the front con­tin­gents, the pas­toral chiefs from Shep­herd’s Bush, with their spears and fleeces, were seen ad­van­cing, and the rude clans from Pad­ding­ton Green. They were ad­van­cing for a very good reason. Buck, of North Kens­ing­ton, was sig­nalling wildly; he was sur­roun­ded, and totally cut off. His re­gi­ments were a strug­gling mass of people, is­landed in a red sea of Not­ting Hill.

The al­lies had been too care­less and con­fid­ent. They had al­lowed Barker’s force to be broken to pieces by Turn­bull, and the mo­ment that was done, the as­tute old leader of Not­ting Hill swung his men round and at­tacked Buck be­hind and on both sides. At the same mo­ment Wayne cried, “Charge!” and struck him in front like a thun­der­bolt.

Two-thirds of Buck’s men were cut to pieces be­fore their al­lies could reach them. Then the sea of cit­ies came on with their ban­ners like break­ers, and swal­lowed Not­ting Hill forever. The battle was not over, for not one of Wayne’s men would sur­render, and it las­ted till sun­down, and long after. But it was de­cided; the story of Not­ting Hill was ended.

When Turn­bull saw it, he ceased a mo­ment from fight­ing, and looked round him. The even­ing sun­light struck his face; it looked like a child’s.

“I have had my youth,” he said. Then, snatch­ing an axe from a man, he dashed into the thick of the spears of Shep­herd’s Bush, and died some­where far in the depths of their reel­ing ranks. Then the battle roared on; every man of Not­ting Hill was slain be­fore night.

Wayne was stand­ing by a tree alone after the battle. Several men ap­proached him with axes. One struck at him. His foot seemed partly to slip; but he flung his hand out, and stead­ied him­self against the tree.

Barker sprang after him, sword in hand, and shak­ing with ex­cite­ment.

“How large now, my lord,” he cried, “is the Em­pire of Not­ting Hill?”

Wayne smiled in the gath­er­ing dark.

“Al­ways as large as this,” he said, and swept his sword round in a semi­circle of sil­ver.

Barker dropped, wounded in the neck; and Wilson sprang over his body like a ti­ger-cat, rush­ing at Wayne. At the same mo­ment there came be­hind the Lord of the Red Lion a cry and a flare of yel­low, and a mass of the West Kens­ing­ton hal­berdiers ploughed up the slope, knee-deep in grass, bear­ing the yel­low ban­ner of the city be­fore them, and shout­ing aloud.

At the same second Wilson went down un­der Wayne’s sword, seem­ingly smashed like a fly. The great sword rose again like a bird, but Wilson seemed to rise with it, and, his sword be­ing broken, sprang at Wayne’s throat like a dog. The fore­most of the yel­low hal­berdiers had reached the tree and swung his axe above the strug­gling Wayne. With a curse the King whirled up his own hal­berd, and dashed the blade in the man’s face. He reeled and rolled down the slope, just as the furi­ous Wilson was flung on his back again. And again he was on his feet, and again at Wayne’s throat. Then he was flung again, but this time laugh­ing tri­umphantly. Grasped in his hand was the red and yel­low fa­vour that Wayne wore as Prov­ost of Not­ting Hill. He had torn it from the place where it had been car­ried for twenty-five years.

With a shout the West Kens­ing­ton men closed round Wayne, the great yel­low ban­ner flap­ping over his head.

“Where is your fa­vour now, Prov­ost?” cried the West Kens­ing­ton leader.

And a laugh went up.

Adam struck at the stand­ard-bearer and brought him reel­ing for­ward. As the ban­ner stooped, he grasped the yel­low folds and tore off a shred. A hal­berdier struck him on the shoulder, wound­ing bloodily.

“Here is one col­our!” he cried, push­ing the yel­low into his belt; “and here!” he cried, point­ing to his own blood—“here is the other.”

At the same in­stant the shock of a sud­den and heavy hal­berd laid the King stunned or dead. In the wild vis­ions of van­ish­ing con­scious­ness, he saw again some­thing that be­longed to an ut­terly for­got­ten time, some­thing that he had seen some­where long ago in a res­taur­ant. He saw, with his swim­ming eyes, red and yel­low, the col­ours of Ni­caragua.

Quin did not see the end. Wilson, wild with joy, sprang again at Adam Wayne, and the great sword of Not­ting Hill was whirled above once more. Then men ducked in­stinct­ively at the rush­ing noise of the sword com­ing down out of the sky, and Wilson of Bayswa­ter was smashed and wiped down upon the floor like a fly. Noth­ing was left of him but a wreck; but the blade that had broken him was broken. In dy­ing he had snapped the great sword and the spell of it; the sword of Wayne was broken at the hilt. One rush of the en­emy car­ried Wayne by force against the tree. They were too close to use hal­berd or even sword; they were breast to breast, even nos­trils to nos­trils. But Buck got his dag­ger free.

“Kill him!” he cried, in a strange stifled voice. “Kill him! Good or bad, he is none of us! Do not be blinded by the face! … God! have we not been blinded all along!” and he drew his arm back for a stab, and seemed to close his eyes.

Wayne did not drop the hand that hung on to the tree-branch. But a mighty heave went over his breast and his whole huge fig­ure, like an earth­quake over great hills. And with that con­vul­sion of ef­fort he rent the branch out of the tree, with tongues of torn wood; and, sway­ing it once only, he let the splintered club fall on Buck, break­ing his neck. The plan­ner of the Great Road fell face fore­most dead, with his dag­ger in a grip of steel.

“For you and me, and for all brave men, my brother,” said Wayne, in his strange chant, “there is good wine poured in the inn at the end of the world.”

The packed men made an­other lurch or heave to­wards him; it was al­most too dark to fight clearly. He caught hold of the oak again, this time get­ting his hand into a wide crevice and grasp­ing, as it were, the bowels of the tree. The whole crowd, num­ber­ing some thirty men, made a rush to tear him away from it; they hung on with all their weight and num­bers, and noth­ing stirred. A solitude could not have been stil­ler than that group of strain­ing men. Then there was a faint sound.

“His hand is slip­ping,” cried two men in ex­ulta­tion.

“You don’t know much of him,” said an­other, grimly (a man of the old war). “More likely his bone cracks.”

“It is neither—by God, it is neither!” said one of the first two.

“What is it, then?” asked the second.

“The tree is fall­ing,” he replied.

“As the tree falleth, so shall it lie,” said Wayne’s voice out of the dark­ness, and it had the same sweet and yet hor­rible air that it had had through­out, of com­ing from a great dis­tance, from be­fore or after the event. Even when he was strug­gling like an eel or bat­ter­ing like a mad­man, he spoke like a spec­tator. “As the tree falleth, so shall it lie,” he said. “Men have called that a gloomy text. It is the es­sence of all ex­ulta­tion. I am do­ing now what I have done all my life, what is the only hap­pi­ness, what is the only uni­ver­sal­ity. I am cling­ing to some­thing. Let it fall, and there let it lie. Fools, you go about and see the king­doms of the Earth, and are lib­eral and wise and cos­mo­pol­itan, which is all that the devil can give you—all that he could of­fer to Christ, only to be spurned away. I am do­ing what the truly wise do. When a child goes out into the garden and takes hold of a tree, say­ing, ‘Let this tree be all I have,’ that mo­ment its roots take hold on hell and its branches on the stars. The joy I have is what the lover knows when a wo­man is everything. It is what a sav­age knows when his idol is everything. It is what I know when Not­ting Hill is everything. I have a city. Let it stand or fall.”

As he spoke, the turf lif­ted it­self like a liv­ing thing, and out of it rose slowly, like cres­ted ser­pents, the roots of the oak. Then the great head of the tree, that seemed a green cloud among grey ones, swept the sky sud­denly like a broom, and the whole tree heeled over like a ship, smash­ing every­one in its fall.

III Two Voices

In a place in which there was total dark­ness for hours, there was also for hours total si­lence. Then a voice spoke out of the dark­ness, no one could have told from where, and said aloud—

“So ends the Em­pire of Not­ting Hill. As it began in blood, so it ended in blood, and all things are al­ways the same.”

And there was si­lence again, and then again there was a voice, but it had not the same tone; it seemed that it was not the same voice.

“If all things are al­ways the same, it is be­cause they are al­ways heroic. If all things are al­ways the same, it is be­cause they are al­ways new. To each man one soul only is given; to each soul only is given a little power—the power at some mo­ments to out­grow and swal­low up the stars. If age after age that power comes upon men, whatever gives it to them is great. Whatever makes men feel old is mean—an em­pire or a skin­flint shop. Whatever makes men feel young is great—a great war or a love-story. And in the darkest of the books of God there is writ­ten a truth that is also a riddle. It is of the new things that men tire—of fash­ions and pro­pos­als and im­prove­ments and change. It is the old things that startle and in­tox­ic­ate. It is the old things that are young. There is no scep­tic who does not feel that many have doubted be­fore. There is no rich and fickle man who does not feel that all his nov­el­ties are an­cient. There is no wor­ship­per of change who does not feel upon his neck the vast weight of the wear­i­ness of the uni­verse. But we who do the old things are fed by nature with a per­petual in­fancy. No man who is in love thinks that any­one has been in love be­fore. No wo­man who has a child thinks that there have been such things as chil­dren. No people that fight for their own city are haunted with the bur­den of the broken em­pires. Yes, O dark voice, the world is al­ways the same, for it is al­ways un­ex­pec­ted.”

A little gust of wind blew through the night, and then the first voice answered—

“But in this world there are some, be they wise or fool­ish, whom noth­ing in­tox­ic­ates. There are some who see all your dis­turb­ances like a cloud of flies. They know that while men will laugh at your Not­ting Hill, and will study and re­hearse and sing of Athens and Jer­u­s­alem, Athens and Jer­u­s­alem were silly sub­urbs like your Not­ting Hill. They know that the Earth it­self is a sub­urb, and can feel only drear­ily and re­spect­ably amused as they move upon it.”

“They are philo­soph­ers or they are fools,” said the other voice. “They are not men. Men live, as I say, re­joicing from age to age in some­thing fresher than pro­gress—in the fact that with every baby a new sun and a new moon are made. If our an­cient hu­man­ity were a single man, it might per­haps be that he would break down un­der the memory of so many loy­al­ties, un­der the bur­den of so many di­verse hero­isms, un­der the load and ter­ror of all the good­ness of men. But it has pleased God so to isol­ate the in­di­vidual soul that it can only learn of all other souls by hearsay, and to each one good­ness and hap­pi­ness come with the youth and vi­ol­ence of light­ning, as mo­ment­ary and as pure. And the doom of fail­ure that lies on all hu­man sys­tems does not in real fact af­fect them any more than the worms of the in­ev­it­able grave af­fect a chil­dren’s game in a meadow. Not­ting Hill has fallen; Not­ting Hill has died. But that is not the tre­mend­ous is­sue. Not­ting Hill has lived.”

“But if,” answered the other voice, “if what is achieved by all these ef­forts be only the com­mon con­tent­ment of hu­man­ity, why do men so ex­tra­vag­antly toil and die in them? Has noth­ing been done by Not­ting Hill than any chance clump of farm­ers or clan of sav­ages would not have done without it? What might have been done to Not­ting Hill if the world had been dif­fer­ent may be a deep ques­tion; but there is a deeper. What could have happened to the world if Not­ting Hill had never been?”

The other voice replied—

“The same that would have happened to the world and all the starry sys­tems if an apple-tree grew six apples in­stead of seven; some­thing would have been etern­ally lost. There has never been any­thing in the world ab­so­lutely like Not­ting Hill. There will never be any­thing quite like it to the crack of doom. I can­not be­lieve any­thing but that God loved it as He must surely love any­thing that is it­self and un­re­place­able. But even for that I do not care. If God, with all His thun­ders, hated it, I loved it.”

And with the voice a tall, strange fig­ure lif­ted it­self out of the debris in the half-dark­ness.

The other voice came after a long pause, and as it were hoarsely.

“But sup­pose the whole mat­ter were really a ho­cus-po­cus. Sup­pose that whatever mean­ing you may choose in your fancy to give to it, the real mean­ing of the whole was mock­ery. Sup­pose it was all folly. Sup­pose—”

“I have been in it,” answered the voice from the tall and strange fig­ure, “and I know it was not.”

A smal­ler fig­ure seemed half to rise in the dark.

“Sup­pose I am God,” said the voice, “and sup­pose I made the world in idle­ness. Sup­pose the stars, that you think eternal, are only the idiot fire­works of an ever­last­ing school­boy. Sup­pose the sun and the moon, to which you sing al­tern­ately, are only the two eyes of one vast and sneer­ing gi­ant, opened al­tern­ately in a never-end­ing wink. Sup­pose the trees, in my eyes, are as fool­ish as enorm­ous toad­stools. Sup­pose So­crates and Char­le­magne are to me only beasts, made fun­nier by walk­ing on their hind legs. Sup­pose I am God, and hav­ing made things, laugh at them.”

“And sup­pose I am man,” answered the other. “And sup­pose that I give the an­swer that shat­ters even a laugh. Sup­pose I do not laugh back at you, do not blas­pheme you, do not curse you. But sup­pose, stand­ing up straight un­der the sky, with every power of my be­ing, I thank you for the fools’ para­dise you have made. Sup­pose I praise you, with a lit­eral pain of ec­stasy, for the jest that has brought me so ter­rible a joy. If we have taken the child’s games, and given them the ser­i­ous­ness of a Cru­sade, if we have drenched your grot­esque Dutch garden with the blood of mar­tyrs, we have turned a nurs­ery into a temple. I ask you, in the name of Heaven, who wins?”

The sky close about the crests of the hills and trees was be­gin­ning to turn from black to grey, with a ran­dom sug­ges­tion of the morn­ing. The slight fig­ure seemed to crawl to­wards the lar­ger one, and the voice was more hu­man.

“But sup­pose, friend,” it said, “sup­pose that, in a bit­terer and more real sense, it was all a mock­ery. Sup­pose that there had been, from the be­gin­ning of these great wars, one who watched them with a sense that is bey­ond ex­pres­sion, a sense of de­tach­ment, of re­spons­ib­il­ity, of irony, of agony. Sup­pose that there were one who knew it was all a joke.”

The tall fig­ure answered—

“He could not know it. For it was not all a joke.”

And a gust of wind blew away some clouds that sealed the sky­line, and showed a strip of sil­ver be­hind his great dark legs. Then the other voice came, hav­ing crept nearer still.

“Adam Wayne,” it said, “there are men who con­fess only in ar­tic­ulo mor­tis; there are people who blame them­selves only when they can no longer help oth­ers. I am one of them. Here, upon the field of the bloody end of it all, I come to tell you plainly what you would never un­der­stand be­fore. Do you know who I am?”

“I know you, Auberon Quin,” answered the tall fig­ure, “and I shall be glad to un­bur­den your spirit of any­thing that lies upon it.”

“Adam Wayne,” said the other voice, “of what I have to say you can­not in com­mon reason be glad to un­bur­den me. Wayne, it was all a joke. When I made these cit­ies, I cared no more for them than I care for a cen­taur, or a mer­man, or a fish with legs, or a pig with feath­ers, or any other ab­surdity. When I spoke to you sol­emnly and en­cour­agingly about the flag of your free­dom and the peace of your city, I was play­ing a vul­gar prac­tical joke on an hon­est gen­tle­man, a vul­gar prac­tical joke that has las­ted for twenty years. Though no one could be­lieve it of me, per­haps, it is the truth that I am a man both timid and tender­hearted. I never dared in the early days of your hope, or the cent­ral days of your su­prem­acy, to tell you this; I never dared to break the co­lossal calm of your face. God knows why I should do it now, when my farce has ended in tragedy and the ruin of all your people! But I say it now. Wayne, it was done as a joke.”

There was si­lence, and the freshen­ing breeze blew the sky clearer and clearer, leav­ing great spaces of the white dawn.

At last Wayne said, very slowly—

“You did it all only as a joke?”

“Yes,” said Quin, briefly.

“When you con­ceived the idea,” went on Wayne, dream­ily, “of an army for Bayswa­ter and a flag for Not­ting Hill, there was no gleam, no sug­ges­tion in your mind that such things might be real and pas­sion­ate?”

“No,” answered Auberon, turn­ing his round white face to the morn­ing with a dull and splen­did sin­cer­ity; “I had none at all.”

Wayne sprang down from the height above him and held out his hand.

“I will not stop to thank you,” he said, with a curi­ous joy in his voice, “for the great good for the world you have ac­tu­ally wrought. All that I think of that I have said to you a mo­ment ago, even when I thought that your voice was the voice of a de­ris­ive om­ni­po­tence, its laughter older than the winds of heaven. But let me say what is im­me­di­ate and true. You and I, Auberon Quin, have both of us through­out our lives been again and again called mad. And we are mad. We are mad, be­cause we are not two men, but one man. We are mad, be­cause we are two lobes of the same brain, and that brain has been cloven in two. And if you ask for the proof of it, it is not hard to find. It is not merely that you, the hu­mor­ist, have been in these dark days stripped of the joy of grav­ity. It is not merely that I, the fan­atic, have had to grope without hu­mour. It is that, though we seem to be op­pos­ite in everything, we have been op­pos­ite like man and wo­man, aim­ing at the same mo­ment at the same prac­tical thing. We are the father and the mother of the Charter of the Cit­ies.”

Quin looked down at the debris of leaves and tim­ber, the rel­ics of the battle and stam­pede, now glisten­ing in the grow­ing day­light, and fi­nally said—

“Yet noth­ing can al­ter the ant­ag­on­ism—the fact that I laughed at these things and you ad­ored them.”

Wayne’s wild face flamed with some­thing god­like, as he turned it to be struck by the sun­rise.

“I know of some­thing that will al­ter that ant­ag­on­ism, some­thing that is out­side us, some­thing that you and I have all our lives per­haps taken too little ac­count of. The equal and eternal hu­man be­ing will al­ter that ant­ag­on­ism, for the hu­man be­ing sees no real ant­ag­on­ism between laughter and re­spect, the hu­man be­ing, the com­mon man, whom mere geni­uses like you and me can only wor­ship like a god. When dark and dreary days come, you and I are ne­ces­sary, the pure fan­atic, the pure sat­ir­ist. We have between us remedied a great wrong. We have lif­ted the mod­ern cit­ies into that po­etry which every­one who knows man­kind knows to be im­meas­ur­ably more com­mon than the com­mon­place. But in healthy people there is no war between us. We are but the two lobes of the brain of a plough­man. Laughter and love are every­where. The cathed­rals, built in the ages that loved God, are full of blas­phem­ous grot­esques. The mother laughs con­tinu­ally at the child, the lover laughs con­tinu­ally at the lover, the wife at the hus­band, the friend at the friend. Auberon Quin, we have been too long sep­ar­ated; let us go out to­gether. You have a hal­berd and I a sword, let us start our wan­der­ings over the world. For we are its two es­sen­tials. Come, it is already day.”

In the blank white light Auberon hes­it­ated a mo­ment. Then he made the formal sa­lute with his hal­berd, and they went away to­gether into the un­known world.

Endnotes

1. Clan­ri­carde Gar­dens at this time was no longer a cul-de-sac, but was con­nec­ted by Pump Street to Pem­bridge Square. ↩