"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 daïs, 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 daïs,

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 any one 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 any one 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 for ever."

"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 lamp-posts

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 daïs.

"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 daïs.

"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

CHAPTER 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, red-headed 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

sky-line 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 short-sighted) the red and white and yellow suns

of the gas-lights thronged and melted into each other like an orchard

of fiery trees, the beginning of the woods of elf-land.

But, oddly enough, it was because he was a small poet that he came to

his strange and isolated triumph. It was because he was a failure in

literature that he became a portent in English history. He was one of

those to whom nature has given the desire without the power of

artistic expression. He had been a dumb poet from his cradle. He might

have been so to his grave, and carried unuttered into the darkness a

treasure of new and sensational song. But he was born under the lucky

star of a single coincidence. He happened to be at the head of his

dingy municipality at the time of the King's jest, at the time when

all municipalities were suddenly commanded to break out into banners

and flowers. Out of the long procession of the silent poets, who have

been passing since the beginning of the world, this one man found

himself in the midst of an heraldic vision, in which he could act and

speak and live lyrically. While the author and the victims alike

treated the whole matter as a silly public charade, this one man, by

taking it seriously, sprang suddenly into a throne of artistic

omnipotence. Armour, music, standards, watch-fires, the noise of

drums, all the theatrical properties were thrown before him. This one

poor rhymster, having burnt his own rhymes, began to live that life of

open air and acted poetry of which all the poets of the earth have

dreamed in vain; the life for which the Iliad is only a cheap

substitute.

Upwards from his abstracted childhood, Adam Wayne had grown strongly

and silently in a certain quality or capacity which is in modern

cities almost entirely artificial, but which can be natural, and was

primarily almost brutally natural in him, the quality or capacity of

patriotism. It exists, like other virtues and vices, in a certain

undiluted reality. It is not confused with all kinds of other things.

A child speaking of his country or his village may make every mistake

in Mandeville or tell every lie in Munchausen, but in his statement

there will be no psychological lies any more than there can be in a

good song. Adam Wayne, as a boy, had for his dull streets in Notting

Hill the ultimate and ancient sentiment that went out to Athens or

Jerusalem. He knew the secret of the passion, those secrets which make

real old national songs sound so strange to our civilisation. He knew

that real patriotism tends to sing about sorrows and forlorn hopes

much more than about victory. He knew that in proper names themselves

is half the poetry of all national poems. Above all, he knew the

supreme psychological fact about patriotism, as certain in connection

with it as that a fine shame comes to all lovers, the fact that the

patriot never under any circumstances boasts of the largeness of his

country, but always, and of necessity, boasts of the smallness of it.

All this he knew, not because he was a philosopher or a genius, but

because he was a child. Any one who cares to walk up a side slum like

Pump Street, can see a little Adam claiming to be king of a

paving-stone. And he will always be proudest if the stone is almost

too narrow for him to keep his feet inside it.

It was while he was in such a dream of defensive battle, marking out

some strip of street or fortress of steps as the limit of his haughty

claim, that the King had met him, and, with a few words flung in

mockery, ratified for ever the strange boundaries of his soul.

Thenceforward the fanciful idea of the defence of Notting Hill in war

became to him a thing as solid as eating or drinking or lighting a

pipe. He disposed his meals for it, altered his plans for it, lay

awake in the night and went over it again. Two or three shops were to

him an arsenal; an area was to him a moat; corners of balconies and

turns of stone steps were points for the location of a culverin or an

archer. It is almost impossible to convey to any ordinary imagination

the degree to which he had transmitted the leaden London landscape to

a romantic gold. The process began almost in babyhood, and became

habitual like a literal madness. It was felt most keenly at night,

when London is really herself, when her lights shine in the dark like

the eyes of innumerable cats, and the outline of the dark houses has

the bold simplicity of blue hills. But for him the night revealed

instead of concealing, and he read all the blank hours of morning and

afternoon, by a contradictory phrase, in the light of that darkness.

To this man, at any rate, the inconceivable had happened. The

artificial city had become to him nature, and he felt the curbstones

and gas-lamps as things as ancient as the sky.

One instance may suffice. Walking along Pump Street with a friend, he

said, as he gazed dreamily at the iron fence of a little front garden,

"How those railings stir one's blood!"

His friend, who was also a great intellectual admirer, looked at them

painfully, but without any particular emotion. He was so troubled

about it that he went back quite a large number of times on quiet

evenings and stared at the railings, waiting for something to happen

to his blood, but without success. At last he took refuge in asking

Wayne himself. He discovered that the ecstacy lay in the one point he

had never noticed about the railings even after his six visits--the

fact that they were, like the great majority of others--in London,

shaped at the top after the manner of a spear. As a child, Wayne had

half unconsciously compared them with the spears in pictures of

Lancelot and St. George, and had grown up under the shadow of the

graphic association. Now, whenever he looked at them, they were simply

the serried weapons that made a hedge of steel round the sacred homes

of Notting Hill. He could not have cleansed his mind of that meaning

even if he tried. It was not a fanciful comparison, or anything like

it. It would not have been true to say that the familiar railings

reminded him of spears; it would have been far truer to say that the

familiar spears occasionally reminded him of railings.

A couple of days after his interview with the King, Adam Wayne was

pacing like a caged lion in front of five shops that occupied the

upper end of the disputed street. They were a grocer's, a chemist's, a

barber's, an old curiosity shop and a toy-shop that sold also

newspapers. It was these five shops which his childish fastidiousness

had first selected as the essentials of the Notting Hill campaign, the

citadel of the city. If Notting Hill was the heart of the universe,

and Pump Street was the heart of Notting Hill, this was the heart of

Pump Street. The fact that they were all small and side by side

realised that feeling for a formidable comfort and compactness which,

as we have said, was the heart of his patriotism, and of all

patriotism. The grocer (who had a wine and spirit licence) was

included because he could provision the garrison; the old curiosity

shop because it contained enough swords, pistols, partisans,

cross-bows, and blunderbusses to arm a whole irregular regiment; the

toy and paper shop because Wayne thought a free press an essential

centre for the soul of Pump Street; the chemist's to cope with

outbreaks of disease among the besieged; and the barber's because it

was in the middle of all the rest, and the barber's son was an

intimate friend and spiritual affinity.

It was a cloudless October evening settling down through purple into

pure silver around the roofs and chimneys of the steep little street,

which looked black and sharp and dramatic. In the deep shadows the

gas-lit shop fronts gleamed like five fires in a row, and before them,

darkly outlined like a ghost against some purgatorial furnaces, passed

to and fro the tall bird-like figure and eagle nose of Adam Wayne.

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

"There are, after all, enigmas," he said "even to the man who has

faith. There are doubts that remain even after the true philosophy is

completed in every rung and rivet. And here is one of them. Is the

normal human need, the normal human condition, higher or lower than

those special states of the soul which call out a doubtful and

dangerous glory? those special powers of knowledge or sacrifice which

are made possible only by the existence of evil? Which should come

first to our affections, the enduring sanities of peace or the

half-maniacal virtues of battle? Which should come first, the man

great in the daily round or the man great in emergency? Which should

come first, to return to the enigma before me, the grocer or the

chemist? Which is more certainly the stay of the city, the swift

chivalrous chemist or the benignant all-providing grocer? In such

ultimate spiritual doubts it is only possible to choose a side by the

higher instincts, and to abide the issue. In any case, I have made my

choice. May I be pardoned if I choose wrongly, but I choose the

grocer."

"Good morning, sir," said the grocer, who was a middle-aged man,

partially bald, with harsh red whiskers and beard, and forehead lined

with all the cares of the small tradesman. "What can I do for you,

sir?"

Wayne removed his hat on entering the shop, with a ceremonious

gesture, which, slight as it was, made the tradesman eye him with the

beginnings of wonder.

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

"Why, sir," said the grocer, "that sounds like the times when I was a

boy and we used to have elections."

"You will have them again," said Wayne, firmly, "and far greater

things. Listen, Mr. Mead. I know the temptations which a grocer has to

a too cosmopolitan philosophy. I can imagine what it must be to sit

all day as you do surrounded with wares from all the ends of the

earth, from strange seas that we have never sailed and strange forests

that we could not even picture. No Eastern king ever had such

argosies or such cargoes coming from the sunrise and the sunset, and

Solomon in all his glory was not enriched like one of you. India is at

your elbow," he cried, lifting his voice and pointing his stick at a

drawer of rice, the grocer making a movement of some alarm, "China is

before you, Demerara is behind you, America is above your head, and at

this very moment, like some old Spanish admiral, you hold Tunis in

your hands."

Mr. Mead dropped the box of dates which he was just lifting, and then

picked it up again vaguely.

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

"I know, I say, the temptations of so international, so universal a

vision of wealth. I know that it must be your danger not to fall like

many tradesmen into too dusty and mechanical a narrowness, but rather

to be too broad, to be too general, too liberal. If a narrow

nationalism be the danger of the pastry-cook, who makes his own wares

under his own heavens, no less is cosmopolitanism the danger of the

grocer. But I come to you in the name of that patriotism which no

wanderings or enlightenments should ever wholly extinguish, and I ask

you to remember Notting Hill. For, after all, in this cosmopolitan

magnificence, she has played no small part. Your dates may come from

the tall palms of Barbary, your sugar from the strange islands of the

tropics, your tea from the secret villages of the Empire of the

Dragon. That this room might be furnished, forests may have been

spoiled under the Southern Cross, and leviathans speared under the

Polar Star. But you yourself--surely no inconsiderable treasure--you

yourself, the brain that wields these vast interests--you yourself, at

least, have grown to strength and wisdom between these grey houses and

under this rainy sky. This city which made you, and thus made your

fortunes, is threatened with war. Come forth and tell to the ends of

the earth this lesson. Oil is from the North and fruits from the

South; rices are from India and spices from Ceylon; sheep are from New

Zealand and men from Notting Hill."

The grocer sat for some little while, with dim eyes and his mouth

open, looking rather like a fish. Then he scratched the back of his

head, and said nothing. Then he said--

"Anything out of the shop, sir?"

Wayne looked round in a dazed way. Seeing a pile of tins of pine-apple

chunks, he waved his stick generally towards them.

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

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

"Yes, yes; all those," replied Wayne, still a little bewildered, like

a man splashed with cold water.

"Very good, sir; thank you, sir," said the grocer with animation. "You

may count upon my patriotism, sir."

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

gathering night.

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

"What a nice fellow he is!" he said. "It's odd how often they are

nice. Much nicer than those as are all right."

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

unmistakably wavering.

"What a weakness it is!" he muttered. "I have never got rid of it from

childhood--the fear of this magic shop. The grocer is rich, he is

romantic, he is poetical in the truest sense, but he is not--no, he is

not supernatural. But the chemist! All the other shops stand in

Notting Hill, but this stands in Elf-land. Look at those great burning

bowls of colour. It must be from them that God paints the sunsets. It

is superhuman, and the superhuman is all the more uncanny when it is

beneficent. That is the root of the fear of God. I am afraid. But I

must be a man and enter."

He was a man, and entered. A short, dark young man was behind the

counter with spectacles, and greeted him with a bright but entirely

business-like smile.

"A fine evening, sir," he said.

"Fine indeed, strange Father," said Adam, stretching his hands

somewhat forward. "It is on such clear and mellow nights that your

shop is most itself. Then they appear most perfect, those moons of

green and gold and crimson, which from afar oft guide the pilgrim of

pain and sickness to this house of merciful witchcraft."

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

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

some sal volatile."

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

man, genially.

"One and six--one and six," replied Wayne, with a wild submissiveness.

"I come to ask you, Mr. Bowles, a terrible question."

He paused and collected himself.

"It is necessary," he muttered--"it is necessary to be tactful, and to

suit the appeal to each profession in turn."

"I come," he resumed aloud, "to ask you a question which goes to the

roots of your miraculous toils. Mr. Bowles, shall all this witchery

cease?" And he waved his stick around the shop.

Meeting with no answer, he continued with animation--

"In Notting Hill we have felt to its core the elfish mystery of your

profession. And now Notting Hill itself is threatened."

"Anything more, sir?" asked the chemist.

"Oh," said Wayne, somewhat disturbed--"oh, what is it chemists sell?

Quinine, I think. Thank you. Shall it be destroyed? I have met these

men of Bayswater and North Kensington--Mr. Bowles, they are

materialists. They see no witchery in your work, even when it is

wrought within their own borders. They think the chemist is

commonplace. They think him human."

The chemist appeared to pause, only a moment, to take in the insult,

and immediately said--

"And the next article, please?"

"Alum," said the Provost, wildly. "I resume. It is in this sacred

town alone that your priesthood is reverenced. Therefore, when you

fight for us you fight not only for yourself, but for everything you

typify. You fight not only for Notting Hill, but for Fairyland, for as

surely as Buck and Barker and such men hold sway, the sense of

Fairyland in some strange manner diminishes."

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

"Oh yes, jujubes--Gregory powder--magnesia. The danger is imminent. In

all this matter I have felt that I fought not merely for my own city

(though to that I owe all my blood), but for all places in which these

great ideas could prevail. I am fighting not merely for Notting Hill,

but for Bayswater itself; for North Kensington itself. For if the

gold-hunters prevail, these also will lose all their ancient

sentiments and all the mystery of their national soul. I know I can

count upon you."

"Oh yes, sir," said the chemist, with great animation; "we are always

glad to oblige a good customer."

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

soul.

"It is so fortunate," he said, "to have tact, to be able to play upon

the peculiar talents and specialities, the cosmopolitanism of the

grocer and the world-old necromancy of the chemist. Where should I be

without tact?"

CHAPTER II--_The Remarkable Mr. Turnbull_

After two more interviews with shopmen, however, the patriot's

confidence in his own psychological diplomacy began vaguely to wane.

Despite the care with which he considered the peculiar rationale and

the peculiar glory of each separate shop, there seemed to be something

unresponsive about the shopmen. Whether it was a dark resentment

against the uninitiate for peeping into their masonic magnificence, he

could not quite conjecture.

His conversation with the man who kept the shop of curiosities had

begun encouragingly. The man who kept the shop of curiosities had,

indeed, enchanted him with a phrase. He was standing drearily at the

door of his shop, a wrinkled man with a grey pointed beard, evidently

a gentleman who had come down in the world.

"And how does your commerce go, you strange guardian of the past?"

said Wayne, affably.

"Well, sir, not very well," replied the man, with that patient voice

of his class which is one of the most heart-breaking things in the

world. "Things are terribly quiet."

Wayne's eyes shone suddenly.

"A great saying," he said, "worthy of a man whose merchandise is human

history. Terribly quiet; that is in two words the spirit of this age,

as I have felt it from my cradle. I sometimes wondered how many other

people felt the oppression of this union between quietude and terror.

I see blank well-ordered streets and men in black moving about

inoffensively, sullenly. It goes on day after day, day after day, and

nothing happens; but to me it is like a dream from which I might wake

screaming. To me the straightness of our life is the straightness of a

thin cord stretched tight. Its stillness is terrible. It might snap

with a noise like thunder. And you who sit, amid the _débris_ of the

great wars, you who sit, as it were, upon a battlefield, you know that

war was less terrible than this evil peace; you know that the idle

lads who carried those swords under Francis or Elizabeth, the rude

Squire or Baron who swung that mace about in Picardy or Northumberland

battles, may have been terribly noisy, but were not like us, terribly

quiet."

Whether it was a faint embarrassment of conscience as to the original

source and date of the weapons referred to, or merely an engrained

depression, the guardian of the past looked, if anything, a little

more worried.

"But I do not think," continued Wayne, "that this horrible silence of

modernity will last, though I think for the present it will increase.

What a farce is this modern liberality! Freedom of speech means

practically, in our modern civilisation, that we must only talk about

unimportant things. We must not talk about religion, for that is

illiberal; we must not talk about bread and cheese, for that is

talking shop; we must not talk about death, for that is depressing; we

must not talk about birth, for that is indelicate. It cannot last.

Something must break this strange indifference, this strange dreamy

egoism, this strange loneliness of millions in a crowd. Something must

break it. Why should it not be you and I? Can you do nothing else but

guard relics?"

The shopman wore a gradually clearing expression, which would have led

those unsympathetic with the cause of the Red Lion to think that the

last sentence was the only one to which he had attached any meaning.

"I am rather old to go into a new business," he said, "and I don't

quite know what to be, either."

"Why not," said Wayne, gently having reached the crisis of his

delicate persuasion--"why not be a colonel?"

It was at this point, in all probability, that the interview began to

yield more disappointing results. The man appeared inclined at first

to regard the suggestion of becoming a colonel as outside the sphere

of immediate and relevant discussion. A long exposition of the

inevitable war of independence, coupled with the purchase of a

doubtful sixteenth-century sword for an exaggerated price, seemed to

resettle matters. Wayne left the shop, however, somewhat infected with

the melancholy of its owner.

That melancholy was completed at the barber's.

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

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

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

"War!" said Wayne, warmly. "But not for anything inconsistent with the

beautiful and the civilised arts. War for beauty. War for society. War

for peace. A great chance is offered you of repelling that slander

which, in defiance of the lives of so many artists, attributes

poltroonery to those who beautify and polish the surface of our lives.

Why should not hairdressers be heroes? Why should not--"

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

your sort here. You get out."

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

enraged.

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

"Notting Hill," he said, "will need her bolder sons;" and he turned

gloomily to the toy-shop.

It was one of those queer little shops so constantly seen in the side

streets of London, which must be called toy-shops only because toys

upon the whole predominate; for the remainder of goods seem to consist

of almost everything else in the world--tobacco, exercise-books,

sweet-stuff, novelettes, halfpenny paper clips, halfpenny pencil

sharpeners, bootlaces, and cheap fireworks. It also sold newspapers,

and a row of dirty-looking posters hung along the front of it.

"I am afraid," said Wayne, as he entered, "that I am not getting on

with these tradesmen as I should. Is it that I have neglected to rise

to the full meaning of their work? Is there some secret buried in each

of these shops which no mere poet can discover?"

He stepped to the counter with a depression which he rapidly conquered

as he addressed the man on the other side of it,--a man of short

stature, and hair prematurely white, and the look of a large baby.

"Sir," said Wayne, "I am going from house to house in this street of

ours, seeking to stir up some sense of the danger which now threatens

our city. Nowhere have I felt my duty so difficult as here. For the

toy-shop keeper has to do with all that remains to us of Eden before

the first wars began. You sit here meditating continually upon the

wants of that wonderful time when every staircase leads to the stars,

and every garden-path to the other end of nowhere. Is it

thoughtlessly, do you think, that I strike the dark old drum of peril

in the paradise of children? But consider a moment; do not condemn me

hastily. Even that paradise itself contains the rumour or beginning of

that danger, just as the Eden that was made for perfection contained

the terrible tree. For judge childhood, even by your own arsenal of

its pleasures. You keep bricks; you make yourself thus, doubtless,

the witness of the constructive instinct older than the destructive.

You keep dolls; you make yourself the priest of that divine idolatry.

You keep Noah's Arks; you perpetuate the memory of the salvation of

all life as a precious, an irreplaceable thing. But do you keep only,

sir, the symbols of this prehistoric sanity, this childish rationality

of the earth? Do you not keep more terrible things? What are those

boxes, seemingly of lead soldiers, that I see in that glass case? Are

they not witnesses to that terror and beauty, that desire for a lovely

death, which could not be excluded even from the immortality of Eden?

Do not despise the lead soldiers, Mr. Turnbull."

"I don't," said Mr. Turnbull, of the toy-shop, 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 toy-shop 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 toy-shop 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

any one, 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.

CHAPTER 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 any one else. We offer the thousand.

It's not business-like, 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 any one 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 water-colour 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 every one'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 any one else could stir.

* * * * *

Forty workmen, a hundred Bayswater Halberdiers, two hundred from

South, and three from North Kensington, assembled at the foot of

Holland Walk and marched up it, under the general direction of Barker,

who looked flushed and happy in full dress. At the end of the

procession a small and sulky figure lingered like an urchin. It was

the King.

"Barker," he said at length, appealingly, "you are an old friend of

mine--you understand my hobbies as I understand yours. Why can't you

let it alone? I hoped that such fun might come out of this Wayne

business. Why can't you let it alone? It doesn't really so much matter

to you--what's a road or so? For me it's the one joke that may save me

from pessimism. Take fewer men and give me an hour's fun. Really and

truly, James, if you collected coins or humming-birds, and I could buy

one with the price of your road, I would buy it. I collect

incidents--those rare, those precious things. Let me have one. Pay a

few pounds for it. Give these Notting Hillers a chance. Let them

alone."

"Auberon," said Barker, kindly, forgetting all royal titles in a rare

moment of sincerity, "I do feel what you mean. I have had moments when

these hobbies have hit me. I have had moments when I have sympathised

with your humours. I have had moments, though you may not easily

believe it, when I have sympathised with the madness of Adam Wayne.

But the world, Auberon, the real world, is not run on these hobbies.

It goes on great brutal wheels of facts--wheels on which you are the

butterfly; and Wayne is the fly on the wheel."

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

"Thank you, James; what you say is true. It is only a parenthetical

consolation to me to compare the intelligence of flies somewhat

favourably with the intelligence of wheels. But it is the nature of

flies to die soon, and the nature of wheels to go on for ever. Go on

with the wheel. Good-bye, old man."

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

bamboo on his leg.

The King watched the tail of the retreating regiment with a look of

genuine depression, which made him seem more like a baby than ever.

Then he swung round and struck his hands together.

"In a world without humour," he said, "the only thing to do is to eat.

And how perfect an exception! How can these people strike dignified

attitudes, and pretend that things matter, when the total

ludicrousness of life is proved by the very method by which it is

supported? A man strikes the lyre, and says, 'Life is real, life is

earnest,' and then goes into a room and stuffs alien substances into a

hole in his head. I think Nature was indeed a little broad in her

humour in these matters. But we all fall back on the pantomime, as I

have in this municipal affair. Nature has her farces, like the act of

eating or the shape of the kangaroo, for the more brutal appetite. She

keeps her stars and mountains for those who can appreciate something

more subtly ridiculous." He turned to his equerry. "But, as I said

'eating,' let us have a picnic like two nice little children. Just run

and bring me a table and a dozen courses or so, and plenty of

champagne, and under these swinging boughs, Bowler, we will return to

Nature."

It took about an hour to erect in Holland Lane the monarch's simple

repast, during which time he walked up and down and whistled, but

still with an unaffected air of gloom. He had really been done out of

a pleasure he had promised himself, and had that empty and sickened

feeling which a child has when disappointed of a pantomime. When he

and the equerry had sat down, however, and consumed a fair amount of

dry champagne, his spirits began mildly to revive.

"Things take too long in this world," he said. "I detest all this

Barkerian business about evolution and the gradual modification of

things. I wish the world had been made in six days, and knocked to

pieces again in six more. And I wish I had done it. The joke's good

enough in a broad way, sun and moon and the image of God, and all

that, but they keep it up so damnably long. Did you ever long for a

miracle, Bowler?"

"No, sir," said Bowler, who was an evolutionist, and had been

carefully brought up.

"Then I have," answered the King. "I have walked along a street with

the best cigar in the cosmos in my mouth, and more Burgundy inside me

than you ever saw in your life, and longed that the lamp-post would

turn into an elephant to save me from the hell of blank existence.

Take my word for it, my evolutionary Bowler, don't you believe people

when they tell you that people sought for a sign, and believed in

miracles because they were ignorant. They did it because they were

wise, filthily, vilely wise--too wise to eat or sleep or put on their

boots with patience. This seems delightfully like a new theory of the

origin of Christianity, which would itself be a thing of no mean

absurdity. Take some more wine."

The wind blew round them as they sat at their little table, with its

white cloth and bright wine-cups, and flung the tree-tops of Holland

Park against each other, but the sun was in that strong temper which

turns green into gold. The King pushed away his plate, lit a cigar

slowly, and went on--

"Yesterday I thought that something next door to a really entertaining

miracle might happen to me before I went to amuse the worms. To see

that red-haired maniac waving a great sword, and making speeches to

his incomparable followers, would have been a glimpse of that Land of

Youth from which the Fates shut us out. I had planned some quite

delightful things. A Congress of Knightsbridge with a treaty, and

myself in the chair, and perhaps a Roman triumph, with jolly old

Barker led in chains. And now these wretched prigs have gone and

stamped out the exquisite Mr. Wayne altogether, and I suppose they

will put him in a private asylum somewhere in their damned humane way.

Think of the treasures daily poured out to his unappreciative keeper!

I wonder whether they would let me be his keeper. But life is a vale.

Never forget at any moment of your existence to regard it in the light

of a vale. This graceful habit, if not acquired in youth--"

The King stopped, with his cigar lifted, for there had slid into his

eyes the startled look of a man listening. He did not move for a few

moments; then he turned his head sharply towards the high, thin, and

lath-like paling which fenced certain long gardens and similar spaces

from the lane. From behind it there was coming a curious scrambling

and scraping noise, as of a desperate thing imprisoned in this box of

thin wood. The King threw away his cigar, and jumped on to the table.

From this position he saw a pair of hands hanging with a hungry clutch

on the top of the fence. Then the hands quivered with a convulsive

effort, and a head shot up between them--the head of one of the

Bayswater Town Council, his eyes and whiskers wild with fear. He swung

himself over, and fell on the other side on his face, and groaned

openly and without ceasing. The next moment the thin, taut wood of the

fence was struck as by a bullet, so that it reverberated like a drum,

and over it came tearing and cursing, with torn clothes and broken

nails and bleeding faces, twenty men at one rush. The King sprang five

feet clear off the table on to the ground. The moment after the table

was flung over, sending bottles and glasses flying, and the _débris_

was literally swept along the ground by that stream of men pouring

past, and Bowler was borne along with them, as the King said in his

famous newspaper article, "like a captured bride." The great fence

swung and split under the load of climbers that still scaled and

cleared it. Tremendous gaps were torn in it by this living artillery;

and through them the King could see more and more frantic faces, as in

a dream, and more and more men running. They were as miscellaneous as

if some one had taken the lid off a human dustbin. Some were

untouched, some were slashed and battered and bloody, some were

splendidly dressed, some tattered and half naked, some were in the

fantastic garb of the burlesque cities, some in the dullest modern

dress. The King stared at all of them, but none of them looked at the

King. Suddenly he stepped forward.

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

"Beaten," said the politician--"beaten all to hell!" And he plunged

past with nostrils shaking like a horse's, and more and more men

plunged after him.

Almost as he spoke, the last standing strip of fence bowed and

snapped, flinging, as from a catapult, a new figure upon the road. He

wore the flaming red of the halberdiers of Notting Hill, and on his

weapon there was blood, and in his face victory. In another moment

masses of red glowed through the gaps of the fence, and the pursuers,

with their halberds, came pouring down the lane. Pursued and pursuers

alike swept by the little figure with the owlish eyes, who had not

taken his hands out of his pockets.

The King had still little beyond the confused sense of a man caught in

a torrent--the feeling of men eddying by. Then something happened

which he was never able afterwards to describe, and which we cannot

describe for him. Suddenly in the dark entrance, between the broken

gates of a garden, there appeared framed a flaming figure.

Adam Wayne, the conqueror, with his face flung back, and his mane like

a lion's, stood with his great sword point upwards, the red raiment of

his office flapping round him like the red wings of an archangel. And

the King saw, he knew not how, something new and overwhelming. The

great green trees and the great red robes swung together in the wind.

The sword seemed made for the sunlight. The preposterous masquerade,

born of his own mockery, towered over him and embraced the world. This

was the normal, this was sanity, this was nature; and he himself,

with his rationality and his detachment and his black frock-coat, he

was the exception and the accident--a blot of black upon a world of

crimson and gold.

BOOK IV

CHAPTER I--_The Battle of the Lamps_

Mr. Buck, who, though retired, frequently went down to his big drapery

stores in Kensington High Street, was locking up those premises, being

the last to leave. It was a wonderful evening of green and gold, but

that did not trouble him very much. If you had pointed it out, he

would have agreed seriously, for the rich always desire to be

artistic.

He stepped out into the cool air, buttoning up his light yellow coat,

and blowing great clouds from his cigar, when a figure dashed up to

him in another yellow overcoat, but unbuttoned and flying behind him.

"Hullo, Barker!" said the draper. "Any of our summer articles? You're

too late. Factory Acts, Barker. Humanity and progress, my boy."

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

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

"By Wayne."

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

gleamed in the lamplight.

"Come and have a drink," he said.

They adjourned to a cushioned and glaring buffet, and Buck established

himself slowly and lazily in a seat, and pulled out his cigar-case.

"Have a smoke," he said.

Barker was still standing, and on the fret, but after a moment's

hesitation, he sat down as if he might spring up again the next

minute. They ordered drinks in silence.

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

"How the devil do I know?" cried Barker. "It happened like--like a

dream. How can two hundred men beat six hundred? How can they?"

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

"I don't know; I can't describe," said the other, drumming on the

table. "It seemed like this. We were six hundred, and marched with

those damned poleaxes of Auberon's--the only weapons we've got. We

marched two abreast. We went up Holland Walk, between the high palings

which seemed to me to go straight as an arrow for Pump Street. I was

near the tail of the line, and it was a long one. When the end of it

was still between the high palings, the head of the line was already

crossing Holland Park Avenue. Then the head plunged into the

network of narrow streets on the other side, and the tail and myself

came out on the great crossing. When we also had reached the northern

side and turned up a small street that points, crookedly as it were,

towards Pump Street, the whole thing felt different. The streets

dodged and bent so much that the head of our line seemed lost

altogether: it might as well have been in North America. And all this

time we hadn't seen a soul."

[Illustration: Map of the SEAT of WAR.]

Buck, who was idly dabbing the ash of his cigar on the ash-tray, began

to move it deliberately over the table, making feathery grey lines, a

kind of map.

"But though the little streets were all deserted (which got a trifle

on my nerves), as we got deeper and deeper into them, a thing began to

happen that I couldn't understand. Sometimes a long way ahead--three

turns or corners ahead, as it were--there broke suddenly a sort of

noise, clattering, and confused cries, and then stopped. Then, when it

happened, something, I can't describe it--a kind of shake or stagger

went down the line, as if the line were a live thing, whose head had

been struck, or had been an electric cord. None of us knew why we were

moving, but we moved and jostled. Then we recovered, and went on

through the little dirty streets, round corners, and up twisted ways.

The little crooked streets began to give me a feeling I can't

explain--as if it were a dream. I felt as if things had lost their

reason, and we should never get out of the maze. Odd to hear me talk

like that, isn't it? The streets were quite well-known streets, all

down on the map. But the fact remains. I wasn't afraid of something

happening. I was afraid of nothing ever happening--nothing ever

happening for all God's eternity."

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

on.

"And then something did happen. Buck, it's the solemn truth, that

nothing has ever happened to you in your life. Nothing had ever

happened to me in my life."

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

"Nothing has ever happened," repeated Barker, with a morbid obstinacy.

"You don't know what a thing happening means? You sit in your office

expecting customers, and customers come; you walk in the street

expecting friends, and friends meet you; you want a drink, and get it;

you feel inclined for a bet, and make it. You expect either to win or

lose, and you do either one or the other. But things happening!" and

he shuddered ungovernably.

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

"As we walked wearily round the corners, something happened. When

something happens, it happens first, and you see it afterwards. It

happens of itself, and you have nothing to do with it. It proves a

dreadful thing--that there are other things besides one's self. I can

only put it in this way. We went round one turning, two turnings,

three turnings, four turnings, five. Then I lifted myself slowly up

from the gutter where I had been shot half senseless, and was beaten

down again by living men crashing on top of me, and the world was full

of roaring, and big men rolling about like nine-pins."

Buck looked at his map with knitted brows.

"Was that Portobello Road?" he asked.

"Yes," said Barker--"yes; Portobello Road. I saw it afterwards; but,

my God, what a place it was! Buck, have you ever stood and let a six

foot of man lash and lash at your head with six feet of pole with six

pounds of steel at the end? Because, when you have had that

experience, as Walt Whitman says, 'you re-examine philosophies and

religions.'"

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

see what happened?"

"I know what happened exceedingly well. I was knocked down four times;

an experience which, as I say, has an effect on the mental attitude.

And another thing happened, too. I knocked down two men. After the

fourth fall (there was not much bloodshed--more brutal rushing and

throwing--for nobody could use their weapons), after the fourth fall,

I say, I got up like a devil, and I tore a poleaxe out of a man's hand

and struck where I saw the scarlet of Wayne's fellows, struck again

and again. Two of them went over, bleeding on the stones, thank God;

and I laughed and found myself sprawling in the gutter again, and got

up again, and struck again, and broke my halberd to pieces. I hurt a

man's head, though."

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

thick moustache.

"What is the matter?" asked Barker, stopping, for the man had been

calm up to now, and now his agitation was far more violent than his

own.

"The matter?" said Buck, bitterly; "don't you see how these maniacs

have got us? Why should two idiots, one a clown and the other a

screaming lunatic, make sane men so different from themselves? Look

here, Barker; I will give you a picture. A very well-bred young man of

this century is dancing about in a frock-coat. He has in his hands a

nonsensical seventeenth-century halberd, with which he is trying to

kill men in a street in Notting Hill. Damn it! don't you see how

they've got us? Never mind how you felt--that is how you looked. The

King would put his cursed head on one side and call it exquisite. The

Provost of Notting Hill would put his cursed nose in the air and call

it heroic. But in Heaven's name what would you have called it--two

days before?"

Barker bit his lip.

"You haven't been through it, Buck," he said. "You don't understand

fighting--the atmosphere."

"I don't deny the atmosphere," said Buck, striking the table. "I only

say it's their atmosphere. It's Adam Wayne's atmosphere. It's the

atmosphere which you and I thought had vanished from an educated world

for ever."

"Well, it hasn't," said Barker; "and if you have any lingering doubts,

lend me a poleaxe, and I'll show you."

There was a long silence, and then Buck turned to his neighbour and

spoke in that good-tempered tone that comes of a power of looking

facts in the face--the tone in which he concluded great bargains.

"Barker," he said, "you are right. This old thing--this fighting, has

come back. It has come back suddenly and taken us by surprise. So it

is first blood to Adam Wayne. But, unless reason and arithmetic and

everything else have gone crazy, it must be next and last blood to us.

But when an issue has really arisen, there is only one thing to do--to

study that issue as such and win in it. Barker, since it is fighting,

we must understand fighting. I must understand fighting as coolly and

completely as I understand drapery; you must understand fighting as

coolly and completely as you understand politics. Now, look at the

facts. I stick without hesitation to my original formula. Fighting,

when we have the stronger force, is only a matter of arithmetic. It

must be. You asked me just now how two hundred men could defeat six

hundred. I can tell you. Two hundred men can defeat six hundred when

the six hundred behave like fools. When they forget the very

conditions they are fighting in; when they fight in a swamp as if it

were a mountain; when they fight in a forest as if it were a plain;

when they fight in streets without remembering the object of streets."

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

"What is the object of supper?" cried Buck, furiously. "Isn't it

obvious? This military science is mere common sense. The object of a

street is to lead from one place to another; therefore all streets

join; therefore street fighting is quite a peculiar thing. You

advanced into that hive of streets as if you were advancing into an

open plain where you could see everything. Instead of that, you were

advancing into the bowels of a fortress, with streets pointing at you,

streets turning on you, streets jumping out at you, and all in the

hands of the enemy. Do you know what Portobello Road is? It is the

only point on your journey where two side streets run up opposite each

other. Wayne massed his men on the two sides, and when he had let

enough of your line go past, cut it in two like a worm. Don't you see

what would have saved you?"

Barker shook his head.

"Can't your 'atmosphere' help you?" asked Buck, bitterly. "Must I

attempt explanations in the romantic manner? Suppose that, as you were

fighting blindly with the red Notting Hillers who imprisoned you on

both sides, you had heard a shout from behind them. Suppose, oh,

romantic Barker! that behind the red tunics you had seen the blue and

gold of South Kensington taking them in the rear, surrounding them in

their turn and hurling them on to your halberds."

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

"The thing would have been as possible," said Buck, simply, "as simple

as arithmetic. There are a certain number of street entries that lead

to Pump Street. There are not nine hundred; there are not nine

million. They do not grow in the night. They do not increase like

mushrooms. It must be possible, with such an overwhelming force as we

have, to advance by all of them at once. In every one of the arteries,

or approaches, we can put almost as many men as Wayne can put into the

field altogether. Once do that, and we have him to demonstration. It

is like a proposition of Euclid."

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

delightfully.

"I'll tell you what I think," said Buck, getting up jovially. "I

think Adam Wayne made an uncommonly spirited little fight; and I think

I am confoundedly sorry for him."

"Buck, you are a great man!" cried Barker, rising also. "You've

knocked me sensible again. I am ashamed to say it, but I was getting

romantic. Of course, what you say is adamantine sense. Fighting, being

physical, must be mathematical. We were beaten because we were neither

mathematical nor physical nor anything else--because we deserved to be

beaten. Hold all the approaches, and with our force we must have him.

When shall we open the next campaign?"

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

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

late."

Buck turned on him, stamping.

"Do you think fighting is under the Factory Acts?" he said; and he

called a cab. "Notting Hill Gate Station," he said; and the two drove

off.

* * * * *

A genuine reputation can sometimes be made in an hour. Buck, in the

next sixty or eighty minutes, showed himself a really great man of

action. His cab carried him like a thunderbolt from the King to

Wilson, from Wilson to Swindon, from Swindon to Barker again; if his

course was jagged, it had the jaggedness of the lightning. Only two

things he carried with him--his inevitable cigar and the map of North

Kensington and Notting Hill. There were, as he again and again pointed

out, with every variety of persuasion and violence, only nine possible

ways of approaching Pump Street within a quarter of a mile round it;

three out of Westbourne Grove, two out of Ladbroke Grove, and four out

of Notting Hill High Street. And he had detachments of two hundred

each, stationed at every one of the entrances before the last green of

that strange sunset had sunk out of the black sky.

The sky was particularly black, and on this alone was one false

protest raised against the triumphant optimism of the Provost of North

Kensington. He overruled it with his infectious common sense.

"There is no such thing," he said, "as night in London. You have only

to follow the line of street lamps. Look, here is the map. Two hundred

purple North Kensington soldiers under myself march up Ossington

Street, two hundred more under Captain Bruce, of the North Kensington

Guard, up Clanricarde Gardens.[1] Two hundred yellow West Kensingtons

under Provost Swindon attack from Pembridge Road. Two hundred more of

my men from the eastern streets, leading away from Queen's Road. Two

detachments of yellows enter by two roads from Westbourne Grove.

Lastly, two hundred green Bayswaters come down from the North through

Chepstow Place, and two hundred more under Provost Wilson himself,

through the upper part of Pembridge Road. Gentlemen, it is mate in two

moves. The enemy must either mass in Pump Street and be cut to pieces;

or they must retreat past the Gaslight & Coke Co., and rush on my four

hundred; or they must retreat past St. Luke's Church, and rush on the

six hundred from the West. Unless we are all mad, it's plain. Come on.

To your quarters and await Captain Brace's signal to advance. Then you

have only to walk up a line of gas-lamps and smash this nonsense by

pure mathematics. To-morrow we shall all be civilians again."

[Footnote 1: Clanricarde Gardens at this time was no longer a

_cul-de-sac_, but was connected by Pump Street to Pembridge Square.

See map.]

His optimism glowed like a great fire in the night, and ran round the

terrible ring in which Wayne was now held helpless. The fight was

already over. One man's energy for one hour had saved the city from

war.

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.

* * * * *