 6. Book II. CHAPTER III. ENTER A LUNATIC. The king of the fairies, who was, it is to be presumed, the godfather of King Auburn, must have been very favourable on this particular day to his fantastic godchild. For with the entrance of the guard of the Provo of Notting Hill, there was a certain more or less inexplicable addition to his delight. The wretched navvies and sandwich men, who carried the colours of Bayswater or South Kensington, engaged merely for the day to satisfy the royal hobby, slouched into the room with a comparative hang-dog air and a great part of the king's intellectual pleasure, consisted in the contrast between the arrogance of their swords and feathers and the meek misery of their faces. But these Notting Hill halberdeers in their red tunics, belted with gold, had the air rather of an absurd gravity. They seemed, so to speak, to be taking part in the joke. They marched and wheeled into position with an almost startling dignity and discipline. They carried a yellow banner with a great red lion, named by the king as the Notting Hill emblem, after a small public house in the neighbourhood, which he once frequented. Between the two lines of his followers there advanced towards the king a tall red-haired young man with high features and bold blue eyes. He would have been called handsome, but that a certain indefinable air of his nose being too big for his face and his feet for his legs gave him a look of awkwardness and extreme youth. His robes were red, according to the king's heraldry, and alone among the provos he was girt with a great sword. This was Adam Wayne, the intractable provo of Notting Hill. The king flung himself back in his chair and rubbed his hands. What a day, what a day, he said to himself. Now there'll be a row. I'd no idea it would be such fun as it is. These provos are so very indignant, so very reasonable, so very right. This fellow, by the look in his eyes, is even more indignant than the rest. No sign in those large blue eyes, at any rate, of ever having heard of a joke. He'll remonstrate with the others, and they'll remonstrate with him, and they'll all make themselves sumptuously happy remonstrating with me. Welcome, my lord, he said aloud. What news from the hill of a hundred legends? What have you for the ear of your king? I know that troubles have arisen between you and these others, our cousins, but these troubles it shall be our pride to compose, and I doubt not, and cannot doubt, that your love for me is not less tender, no less ardent than theirs. Mr. Buck made a bitter face, and James Barker's nostrils curled. Wilson began to giggle faintly, and the provo of the West Kensington followed in a smothered way, but the big blue eyes of Adam Wayne never changed, and he called out in an odd, a boyish voice down the hall. I bring homage to my king, I bring him the only thing I have, my sword. And with the great gesture he flung it down on the ground, and knelt on one knee behind it. There was a dead silence. I beg your pardon, said the king blankly. You speak well, Sire said Adam Wayne, as you ever speak when you say that my love is not less than the love of these. Small would it be if it were not more, for I am the air of your scheme, the child of the great charter. I stand here, for the rites the charter gave me, and I swear by your sacred crown that where I stand, I stand fast. The eyes of all five men stood out of their heads. Then Buck said in his jolly jarring voice, Is the whole world mad? The king sprang to his feet, and his eyes blazed. Yes, he cried in a voice of exultation, the whole world is mad, but Adam Wayne and me. It is true as death what I told you long ago, James Barker. Seriousness sends men mad. You are mad because you care for politics, as mad as a man who collects tram tickets. Buck is mad because he cares for money, and mad as a man who lives on opium. Wilson is mad because he thinks himself right, as mad as a man who thinks himself God Almighty. The Provo of West Kensington is mad, because he thinks he is respectable, as mad as a man who thinks he is a chicken. All men are mad, but the humorist, who cares for nothing and possesses everything. I thought that there was only one humorist in England, fools, doltes, open your cow's eyes. There are two. In Notting Hill, in that unpromising elevation, there has been born an artist. You thought to spoil my joke and bully me out of it by becoming more and more modern, more and more practical, more and more bustling and rational. O what a feast it was to answer you by becoming more and more august, more and more gracious, more and more ancient and mellow. But this lad has seen how to bowl me out. He has answered me back vaunt for vaunt, rhetoric for rhetoric. He has lifted the only shield I cannot break, the shield of an impenetral pomposity. Listen to him. You have come, my lord, about Pump Street? About the city of Notting Hill, answered Wayne proudly, of which Pump Street is a living and rejoicing part. Not a very large part, said Barker contemptuously. That, which is large enough for the rich to covet, said Wayne, drawing up his head, is large enough for the poor to defend. The king slapped both his legs and waved his feet for a second in the air. Every respectable person in Notting Hill cutting buck with cold, coarse voice is for us and against you. I have plenty of friends in Notting Hill. Your friends are those who have taken your gold for other men's hurt stones, my lord buck, said provo Wayne. I can well believe they are your friends. They never sold dirty toys anyhow, said Buck, laughing shortly. They've sold dirtier things, said Wayne calmly. They have sold themselves. It's no good, my buckling, said the king, rolling about out his chair. You can't cope with this chivalrous eloquence. You can't cope with an artist. You can't cope with the humorous of Notting Hill. O nunctimitus, that I have lived to see this day. Provo Wayne, you stand firm. Let them wait and see, said Wayne. If I stood firm before, do you think I shall weaken now that I have seen the face of the king? For I fight for something greater, if greater there can be, than the hurt stones of my people and the lordship of the lion. I fight for your royal vision, for the great dream you dreamt, of the league of the free cities. If you have given me this liberty, if I had been a beggar, and you had flung me a coin, if I had been a peasant in a dance, and you had flung me a favor, do you think I would have let it be taken by any ruffians on the road? This leadership and liberty of Notting Hill is a gift from your majesty, and if it is taken from me by God it shall be taken in a battle, and the noise of that battle shall be heard in the flats of Chelsea and in the studios of St. John's Woods. It is too much, it is too much, said the king. Nature is weak, I must speak to you, brother artist, without further disguise. Let me ask you a solemn question, Adam Wayne, Lord High Provo of Notting Hill. Don't you think it's splendid? Splendid, cried Adam Wayne. It has the splendor of God. Bold out again, said the king. You will keep up the pose. Funnily, of course, it is serious, but seriously, isn't it funny? What? asked Wayne with the eyes of a baby. Hang it all, don't play any more, the whole business, the charter of the cities, isn't it immense? Immense is no unworthy word for that glorious design. Oh, hang you, but of course I see. You want me to clear the room of these reasonable sounds. You want the two humorists alone together. Leave us, gentlemen. Buck threw a sour look at Barker and a sullen signal. The whole pageant of blue and green, of red and gold and purple, rolled out of the room, leaving only two in the great hall. The king, sitting in his seat on the Diaz, and the red-clad figure, still kneeling on the floor before his fallen sword. The king bounded down the steps and smacked Provo 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 a 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 you! But what's this? What's the devil's this? The king stared into the young Provo's face and in the twilight of the rooms began to see that his face was quite white and his lips shaking. What in God's name is the matter? cried Auburn, holding his wrist. Wayne flung back his face and the tears were shining on it. I am only a boy, he said, but it is true. I would paint the red lion on my shield if I had only my blood. King Auburn 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 nodding 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 Diaz 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 nodding hill patriot that you are? Wayne made a violent gesture, and the king sued him wildly. All right, all right, I see you are, but let me take it in. Do you 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 provo. 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 luxuriously. Never crossed your mind that anyone ever thought that the idea of nodding hill idealism was slightly ridiculous? Of course they think so, said Wayne. What was the meaning of mocking the prophets? Where, asked the king, lean forward, where in heaven's name did you get this miraculously insane idea? You have been my tutor, sire, said the provo, and all that is high and honorable. Huh? 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 and 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 noble secrecy watching over your people's welfare. But I need have had no fear. Then I was 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 to turn my sword against the enemies of my inviolate city. Like a priest pointing to the altar, you pointed to the hill of nodding. 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 has 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. 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 humor to amuse you, and I seem to have brought tears to your eyes. What's to be done with people, when you ride a pantomime for them, call the sausages, classic festoons, and the policemen cut into 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? Absurdest, Wayne Blankley? Why should I? The king stared back equally blank. 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, and 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 thought we're 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. I began, Auburn, 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 cretesque 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, which men tyrannize, 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 humor? But what was the good of it? Upside down or right side up, Peter was Peter to mankind. Upside down he still hangs over Europe, and millions move and breathe, only in the life of his church. King Auberon got up absently. There's something in what you say, he said. You seem to have been thinking, young man. Only feeling, sire, answered the provo. 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 the nights that were knights 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 a co-test, 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 the sorrow of joy? Why should anyone be able to raise a laugh by saying the cause of Notting Hill? Notting Hill, where thousands of immortal spirits blaze, with alternate hope and fear. Auberon was flicking dust off his sleeve, with quite a new seriousness on his face, distinct from the owlish salinity which was the pose of his humor. It is very difficult, he said at last. It is a damn 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 the 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, Provo 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, has Auberon? The Provo 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 holy common. Whatever is touched with it takes a magic from outside the world. If I touch with this fairy wand, the railways and the roads of Notting Hill, men will love them, and be afraid of them forever. What the devil are you talking about, asked the king? It has made mean landscapes magnificent, and hovels outlast cathedrals went on the madmen. 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 Diaz. Yes, yes, cried Wayne hoarsely. The things touched by that are not vulgar. The things touched by that. King Auburn 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 at him, 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. There were never any necessary wars, but the religious wars. There were never any just wars, but the religious wars. There was 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 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 Diaz. 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 the sudden chatter of a bird, the high, nasal, but well-bred voice of Barker. I said to him quite plainly, the public interests. Auburn turned on Wayne with violence. What the devil is all this? What am I saying? What are you saying? Have you hypnotized me? Curse your uncanny blue eyes. Let me go. Give me back my sense of humor. Give it back. Give it 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 ravellazian laughter. I don't think you have, he cried. End of Book Two, Chapter Two. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G. K. Chesterton. Section Seven, Book Three, Chapter One, The Mental Condition of Adam Wayne A little while after the king's ascension, 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 a peculiar favor. 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 effectation 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 a 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 books 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 handsome cab poet, whose cunning carved this amorous shell where twain may dwell. Shirley wrote the king, no one but a woman could have written those lines. A woman is always a weakness for nature. With her art is only beautiful as an echo, or a shadow of it. She is praising the handsome cab by a theme in 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 sake of 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 in her head, and furry beasts to bite her about the throat. In the heart of a dim city she models her bat on a flaring cottage garden of flowers. We, with our nobler's civic sentiment, model ours on a chimney-pot, the ensign of civilization, 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 continue thunderbolt is, as we have said, that they praise the handsome 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, empoignant melancholy of the theme by a sudden sense of rushing at the end. The wind round the old street corner swung sudden as quick as a cab. Here the distinction is obvious. Daisy Daydream thinks it a great compliment to a handsome 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 the rose and the lily contend in her complexion, says with a purer modernism that the red omnibus of Henry Smith 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 somewhat of money, but the king was a very good critic, whatever he may have been as a 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 written by a man who had seen nothing else but London, and who regarded it therefore as the universe. He 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 fast in his own Pump Street, and in its neighborhood. 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 at things enduring like the mountains, and so he wrote about them as one would write about mountains. Nature puts on a disguise when she speaks to every man. To this man she put on the disguise of Notting Hill. Nature would mean to a poet born in the Cumberland Hills, a stormy skyline, and sudden rocks. Nature would mean to a poet born in the Essex Flats, a waste of splendid waters and splendid sunsets. So Nature meant to this man Wayne a line of violent roofs and lemon lamps, the cure of a scarol of the town. He did not think it clever or funny to praise the shadows and the colors of the town. He had seen no other shadows or colors, and so he praised them, because they were shadows and colors. 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, 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 realize 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 beginnings of the woods of Elfland. 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 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. Armor, music, standards, watch fires, the noise of drums, all the theatrical properties were thrown before him. This one poor rhymester, 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 civilization. He knew that real patriotism tends to sing about sorrows and forlorn hopes much more than about victory. He knew that improper names themselves is half the poetry of all the 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 genius, but because he was a child. Anyone who cares to walk up a side slum like Pump Street can see a little Adam claiming to be king of a paving stone, and he will always be proudest if the stone is almost too narrow for him to keep his feet inside it. It was while he was in such a dream of defensive battle, marking out some strip of street or fortress or steps, as the limit of his haughty claim, that the king had met him, and with a few words flung in mockery, ratified forever the strange boundaries of his soul. Thenceforward the fanciful idea of the defense 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 culverine 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 darkness like the eyes of innumerable cats and the outline of the dark houses has the bold simplicity of the 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 curb stones 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 ecstasy 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 and pictures of Lancelot and Sir 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 if he had 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 grocers, a chemists, a barbers, and an old curiosity shop and a toy shop that sold also newspapers. It was these five shops which his childish festiviousness had first selected as the essentials of 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 realized that feeling for 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 license, was included because he could provision the garrisons. The old curiosity shop because he contained enough swords, pistols, partisans, crossbows, and blunderbuses to arm a whole irregular regiment. The toy and paper shop because Wayne thought a free press an essential center for the soul of Pump Street. The chemists to cope with outbreaks of disease among the besieged, and the barbers 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 round the roofs and chimneys of the steep little street, which looked black and sharp and dramatic. In the deep shadows the guest-lit shop fronts gleamed like five fires in a row, and before them darkly outlined like a ghost against some purgatorial furnaces past 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 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-miniacal 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 benign 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 a beard, and a forehead lined with all the cares of small tradesmen. 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 tradesmen 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 argoses or such cargos 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 made 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 color, but 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 in erroneous, but rather to be too broad, to be too general, to be too liberal. If a narrow nationalism be the danger of the pastry cook, who makes his own wares under his own heavens, no less his cosmopolitanism the danger of a grocer. But I come to you in the name of that patriotism, which no wanderings or enlightenment should ever wholly extinguish, and I ask you to remember nodding 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 Leviathan 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 strengthen 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, rice is from India and spices from Ceylon. Sheep are from New Zealand, and men from nodding hill. The grocer sat for some little while with dim eyes and his mouth open, looking rather like a fish. Then he scratched the back of his head and said nothing. Then he said, Anything out of the shop, sir? Wayne looked round in a dazed way, seeing a pile of tins of pineapple chunks, and he waved his stick generally towards him. Yes, he said, I'll take those. All those, sir, said the grocer, with greatly increased interest. Yes, yes, all those, said Wayne. Still a little bewildered, like a man splashed with cold water. Very good, sir, thank you, 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 his place. What a nice fellow he is, he said. It's odd how often they are nice, much nicer than those who are all right. Meanwhile, Adam Wayne stood outside the glowing chemist 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 standing on Notting Hill, but this stands in Elfland. Look at those great burning bowls of color. It must be from them that God paints the sunsets. It is superhuman, and the superhuman is all the more uncanny when it is beneficent. That is the root of the fear of God. I am afraid, but I must be a man and enter. He was a man, and entered. A short, dark young man was behind the counter with spectacles, and greeted him with a bright but entirely businesslike smile. A fine evening, sir, he said. Fine indeed, strange father, said Adam, stretching his hand 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 a far-off 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 salvolatile. Eight pence, ten pence, or one, and six pence 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 soothe 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 to stick round the shop. Meeting with no answer he continued with the animation. In Notting Hill we have fell to its core the elvish mystery of your profession, and now Notting Hill itself is threatened. Anything more, sir, said the chemist? Oh, said Wayne, somewhat disturbed. Oh, what is it, chemist, cell 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. Allam said the provo wilde. 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, as 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 fulfillment of soul. It is so fortunate, he said, to have tacked, to be able to play upon the peculiar talents and specialties, the cosmopolitanism of the grocer, and the world-old necromancy of the chemist. Where should I be without tacked? END OF BOOK 3 CHAPTER I THE NAPOLION OF NOTTING HILL by G. K. CHESTERTON SECTION VIII. BOOK III. CHAPTER II THE REMARCOBLE MR. TURNBULL After two more interviews with Shopman, however, the Patriots' 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 Shopman. 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 gray, pointed beard, evidently a gentleman who had come down in the world. And how does your commerce go, you strange guardian of the past? said Wayne affably. Well, sir, not very well replied the man with that patient voice of his class, which is one of the most heartbreaking things in the world. Things are terribly quiet. Wayne's eyes shone subtly. A great saying, he said, worthy of a man whose merchandise is human history, terribly quiet. That is in two words the spirit of this age as I have felt it from my cradle. I sometimes wondered how many other people felt the oppression of this union between quietude and terror. I see blank, well-ordered streets and men in black moving about inoffensively, sullenly. It goes on day after day, day after day, and nothing happens. But to me it is like a dream from which I might wake screaming. To me the straightness of our life is the straightness of a thin cord stretched tight. Its stillness is terrible. It might snap with a noise like thunder, and you who sit amid the debris of the great wars, you who sit as it were upon a battlefield, you know that war was less terrible than this evil peace. You know, 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 we're 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 ingrained 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 civilization, 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 shop man 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 16th century sword for an exaggerated price, seemed to resettle matters. Wayne left the shop, however, somewhat infected with a melancholy of its owner. That melancholy was completed at the barbers. Shaving, sir, inquired the 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 civilized 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 poltonery 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 irresistibly. We don't want any of your sword 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, we'll 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, half-penny paper clips, half-penny pencil sharpeners, bootlaces, and cheap fireworks. It also sold newspapers and a row of dirty looking posters hung along with 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 shopkeeper 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 drama peril in the paradise of children? But consider a moment. Do not condemn me hastily. Even that paradise itself contains the rumor or beginning of that danger. Just as the Eden that was made for perfection contained the terrible tree, for a judged childhood, even by your own arsenal of its pleasures. You keep bricks. You make yourself thus doubtless the witness of the constructive instincts older than the destructive. You keep dowels. You make yourself the priest of that divine idolatry. You keep Noah's ark. You perpetuate the memory of the salvation of all life, as a precious and 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 that 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 that soldiers enter. For it cannot be denied—I author 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 shopkeeper 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! 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 in red. Last fighting, reduction of the central Dervish city. Remarkable, et cetera. On the other, he read. Last small republic annexed. Nicaraguan capital surrenders after months 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 parlor at the back of the shop. In the center of the parlor 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 certain odd grouping of them, which did not seem either entirely commercial or entirely haphazard. You are acquainted, no doubt, said Turnbull, turning his 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 toward their 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 shopkeeper, 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 defense of Notting Hill. I— Defense of Notting Hill? Yes, sir, this way, sir, said Turnbull, with a 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. Sirs, said Turnbull impressively. You have, by a kind of accident, hit upon the whole secret of my life. As a boy I grew up among the last wars of the world, when Nicaragua was taken and the dervishes wiped out. And I adopted it as a hobby, sir, as you might adopt astronomy or bird-stuffing. I had no ill will to anyone, but I was interested in war as a science, as a game. And suddenly I was bowled out. The big powers of the world, having swallowed up all the small ones, came to that confounded agreement, and there was no more war. There was nothing more for me to do, but to do what I do now, to read the old campaigns in dirty old newspapers, and to work them out with tin soldiers. One other thing had occurred to me. I thought it an amusing fancy to make a plan, of how this district of ours ought to be defended, if it were ever attacked. It seems to interest you too. If it were ever attacked, repeated Wayne, awed in 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 the 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 gray 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, or 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 Provo 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 unsweap 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 tanker to veil 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 nine pence. Turnbull nodded and put his head in the tanker. 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 mouthful. 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 and handsome cabs. Are you insane? asked the provost. It is only my like touch, returned Turnbull. These handsome cab rides will raise the tone. Raise the tone, my dear fellow, of our London youths. Widen their eyes and brace their nerve 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, Mads had Wayne laying down his pencil and five pounds gone. You are an error, replied Turnbull. You grave preachers 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 handsome cabs. I told them in every case to tell the cab men 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, and 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 Provo staring. A minute or two afterwards the Provo laughed. He only laughed once or twice in his life, and then he did it in a queer way as if it were an arty 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 civilization. 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 merry one. Section 9. Book III. 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 provos. 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 half-penny boy's paper. Thus also it happened that the only spot of color in the room was Adam Wayne, who entered in great dignity with the great red robes and the great red sword. We have met St. Auberon to decide the most arduous of modern problems. May we be successful! and he sat down gravely. But turned his chair a little and flung one leg over the other. Your Majesty, he said quite good humorably. There's only one thing I can't understand, and that is why this affair is not settled in five minutes. Here is a small property which is worth a thousand to us, and is not worth a hundred to anyone else. We offer the thousand. It's not business-like, I know, for we ought to get 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 have a right to stand out for a bigger price. But you aren't doing it. 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 steered 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 eye 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 have done our best to be generous. I defy anyone to deny it. As it is, Mr. Wayne, I don't want to say a word that's uncivil. I hope it's not uncivil to say that you can be and ought to be in goal. 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. The king could compel you, and I hope you 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 the great parchment on the table. It was decorated down the sides with wild, water-colored sketches of vestrymen and crowns and wreaths. The charter of the cities, he began. Buck exploded in a brutal oath and laughed. That tomfool joke, haven't we had enough? And there you sit, cried Wayne, springy erect, 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. Oh, 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 Provo of South Kensington, said King Auburn 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 Provo of Notting Hill, proceed. Wayne turned his blue eyes on the king, and to everyone's surprise there was a look in them not of triumph, but of a certain childish distress. I am sorry, Your Majesty, he said. I fear I was more than equally to blame with the Lord Provo 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 Provo 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 businessmen are all simple-minded, and have therefore that degree of communion with phonetics. The king, for some reason, looked for the first time in his life, ashamed. This very kind speech of the Provo of Notting Hill began Buck pleasantly, seems to me to show that we have at least got 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 rackets, 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, and not lifting his eyes from the table. And amid a dead silence the Provo 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 in 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 favorably 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 at 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 an appeal to your common good nature for a sincere answer? When you do 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 shut up a road, to spoiling the chances of cabs on the bus's railway stations, to disorganizing half a city, to risking a kind of civil war? Whatever were your objects, were they that? Barker and Wilson looked at him admiringly. They came more admiringly still. Provo, Buck, said Auburn. 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 and 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 asked to have it put before them. Meanwhile, no one's interests, not even in all probability his own, can really be 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 a 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 amidst a dude, but excited applause among his allies. Mr. Buck, said the King, 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 workman, and Mr. Wayne does the 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. 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 Halberdeers. 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 Gailey. It might happen, said the King restlessly, that one nodding hillar fought better than two North Kensington's. It might, said Buck Gailey, 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 lean 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 nodding 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 them. 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 bandana 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 shall not offend you by describing it 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 swively, 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 header, 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 Holberdeers and smash him. It would be more sportsmen-like to take two hundred. More sportsmen-like, 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 Auburn, 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 businessmen. Well, said the King weirly, the conference is at an end at last. And he went out of the room before anyone else could stir. Forty workmen, a hundred Bayswater Holberdeers, two hundred from south and three from north Kensington, assembled at the foot of Holland Walk, and marched up it, under the gentle direction of Barker, who looked flushed and happy and full-dress. At the end of the procession a small and sulky figure lingered like an urchin. It was the King. Barker, he said it appealingly, You are an old friend of mine. You understand my hobbies, as I understand yours. Why can't you let it alone? I hope that such fun might come out of this wain 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 of hummingbirds, and I could buy one with the price of your road, I would buy it. I collect incidents, those rare, those precious things. Let me have one. Pay a few pounds for it. Give these knotting-hillers a chance. Let them alone. Auburn 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 sympathized with your humours. I have had moments, though you may not easily believe it, when I have sympathized with the madness of Adam Wayne. But the world, Auburn, 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. Auburn's eyes looked frankly at the others. 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 in the nature of flies to die soon. And the nature of wheels to go on forever. 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 tale of the retreating regimen 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 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 liar 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 equity. 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 bowels, 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 equity 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 balker area in business about evolution and the gradual modification of things. I wish the world had been made in six days and knocked to pieces again in six more, and I wish I had done it. The joke's good enough, in a broad way, sun and moon and the image of God and all that, but they keep it up so damnably long. Did you ever long for a miracle bowler? No, sir, said bowler, who was an evolutionist, and had been carefully brought up. Then I have answered the king. I have walked along a street with the best cigar in the cosmos in my mouth, and more burgundy inside me than you ever saw in your life, and longed that the lamppost would turn into an elephant to save me from the hell of blank existence. Take my word for it, my evolutionary bowler. Don't you believe people when they tell you that people sought for a sign and believed in miracles because they were ignorant? They did it because they were wise, filthily, vilely wise, too wise to eat or sleep or put on their boots with patience. This seems delightfully like a new theory of the origin of Christianity, which would itself be a thing of no mean absurdity. Take some more wine. The wind blew round them as they sat at their little table with his white cloth and bright wine cups and flung the treetops of Holland Park against each other. But the sun was in that strong temper which turns green into gold. The king pushed away his plate, lit a cigar slowly, and went on. Yesterday I thought that something next door to a really entertaining miracle might happen to me before I went to amuse the worms. To see that red-haired maniac waving a great sword and making speeches to his incomparable followers would have been a glimpse of that land of youth from which the fate 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. I 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 veil. Never forget at any moment of your existence to regard it in the light of a veil. 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 and turned his head sharply towards the high, thin, and laugh-like pailing 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 onto the table. From this position he saw a pair of hands hanging with a hungry clutch at 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 Bayswaters 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 to the ground. The moment after the table was flung over, sending bottles and glasses flying, and the debris was literally swept along the ground by that stream of men pouring past, and Buller was born along with them as the king said in his famous newspaper article, Like a Captured Bride. The great fence swung and split under the load of climbers that still scaled and cleared it. Tremendous gaps were torn in it by this living artillery, and through them the king could see more and more frantic faces as in a dream, and more and more men running. They were as miscellaneous as if someone had taken the lid off a human dustbin. Some were untouched, some were slashed and battered and bloody, some were splendidly dressed, some tattered and half-naked, some were in the fantastic garb of the burlesque cities, some in the dullest modern dress. The king stared at all of them, but none of them looked at the king. Suddenly he stepped forward. Barker, he said, What is all this? Beaten, said the politician, Beaten all too 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 halberd ears 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 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, 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. End of book 3 chapter 3