 Chapter 1 The Battle of the Lamps Mr. Bach, 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 he had pointed it out, he would have agreed seriously, for the rich always desired to be artistic. He stepped out from the cool air, butting up his light yellow coat, and blowing great clouds from his cigar. One a figure dashed up to him in another yellow overcoat, but unbuttoned, and flying behind him. �Hello, Barker,� said the draper. �Any of our summer articles? You're too late. Factory Hacks, Barker. Humanity in progress, my boy. �Oh, don't shatter,� cried Barker, stamping. �We've been beaten.� �Beaten by what?� asked Bach, mystified. �By Wayne.� Bach looked at Barker's fierce white face for the first time as it gleamed in the lamp-light. �Come and have a drink,� he said. The adjourn to a cushioned and glaring buffet, and Bach 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 Bach, turning his big bold eyes on him. �How the devil do I know?� cried Barker. �It happened like a dream. How can two hundred men beat six hundred? How can they?� �Well� said Buck Cooley. �How did they?� he said. �You ought to know.� �I don't know. I can't describe� said the other, drumming on the tables. �It seemed like this. We were six hundred, and marched with those damned poleaxes of auberons. The only weapons we�ve got. We marched to a breast. We went up Holland Walk, between the high palings, which seemed to me to go straight as an arrow for Pump Street. I was near the tail of the line, and it was a long one. When the end of it was still between the high palings, the head of the line was already crossing Holland Park Avenue. Then the head plunged into the network of narrow streets on the other side, and the tail and myself came out on the great crossing. When we also had reached the northern side and turned up a small street that points crookedly as it were towards Pump Street, the whole thing felt different. The streets dodged and bent so much that the head of our line seemed lost altogether. It might as well have been in North America, and all this time we hadn�t seen a soul. Buck, who was idly dabbing the ash of his cigar on the ashtray, began to move it deliberately over the table, making feathery gray 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 confusing 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 we went on through the little dirty streets around 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 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 drank his glass and called for more whiskey. 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 has 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 streets, expecting friends, and friends meet you. You want a drink? You get it. You feel inclined for a bet? You 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 weirdly around 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 self. I can only put it 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 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 doubts, 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 poleax 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 heard a man�s head, though. He sat 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�ll 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 provo of Notting Hill would put his cursed nose in the air and call it heroic. And in Heaven�s name, what would you have called it two days before? Barker bit his lip. �You haven�t been through it, Buck,� he said. �You don�t understand fighting. The atmosphere.� �I don�t deny the atmosphere,� said Buck, striking the table. �I only say it�s their atmosphere. It�s Adam Wayne�s atmosphere. It�s the atmosphere which you and I thought had vanished from an educated world forever. �Well, it hasn�t� said Barker. �And if you have any lingering doubts, lend me a poleaxe, and I�ll show you.� There was a long silence, and then Buck turned to his neighbor, and spoke in that good tempered tone that comes of a power of looking fax 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 fax. 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 ask 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 fool, 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 plane. 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 an enemy. Do you know what Portobello wrote is? It is the only point on your journey where two side streets run up opposite each other. Wayne masked 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-knotting hillers who imprisoned you on both sides, you had heard a shout from behind them. Suppose, O 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 hull-brids. If the thing had been possible began Barker cursing. The thing would have been 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, and 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 you do that, and we have him to demonstration, it is like a proposition of Euclid. You think that is certain, asked Barker anxiously, 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 ameagerly, do you mean now? It is so late. Buck turned on him stamping. Do you think fighting is under the factory ax, he said? And he called the 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 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 around it. Three out of Westbourne Grove, two out of Ladbrook 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 Provo 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 Clannacard Gardens. Two hundred yellow West Kensington's under Provo Swindon attack from Pembridge Road. Two hundred more of my men from the eastern streets leading away from Queens Road. Two detachments of yellows enter by two roads from Westbourne Grove. Lastly, two hundred green bayswaters come down from the north through Cheepstow Place, and two hundred more under Provo 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 and Coke Company 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 to your quarters and await Captain Brace's signal to advance. Then you have only to walk up a line of gas lamps and smash this nonsense by pure mathematics. Tomorrow, we shall all be civilians again. Footnote 1. Clannacard Gardens at this time was no longer a cul-de-sac, but was connected by Pump Street to Pembridge Square, a seamap. 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 halberdeers, which darkly but richly colored the black night. At length the shrill trumpet ran 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 with an 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 lamp-light 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 rumbling along the stones. But the halberds were leveled 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. Provo 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 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 a certainty of a machine. But scarcely a hundred yards further their halberd points again fell in line gleaming in the gas light. For again a clatter of feet was heard on the stones, and again it proved only the messenger. Mr. Provo, he said, the yellow West Kensington's 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 Provo 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 Pearl Dwayne, I really am, he thought. He spoke up splendidly for me at that council, and he blackened 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 civilization. And what a wonderful hoax all this military genius is. I suspect I've just discovered what Quarmwell 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, and if they're not flying past the church, they're flying past the works, and so we have them. We businessmen 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 Wilford 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 were we to get on? How were we to chase the enemy? Where have they gone? The enemy went, said the rough voice behind, and then stopped doubtfully. There shouted Buck, stamping like a madman. They went, said the rough voice, past the gasworks, 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 a 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 a 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 it gave no glint against any light. Buck, though badly maimed, with the blow of a halberd, kept in angry but splendid sanity. He groped madly for the wall and found it. Struggling with crawling fingers along it he found a side opening and retreated into it with the remnants of his men. Their adventures during that prodigious night are not to be described. They did not know whether they were going towards or away from the enemy, not knowing where they themselves were or where their opponents were. It was mere irony to ask where was the rest of their army. For a thing had descended upon them which London does not know—darkness, which was before the stars were made, and they were as much lost in it as if they had been made before the stars. Every now and then, as those frightful hours wore on, they buffeted into darkness against living men who struck at them, and at whom they struck with an idiot fury. When at last the Grey Dawn came, they found they had wandered back to the edge of the Uxbridge Road. They found that in those horrible eyeless encounters, the North Kensington's and the Bayswater's and the West Kensington's had again and again met and butchered each other, and they heard that Adam Wayne was barricaded in Pump Street. CHAPTER II The Correspondent of the Court Journal Journalism had become, like most other such things in England under the cautious government and philosophy represented by James Barker, somewhat sleepy and much diminished in importance. This was partly due to the disappearance of party government and public speaking, partly to the compromise of deadlock which had made foreign wars impossible, but mostly of course to the temper of the whole nation which was that of a people in a kind of backwater. Perhaps the most well-known of the remaining newspapers was the Court Journal, which was published in a dusty but genteel-looking office just out of Kensington High Street. For when all the papers of a people have been for years growing more and more dim and decorous and optimistic, the dimmest and most decorous and most optimistic is very likely to win. In the journalistic competition which was still going on at the beginning of the twentieth century, the final victor was the Court Journal. For some mysterious reason the King had a great affection for hanging about in the Court Journal office, smoking a morning cigarette and looking over files like all ingrainedly idle men. He was very fond of lounging and chatting in places where other people were doing work. But one would have thought that, even in the prosaic England of his day, he might have found a more bustling center. On this particular morning, however, he came out of Kensington Place with a more alert step and busier air than usual. He wore an extravagantly long frock coat, a pale green waistcoat, a very full and de-gage black tie, and curious yellow gloves. This was his uniform as Colonel of a regiment of his own creation, the first decadence green. It was a beautiful sight to see him drilling them. He walked quickly across the park and the high street, lighting his cigarette as he went and flung open the door of the Court Journal office. You've heard the news, Pally, you've heard the news, he said. The editor's name was Hoskins, but the King called him Pally, which was an abbreviation of palladium of our liberties. Well, Your Majesty said Hoskins slowly. He was a worried, gentlemanly-looking person, with a wandering brown beard. Well, Your Majesty, I've heard rather curious things, but I— You'll hear more of them, said the King, dancing a few steps in a kind of shuffle. You'll hear more of them, my blood and thunder-tribune. Do you know what I'm going to do for you? No, Your Majesty, replied the palladium vaguely. I'm going to put your paper on strong, dashing, enterprising lines, said the King. Now where are your posters of last night's defeat? I did not propose, Your Majesty, said the editor, to have any posters, exactly. Paper, paper, cried the King wildly. Bring me paper as big as a house, I'll do you posters. Stop, I must take my coat off. He began removing that garment with an air of set intensity, flung it playfully at Mr. Hoskins' head, entirely enveloping him, and looked at himself in the glass. The coat off, he said, and the hat on, that looks like a sub-editor, it is indeed the very essence of sub-editing. Well, he continued turning round abruptly. Come along with that paper. The palladium had only just extricated himself reverently from the folds of the King's frock coat, and said, be wildered. I'm afraid, Your Majesty. Oh, you've got no enterprise at Oberon. What is that roll in the corner? Wallpaper, decorations for your private residence, art in the home? Pally fling it over here, and I'll paint such posters on the back of it that when you put it up in your drawing room, you'll paste the original pattern against the wall. And the King unrolled the wallpaper, spread it over the whole floor. Now give me the scissors, he cried, and took them himself before the other could stir. He slipped the paper into about five pieces, each nearly as big as a door. Then he took a big blue pencil, and went down on his knees in the dusty oilcloth, and began to write on them in huge letters. From the front, General Buck defeated, darkness, danger, and death. Wayne said to be in Pump Street, feeling in the city. He contemplated it for some time with his head on one side, and got up with a sigh. Not quite intense enough, he said, not alarming. I want the court journal to be feared as well as loved. Let us try something more hard-hitting. And he went down on his knees again. After sucking the blue pencil for some time, he began writing again, busily, how will this do? He said, Wayne's wonderful victory. I suppose he said, looking up appealingly, and sucking the pencil. I suppose we couldn't say, victory. Wayne's wonderful victory? No, no, refinement, Pally, refinement, I have it. Wayne wins, astounding fight in the dark. The gas lamps in their courses fought against Buck. Nothing like our fine old English translation. What else can we say? Well, anything to annoying old Buck, he added thoughtfully in smaller letters. He ordered a court-martial on General Buck. Those will do for the present, he said, and turned them both face downwards, paced, please. The Palladium, with an air of great terror, brought the paced out of an inner room. The king slathered on with the enjoyment of a child messing with treacle, then taking one of his huge compositions, fluttering in each hand, he ran outside and began pasting them up in prominent positions over the front of the office. And now, said Obron, entering again with undiminished vivacity, now for the leading article. He picked up another of the large strips of wallpaper, and laying it across the desk, pulled out a fountain pen, and began writing with feverish intensity, reading clauses and fragments allowed to himself, and rolling them on his tongue-like wine to see if they had the pure journalistic flavor. The news of the disaster to our forces in Notting Hill, awful as it is, awful as it is, no distressing as it is, may do some good if it draws attention to, what's his name, inefficiency, scandals, scandalous inefficiency, of course, of the government's preparations. In our present state of information it would be premature, what a jolly word, it would be premature to cast any reflections upon the conduct of General Buck, whose services upon so many stricken fields, and whose honorable scars and laurels give him a right to have judgment upon him, at least suspended. But there is one matter on which we must speak plainly. We have been silent on it too long, from feelings perhaps of mistaken caution, perhaps of mistaken loyalty. The situation would never have arisen but for what we can only call the indefensible conduct of the King. It pains us to say such things, but speaking as we do in the public interest, I plagiarize from Barker's famous epigram, we shall not shrink because of the distress we may cause to any individual, even the most exalted. At this crucial moment of our country, the voice of the people demands with a single tone, where is the King? What is he doing while his subjects tear each other in pieces in the streets of a great city? Are his amusements and his dissipations, of which we cannot pretend to be ignorant? So engrossing that he can spare no thought for a perishing nation, it is with the deep sense of our responsibility that we warn that exalted person that neither his great position nor his incomparable talents will save him in the hour of delirium from the fate of all those who in the madness of luxury or tyranny have met the English people in the rare day of its wrath. I am now said the King going to write an account of the battle by an eyewitness, and he picked up a fourth sheet of wallpaper, almost at the same moment. Buck strode quickly into the office. He had a bandage round his head. I was told, he said, with his usual gruff civility that your majesty was here. And of all things on earth cried the King with delight, here is an eyewitness. An eyewitness who I regret to observe has at present only one eye to witness with. Can you write us the special article, Buck? Have you a rich style? Buck, with self-restraint which almost approached politeness, took no notice whatever of the King's maddening geniality. I took the liberty, your majesty, he said shortly, of asking Mr. Barker to come here also. As he spoke, indeed Barker came swinging into the office with his usual air of hurry. What is happening now, asked Buck, turning to him with a kind of relief. Fighting still going on, said Barker. The four hundred from West Kensington were hardly touched last night. They hardly got near the place. Poor Wilson's bayswater men got cut about, though. They fought confoundedly well. They took Pumstree once, what mad things do happen in the world, to think that of all of us it should be little Wilson with the red whiskers who came out best. The King made a note on his paper, romantic conduct of Mr. Wilson. Yes, said Buck, it makes one a bit less proud of one's— The King suddenly folded or crumpled up the paper and put it in his pocket. I have an idea, he said. I will be an eyewitness. I will write you such letters in the front as will be more gorgeous than the real thing. Give me my coat, Palladium. I entered this room a mere king of England. I leave it special war correspondent of the court journal. It is useless to stop me, Pallie. It is vain to cling to my knees, Buck. It is hopeless Barker to weep upon my neck. When duty calls, the remainder of the sentiment escapes me. You will receive my first article this evening by the eight o'clock post. And running out of the office, he jumped upon a blue bayswater on the bus that went swinging by. Well, said Barker gloomily. Well? Barker, said Buck, business may be lower than politics, but war is, as I discovered last night, a long sight more like business. You politicians are such ingrained demagogues that even when you have a despotism you think of nothing but public opinion. So you learn to tack and run and are afraid of the first breeze. Now we stick to a thing and get it. And our mistakes help us. Look here at this moment we've beaten Wayne. Beaten Wayne, repeated Barker. Why, the dickens not, cried the other, flinging out his hands. Look here. I said last night that we had them by holding the nine entrances. Well, I was wrong. We should have had them, but for a singular event. The lamps went out. But for that it was certain. Has it occurred to you, my brilliant Barker, that another singular event has happened? What's that singular event of the lamps going out? What event, asked Barker? By an astounding coincidence the sun has risen, cried out Buck, with a savage air of patience. Why the hell aren't we holding all those approaches now and passing in on them again? It should have been done at sunrise. The confounded doctor wouldn't let me go. You were in command. Barker smiled grimly. It is a gratification to me, my dear Buck, to be able to say that we anticipated your suggestions precisely. We went as early as possible to reconnoiter the nine entrances. Unfortunately, while we were fighting each other in the dark, like a lot of drunken navies, Mr. Wayne's friends were working very hard indeed. Three hundred yards from Pump Street at every one of those entrances there is a barricade nearly as high as the houses. They were finishing the last impenbridge road when we arrived. For our mistakes, he cried bitterly and flung his cigarette on the ground. It is not we who learn from them. There was a silence for a few moments, and Barker lay back weirdly in a chair. The office clock ticked exactly in the stillness. At length Barker said suddenly, Buck, does it ever cross your mind what this is all about? The Hammersmith to media veil thoroughfare was an uncommonly good speculation. You and I hoped a great deal from it. But is it worth it? It will cost us thousands to crush this ridiculous riot. Suppose we let it alone? And be thrashed in public by a red-haired madman whom any two doctors would lock up right out, Buck, starting to his feet. What do you propose to do, Mr. Barker, to apologize to the admirable Mr. Wayne, to kneel to the Charter of the Cities, clasped to your bosom the flag of the Red Lion, to kiss in secession every sacred lamppost that saved Notting Hill? No, by God, my men fought jolly well. They were beaten by a trick and they'll fight again. Buck, said Barker, I always admired you, and you were quite right in what you said the other day. In what? In saying, said Barker, rising quietly, that we had all got into Adam Wayne's atmosphere and out of our own. My friend, the whole territorial kingdom of Adam Wayne extends to about nine streets, with barricades at the end of them. The spiritual kingdom of Adam Wayne extends God knows where. It extends to this office at any rate. The red-haired madman whom any two doctors would lock up is filling this room with his roaring, unreasonable soul. And it was the red-haired madman who said the last word you spoke. Buck walked to the window without replying. You understand, of course, he said at last, I do not dream of giving in. The king, meanwhile, was rattling along on the top of his blue omnibus. The traffic of London, as a whole, had not, of course, been greatly disturbed by these events, for the affair was treated as a Notting Hill riot, and that area was marked off as if it had been in the hands of a gang of recognized rioters. The blue omnibuses simply went round, as they would have done if a road were being mended, and the omnibus on which the correspondent of the court-journal was sitting swept round the corner of Queen's Road, Bayswater. The king was alone on the top of the vehicle, and was enjoying the speed at which it was going. Foward, my beauty, my Arab, he said patting the omnibus encouragingly, fleet us of all thy bounding tribe. Are thy relations with thy driver, I wonder, of the better one and his steed? Does he sleep side by side with thee? His meditations were broken by a sudden and jarring stoppage. Looking over the edge, he saw that the heads of the horses were being held by men in the uniform of Wayne's army, and heard the voice of an officer calling out orders. King Auberon descended from the omnibus with dignity. The guard, or picket of red-holbered ears, who had stopped the vehicle, did not number more than twenty, and they were under the command of a short, dark, clever-looking young man, conspicuous among the rest, as being clad in an ordinary frockcoat, but hurt round the waist with a red sash and a long seventeenth-century sword. A shiny silk hat and spectacles completed the outfit in a pleasing manner. To whom have I the honor of speaking, said the king, evering to look like Charles I, in spite of personal difficulties? The dark man and spectacles lifted his hat with equal gravity. My name is Bowles, he said. I am a chemist. I am also a captain of O Company of the army of Notting Hill. I am distressed at having to incommode you by stopping the omnibus, but this area is covered by our proclamation, and we intercept all traffic. May I ask to whom I have the honor? Why, good gracious! I beg your majesty's pardon. I am quite overwhelmed at finding myself concerned with the king. Albaron put up his hand with indescribable grandeur. Not with the king, he said, with the special war correspondent of the court journal. I beg your majesty's pardon. Began Mr. Bowles doubtfully. Do you call me majesty? I repeat, said Albaron firmly. I am a representative of the press. I have chosen with a deep sense of responsibility the name of Pinker. I should desire avail to be drawn over the past. Very well, sir, said Mr. Bowles with an error submission. In our eyes the sanctity of the press is at least as great as that of the throne. We desire nothing better than that our wrongs and our glory should be widely known. May I ask Mr. Pinker if you have any objection to being presented to the provo and to General Turnbull? The provo I have had the honor of meeting, said Albaron easily. We old journalists, you know, meet everybody. I should be most delighted to have the same honor again. General Turnbull also it would be a gratification to know. The younger men are so interesting. We of the old Fleet Street gang lose touch with them. Will you be so good as to step this way? said the leader of Old Company. I am always good, said Mr. Pinker. Lead on. CHAPTER XII The Great Army of South Kensington. The article from the special correspondent of the court journal arrived in due course written on very coarse copy paper in the king's arabesque of handwriting in which three words filled a page and yet were illegible. Moreover the contribution was the more perplexing at first as it opened with a succession of erased paragraphs. The writer appeared to have attempted the article once or twice in several journalistic styles. At the side of one experiment was written tri-american style and the fragment began. The king must go. We want gritty men. Flap-doodle is all very. And then broke off followed by the note Good Sound Journalism Safer. Try it. The experiment in Good Sound Journalism appeared to begin. The greatest of English poets has said that arose by any. This also stopped abruptly. The next annotation at the side was almost undecipherable but seemed to be something like, How about old Stevens and the Mott Just, sir, E.G.? Morning winked a little wearily at me over the curved edge of Camden Hill and its houses with their sharp shadows. Under the abrupt black cardboard of the outline it took some little time to detect colors. But at length I saw a brownish-yellow shifting in the obscurity and I knew that it was the guard of Swindon's West Kensington Army. They are being held as a reserve and lining the whole ridge above the Bayswater Road. Their camp and their main force is under the Great Waterworks Tower on Camden Hill. I forgot to say that the Waterworks Tower looks swart. As I passed them and came over the curve of Silver Street, I saw the blue cloudy masses of Barker's men blocking the entrance to the high road like a sapphire smoke. Good. The disposition of the Allied troops under the general management of Mr. Wilson appears to be as follows. The Yellow Army, if I may so describe the West Kensingtonians, lies, as I have said, in a strip below the ridge, its furthest point westward being the west side of Camden Hill Road, its furthest point eastward the beginning of Kensington Gardens. The Green Army of Wilson lines the Notting Hill High Road itself from Queens Road to the corner of Pembridge Road, curving round the ladder and extending some 300 yards up towards Westbourne Grove. Westbourne Grove itself is occupied by Barker of South Kensington. The fourth side of this rough square, the Queens Road side, is held by some of Buck's purple warriors. The whole resembles some ancient and dainty Dutch flowerbed. Along the crest of Camden Hill lie the golden crocuses of West Kensington. They are, as it were, the first fiery fringe of the whole. Northward lies our Hyacinth Barker with all his blue hyacinths. Round to the southwest run the green rushes of Wilson of Bayswater and a line of violet irises aptly symbolized by Mr. Buck. Complete the whole. The Argenta exterior, I am losing the style I should have said, curving with a whisk instead of merely curving. Also I should have called the Hyacinth sudden. I cannot keep this up. War is too rapid for this style of writing. Please ask Office Boy to insert moat justs. The truth is that there is nothing to report. That commonplace element, which is always ready to devour all beautiful things, as the black pig in the Irish mythology will finally devour the stars and gods. That commonplace element, as I say, has, in its black pigish way devoured finally the chances of any romance in this affair. That which once consisted of absurd but thrilling combats in the streets has degenerated into something which is the very prose of warfare. It has degenerated into a siege. The siege may be defined as a peace, plus the inconvenience of war. Of course, Wayne cannot hold out. There is no more chance of help from anywhere else than of ships from the moon. And if old Wayne had stocked his street with tinned meats till all his garrison had to sit on them, he couldn't hold out for more than a month or two. As a matter of melancholy fact, he has done something rather like this. He has stocked his street with food until there must be uncommonly little room to turn around. But what is the good? To hold out for all that time and then to give in of necessity, what does it mean? It means waiting until your victories are forgotten and then taking the trouble to be defeated? I cannot understand how Wayne can be so inartistic. And how odd it is, yet one views the thing quite differently when one knows it is defeated. I always thought Wayne was rather fine. But now when I know that he is done for, there seems to be nothing else but Wayne. All the streets seem to point at him. All the chimneys seem to lean towards him. I suppose it is a morbid feeling, but Pump Street seems to be the only part of London that I feel physically. I suppose I say that is morbid. I suppose it is exactly how a man feels about his heart when his heart is weak. Pump Street, the heart is a pump, and I am dribbling. Our finest leader at the front is, beyond all question, General Wilson. He has adopted, alone among the other provos, the uniform of his own Holberdeers, although that fine old sixteen-century garb was not originally intended to go with red-side whiskers. It was he who, against the most admirable and desperate defense, broke last night into Pump Street and held it for at least half an hour. He was, afterwards expelled from it by General Turnbull of Notting Hill, but only after desperate fighting and the sudden descent of that terrible darkness, which proved so much more fatal to the forces of General Buck and General Swindon. Provo Wayne himself, with whom I had, with great good fortune, a most interesting interview, bore the most eloquent testimony to the conduct of General Wilson and his men. His precise words are as follows. I have bought sweets at his funny little shop when I was four years old, and ever since I never noticed anything, I am ashamed to say, except that he talked through his nose and didn't wash himself particularly, and he came over to our barricade like a devil from hell. I repeated this speech to General Wilson himself and with some delicate improvements, and he seemed pleased with it. He does not, however, seem pleased with anything so much just now as he is with wearing a sword. I have it from the front on the best authority that General Wilson was not completely shaved yesterday. It is believed in military circles that he is growing a mustache. As I have said, there is nothing to report. I walked weirdly to the pillar box at the corner of Pembridge Road to post my copy. Nothing whatever has happened except the preparations for a particularly long and feeble siege, during which I trust I shall not be required to be at the front. As I glance up Pembridge Road in the growing dust, the aspect of that road reminds me that there is one note worth adding. General Buck has suggested, with characteristic acumen to General Wilson, that in order to obviate the possibility of such a catastrophe as overwhelmed the Allied forces in the last advance on Notting Hill, the catastrophe I mean of the extinguished lamps, each soldier should have a lighted lantern round his neck. This is one of the things which I really admire about General Buck. He possesses what people use to mean by the humility of the man of science. That is, he learns steadily from his mistakes. Wayne may score off him in some other way, but not him that way. The lanterns look like fairy lights as they curve round the end of Pembridge Road. Later I write with some difficulty because the blood will run down my face and make patterns on the paper. Blood is a very beautiful thing. That is why it is concealed. If you ask why blood runs down my face, I can only reply that I was kicked by a horse. If you ask me what horse, I can reply with some pride that it was a war horse. If you ask me how a war horse came on the scene in our simple pedestrian warfare, I am reduced to the necessity so painful to a special correspondent of recounting my experiences. I was, as I have said in the very act of posting copy at the pillar box and of glancing as I did so up the glittering curve of Pembridge Road, studded with the lights of Wilson's men. I don't know what made me pause to examine the matter, but I had a fancy that the line of lights where it melted into the indistinct brown twilight was more indistinct than usual. I was almost certain that in a certain stretch of the road where there had been five lights there were now only four. I strained my eyes, I counted them again, and there were only three. A moment after there were only two. An instant after only one and an instant after that the lanterns near to me swung like jangled bells as if struck suddenly. They flared and fell, and for the moment the fall of them was like the fall of the sun, the stars out of the heaven. It left everything in a primal blindness. As a matter of fact the road was not yet legitimately dark. There was still red rays of a sunset in the sky, and the brown gloaming was still warm as it were with a feeling as a firelight. But for three seconds after the lanterns swung and sank I saw in front of me a blackness blocking the sky. And with the fourth second I knew that this blackness which blocked the sky was a man on a great horse, and I was trampled and tossed aside as the swirl of horsemen swept round the corner. And as they turned I saw that they were not black but scarlet. They were a sortie of the besieged, wane riding ahead. I lifted myself from the gutter, blinded with blood of a very slight skin wound, and clearly enough not caring either for the blindness or for the slightness of the wound. For one mortal minute after that amazing cavalcade has spun past there was dead stillness on the empty road. And then came Barker and all his halberdeers running like devils in the track of them. It had been their business to guard the gate by which the sortie had broken out, but they had not reckoned and small blamed to them on cavalry. As it was Barker and his men made a perfectly splendid run after them, almost catching wane's horses by the tails. Nobody can understand the sortie. It consists only of a small number of wane's garrison. Turnbull himself, with the vast mass of it, is undoubtedly still barricaded in Pump Street. Sorties of this kind are natural enough in the majority of historical sieges, such as the Siege of Paris in 1870, because in such cases the besieged are certain of some support outside. But what can be the object of it in this case? Wane knows, or if he is too mad to know anything, at least Turnbull knows, that there is not and never has been the smallest chance of support for him outside, that the mass of the same modern inhabitants of London regard this farcical patriotism with as much contempt as they do the original idiocy that gave it birth, nefali of our miserable king. What wane and his horsemen are doing nobody can even conjecture. The general theory round here is that he is simply a traitor and has abandoned the besieged. But all such larger but yet more soluble riddles are as nothing compared with a one small but unanswerable riddle. Where did they get the horses? Later. I have heard a most extraordinary account of the origin of the appearance of the horses. It appeared that the amazing person General Turnbull, who is now ruling Pump Street in the absence of Wane, sent out on the morning of the declaration of war a vast number of little boys or cherubs of the gutter, as we pressmen say, with half-crowns in their pockets to take cabs all over London. No less than a hundred and sixty cabs met at Pump Street were commandeered by the garrison. The men were set free, the cabs used to make barricades, and the horses kept in Pump Street where they were fed and exercised for several days until they were sufficiently rapid and efficient to be used for this wild ride out of the town. If this is so, and I have it on the best possible authority, the method of the sortie is explained, but we have no explanation of its object. Just as Barker's blues were swinging round the corner after them they were stopped, but not by an enemy, only by the voice of one man, and he a friend. Red Wilson of Bayswater ran alone along the main road, like a madman, waving them back with a hull-bread snatched from a sentinel. He was in supreme command, and Barker stopped at the corner, staring and bewildered. We could hear Wilson's voice loud and distinct out of the dusk, so that it seemed strange that the great voice should come out of the little body. Halt, South Kensington! Guard this entry and prevent them returning. I will pursue. Forward the green guards. A wall of dark blue uniforms and a wood of pole-axes was between me and Wilson, for Barker's men blocked the mouth of the road in two rigid lines. But through them and through the dusk I could hear the clear orders and the clank of arms, and see the green army of Wilson marching by toward the west. They were our great fighting men. Wilson had filled them with his own fire. In a few days they had become veterans. Each of them wore a silver medal of a pump, to boast that they alone of all the allied armies had stood victorious in Pump Street. I managed to slip past the detachment of Barker's Blues, who are guarding the end of Pembridge Road, and a sharp spell of running brought me to the tail of Wilson's green army as it swung down the road in pursuit of the flying wane. The dusk had deepened into an almost total darkness. For some time I only heard the throb of the marching pace. Then suddenly there was a cry, and the tall fighting men were flung back on me almost crushing me, and again the lanterns swung and jingled and the cold nozzles of great horses pushed into the precipice. They had turned and charged us. Two fools came the voice of Wilson, cleaving our panic with a splendid cold anger. Don't you see the horses have no riders? It was true. We were being plunged at by a stampede of horses with empty saddles. What could it mean? Had Wayne met some of our men and been defeated, or had he flung these horses at us at some kind of ruse or mad new mode of warfare, such as he's seen Benton inventing? And did he and his men want to get away in disguise? Or did they want to hide in houses somewhere? Never did I admire any man's intellect, even my own, so much as I did Wilson's at that moment. Without a word he simply pointed the halberd, which he still grasped, to the southern side of the road. As you know the streets running up to the ridge of Camden Hill from the main road are peculiarly steep. They are more like sudden flights of stairs. We were just opposite Aubrey Road, the steepest of all. Up that it would have been far more difficult to urge half-trained horses than to run up on one's feet. Left wheel, hallowed Wilson, they have gone up here, he added to me, who happened to be at his elbow. Why, I venture to ask. Can't say for certain, replied the base water general. They've gone up here in a great hurry. Anyhow they simply turned their horses loose because they couldn't take them up. I fancy I know. I fancy they're trying to get over the ridge to Kensington or Hammersmith or somewhere, and are striking up here because it's just beyond the end of our line. Damn fools not to have gone further along the road, though. They've only just shaved our last outpost. Lambert is hardly four hundred yards from here, and I've sent him word. Lambert, I said. Not young Wilfred Lambert, my old friend. Wilfred Lambert's name, said the general, used to be a man about town, silly fellow with a big nose. That kind of man always volunteers for some war or other, and what's funnier, he generally isn't have bad at it. Lambert is distinctly good. The yellow West Kensington's I always reckoned the weakest part of my army, but he has pulled them together uncommonly well, though he's subordinate to Swindon, who's a donkey. In the attack from Pembridge Road the other night, he showed great pluck. He has shown greater pluck than that, I said. He has criticized my sense of humor. That was his first engagement. This remark was, I am sorry to say lost on the admirable commander of the Allied forces. We were in the act of climbing the last half of Warby Road, which is so abrupt a slope, that it looks like an old-fashioned map leaning up against the wall. There are lines of little trees, one above the other, as in the old-fashioned map. We reached the top of it, panting somewhat, and we were just about to turn a corner by a place called, in chivalrous anticipation of our wars of sword and axe, Tower Creasy. When we were suddenly knocked in the stomach, I can use no other term, by a horde of men hurled back upon us. They wore the red uniform of wane. Their halberds were broken, their foreheads bleeding. But the mere impetus of their retreat staggered us, as we stood at the last ridge of the slope. Good old Lambert yelled out suddenly, and stalled Mr. Wilson of base water in an uncontrollable excitement. Damn jolly old Lambert. He's got there already. He's driving them back on us. Hurrah, hurrah! Forward the green guards. We swung round the corner eastwards, Wilson running first, brandishing the halberd. Will you pardon a little egotism? Everyone likes a little egotism when it takes the foremost mind does, in this case, of a disgraceful confession. The thing is really a little interesting, because it shows how the merely artistic habit has bitten into men like me. It was the most intensely exciting occurrence that has ever come to me in my life. And I was really intensely excited about it. And yet, as we turned that corner, the first impression I had was of something that had not to do with the fight at all. I was stricken from the sky as by a thunderbolt, by the height of the Waterworks Tower on Camden Hill. I don't know whether Londoners generally realize how high it looks when one comes out in this way, almost immediately under it. For the second it seems to me that at the foot of it, even human war was a triviality. For the second I felt as if I had been drunk with some trivial orgy, and that I had been sobered by the shock of that great shadow. On moments afterwards I realized that under it was going on something more enduring than stone, and something wilder than the dizziest height, the agony of man. And I knew that, compared to that. This overwhelming tower was itself a triviality. It was a mere stalk of stone which humanity could snap like a stick. I don't know why I have talked so much about this silly old Waterworks Tower, which at the very best was only a tremendous background. It was that, certainly, a somber and awful landscape against which our figures were relieved. But I think the real reason was that there was in my own mind so sharp a transition from the Tower of Stone to the Man of Flesh. For what I saw first when I had shaken it off as it were, the shadow of the Tower, was a man, and a man I knew. Lambert stood at the further corner of the street that curbed round the tower, his figure outlined in some degree by the beginning of a moonrise. He looked magnificent, a hero, but he looked something much more interesting than that. He was, as it happened, in almost precisely the same swaggering attitude in which he had stood nearly fifteen years ago when he swung his walking stick and struck it into the ground and told me that all my subtlety was drivel. And upon my soul I think he required more courage to say that than to fight as he does now. For then he was fighting against something that was in the Ascendant, fashionable and victorious. And now he is fighting at the risk of his life, no doubt, merely against something which is already dead and which is impossibly futile, of which nothing has been more impossible and futile than this very sortie which has brought him into contact with it. People nowadays allow infinitely too little for the psychological sense of victory as a factor in affairs. Then he was attacking the degraded but undoubtedly victorious Quinn. Now he is attacking the interesting, but totally extinguished Wayne. His name recalls to me the details of the scene. The facts were these. A line of red halberdeers headed by Wayne were marching up the street, close under the northern wall, which is in fact the bottom of a sort of dike or fortification of the waterworks. Lambert and his yellow West Kensington's had that instant swept round the corner and had just shaken the Wainites heavily, hurling back a few of the more timid as I have just described into our very arms. When our force struck the tail of Wayne's, everyone knew that all was up with him. His favorite military barber was struck down, his grocer was stunned, he himself was hurt in the thigh and reeled back against the wall. We had him in a trap with two jaws. Is that you, shouted Lambert genuinely to Wilson across the hemmed-in host of Notting Hill? That's about the ticket, replied the general Wilson. Keep them under the wall. The men of Notting Hill were falling fast. Adam Wayne threw up his long arms to the wall above him and with a spring stood upon it. A gigantic figure against the moon. He tore the banner out of the hands of the standard bearer below him and shook it out suddenly above our heads so that it was like thunder in the heavens. Round the red lion, he cried. Swords, round the red lion. Halbrids, round the red lion. They are the thorns round rows. His voice and the crack of the banner made a momentary rally and Lambert, whose idiotic face was almost beautiful with battle, felt it as by an instinct and cried. Drop your public house flag, you footler. Drop it. The banner of the red lion seldom stoops, said Wayne proudly, letting it out luxuriant in the night wind. The next moment I knew that poor Adam's sentimental theatricality had cost him much. Lambert was on the wall at a bound. His sword at his teeth. He had slashed at Wayne's head before he had time to draw his sword, his hands being busy with the enormous flag. He stepped back only just in time to avoid the first cut and let the flagstaff fall so that the spear blade at the end of it pointed to Lambert. The banner stoops cried Wayne in a voice that must have startled streets. The banner of Notting Hill stoops to a hero, and with the words he drove the spear point in half the flag, half through Lambert's body, and dropped him dead upon the road below, a stone upon the stones of the street. Notting Hill, Notting Hill cried Wayne in a sort of divine rage. Her banner is all the holier for the blood of a brave enemy. Up on the wall, Patriots, up on the wall, Notting Hill. With his long, strong arm, he actually dragged a man up on the wall to be silhouetted against the moon. And more and more men climbed up there, pulled themselves or were pulled, till clusters and crowds of half-massacred men of Pump Street masked upon the wall above us. Notting Hill, Notting Hill cried Wayne unceasingly. Well, what about Bayswater, as to worthy working man in Wilson's army irritably? Bayswater forever. We have won, cried Wayne, striking his flagstaff in the ground. Bayswater forever. We have taught our enemies patriotism. Oh, cut these fellows up and have done with it, cried one of Lambert's lieutenants, who was reduced to something bordering on madness by the responsibility of succeeding to the command. Let us by all means try, said Wilson grimly. And the two armies closed round the third. I simply cannot describe what followed. I'm sorry, but there is such a thing as physical fatigue, as physical nausea. And I may add as physical terror. Suffice it to say that the above paragraph was written about 11 p.m. and that it is now about 2 a.m. And the battle is not finished. And it is not likely to be. Suffice it further to say that down the steep streets which lead from the Waterworks Tower to the Notting Hill High Road, blood has been running and is running in great red serpents that curl out into the main thoroughfare and shine in the moon. Later. The final touch has been given to all this terrible utilities. Hours have passed. Morning has broken. Men are still swaying and fighting at the foot of the tower and round the corner of Aubrey Road. The fight has not finished. But I know it is a farce. News has just come to show that Wayne's amazing sortie, followed by the amazing resistance through a whole night on the Wall of the Waterworks, is if it had not been. What was the object of that strange exodus we shall probably never know, for the simple reason that everyone who knew will probably be cut to pieces in the course of the next two or three hours? I have heard about three minutes ago what Buck and Buck's methods have won after all. He was perfectly right, of course, when one comes to think of it, in holding that it was physically impossible for a street to defeat a city. While we thought he was patrolling the eastern gates with his purple army, while we were rushing about the streets and waving halberds and lanterns, while poor old Wilson was scheming like Mulkey and fighting like Achilles to entrap the wild Provo of Notting Hill. Mr. Buck, retired draper, had simply driven down in a handsome cab and done something about as plain as butter and about as useful and nasty. He has gone down to South Kensington, Brompton, and Fulham, and by spending about 4,000 pounds of his private means has raised an army of nearly as many men. That is to say, an army big enough to beat not only Wayne, but Wayne and all his present enemies put together. The army, I understand, is encamped along High Street, Kensington, and fills it from the church to Addison Road Bridge. It is to advance by 10 different roads uphill to the north. I cannot endure to remain here. Everything makes it worse than it need be. The dawn, for instance, has broken round Camden Hill. Splendid spaces of silver edged with gold are torn out of the sky. Where still Wayne and his men feel the dawn, their faces, though bloody and pale, are strangely hopeful. In supportably pathetic, worst of all for the moment they are winning. If it were not for Buck and the new army, they might just and only just win. I repeat, I cannot stand it. It is like watching that wonderful play of old materlinks. You know my partiality for the healthy, jolly old authors of the 19th century. In which one has to watch the quiet conduct of people inside a parlor, while knowing that the very men are outside the door, whose word can blast it all with tragedy. And this is the worst for the men are not talking, but writhing and bleeding and dropping dead, for a thing that is already settled and settled against them. The great gray masses of men still toil and tug and sway hither and thither around the great gray tower, and the tower is still motionless, as it always will be motionless. These men will be crushed before the sun is set, and new men will arise and be crushed, and new wrongs done and tyranny will always rise like the sun, and injustice will always be as fresh as the flowers of spring, and the stone tower will always look down on it. Matter in its brutal beauty will always look down on those who are mad enough to consent to die, and yet more mad, since they consent to live. Thus ended abruptly the first and last contribution of the special correspondent of the court journal to that valued periodical. The correspondent himself, as has been said, was simply sick and gloomy at the last news of the triumph of Buck. He slouched sadly down the sleep-albury road, up into which he had the night before run and so unusual in excitement, and strolled out into the empty dawn-lit main-road, looking vaguely for a cab. He saw nothing in the vacant space except the blue and gold-glittering thing running very fast, which looked at first like a very tall beetle, but turned out to his greatest onishment, to be barker. "'Have you heard the good news?' asked that gentleman. "'Yes,' said Quinn, with a measured voice. "'I have heard the glad tidings of great joy. Shall we take a handsome cab down to Kensington? I see one over there.' They took the cab and were in four minutes, fronting the ranks of the multitudinous and invincible army. Quinn had not spoken a word all the way, and something about him had prevented the essentially impressionable barker from speaking either. The great army, as it moved up Kensington High Street, calling many heads to the numberless windows, for it was long indeed longer than the lives of most of the tolerably young, since such an army had been in London. Compared with the vast organization, which was now swallowing up the miles, with Buck at its head as leader, and the King hanging at its tail as journalist, the whole story of our problem was insignificant. In the presence of that army, the red-knotting hills and the green base waters were alike tiny and straggling groups. In its presence, the whole struggle round Pump Street was like an anthill under the hoof of an ox. Every man who felt or looked at that infinity of men knew that it was the triumph of Buck's brutal arithmetic, whether Wayne was right or wrong, wise or foolish, was quite a fair matter for discussion, but it was a matter of history. At the foot of Church Street opposite Kensington Church, they paused in their glowing good humor. Let us send some kind of messenger or herald up to them, said Buck, turning to Barker and the King. Let us send then ask them to cave in without more muddle. What shall we say to them, said Barker doubtfully? The facts of the case are quite sufficient, rejoined Buck. It is the facts of the case that make an army surrender. Let us simply say that our army that is fighting their army, and their army that is fighting our army, amount altogether about 1,000 men. Say that we have 4,000. It is very simple. Of the 1,000 fighting, they have at the very most 300, so that with those 300 they have now to fight 4,700 men. Let them do it, if it amuses them. And the provo of North Kensington laughed. The herald who was dispatched up Church Street in all the pomp of the South Kensington Blue and Gold with the three birds on his tabard, was attended by two trumpeters. What will they do when they consent, has Barker, for the sake of saying something in the sudden stillness of that immense army? I know my wane very well, said Buck laughing. When he submits, he will send a red herald, flaming with the lion of Notting Hill. Even defeat will be delightful to him, since it is formal and romantic. The king, who had strolled up to the head of the line, broke silence for the first time. I shouldn't wonder, he said, if he defied you, and didn't send the herald after all. I don't think you do know your wane, quite so well as you think. All right, Your Majesty, said Buck easily. If it isn't disrespectful, I'll put my political calculations in a very simple form. I'll lay you 10 pounds to a shilling, the herald comes with the surrender. All right, said Oberon. I may be wrong, but it's my notion of Adam wane that he'll die in his city. And that, till he's dead, it will not be a safe property. The bets made, Your Majesty, said Buck's. Another long silence ensued in the course of which Barker alone, amid the motionless army, strolled and stamped in his restless way. Then Buck suddenly lent forward. It's taking your money, Your Majesty, he said. I knew it was. There comes the herald from Adam wane. It's not pride the king peering for it also, you brute. It's a red omnibus. It's not, said Buck calmly. And the king did not answer. For down the center of the spacious and silent church street was walking beyond question, the herald of the red lion with two trumpeters. Buck had something in him which taught him how to be magnanimous. In his hour of success he felt magnanimous toward wane, whom he really admired, magnanimous toward the king, off whom he had scored so publicly. And above all magnanimous towards Barker, who was the titular head of this vast south Kensington army, which his own talent had evoked. General Barker, he said bowing, do you propose now to receive the message from the besiege? Barker bowed also and advanced toward the herald. Has your master, Mr. Adam wane received our request for surrender, he asked? The herald conveyed a solemn and respectful affirmative. Barker resumed coughing slightly, but encouraged. What answer does your master send? The herald again inclined himself submissively and answered in a kind of monotone. My message is this, Adam wane, Lord High Provo of Notting Hill, under the charter of King Oberon and the laws of God and all mankind, free and of a free city, greets James Barker, Lord High Provo of South Kensington, by the same rights, free and honorable, leader of the army of the south. With all friendly reverence and with all constitutional considerations, he desires James Barker to lay down his arms, and the whole army under his command to lay down their arms also. Before the words were ended, the king had run forward into the open space with shining eyes. The rest of the staff and the forefront of the army were literally struck breathless. When they recovered, they began to laugh beyond restraint. The revulsion was too sudden. The Lord High Provo of Notting Hill, continued the herald, does not propose in the event of your surrender to use his victory for any of those repressive purposes which others have entertained against him. He will leave you your free laws and your free cities, your flags and your governments. He will not destroy the religion of South Kensington or crush the old customs of Bayswater. An irrepressible explosion of laughter went up from the forefront of the great army. The king must have had something to do with this, humors said, buck-slapping his thigh. It is too deliciously insolent. Barker have a glass of wine. And in his conviviality, he actually sent a soldier across to the restaurant opposite the church and brought out two glasses for a toast. When the laughter had died down, the herald continued quite monotonously. In the event of your surrendering your arms and dispersing under the superintendence of our forces, these local rites of yours shall be carefully observed. In the event of your not doing so, the Lord High Provo of Notting Hill desires to announce that he has just captured the Water Works Tower just above you on Camden Hill, and that within ten minutes from now, that is, on the reception through me of your refusal, he will open the great reservoir and flood the whole valley where you stand in thirty feet of water. God save King Oberon. Buck had dropped his glass and sent a great splash of wine over the road. But, but, he said, and then, by a last and splendid effort of his great sanity, looked the facts in the face. We must surrender, he said. You could do nothing against fifty thousand tons of water coming down a steep hill, ten minutes' heads. We must surrender. Our four thousand men might as well be four. They kiss thee galore. Perkins, you may as well get me another glass of wine. In this way the vast army of South Kensington surrendered, and the Empire of Notting Hill began. One further fact in this connection is perhaps worth mentioning. The fact that after his victory, Adam Wayne caused the Great Tower on Camden Hill to be plated with gold and inscribed with a great epithet, saying it was the monument of Wilford Lambert, the heroic defender of the place, and surmounted it with a statue. In which his large nose was done something less than justice to. Book 5 Chapter 1 The Empire of Notting Hill On the evening of the 3rd of October, 20 years after the great victory of Notting Hill, which gave it the dominion of London, King Auberon came as of old out of Kensington Palace. He had changed little, save for a streak or two of gray in his hair, for his face had always been old and his steps slow, and as it were decrepit. If he looked old, it was not because of anything physical or mental. It was because he still wore, with quaint conservatism, the frock coat and high hat of the days before the Great War. I have survived the deluge, he said. I am a pyramid, and must behave as such. As he passed up the street, the Kensingtonians in their picturesque blue smocks saluted him as a king, and then looked after him as a curiosity. It seemed odd to them that men had once worn so elvish in attire. The king, cultivating the walk attributed to the oldest inhabitant, Gaffer Auberon, his friends were now confidentially desired to call him, went toddling northward. He paused with reminiscence in his eye at the southern gate of Notting Hill, one of those nine great gates of bronze and steel, wrought with reliefs of the old battles by the hand of Chiffy himself. Ah, he said, shaking his head and assuming an unnecessary era of age, a provincialism of accent. Ah, I mind when there weren't none of this here. He passed through the Ossington Gate, surmounted by a great lion wrought in red copper and yellow brass, with the motto, Nothing Hill. The guard in red and gold saluted him with his hull-bread. It was about sunset, and the lamps were being lit. Auberon paused to look at them, for they were Chiffy's finest work, and his artistic eye never failed to feast on them. In memory of the great battle of the lamps each great iron lamp was surmounted by a veiled figure, sword in hand, holding over the flame an iron hood or extinguisher, as if ready to let it fall if the armies of the south and west should again show their flags in the city. Thus no child in Notting Hill could play about the streets without the very lamppost reminding him of the salvation of his country in the dreadful year. Old Wayne was right in his way, commented the King. The sword does make things beautiful. It has made the whole world romantic by now, and to think people once thought near Befoun for suggesting a romantic Notting Hill. Drury me, drury me. I think that is the expression. It seems like a previous existence. Turning a corner, he found himself in Pump Street, opposite the four shops which Adam Wayne had studied 20 years before. He entered idly the shop of Mr. Mead the Grocer. Mr. Mead was somewhat older, like the rest of the world, and his red beard, which he now wore with a moustache, and long and full, was partly blanched and discolored. He was dressed in a long, richly embroidered robe of blue, brown, and crimson, interwoven with an eastern complexity of pattern, and covered with obscure symbols and pictures, representing his wares passing from hand to hand, and from nation to nation. Brown his neck was the chain of the blue argosy cut in turquoise, which he wore as grand master of the grocers. The whole shop had the somber and sumptuous look of its owner. The wares were displayed as prominently as in the olden days, but they were now blended and arranged with a sense of tint and grouping, too often neglected by the dim grocers of those forgotten days. The wares were shown plainly, but shown not so much as an old grocer would have shown his stock, but rather, as an educated virtuoso would have shown his treasures. The tea was stored in great blue and green vases, inscribed with the nine indispensable sayings of the wise men of China. Other vases of a confused orange and purple, less rigid and dominant, more humble and dreamy, stored symbolically the tea of India. A row of caskets of a simple silvery metal contained tinned meats. Each was wrought with some rude but rhythmic form as a shell, a horn, a fish, or an apple, to indicate what material had been canned in it. Your Majesty! said Mr. Mead, sweeping an oriental reverence. This is an honour to me, but yet more an honour to the city. Albarón took off his hat. Mr. Mead, he said, nodding hill, whether in giving or taking, can deal in nothing but honour. Do you happen to sell licorice? Licorice, sir, said Mr. Mead, is not the least important of our benefits out of the dark heart of Arabia, and going reverently towards a green and silver canister made in the form of an Arabian mosque he proceeded to serve his customer. I was just thinking, Mr. Mead, said the King, reflectively. I don't know why I should think about it just now, but I was just thinking of twenty years ago. Do you remember the times before the war? The grocer, having wrapped up the licorice sticks in a piece of paper, inscribed with some appropriate sentiment, lifted his large gray eyes dreamily and looked at the darkening sky outside. Oh, yes, Your Majesty, he said. I remember these streets before the Lord Provo began to rule us. I can't remember how we felt very well. All the great songs and the fighting changed one so. And I don't think we can really estimate all we owe to the Provo. But I can remember his coming into this very shop twenty-two years ago, and I remember the things he said. The singular thing is that, as far as I remember, I thought the things he said odd at that time. Now it's the things that I said as far as I can recall them that seem to me odd, as odd as a madman's antics. Ah, said the king, and looked at him with an unfathomable quietness. I thought nothing of being a grocer, then, he said. Isn't that odd enough for anybody? I thought nothing of all the wonderful places that my goods come from, and wonderful ways that they are made. I did not know that I was for all practical purposes a king, with slaves spearing fishes near the secret pool, and gathering fruits in the islands under the world. My mind was blank on the thing I was as mad as a header. The king turned also, and stared out into the dark, where the great lamps that commemorated the battle were already flaming. And is this the end of poor old Wayne, he said half to himself? To inflame everyone so much that he has lost himself in the blaze? Is this his victory, that he, my incomparable Wayne, is now only one in a world of Wayne's? As he conquered and become by conquest commonplace? Must Mr. Me the grocer talk as high as he? Lord, what a strange world in which a man cannot remain unique, even by taking the trouble to go mad. And he went dreamily out of the shop. He paused outside the next one almost precisely, as the provo had done two decades before. How uncommonly creepy this shop looks, he said. But yet somehow encouragingly creepy, invitingly creepy. It looks like something in a jolly old nursery story in which you are frightened out of your skin, and yet know that things always end well. The way those low, sharp gables are carved like great black bat's wings folded down, and the way those queer-colored bowls underneath are made to shine like giant's eyeballs, it looks like a benevolent warlock's hut. It is apparently a chemist's. Almost as he spoke, Mr. Boll's a chemist came to his shop door in a long black velvet gown and hood, monastic as it were, but yet with a touch of the diabolic. His hair was still quite black and his face even paler than a bold. The only spot of color he carried was a red star cut in some precious stone of strong tint hung on his breast. He belonged to the Society of the Red Star of Charity, founded on the lamps displayed by doctors and chemists. A fine evening, sir, said the chemist. Why, I can scarcely be mistaken in supposing it to be your Majesty. Pray step inside and share a bottle of cell volatile or anything that may take your fancy. As it happens there is an old acquaintance of your Majesties in my shop, carousing, if I may be permitted the term, upon that beverage this moment. The King entered the shop, which was an Aladdin's garden of shades and hues, for as the chemist's scheme of color was more brilliant than the grocer's scheme, so it was arranged with even more delicacy and fancy. Never, if the phrase may be employed, had such a nose-gay of medicines been presented to the artistic eye. But even the solemn rainbow of that evening interior was rivaled or even eclipsed by the figure standing in the center of the shop. His form, which was a large and stately one, was clad in a brilliant blue velvet, cut in the richest renaissance fashion, and slashed so as to show gleams and gaps of a wonderful lemon or pale yellow. He had several chains round his neck, and his plumes, which were of several tints of bronze and gold, hung down to the great gold hilt of his long sword. He was drinking a dose of salvolitol, and admiring its opal tint. The King advanced with a slight mystification toward the tall figure whose face was in shadow. Then he said, By the great Lord of Luck, Barker, the figure removed his plumed cap, showing the same dark head and long, almost equinine face which the King had so often seen rising out of the high collar of Bond Street. Except for a gray patch on each temple it was totally unchanged. Your Majesty, said Barker, this is a meeting nobly retrospective, a meeting that has about it a certain October gold. I drink two old days, and he finished his salvolitol with a simple feeling. I am delighted to see you again, Barker, said the King. It is indeed long since we met. What with my travels in Asia Minor and my book having to be written? You have read my life of Prince Albert for children, of course. We have scarcely met twice since the Great War. That is, twenty years ago. I wonder, said Barker thoughtfully, if I might speak freely to Your Majesty. Well, said Aubran, it is rather late in the day to start speaking respectfully. Flap away, my bird of freedom. Well, Your Majesty, replied Barker, lowering his voice. I don't think it will be so long to the next war. What do you mean, asked Aubran? We will stand this insolence no longer, burst out Barker fiercely. We are not slaves, because Adam Wayne, twenty years ago, cheated us with a water pipe. Notting Hill is notting Hill, it is not the world. We in South Kensington, we also have memories. Ah, and hopes. If they fought for these trumpery shops and a few lampposts, shall we not fight for the Great High Street and the sacred Natural History Museum? Great Heavens, said the astounded Aubran, will wonders never cease? Have the two greatest marvels been achieved? Have you turned altruistic, and has Wayne turned selfish? Are you the patriot, and he the tyrant? It is not from Wayne himself altogether that the evil comes, answered Barker. He indeed is now mostly wrapped in dreams and sits with his old sword beside the fire. But notting Hill is the Tyrant your Majesty. Its counsel and its crowds have been so intoxicated by the spreading over the whole city of Wayne's old ways and visions, that they try to meddle with everyone, and rule everyone, and civilize everyone, and tell everyone what is good for him. I do not deny the great impulse which his old war, wild as it seemed, gave to the civic life of our time. It came when I was still a young man, and I admit it enlarged my career. But we are not going to see our own cities flouted and thwarted from day to day, because of something Wayne did for us all nearly a quarter of a century ago. I am just waiting here for news upon this very matter. It is rumored that Notting Hill has vetoed the statue of General Wilson they are putting up opposite Cheapstow Place. If that is so, it is a black and white shameless breach of the terms on which we surrendered to Turnbull after the Battle of the Tower. We were to keep our own customs and self-government. If that is so, it is so, said a deep voice, and both men turned round. A burly figure in purple robes with the silver eagle hung round his neck and mustaches, almost as florid as his plume stood in the doorway. Yes, he said, acknowledging the king-start, I am Provo Buck, and the news is true. These men of the hill have forgotten that we fought round the Tower as well as they, and that it is sometimes foolish as well as base to despise the Concord. Let us step outside, said Barker, with a grim composure. Buck did so, and said, rolling his eyes up and down the Lamplit Street. I would like to have a go at smashing all this he muttered, though I am over sixty, I would like. His voice entered in a cry, and he reeled back a step with his hands to his eyes, as he had done in those streets twenty years before. Darkness he cried. Darkness again. What does it mean? For in truth every lamp in the street had gone out, so that they could not see even each other's outline except faintly. The voice of the chemist came with startling cheerfulness out of the density. Oh, don't you know, he said. Did they never tell you this is the Feast of the Lamps, the anniversary of the great battle that almost lost and just saved Notting Hill? Don't you know, Your Majesty, that on this night, twenty-one years ago, we saw Wilson's green uniforms charging down this street, and driving Wayne and Turnbull back upon the gasworks, fighting with their handful, like fiends from hell? And then in that great hour, Wayne sprang through a window of the gasworks with one blow of his hand brought darkness on the whole city, and then, with a cry like a lion's, that was heard through four streets, flew at Wilson's men's sword in hand and swept them bewildered as they were and ignorant of the map, clear out of the sacred street again. And don't you know, that upon that night, every year, all lights are turned out for half an hour while we sing the Notting Hill anthem in the darkness? Hark! There it begins. Through the night came a crash of drums and then a strong swell of human voices. When the world was in the balance, there was night on Notting Hill. There was night on Notting Hill. It was nobler than the day. On the cities where the lights are and the firesides glow, from the seas and from the deserts came the thing we did not know. Came the darkness, came the darkness, came the darkness on the foe, and the old guard of God turned to bay, for the old guard of God turns to bay, turns to bay, and the stars fall down before it, ere its banners fall to day. For when armies were around us as a howling and a horde, when falling was the citadel and broken was the sword, the darkness came upon them like the dragon of the Lord, when the old guard of God turned to bay. The voices were just uplifting themselves in a second verse when they were stopped by a scurry and a yell. Barker had bounded into the street with a cry of South Kensington and drawn a dagger. In less time than a man could blink, the whole packed street was full of curses and struggling. Barker was flung back against the shop front, but used the second only to draw his sword as well as his dagger, and calling out, This is not the first time I've come through the thick of you, flung himself again into the press. It was evident that he had drawn blood at last, for a more violent outcry arose, and many other knives and swords were discernible in the faint light. Barker, after having wounded more than one man, seemed on the point of being flung back again when Buck suddenly stepped out into the street. He had no weapon, for he affected rather the peaceful magnificence of the great burger than the pugnacious dandyism which had replaced the old somber dandyism in Barker. But with a blow of his clenched fist he broke the pain of the next shop, which was the old curiosity shop, and plunging in his hands snatched a kind of Japanese scimitar, and calling out Kensington Kensington rushed to Barker's assistance. Barker's sword was broken, but he was laying about him with his dagger. Just as Buck ran up, a man of nodding hill struck Barker down, but Buck struck the man down on top of him, and Barker sprang up again, the blood running down his face. Suddenly all these cries were cloven by a great voice that seemed to fall out of heaven. It was terrible to Buck and Barker and the King, from it seeming to come out of the empty skies, but it was more terrible because it was a familiar voice, and one which at the same time they had not heard for so long. Turn up the lights, said the voice from above them, and for a moment there was no reply, but only a tumult. In the name of nodding hill and of the great council of the city, turn up the lights. There was again a tumult, and a vagueness for a moment. Then the whole street and every object in it sprang suddenly out of the darkness, as every lamp sprang into life. And looking up they saw, standing upon the balcony, near the roof of one of the highest houses, the figure and the face of Adam Wayne, his red hair blowing behind him, a little streaked with gray. What is this, my people, he said? Is it altogether impossible to make a thing good without it immediately insisting on being wicked? The glory of nodding hill and having achieved its independence has been enough for me to dream of for many years, as I sat beside the fire. Is it really not enough for you, who have had so many other affairs to excite and distract you? Nodding hill is a nation. Why should it condescend to be a mere empire? You wish to pull down the statue of General Wilson, which the men of Bayswater have so rightly erected in Westbourne Grove? Fools? Who erected that statue? Did Bayswater erect it? No, nodding hill erected it. Do you not see that it is the glory of our achievement that we have infected the other cities with the idealism of nodding hill? Is it we who have created not only our own side but both sides of this controversy? Oh, too humble fools, why should you wish to destroy your enemies? You have done something more to them. You have created your enemies. You wish to pull down that gigantic silver hammer which stands like an obelisk in the center of the Broadway of Hammersmith? Fools? Before nodding hill arose, did any person passing through Hammersmith Broadway expect to see there a gigantic silver hammer? You wish to abolish the great bronze figure of a knight standing upon the artificial bridge at Knightsbridge? Fools, who would have thought of it before nodding hill arose? I have even heard, and with deep pain I have heard it, that the evil eye of our imperial envy has been cast towards the remote horizon of the West, and that we have objected to the great black monument of a crown raven, which commemorates the skirmish at Ravens Court Park. Who created all these things? Were they there before we came? Cannot you be content with that destiny which was enough for Athens, which was enough for Nazareth, the destiny, the humble purpose of creating a new world? Is Athens angry because Romans and Florentines have adopted her Frisiology for expressing their own patriotism? Is Nazareth angry because she is a little village? It has become the type of all little villages out of which, as the snob say, no good can come. Has Athens asked everyone to wear the chelmies? Are all followers of the Nazarene compelled to wear turbans? No, but the soul of Athens went forth and made men drink hemlock, and the soul of Nazareth went forth, and made men consent to be crucified. So has the soul of nodding hill gone forth, and made men realize what it is to live in a city. Just as we inaugurated our symbols and ceremonies, so they have inaugurated theirs, and are used so mad as to contend against them. Nodding hill is right. It has always been right. It has molded itself on its own necessities, its own sign quite on. It has accepted its own ultimatum. Because it is a nation, it has created itself. And because it is a nation, it can destroy itself. Nodding hill shall always be the judge. If it is your will, because of this matter of General Wilson's statue to make war upon Bayswater, a roar of cheers broke in upon his words, and further speech was impossible. Pale to the lips, the great patriot tried again and again to speak, but even his authority could not keep down the dark and roaring masses in the street below him. He said something further, but it was not audible. He descended at last sadly from the garrison which he lived, and mingled with the crowd at the foot of the houses. Finding General Turnbull, he put his hand on his shoulder with a queer affection of gravity, and said, Tomorrow, old man, we shall have a new experience, as fresh as the flowers of spring. We shall be defeated. You and I have been through three battles together, and have somehow or other missed this peculiar delight. It is unfortunate that we shall not probably be able to exchange our experiences, because as it most annoyingly happens, we shall probably both be dead. Turnbull looked dimly surprised. I don't mind so much about being dead, he said, but why should you say that we shall be defeated? The answer is very simple, replied Wayne Comley. It is because we ought to be defeated. We have been in the most horrible holes before now, but in all those I was perfectly certain that the stars were on our side, and that we ought to get out. Now I know that we ought not to get out, and that takes away from me everything with which I won. As Wayne spoke, he started a little, for both men became aware that a third figure was listening to them, a small figure with wondering eyes. Is it really true, my dear Wayne, said the King interrupting, that you think he will be beaten to-morrow? There can be no doubt about it whatever, replied Adam Wayne. The real reason is the one of which I have just spoken. But as a concession to your materialism, I will add that they have an organized army of a hundred allied cities against our one. That in itself, however, would be unimportant. Quinn, with his round eyes, seemed strangely insistent. Are you quite sure, he said, that you must be beaten? I am afraid, said Turnbull Gloomley, that there can be no doubt about it. Then cried the King, flinging out his arms, give me a halberd. Give me a halberd, somebody. I desire all men to witness, that I, Oberon, King of England, do here and now abdicate, and implore the Provo of Notting Hill to permit me to enlist in his army. Give me a halberd. He seized one from some passing guard, and shouldering it stamped solemnly after the shouting columns of halberdeers, which were by this time parading the streets. He had, however, nothing to do with the wrecking of the statue of General Wilson, which took place before morning.