The Napoleon of Notting Hill Read online

  “I have just been explaining the situation to his Majesty,” said Buck, curtly, but recovering his civility. “I am not sure, however, whether his Majesty knows how much the matter affects you also.”

  “It affects both of us, yer see, yer Majesty, as this scheme was started for the benefit of the ’ole neighbourhood. So Mr. Buck and me we put our ’eads together...”

  The King clasped his hands.

  “Perfect,” he cried in ecstacy. “Your heads together! I can see it! Can’t you do it now? Oh, do do it now.”

  A smothered sound of amusement appeared to come from the halberdiers, but Mr. Wilson looked merely bewildered, and Mr. Buck merely diabolical.

  “I suppose,” he began, bitterly, but the King stopped him with a gesture of listening.

  “Hush,” he said, “I think I hear some one else coming. I seem to hear another herald, a herald whose boots creak.”

  As he spoke another voice cried from the doorway:

  “The Lord High Provost of South Kensington desires an audience.”

  “The Lord High Provost of South Kensington!” cried the King. “Why, that is my old friend James Barker! What does he want, I wonder? If the tender memories of friendship have not grown misty, I fancy he wants something for himself, probably money. How are you, James?”

  Mr. James Barker, whose guard was attired in a splendid blue, and whose blue banner bore three gold birds singing, rushed, in his blue and gold robes, into the room. Despite the absurdity of all the dresses, it was worth noticing that he carried his better than the rest, though he loathed it as much as any of them. He was a gentleman, and a very handsome man, and could not help unconsciously wearing even his preposterous robe as it should be worn. He spoke quickly, but with the slight initial hesitation he always showed in addressing the King, due to suppressing an impulse to address his old acquaintance in the old way.

  “Your Majesty...pray forgive my intrusion. It is about this man at Pump Street. I see you have Buck here, so you have probably heard what is necessary. I...”

  The King swept his eyes anxiously round the room, which now blazed with the trappings of three cities.

  “There is one thing necessary,” he said.

  “Yes, your Majesty,” said Mr. Wilson of Bayswater, a little eagerly. “What does yer Majesty think necessary?”

  “A little yellow,” said the King, firmly. “Send for the Provost of West Kensington.”

  Amid some materialistic protests he was sent for and arrived with his yellow halberdiers in his saffron robes, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief. After all, placed as he was, he had a good deal to say on the matter.

  “Welcome, West Kensington,” said the King. “I have long wished to see you, touching that matter of the Hammersmith land to the south of the Rowton House. Will you hold it feudally from the Provost of Hammersmith? You have only to do him homage by putting his left arm in his overcoat and then marching home in state.”

  “No, your Majesty; I’d rather not,” said the Provost of West Kensington, who was a pale young man with a fair moustache and whiskers, who kept a successful dairy.

  The King struck him heartily on the shoulder.

  “The fierce old West Kensington blood,” he said; “they are not wise who ask it to do homage.”

  Tnen he glanced again round the room. It was full of a roaring sunset of colour, and he enjoyed the sight, possible to so few artists...the sight of his own dreams moving and blazing before him. In the foreground the yellow of the West Kensington liveries outlined itself against the dark blue draperies of South Kensington. The crests of these again brightened suddenly into green as the almost woodland colours of Bayswater rose behind them. And over and behind all, the great purple plumes of North Kensington showed almost funereal and black.

  “There is something lacking,” said the King, “something lacking. What can...Ah, there it is!...there it is!”

  In the doorway had appeared a new figure, a herald in flaming red. He cried in a loud but unemotional voice:

  “The Lord High Provost of Notting Hill desires an audience.”

  CHAPTER III

  ENTER A LUNATIC

  THE King of the Fairies, who was, it is to be presumed, the godfather of King Auberon, must have been very favourable on this particular day to his fantastic godchild, for with the entrance of the guard of the Provost of Notting Hill there was a certain more or less inexplicable addition to his delight. The wretched navvies and sandwich-men who carried the colours of Bayswater or South Kensington, engaged merely for the day to satisfy the Royal hobby, slouched into the room with a comparatively hang-dog air, and a great part of the King’s intellectual pleasure consisted in the contrast between the arrogance of their swords and feathers and the meek misery of their faces. But these Notting Hill halberdiers in their red tunics belted with gold had the air rather of an absurd gravity. They seemed, so to speak, to be taking part in the joke. They marched and wheeled into position with an almost startling dignity, and discipline.

  They carried a yellow banner with a great red lion, named by the King as the Notting Hill emblem, after a small public-house in the neighbourhood, which he once frequented.

  Between the two lines of his followers there advanced towards the King a tall, red-haired young man, with high features, and bold blue eyes. He would have been called handsome, but that a certain indefinable air of his nose being too big for his face, and his feet for his legs, gave him a look of awkwardness and extreme youth. His robes were red, according to the King’s heraldry, and alone among the Provosts, he was girt with a great sword. This was Adam Wayne, the intractable Provost of Notting Hill.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  There was a dead silence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Eh?” said the King.

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

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

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

  Suddenly he pulled himself upright.

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

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

  The King stared back equally blankly.

  “I beg your pardon?” he said.

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

  The King smiled.

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