The Napoleon of Notting Hill Read online

  “I am afraid,” said Wayne, as he entered, “that I am not getting on with these tradesmen as I should. Is it that I have neglected to rise to the full meaning of their work? Is there some secret buried in each of these shops which no mere poet can discover?”

  He stepped to the counter with a depression which he rapidly conquered as he addressed the man on the other side of it...a man of short stature, and hair prematurely white, and the look of a large baby.

  “Sir,” said Wayne, “I am going from house to house in this street of ours, seeking to stir up some sense of the danger which now threatens our city. Nowhere have I felt my duty so difficult as here. For the toy-shop keeper has to do with all that remains to us of Eden before the first wars began. You sit here meditating continually upon the wants of that wonderful time when every staircase leads to the stars, and every garden-path to the other end of nowhere. Is it thoughtlessly, do you think, that I strike the dark old drum of peril in the paradise of children? But consider a moment; do not condemn me hastily. Even that paradise itself contains the rumour or beginning of that danger, just as the Eden that was made for perfection contained the terrible tree. For judge childhood, even by your own arsenal of its pleasures. You keep bricks; you make yourself thus, doubtless, the witness of the constructive instinct older than the destructive. You keep dolls; you make yourself the priest of that divine idolatry. You keep Noah’s Arks; you perpetuate the memory of the salvation of all life as a precious, an irreplaceable thing. But do you keep only, sir, the symbols of this prehistoric sanity, this childish rationality of the earth? Do you not keep more terrible things? What are those boxes, seemingly of lead soldiers, that I see in that glass case? Are they not witnesses to that terror and beauty, that desire for a lovely death, which could not be excluded even from the immortality of Eden? Do not despise the lead soldiers, Mr. Turnbull.”

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

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

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

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

  Wayne was almost taken aback by this outburst.

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

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

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

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

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

  Wayne bent over them, and read on one:

  “LAST FIGHTING. REDUCTION OF THE CENTRAL DERVISH CITY. REMARKABLE, ETC.”

  On the other he read:

  “LAST SMALL REPUBLIC ANNEXED. NICARAGUAN CAPITAL SURRENDERS AFTER A MONTH’S FIGHTING. GREAT SLAUGHTER.”

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

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

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

  Wayne lifted his large blue eyes with an infantile wonder.

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

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

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

  “I am afraid not,” said Wayne. “I...”

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

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

  “I am interested in nothing else,” answered the toy-shop keeper, simply.

  Wayne appeared convulsed with a singular, suppressed excitement.

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

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

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

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

  * * *

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

  “Seventeen pounds, eight shillings and nine-pence.”

  Turnbull nodded and put his head in the tankard.

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

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

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

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

  “Are you insane?” asked the Provost.

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

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

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

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

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

  CHAPTER III

  THE EXPERIMENT OF MR. BUCK

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Wayne lifted his large eyes slowly.

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

  Buck flushed and said testily:

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

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

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

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

  “The Charter of the Cities,” he began.

  Buck exploded in a brutal oath and laughed.

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

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

  Buck rose also with blazing eyes.

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

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

  Barker turned to him with frantic gestures.

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

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

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

  “My Lord Provost of Notting Hill, proceed.”

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

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

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

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

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

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