Title: The Napoleon of Notting Hill
Author: G. K. Chesterton
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Language: English
Date first posted: August 2006
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The Napoleon of Notting Hill
G. K. Chesterton



TO HILAIRE BELLOC



For every tiny town or place
God made the stars especially;
Babies look up with owlish face
And see them tangled in a tree;
You saw a moon from Sussex Downs,
A Sussex moon, untravelled still,
I saw a moon that was the town's,
The largest lamp on Campden Hill.
Yea; Heaven is everywhere at home
The big blue cap that always fits,
And so it is (be calm; they come
To goal at last, my wandering wits),
So is it with the heroic thing;
This shall not end for the world's end
And though the sullen engines swing,
Be you not much afraid, my friend.
This did not end by Nelson's urn
Where an immortal England sits--
Nor where your tall young men in turn
Drank death like wine at Austerlitz.
And when the pedants bade us mark
What cold mechanic happenings
Must come; our souls said in the dark,
"Belike; but there are likelier things."
Likelier across these flats afar
These sulky levels smooth and free
The drums shall crash a waltz of war
And Death shall dance with Liberty;
Likelier the barricades shall blare
Slaughter below and smoke above,
And death and hate and hell declare
That men have found a thing to love.
Far from your sunny uplands set
I saw the dream; the streets I trod
The lit straight streets shot out and met
The starry streets that point to God.
This legend of an epic hour
A child I dreamed, and dream it still,
Under the great grey water-tower
That strikes the stars on Campden Hill

G. K. C.




BOOK I



CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY REMARKS ON THE ART OF PROPHECY



THE human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been
playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do
it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.
And one of the games to which it is most attached is called, "Keep to-
morrow dark," and which is also named (by the rustics in Shropshire, I
have no doubt) "Cheat the Prophet." The players listen very carefully
and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is
to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the
clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do
something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it
is great fun.

For human beings, being children, have the childish wilfulness and the
childish secrecy. And they never have from the beginning of the world
done what the wise men have seen to be inevitable. They stoned the
false prophets, it is said; but they could have stoned true prophets
with a greater and juster enjoyment. Individually, men may present a
more or less rational appearance, eating, sleeping, and scheming. But
humanity as a whole is changeful, mystical, fickle, delightful. Men
are men, but Man is a woman.

But in the beginning of the twentieth century the game of Cheat the
Prophet was made far more difficult than it had ever been before. The
reason was, that there were so many prophets and so many prophecies,
that it was difficult to elude all their ingenuities. When a man did
something free and frantic and entirely his own, a horrible thought
struck him afterwards; it might have been predicted. Whenever a duke
climbed a lamp-post, when a dean got drunk, he could not be really
happy, he could not be certain that he was not fulfilling some
prophecy. In the beginning of the twentieth century you could not see
the ground for clever men. They were so common that a stupid man was
quite exceptional, and when they found him, they followed him in
crowds down the street and treasured him up and gave him some high
post in the State. And all these clever men were at work giving
accounts of what would happen in the next age, all quite clear, all
quite keen-sighted and ruthless, and all quite different. And it
seemed that the good old game of hoodwinking your ancestors could not
really be managed this time, because the ancestors neglected meat and
sleep and practical politics, so that they might meditate day and
night on what their descendants would be likely to do.

But the way the prophets of the twentieth century went to work was
this. They took something or other that was certainly going on in
their time, and then said that it would go on more and more until
something extraordinary happened. And very often they added that in
some odd place that extraordinary thing had happened, and that it
showed the signs of the times.

Thus, for instance, there were Mr. H. G. Wells and others, who thought
that science would take charge of the future; and just as the motor-
car was quicker than the coach, so some lovely thing would be quicker
than the motorcar; and so on for ever. And there arose from their
ashes Dr. Quilp, who said that a man could be sent on his machine so
fast round the world that he could keep up a long chatty conversation
in some old-world village by saying a word of a sentence each time he
came round. And it was said that the experiment had been tried on an
apoplectic old major, who was sent round the world so fast that there
seemed to be (to the inhabitants of some other star) a continuous band
round the earth of white whiskers, red complexion and tweeds...a thing
like the ring of Saturn.

Then there was the opposite school. There was Mr. Edward Carpenter,
who thought we should in a very short time return to Nature, and live
simply and slowly as the animals do. And Edward Carpenter was followed
by James Pickie, D.D. (of Pocahontas College), who said that men were
immensely improved by grazing, or taking their food slowly and
continuously, alter the manner of cows. And he said that he had, with
the most encouraging results, turned city men out on all fours in a
field covered with veal cutlets. Then Tolstoy and the Humanitarians
said that the world was growing more merciful, and therefore no one
would ever desire to kill. And Mr. Mick not only became a vegetarian,
but at length declared vegetarianism doomed ("shedding," as he called
it finely, "the green blood of the silent animals"), and predicted
that men in a better age would live on nothing but salt. And then came
the pamphlet from Oregon (where the thing was tried), the pamphlet
called "Why should Salt suffer?" and there was more trouble.

And on the other hand, some people were predicting that the lines of
kinship would become narrower and sterner. There was Mr. Cecil Rhodes,
who thought that the one thing of the future was the British Empire,
and that there would be a gulf between those who were of the Empire
and those who were not, between the Chinaman in Hong-Kong and the
Chinaman outside, between the Spaniard on the Rock of Gibraltar and
the Spaniard off it, similar to the gulf between man and the lower
animals. And in the same way his impetuous friend, Dr. Zoppi ("the
Paul of Anglo-Saxonism"), carried it yet further, and held that, as a
result of this view, cannibalism should be held to mean eating a
member of the Empire, not eating one of the subject peoples, who
should, he said, be killed without needless pain. His horror at the
idea of eating a man in British Guiana showed how they misunderstood
his stoicism who thought him devoid of feeling. He was, however, in a
hard position; as it was said that he had attempted the experiment,
and, living in London, had to subsist entirely on Italian organ-
grinders. And his end was terrible, for just when he had begun, Sir
Paul Swiller read his great paper at the Royal Society, proving that
the savages were not only quite right in eating their enemies, but
right on moral and hygienic grounds, since it was true that the
qualities of the enemy, when eaten, passed into the eater. The notion
that the nature of an Italian organ-man was irrevocably growing and
burgeoning inside him was almost more than the kindly old professor
could bear.

There was Mr. Benjamin Kidd, who said that the growing note of our
race would be the care for and knowledge of the future. His idea was
developed more powerfully by William Borker, who wrote that passage
which every schoolboy knows by heart, about men in future ages weeping
by the graves of their descendants, and tourists being shown over the
scene of the historic battle which was to take place some centuries
afterwards.

And Mr. Stead, too, was prominent, who thought that England would in
the twentieth century be united to America; and his young lieutenant,
Graham Podge, who included the states of France, Germany, and Russia
in the American Union, the State of Russia being abbreviated to Ra.

There was Mr. Sidney Webb, also, who said that the future would see a
continuously increasing order and neatness in the life of the people,
and his poor friend Fipps, who went mad and ran about the country with
an axe, hacking branches off the trees whenever there were not the
same number on both sides.

All these clever men were prophesying with every variety of ingenuity
what would happen soon, and they all did it in the same way, by taking
something they saw 'going strong,' as the saying is, and carrying it
as far as ever their imagination could stretch. This, they said, was
the true and simple way of anticipating the future. "Just as," said
Dr. Pellkins, in a fine passage, "...just as when we see a pig in a
litter larger than the other pigs, we know that by an unalterable law
of the Inscrutable it will some day be larger than an elephant, just
as we know, when we see weeds and dandelions growing more and more
thickly in a garden, that they must, in spite of all our efforts, grow
taller than the chimney-pots and swallow the house from sight, so we
know and reverently acknowledge, that when any power in human politics
has shown for any period of time any considerable activity, it will go
on until it reaches to the sky."

And it did certainly appear that the prophets had put the people
(engaged in the old game of Cheat the Prophet) in a quite
unprecedented difficulty. It seemed really hard to do anything without
fulfilling some of their prophecies.

But there was, nevertheless, in the eyes of labourers in the streets,
of peasants in the fields, of sailors and children, and especially
women, a strange look that kept the wise men in a perfect fever of
doubt. They could not fathom the motionless mirth in their eyes. They
still had something up their sleeve; they were still playing the game
of Cheat the Prophet.

Then the wise men grew like wild things, and swayed hither and
thither, crying, "What can it be? What can it be? What will London be
like a century hence? Is there anything we have not thought of? Houses
upside down...more hygienic, perhaps? Men walking on hands...make feet
flexible, don't you know? Moon... motor-cars... no heads..." And so
they swayed and wondered until they died and were buried nicely.

Then the people went and did what they liked. Let me no longer conceal
the painful truth. The people had cheated the prophets of the
twentieth century. When the curtain goes up on this story, eighty
years after the present date, London is almost exactly like what it is
now.



CHAPTER II THE MAN IN GREEN



VERY few words are needed to explain why London, a hundred years
hence, will be very like it is now, or rather, since I must slip into
a prophetic past, why London, when my story opens, was very like it
was in those enviable days when I was still alive.

The reason can be stated in one sentence. The people had absolutely
lost faith in revolutions. All revolutions are doctrinal...such as the
French one, or the one that introduced Christianity. For it stands to
common sense that you cannot upset all existing things, customs, and
compromises, unless you believe in something outside them, something
positive and divine. Now, England, during this century, lost all
belief in this. It believed in a thing called Evolution. And it said,
"All theoretic changes have ended in blood and ennui. If we change, we
must change slowly and safely, as the animals do. Nature's revolutions
are the only successful ones. There has been no conservative reaction
in favour of tails."

And some things did change. Things that were not much thought of
dropped out of sight. Things that had not often happened did not
happen at all. Thus, for instance, the actual physical force ruling
the country, the soldiers and police, grew smaller and smaller, and at
last vanished almost to a point. The people combined could have swept
the few policemen away in ten minutes: they did not, because they did
not believe it would do them the least good. They had lost faith in
revolutions.

Democracy was dead; for no one minded the governing class governing.
England was now practically a despotism, but not an hereditary one.
Some one in the official class was made King. No one cared how; no one
cared who. He was merely an universal secretary.

In this manner it happened that everything in London was very quiet.
That vague and somewhat depressed reliance upon things happening as
they have always happened, which is with all Londoners a mood, had
become an assumed condition. There was really no reason for any man
doing anything but the thing he had done the day before.

There was therefore no reason whatever why the three young men who had
always walked up to their Government office together should not walk
up to it together on this particular wintry and cloudy morning.
Everything in that age had become mechanical, and Government clerks
especially. All those clerks assembled regularly at their posts. Three
of those clerks always walked into town together. All the
neighbourhood knew them: two of them were tall and one short. And on
this particular morning the short clerk was only a few seconds late to
join the other two as they passed his gate: he could have overtaken
them in three strides; he could have called after them easily. But he
did not.

For some reason that will never be understood until all souls are
judged (if they are ever judged; the idea was at this time classed
with fetish worship) he did not join his two companions, but walked
steadily behind them. The day was dull, their dress was dull,
everything was dull; but in some odd impulse he walked through street
after street, through district after district, looking at the backs of
the two men, who would have swung round at the sound of his voice.
Now, there is a law written in the darkest of the Books of Life, and
it is this: If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times,
you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are
in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time.

So the short Government official looked at the coat-tails of the tall
Government officials, and through street after street, and round
corner after corner, saw only coat-tails, coat-tails, and again coat-
tails...when, he did not in the least know why, something happened to
his eyes.

Two black dragons were walking backwards in front of him. Two black
dragons were looking at him with evil eyes. The dragons were walking
backwards it was true, but they kept their eyes fixed on him none the
less. The eyes which he saw were, in truth, only the two buttons at
the back of a frock-coat: perhaps some traditional memory of their
meaningless character gave this half-witted prominence to their gaze.
The slit between the tails was the nose-line of the monster: whenever
the tails flapped in the winter wind the dragons licked their lips. It
was only a momentary fancy, but the small clerk found it imbedded in
his soul ever afterwards. He never could again think of men in frock-
coats except as dragons walking backwards. He explained afterwards,
quite tactfully and nicely, to his two official friends, that while
feeling an inexpressible regard for each of them he could not
seriously regard the face of either of them as anything but a kind of
tail. It was, he admitted, a handsome tail...a tail elevated in the
air. But if, he said, any true friend of theirs wished to see their
faces, to look into the eyes of their soul, that friend must be
allowed to walk reverently round behind them, so as to see them from
the rear. There he would see the two black dragons with the blind
eyes.

But when first the two black dragons sprang out of the fog upon the
small clerk, they had merely the effect of all miracles...they changed
the universe. He discovered the fact that all romantics know...that
adventures happen on dull days, and not on sunny ones. When the chord
of monotony is stretched most tight, then it breaks with a sound like
song. He had scarcely noticed the weather before, but with the four
dead eyes glaring at him he looked round and realized the strange dead
day.

The morning was wintry and dim, not misty, but darkened with that
shadow of cloud or snow which steeps everything in a green or copper
twilight. The light there is on such a day seems not so much to come
from the clear heavens as to be a phosphorescence clinging to the
shapes themselves. The load of heaven and the clouds is like a load of
waters, and the men move like fishes, feeling that they are on the
floor of a sea. Everything in a London street completes the fantasy;
the carriages and cabs themselves resemble deep-sea creatures with
eyes of flame. He had been startled at first to meet two dragons. Now
he found he was among deep-sea dragons possessing the deep sea.

The two young men in front were like the small young man himself,
well-dressed. The lines of their frock-coats and silk hats had that
luxuriant severity which makes the modern fop, hideous as he is, a
favourite exercise of the modern draughtsman; that element which Mr.
Max Beerbohm has admirably expressed in speaking of "certain
congruities of dark cloth and the rigid perfection of linen."

They walked with the gait of an affected snail, and they spoke at the
longest intervals, dropping a sentence at about every sixth lamp-post.

They crawled on past the lamp-posts; their mien was so immovable that
a fanciful description might almost say, that the lamp-posts crawled
past the men, as in a dream. Then the small man suddenly ran after
them and said:

"I want to get my hair cut. I say, do you know a little shop anywhere
where they cut your hair properly? I keep on having my hair cut, but
it keeps on growing again."

One of the tall men looked at him with the air of a pained naturalist.

"Why, here is a little place," cried the small man, with a sort of
imbecile cheerfulness, as the bright bulging window of a fashionable
toilet-saloon glowed abruptly out of the foggy twilight. "Do you know,
I often find hairdressers when I walk about London. I'll lunch with
you at Cicconani's. You know, I'm awfully fond of hairdressers' shops.
They're miles better than those nasty butchers'." And he disappeared
into the doorway.

The man called James continued to gaze after him, a monocle screwed
into his eye.

"What the devil do you make of that fellow?" he asked his companion, a
pale young man with a high nose.

The pale young man reflected conscientiously for some minutes, and
then said:

"Had a knock on his head when he was a kid, I should think."

"No, I don't think it's that," replied the Honourable James Barker.
"I've sometimes fancied he was a sort of artist, Lambert."

"Bosh!" cried Mr. Lambert, briefly.

"I admit I can't make him out," resumed Barker, abstractedly; "he
never opens his mouth without saying something so indescribably half-
witted that to call him a fool seems the very feeblest attempt at
characterization. But there's another thing about him that's rather
funny. Do you know that he has the one collection of Japanese lacquer
in Europe? Have you ever seen his books? All Greek poets and mediaeval
French and that sort of thing. Have you ever been in his rooms? It's
like being inside an amethyst. And he moves about in all that and
talks like...like a turnip."

"Well, damn all books. Your blue books as well," said the ingenuous
Mr. Lambert, with a friendly simplicity. "You ought to understand such
things. What do you make of him?"

"He's beyond me," returned Barker. "But if you asked me for my
opinion, I should say he was a man with a taste for nonsense, as they
call it...artistic fooling, and all that kind of thing. And I
seriously believe that he has talked nonsense so much that he has half
bewildered his own mind and doesn't know the difference between sanity
and insanity. He has gone round the mental world, so to speak, and
found the place where the East and the West are one, and extreme
idiocy is as good as sense. But I can't explain these psychological
games."

"You can't explain them to me," replied Mr. Wilfrid Lambert, with
candour.

As they passed up the long streets towards their restaurant the copper
twilight cleared slowly to a pale yellow, and by the time they reached
it they stood discernible in a tolerable winter daylight. The
Honourable James Barker, one of the most powerful officials in the
English Government (by this time a rigidly official one), was a lean
and elegant young man, with a blank handsome face and bleak blue eyes.
He had a great amount of intellectual capacity, of that peculiar kind
which raises a man from throne to throne and lets him die loaded with
honours without having either amused or enlightened the mind of a
single man. Wilfrid Lambert, the youth with the nose which appeared to
impoverish the rest of his face, had also contributed little to the
enlargement of the human spirit, but he had the honourable excuse of
being a fool.

Lambert would have been called a silly man; Barker, with all his
cleverness, might have been called a stupid man. But mere silliness
and stupidity sank into insignificance in the presence of the awful
and mysterious treasures of foolishness apparently stored up in the
small figure that stood waiting for them outside Cicconani's. The
little man, whose name was Auberon Quin, had an appearance compounded
of a baby and an owl. His round head, round eyes, seemed to have been
designed by nature playfully with a pair of compasses. His flat dark
hair and preposterously long frock-coat gave him something of the look
of a child's "Noah." When he entered a room of strangers, they mistook
him for a small boy, and wanted to take him on their knees, until he
spoke, when they perceived that a boy would have been more
intelligent.

"I have been waiting quite a long time," said Quin, mildly. "It's
awfully funny I should see you coming up the street at last."

"Why?" asked Lambert, staring. "You told us to come here yourself."

"My mother used to tell people to come to places," said the sage.

They were about to turn into the restaurant with a resigned air, when
their eyes were caught by something in the street. The weather, though
cold and blank, was now quite clear, and across the dull brown of the
wood pavement and between the dull grey terraces was moving something
not to be seen for miles around...not to be seen perhaps at that time
in England...a man dressed in bright colours. A small crowd hung on
the man's heels.

He was a tall stately man, clad in a military uniform of brilliant
green, splashed with great silver facings. From the shoulder swung a
short green furred cloak, somewhat like that of a Hussar, the lining
of which gleamed every now and then with a kind of tawny crimson. His
breast glittered with medals; round his neck was the red ribbon and
star of some foreign order; and a long straight sword, with a blazing
hilt, trailed and clattered along the pavement. At this time the
pacific and utilitarian development of Europe had relegated all such
customs to the Museums. The only remaining force, the small but well-
organized police, were attired in a sombre and hygienic manner. But
even those who remembered the last Life Guards and Lancers who
disappeared in 1912 must have known at a glance that this was not, and
never had been, an English uniform; and this conviction would have
been heightened by the yellow aquiline face, like Dante carved in
bronze, which rose, crowned with white hair, out of the green military
collar, a keen and distinguished, but not an English face.

The magnificence with which the green-clad gentleman walked down the
centre of the road would be something difficult to express in human
language. For it was an ingrained simplicity and arrogance, something
in the mere carriage of the head and body, which made ordinary moderns
in the street stare after him; but it had comparatively little to do
with actual conscious gestures or expression. In the matter of these
merely temporary movements, the man appeared to be rather worried and
inquisitive, but he was inquisitive with the inquisitiveness of a
despot and worried as with the responsibilities of a god. The men who
lounged and wondered behind him followed partly with an astonishment
at his brilliant uniform, that is to say, partly because of that
instinct which makes us all follow one who looks like a madman, but
far more because of that instinct which makes all men follow (and
worship) any one who chooses to behave like a king. He had to so
sublime an extent that great quality of royalty...an almost imbecile
unconsciousness of everybody, that people went after him as they do
after kings...to see what would be the first thing or person he would
take notice of. And all the time, as we have said, in spite of his
quiet splendour, there was an air about him as if he were looking for
somebody; an expression of inquiry.

Suddenly that expression of inquiry vanished, none could tell why, and
was replaced by an expression of contentment. Amid the rapt attention
of the mob of idlers, the magnificent green gentleman deflected
himself from his direct course down the centre of the road and walked
to one side of it. He came to a halt opposite to a large poster of
Colman's Mustard erected on a wooden hoarding. His spectators almost
held their breath.

He took from a small pocket in his uniform a little penknife; with
this he made a slash at the stretched paper. Completing the rest of
the operation with his fingers, he tore off a strip or rag of paper,
yellow in colour and wholly irregular in outline. Then for the first
time the great being addressed his adoring onlookers:

"Can any one," he said, with a pleasing foreign accent, "lend me a
pin?"

Mr. Lambert, who happened to be nearest, and who carried innumerable
pins for the purpose of attaching innumerable buttonholes, lent him
one, which was received with extravagant but dignified bows, and
hyperboles of thanks.

The gentleman in green, then, with every appearance of being
gratified, and even puffed up, pinned the piece of yellow paper to the
green silk and silver-lace adornments of his breast. Then he turned
his eyes round again, searching and unsatisfied.

"Anything else I can do, sir?" asked Lambert, with the absurd
politeness of the Englishman when once embarrassed.

"Red," said the stranger, vaguely, "red."

"I beg your pardon?"

"I beg yours also, Senor," said the stranger, bowing. "I was wondering
whether any of you had any red about you."

"Any red about us?...well, really...no, I don't think I have...I used
to carry a red bandanna once, but..."

"Barker," asked Auberon Quin, suddenly, "where's your red cockatoo?
Where's your red cockatoo?"

"What do you mean?" asked Barker, desperately. "What cockatoo? You've
never seen me with any cockatoo."

"I know," said Auberon, vaguely mollified. "Where's it been all the
time?"

Barker swung round, not without resentment.

"I am sorry, sir," he said, shortly but civilly, "none of us seem to
have anything red to lend you. But why, if one may ask..."

"I thank you, Senor, it is nothing. I can, since there is nothing
else, fulfil my own requirements."

And standing for a second of thought with the penknife in his hand, he
stabbed his left palm. The blood fell with so full a stream that it
struck the stones without dripping. The foreigner pulled out his
handkerchief and tore a piece from it with his teeth. The rag was
immediately soaked in scarlet.

"Since you are so generous, Senor," he said, "another pin, perhaps."

Lambert held one out, with eyes protruding like a frog's.

The red linen was pinned beside the yellow paper, and the foreigner
took off his hat.

"I have to thank you all, gentlemen," he said; and wrapping the
remainder of the handkerchief round his bleeding hand, he resumed his
walk with an overwhelming stateliness.

While all the rest paused, in some disorder, little Mr. Auberon Quin
ran after the stranger and stopped him, with hat in hand. Considerably
to everybody's astonishment, he addressed him in the purest Spanish:

"Senor," he said in that language, "pardon a hospitality, perhaps
indiscreet, towards one who appears to be a distinguished, but a
solitary guest in London. Will you do me and my friends, with whom you
have held some conversation, the honour of lunching with us at the
adjoining restaurant?"

The man in the green uniform had turned a fiery colour of pleasure at
the mere sound of his own language, and he accepted the invitation
with that profusion of bows which so often shows, in the case of the
Southern races, the falsehood of the notion that ceremony has nothing
to do with feeling.

"Senor," he said, "your language is my own; but all my love for my
people shall not lead me to deny to yours the possession of so
chivalrous an entertainer. Let me say that the tongue is Spanish but
the heart English." And he passed with the rest into Cicconani's.

"Now, perhaps," said Barker, over the fish and sherry, intensely
polite, but burning with curiosity, "perhaps it would be rude of me to
ask why you did that?"

"Did what, Senor?" asked the guest, who spoke English quite well,
though in a manner indefinably American.

"Well," said the Englishman, in some confusion, "I mean tore a strip
off a hoarding and... er... cut yourself... and..."

"To tell you that, Senor," answered the other, with a certain sad
pride, "involves merely telling you who I am. I am Juan del Fuego,
President of Nicaragua."

The manner with which the President of Nicaragua leant back and drank
his sherry showed that to him this explanation covered all the facts
observed and a great deal more. Barker's brow, however, was still a
little clouded.

"And the yellow paper," he began, with anxious friendliness, "and the
red rag..."

"The yellow paper and the red rag," said Fuego, with indescribable
grandeur, "are the colours of Nicaragua."

"But Nicaragua..." began Barker, with great hesitation, "Nicaragua is
no longer a..."

"Nicaragua has been conquered like Athens. Nicaragua has been annexed
like Jerusalem," cried the old man, with amazing fire. "The Yankee and
the German and the brute powers of modernity have trampled it with the
hoofs of oxen. But Nicaragua is not dead. Nicaragua is an idea."

Auberon Quin suggested timidly, "A brilliant idea."

"Yes," said the foreigner, snatching at the word. "You are right,
generous Englishman. An idea brilliant, a burning thought. Senor, you
asked me why, in my desire to see the colours of my country, I
snatched at paper and blood. Can you not understand the ancient
sanctity of colours? The Church has her symbolic colours. And think of
what colours mean to us...think of the position of one like myself,
who can see nothing but those two colours, nothing but the red and the
yellow. To me all shapes are equal, all common and noble things are in
a democracy of combination. Wherever there is a field of marigolds and
the red cloak of an old woman, there is Nicaragua. Wherever there is a
field of poppies and a yellow patch of sand, there is Nicaragua,
Wherever there is a lemon and a red sunset, there is my country.
Wherever I see a red pillar-box and a yellow sunset, there my heart
beats. Blood and a splash of mustard can be my heraldry. If there be
yellow mud and red mud in the same ditch, it is better to me than
white stars."

"And if," said Quin, with equal enthusiasm, "there should happen to be
yellow wine and red wine at the same lunch, you could not confine
yourself to sherry. Let me order some Burgundy, and complete, as it
were, a sort of Nicaraguan heraldry in your inside."

Barker was fiddling with his knife, and was evidently making up his
mind to say something, with the intense nervousness of the amiable
Englishman.

"I am to understand, then," he said at last, with a cough, "that you,
ahem, were the President of Nicaragua when it made its...er...one
must, of course, agree...its quite heroic resistance to...er..."

The ex-President of Nicaragua waved his hand.

"You need not hesitate in speaking to me," he said. "I am quite fully
aware that the whole tendency of the world of to-day is against
Nicaragua and against me. I shall not consider it any diminution of
your evident courtesy if you say what you think of the misfortunes
that have laid my republic in ruins."

Barker looked immeasurably relieved and gratified.

"You are most generous, President," he said, with some hesitation over
the title, "and I will take advantage of your generosity to express
the doubts which, I must confess, we moderns have about such things
as...er...the Nicaraguan independence."

"So your sympathies are," said Del Fuego, quite calmly, "with the big
nation which..."

"Pardon me, pardon me, President," said Barker, warmly; "my sympathies
are with no nation. You misunderstand, I think, the modern intellect.
We do not disapprove of the fire and extravagance of such
commonwealths as yours only to become more extravagant on a larger
scale. We do not condemn Nicaragua because we think Britain ought to
be more Nicaraguan. We do not discourage small nationalities because
we wish large nationalities to have all their smallness, all their
uniformity of outlook, all their exaggeration of spirit. If I differ
with the greatest respect from your Nicaraguan enthusiasm, it is not
because a nation or ten nations were against you; it is because
civilization was against you. We moderns believe in a great
cosmopolitan civilization, one which shall include all the talents of
all the absorbed peoples..."

"The Senor will forgive me," said the President. "May I ask the Senor
how, under ordinary circumstances, he catches a wild horse?"

"I never catch a wild horse," replied Barker, with dignity.

"Precisely," said the other; "and there ends your absorption of the
talents. That is what I complain of your cosmopolitanism. When you say
you want all peoples to unite, you really mean that you want all
peoples to unite to learn the tricks of your people. If the Bedouin
Arab does not know how to read, some English missionary or
schoolmaster must be sent to teach him to read, but no one ever says,
'This schoolmaster does not know how to ride on a camel; let us pay a
Bedouin to teach him.' You say your civilization will include all
talents. Will it? Do you really mean to say that at the moment when
the Esquimaux has learnt to vote for a County Council, you will have
learnt to spear a walrus? I recur to the example I gave. In Nicaragua
we had a way of catching wild horses...by lassoing the fore-feet-which
was supposed to be the best in South America. If you are going to
include all the talents, go and do it. If not, permit me to say, what
I have always said, that something went from the world when Nicaragua
was civilized."

"Something, perhaps," replied Barker, "but that something a mere
barbarian dexterity. I do not know that I could chip flints as well as
a primeval man, but I know that civilization can make these knives
which are better, and I trust to civilization."

"You have good authority," answered the Nicaraguan. "Many clever men
like you have trusted to civilization. Many clever Babylonians, many
clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me,
in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilization, what
there is particularly immortal about yours?"

"I think you do not quite understand, President, what ours is,"
answered Barker. "You judge it rather as if England was still a poor
and pugnacious island; you have been long out of Europe. Many things
have happened."

"And what," asked the other, "would you call the summary of those
things?"

"The summary of those things," answered Barker, with great animation,
"is that we are rid of the superstitions, and in becoming so we have
not merely become rid of the superstitions which have been most
frequently and most enthusiastically so described. The superstition of
big nationalities is bad, but the superstition of small nationalities
is worse. The superstition of reverencing our own country is bad, but
the superstition of reverencing other people's countries is worse. It
is so everywhere, and in a hundred ways. The superstition of monarchy
is bad, and the superstition of aristocracy is bad, but the
superstition of democracy is the worst of all."

The old gentleman opened his eyes with some surprise.

"Are you, then," he said, "no longer a democracy in England?"

Barker laughed.

"The situation invites paradox," he said. "We are, in a sense, the
purest democracy. We have become a despotism. Have you not noticed how
continually in history democracy becomes despotism? People call it the
decay of democracy. It is simply its fulfilment. Why take the trouble
to number and register and enfranchise all the innumerable John
Robinsons, when you can take one John Robinson with the same intellect
or lack of intellect as all the rest, and have done with it? The old
idealistic republicans used to found democracy on the idea that all
men were equally intelligent. Believe me, the sane and enduring
democracy is founded on the fact that all men are equally idiotic. Why
should we not choose out of them one as much as another? All that we
want for Government is a man not criminal and insane, who can rapidly
look over some petitions and sign some proclamations. To think what
time was wasted in arguing about the House of Lords, Tories saying it
ought to be preserved because it was clever, and Radicals saying it
ought to be destroyed because it was stupid, and all the time no one
saw that it was right because it was stupid, because that chance mob
of ordinary men thrown there by accident of blood, were a great
democratic protest against the Lower House, against the eternal
insolence of the aristocracy of talents. We have established now in
England, the thing towards which all systems have dimly groped, the
dull popular despotism without illusions. We want one man at the head
of our State, not because he is brilliant or virtuous, but because he
is one man and not a chattering crowd. To avoid the possible chance of
hereditary diseases or such things, we have abandoned hereditary
monarchy. The King of England is chosen like a juryman upon an
official rotation list. Beyond that the whole system is quietly
despotic, and we have not found it raise a murmur."

"Do you really mean," asked the President, incredulously, "that you
choose any ordinary man that comes to hand and make him despot...that
you trust to the chance of some alphabetical list..."

"And why not?" cried Barker. "Did not half the historical nations
trust to the chance of the eldest sons of eldest sons, and did not
half of them get on tolerably well? To have a perfect system is
impossible; to have a system is indispensable. All hereditary
monarchies were a matter of luck: so are alphabetical monarchies. Can
you find a deep philosophical meaning in the difference between the
Stuarts and the Hanoverians? Believe me, I will undertake to find a
deep philosophical meaning in the contrast between the dark tragedy of
the A's, and the solid success of the B's."

"And you risk it?" asked the other. "Though the man may be a tyrant or
a cynic or a criminal?"

"We risk it," answered Barker, with a perfect placidity. "Suppose he
is a tyrant...he is still a check on a hundred tyrants. Suppose he is
a cynic, it is to his interest to govern well. Suppose he is a
criminal...by removing poverty and substituting power, we put a check
on his criminality. In short, by substituting despotism we have put a
total check on one criminal and a partial check on all the rest."

The Nicaraguan old gentleman leaned over with a queer expression in
his eyes.

"My church, sir," he said, "has taught me to respect faith. I do not
wish to speak with any disrespect of yours, however fantastic. But do
you really mean that you will trust to the ordinary man, the man who
may happen to come next, as a good despot?"

"I do," said Barker, simply. "He may not be a good man. But he will be
a good despot. For when he comes to a mere business routine of
government he will endeavour to do ordinary justice. Do we not assume
the same thing in a jury?"

The old President smiled.

"I don't know," he said, "that I have any particular objection in
detail to your excellent scheme of Government. My only objection is a
quite personal one. It is, that if I were asked whether I would belong
to it, I should ask first of all, if I was not permitted, as an
alternative, to be a toad in a ditch. That is all. You cannot argue
with the choice of the soul."

"Of the soul," said Barker, knitting his brows, "I cannot pretend to
say anything, but speaking in the interests of the public..."

Mr. Auberon Quin rose suddenly to his feet.

"If you'll excuse me, gentlemen," he said, "I will step out for a
moment into the air."

"I'm so sorry, Auberon," said Lambert, good-naturedly; "do you feel
bad?"

"Not bad exactly," said Auberon, with self-restraint; "rather good, if
anything. Strangely and richly good. The fact is I want to reflect a
little on those beautiful words that have just been uttered.
'Speaking,' yes, that was the phrase, 'speaking in the interests of
the public.' One cannot get the honey from such things without being
alone for a little."

"Is he really off his chump, do you think?" asked Lambert.

The old President looked after him with queerly vigilant eyes.

"He is a man, I think," he said, "who cares for nothing but a joke. He
is a dangerous man."

Lambert laughed in the act of lifting some macaroni to his mouth.

"Dangerous!" he said. "You don't know little Quin, sir!"

"Every man is dangerous," said the old man, without moving, "who cares
only for one thing. I was once dangerous myself."

And with a pleasant smile he finished his coffee and rose, bowing
profoundly, passed out into the fog, which had again grown dense and
sombre. Three days afterwards they heard that he had died quietly in
lodgings in Soho.

... .

Drowned somewhere else in the dark sea of fog was a little figure
shaking and quaking, with what might at first sight have seemed terror
or ague; but which was really that strange malady, a lonely laughter.
He was repeating over and over to himself with a rich accent "But
speaking in the interests of the public...."



CHAPTER III THE HILL OF HUMOUR



"IN a little square garden of yellow roses, beside the sea," said
Auberon Quin, "there was a Nonconformist minister who had never been
to Wimbledon. His family did not understand his sorrow or the strange
look in his eyes. But one day they repented their neglect, for they
heard that a body had been found on the shore, battered, but wearing
patent leather boots. As it happened, it turned out not to be the
minister at all. But in the dead man's pocket there was a return
ticket to Maidstone."

There was a short pause as Quin and his friends Barker and Lambert
went swinging on through the slushy grass of Kensington Gardens. Then
Auberon resumed.

"That story," he said reverently, "is the test of humour."

They walked on further and faster, wading through higher grass as they
began to climb a slope.

"I perceive," continued Auberon, "that you have passed the test, and
consider the anecdote excruciatingly funny; since you say nothing.
Only coarse humour is received with pot-house applause. The great
anecdote is received in silence, like a benediction. You felt pretty
benedicted, didn't you, Barker?"

"I saw the point," said Barker, somewhat loftily.

"Do you know," said Quin, with a sort of idiot gaiety, "I have lots of
stories as good as that. Listen to this one."

And he slightly cleared his throat.

"Dr. Polycarp was, as you all know, an unusually sallow bimetallist.
'There,' people of wide experience would say, 'there goes the
sallowest bimetallist in Cheshire.' Once this was said so that he
overheard it: it was said by an actuary, under a sunset of mauve and
grey. Polycarp turned upon him. 'Sallow!' he cried fiercely, 'sallow!
Quis tulerit Gracchos de seditione querentes.' It was said that no
actuary ever made game of Dr. Polycarp again."

Barker nodded with a simple sagacity. Lambert only grunted.

"Here is another," continued the insatiable Quin. "In a hollow of the
grey-green hills of rainy Ireland, lived an old, old woman, whose
uncle was always Cambridge at the Boat Race. But in her grey-green
hollows, she knew nothing of this: she didn't know that there was a
Boat Race. Also she did not know that she had an uncle. She had heard
of nobody at all, except of George the First, of whom she had heard (I
know not why), and in whose historical memory she put her simple
trust. And by and by, in God's good time, it was discovered that this
uncle of hers was not really her uncle, and they came and told her so.
She smiled through her tears, and said only, 'Virtue is its own
reward.'"

Again there was a silence, and then Lambert said:

"It seems a bit mysterious."

"Mysterious!" cried the other. "The true humour is mysterious. Do you
not realize the chief incident of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries?"

"And what's that?" asked Lambert, shortly.

"It is very simple," replied the other. "Hitherto it was the ruin of a
joke that people did not see it. Now it is the sublime victory of a
joke that people do not see it. Humour, my friends, is the one
sanctity remaining to mankind. It is the one thing you are thoroughly
afraid of. Look at that tree."

His interlocutors looked vaguely towards a beech that leant out
towards them from the ridge of the hill.

"If," said Mr. Quin, "I were to say that you did not see the great
truths of science exhibited by that tree, though they stared any man
of intellect in the face, what would you think or say? You would
merely regard me as a pedant with some unimportant theory about
vegetable cells. If I were to say that you did not see in that tree
the vile mismanagement of local politics, you would dismiss me as a
Socialist crank with some particular fad about public parks. If I were
to say that you were guilty of the supreme blasphemy of looking at
that tree and not seeing in it a new religion, a special revelation of
God, you would simply say I was a mystic, and think no more about me.
But if...and he lifted a pontifical hand...if I say that you cannot
see the humour of that tree, and that I see the humour of it...my God!
you will roll about at my feet."

He paused a moment, and then resumed.

"Yes; a sense of humour, a weird and delicate sense of humour, is the
new religion of mankind! It is towards that men will strain themselves
with the asceticism of saints. Exercises, spiritual exercises, will be
set in it. It will be asked, 'Can you see the humour of this iron
railing?' or 'Can you see the humour of this field of corn? Can you
see the humour of the stars? Can you see the humour of the sunsets?'
How often I have laughed myself to sleep over a violet sunset."

"Quite so," said Mr. Barker, with an intelligent embarrassment.

"Let me tell you another story. How often it happens that the M.P.'s
for Essex are less punctual than one would suppose. The least punctual
Essex M.P., perhaps, was James Wilson, who said, in the very act of
plucking a poppy..."

Lambert suddenly faced round and struck his stick into the ground in a
defiant attitude.

"Auberon," he said, "chuck it. I won't stand it. It's all bosh."

Both men stared at him, for there was something very explosive about
the words, as if they had been corked up painfully for a long time.

"You have," began Quin, "no..."

"I don't care a curse," said Lambert, violently, "whether I have 'a
delicate sense of humour' or not. I won't stand it. It's all a
confounded fraud. There's no joke in those infernal tales at all. You
know there isn't as well as I do."

"Well," replied Quin, slowly, "it is true that I, with my rather
gradual mental processes, did not see any joke in them. But the finer
sense of Barker perceived it."

Barker turned a fierce red, but continued to stare at the horizon.

"You ass," said Lambert; "why can't you be like other people? Why
can't you say something really funny, or hold your tongue? The man who
sits on his hat in a pantomime is a long sight funnier than you are."

Quin regarded him steadily. They had reached the top of the ridge and
the wind struck their faces.

"Lambert," said Auberon, "you are a great and good man, though I'm
hanged if you look it. You are more. You are a great revolutionist or
deliverer of the world, and I look forward to seeing you carved in
marble between Luther and Danton, if possible in your present
attitude, the hat slightly on one side. I said as I came up the hill
that the new humour was the last of the religions. You have made it
the last of the superstitions. But let me give you a very serious
warning. Be careful how you ask me to do anything outre, to imitate
the man in the pantomime, and to sit on my hat. Because I am a man
whose soul has been emptied of all pleasures but folly. And for
twopence I'd do it."

"Do it then," said Lambert, swinging his stick impatiently. "It would
be funnier than the bosh you and Barker talk."

Quin, standing on the top of the hill, stretched his hand out towards
the main avenue of Kensington Gardens.

"Two hundred yards away," he said, "are all your fashionable
acquaintances with nothing on earth to do but to stare at each other
and at us. We are standing upon an elevation under the open sky, a
peak as it were of fantasy, a Sinai of humour. We are in a great
pulpit or platform, lit up with sunlight, and half London can see us.
Be careful how you suggest things to me. For there is in me a madness
which goes beyond martyrdom, the madness of an utterly idle man."

"I don't know what you are talking about," said Lambert,
contemptuously. "I only know I'd rather you stood on your silly head,
than talked so much."

"Auberon! for goodness' sake..." cried Barker, springing forward; but
he was too late. Faces from, all the benches and avenues were turned
in their direction. Groups stopped and small crowds collected; and the
sharp sunlight picked out the whole scene in blue, green and black,
like a picture in a child's toy-book. And on the top of the small hill
Mr. Auberon Quin stood with considerable athletic neatness upon his
head, and waved his patent-leather boots in the air.

"For God's sake, Quin, get up, and don't be an idiot," cried Barker,
wringing his hands; "we shall have the whole town here."

"Yes, get up, get up, man," said Lambert, amused and annoyed. "I was
only fooling; get up."

Auberon did so with a bound, and flinging his hat higher than the
trees, proceeded to hop about on one leg with a serious expression.
Barker stamped wildly.

"Oh, let's get home, Barker, and leave him," said Lambert; "some of
your proper and correct police will look after him. Here they come!"

Two grave-looking men in quiet uniforms came up the hill towards them.
One held a paper in his hand.

"There he is, officer," said Lambert, cheerfully; "we ain't
responsible for him."

The officer looked at the capering Mr. Quin with a quiet eye.

"We have not come, gentlemen," he said, "about what I think you are
alluding to. We have come from head-quarters to announce the selection
of His Majesty the King. It is the rule, inherited from the old
regime, that the news should be brought to the new Sovereign
immediately, wherever he is; so we have followed you across Kensington
Gardens."

Barker's eyes were blazing in his pale face. He was consumed with
ambition throughout his life. With a certain dull magnanimity of the
intellect he had really believed in the chance method of selecting
despots. But this sudden suggestion, that the selection might have
fallen upon him, unnerved him with pleasure.

"Which of us," he began, and the respectful official interrupted him.

"Not you, sir, I am sorry to say. If I may be permitted to say so, we
know your services to the Government, and should be very thankful if
it were. The choice has fallen..."

"God bless my soul!" said Lambert, jumping back two paces. "Not me.
Don't say I'm autocrat of all the Russias."

"No, sir," said the officer, with a slight cough and a glance towards
Auberon, who was at that moment putting his head between his legs and
making a noise like a cow; "the gentleman whom we have to congratulate
seems at the moment...er...er...occupied."

"Not Quin!" shrieked Barker, rushing up to him; "it can't be. Auberon,
for God's sake pull yourself together. You've been made King!"

With his head still upside down between his legs, Mr. Quin answered
modestly:

"I am not worthy. I cannot reasonably claim to equal the great men who
have previously swayed the sceptre of Britain. Perhaps the only
peculiarity that I can claim is that I am probably the first monarch
that ever spoke out his soul to the people of England with his head
and body in this position. This may in some sense give me, to quote a
poem that I wrote in my youth:

"A nobler office on the earth Than valour, power of brain, or birth
Could give the warrior kings of old. The intellect clarified by this
posture..."

Lambert and Barker made a kind of rush at him.

"Don't you understand?" cried Lambert. "It's not a joke. They've
really made you King. By gosh! they must have rum taste."

"The great Bishops of the Middle Ages," said Quin, kicking his legs in
the air, as he was dragged, up more or less upside down, "were in the
habit of refusing the honour of election three times and then
accepting it. A mere matter of detail separates me from those great
men. I will accept the post three times and refuse it afterwards. Oh!
I will toil for you, my faithful people! You shall have a banquet of
humour."

By this time he had been landed the right way up, and the two men were
still trying in vain to impress him with the gravity of the situation.

"Did you not tell me, Wilfrid Lambert," he said, "that I should be of
more public value if I adopted a more popular form of humour? And when
should a popular form of humour be more firmly riveted upon me than
now, when I have become the darling of a whole people? Officer," he
continued, addressing the startled messenger, "are there no ceremonies
to celebrate my entry into the city?"

"Ceremonies," began the official, with embarrassment, "have been more
or less neglected for some little time, and..."

Auberon Quin began gradually to take off his coat.

"All ceremony," he said, "consists in the reversal of the obvious.
Thus men, when they wish to be priests or judges, dress up like women.
Kindly help me on with this coat." And he held it out.

"But, your Majesty," said the officer, after a moment's bewilderment
and manipulation, "you're putting it on with the tails in front."

"The reversal of the obvious," said the King, calmly, "is as near as
we can come to ritual with our imperfect apparatus. Lead on."

The rest of that afternoon and evening was to Barker and Lambert a
nightmare, which they could not properly realize or recall. The King,
with his coat on the wrong way, went towards the streets that were
awaiting him, and the old Kensington Palace which was the Royal
residence. As he passed small groups of men, the groups turned into
crowds, and gave forth sounds which seemed strange in welcoming an
autocrat. Barker walked behind, his brain reeling, and, as the crowds
grew thicker and thicker, the sounds became more and more unusual. And
when he had reached the great market-place opposite the church, Barker
knew that he had reached it, though he was roods behind, because a cry
went up such as had never before greeted any of the kings of the
earth.




BOOK II



CHAPTER I THE CHARTER OF THE CITIES



LAMBERT was standing bewildered outside the door of the King's
apartments amid the scurry of astonishment and ridicule. He was just
passing out into the street, in a dazed manner, when James Barker
dashed by him.

"Where are you going?" he asked.

"To stop all this foolery, of course," replied Barker; and he
disappeared into the room.

He entered it headlong, slamming the door, and slapping his
incomparable silk hat on the table. His mouth opened, but before he
could speak, the King said:

"Your hat, if you please."

Fidgeting with his fingers, and scarcely knowing what he was doing,
the young politician held it out.

The King placed it on his own chair, and sat on it.

"A quaint old custom," he explained, smiling above the ruins. "When
the King receives the representatives of the House of Barker, the hat
of the latter is immediately destroyed in this manner. It represents
the absolute finality of the act of homage expressed in the removal of
it. It declares that never until that hat shall once more appear upon
your head (a contingency which I firmly believe to be remote) shall
the House of Barker rebel against the Crown of England."

Barker stood with clenched fist, and shaking lip.

"Your jokes," he began, "and my property..." and then exploded with an
oath, and stopped again.

"Continue, continue," said the King, waving his hands.

"What does it all mean?" cried the other with a gesture of passionate
rationality. "Are you mad?"

"Not in the least," replied the King, pleasantly. "Madmen are always
serious; they go mad from lack of humour. You are looking serious
yourself, James."

"Why can't you keep it to your own private life?" expostulated the
other. "You've got plenty of money, and plenty of houses now to play
the fool in, but in the interests of the public..."

"Epigrammatic," said the King, shaking his finger sadly at him. "None
of your daring scintillations here. As to why I don't do it in
private, I rather fail to understand your question. The answer is of
comparative limpidity. I don't do it in private, because it is funnier
to do it in public. You appear to think that it would be amusing to be
dignified in the banquet hall and in the street, and at my own
fireside (I could procure a fireside) to keep the company in a roar.
But that is what every one does. Every one is grave in public, and
funny in private. My sense of humour suggests the reversal of this; it
suggests that one should be funny in public, and solemn in private. I
desire to make the State functions, parliaments, coronations, and so
on, one roaring old-fashioned pantomime. But, on the other hand, I
shut myself up alone in a small store-room for two hours a day, where
I am so dignified that I come out quite ill."

By this time Barker was walking up and down the room, his frock-coat
flapping like the black wings of a bird.

"Well, you will ruin the country, that's all," he said shortly.

"It seems to me," said Auberon, "that the tradition of ten centuries
is being broken, and the House of Barker is rebelling against the
Crown of England. It would be with regret (for I admire your
appearance) that I should be obliged forcibly to decorate your head
with the remains of this hat, but..."

"What I can't understand," said Barker, flinging up his fingers with a
feverish American movement, "is why you don't care about anything else
but your games."

The King stopped sharply in the act of lifting the silken remnants,
dropped them, and walked up to Barker, looking at him steadily.

"I made a kind of vow," he said, "that I would not talk seriously,
which always means answering silly questions. But the strong man will
always be gentle with politicians.

"'The shape my scornful looks deride Required a God to form;' if I may
so theologically express myself. And for some reason I cannot in the
least understand, I feel impelled to answer that question of yours,
and to answer it as if there were really such a thing in the world as
a serious subject. You ask me why I don't care for anything else. Can
you tell me, in the name of all the gods you don't believe in, why I
should care for anything else?"

"Don't you realize common public necessities?" cried Barker. "Is it
possible that a man of your intelligence does not know that it is
every one's interest..."

"Don't you believe in Zoroaster? Is it possible that you neglect
Mumbo-Jumbo?" returned the King, with startling animation. "Does a man
of your intelligence come to me with these damned early Victorian
ethics? If, on studying my features and manner, you detect any
particular resemblance to the Prince Consort, I assure you you are
mistaken. Did Herbert Spencer ever convince you...did he ever convince
anybody...did he ever for one mad moment convince himself...that it
must be to the interest of the individual to feel a public spirit? Do
you believe that, if you rule your department badly, you stand any
more chance, or one half of the chance, of being guillotined, than an
angler stands, of being pulled into the river by a strong pike?
Herbert Spencer refrained from theft for the same reason that he
refrained from wearing feathers in his hair, because he was an English
gentleman with different tastes. I am an English gentleman with
different tastes. He liked philosophy. I like art. He liked writing
ten books on the nature of human society. I like to see the Lord
Chamberlain walking in front of me with a piece of paper pinned to his
coat-tails. It is my humour. Are you answered? At any rate, I have
said my last serious word today, and my last serious word I trust for
the remainder of my life in this Paradise of Fools. The remainder of
my conversation with you today, which I trust will be long and
stimulating, I propose to conduct in a new language of my own by means
of rapid and symbolic movements of the left leg." And he began to
pirouette slowly round the room with a preoccupied expression.

Barker ran round the room after him, bombarding him with demands and
entreaties. But he received no response except in the new language. He
came out banging the door again, and sick like a man coming on shore.
As he strode along the streets he found himself suddenly opposite
Cicconani's restaurant, and for some reason there rose up before him
the green fantastic figure of the Spanish General, standing, as he had
seen him last, at the door with the words on his lips, "You cannot
argue with the choice of the soul."

The King came out from his dancing with the air of a man of business
legitimately tired. He put on an overcoat, lit a cigar, and went out
into the purple night.

"I will go," he said, "and mingle with the people."

He passed swiftly up a street in the neighbourhood of Notting Hill,
when suddenly he felt a hard object driven into his waistcoat. He
paused, put up a single eye-glass, and beheld a boy with a wooden
sword and a paper cocked hat, wearing that expression of awed
satisfaction with which a child contemplates his work when he has hit
some one very hard. The King gazed thoughtfully for some time at his
assailant, and slowly took a note-book from his breast-pocket.

"I have a few notes," he said, "for my dying speech;" and he turned
over the leaves. "Dying speech for political assassination; ditto, if
by former friend...h'm, h'm. Dying speech for death at hands of
injured husband (repentant). Dying speech for same (cynical). I am not
quite sure which meets the present..."

"I'm the King of the Castle," said the boy, truculently, and very
pleased with nothing in particular.

The King was a kind-hearted man, and very fond of children, like all
people who are fond of the ridiculous.

"Infant," he said. "I'm glad you are so stalwart a defender of your
old inviolate Notting Hill. Look up nightly to that peak, my child,
where it lifts itself among the stars so ancient, so lonely, so
unutterably Notting. So long as you are ready to die for the sacred
mountain, even if it were ringed with all the armies of Bayswater..."

The King stopped suddenly, and his eyes shone.

"Perhaps," he said, "perhaps the noblest of all my conceptions. A
revival of the arrogance of the old mediaeval cities applied to our
glorious suburbs. Clapham with a city guard. Wimbledon with a city
wall. Surbiton tolling a bell to raise its citizens. West Hampstead
going into battle with its own banner. It shall be done. I, the King,
have said it." And, hastily presenting the boy with half-a-crown,
remarking, "For the war-chest of Notting Hill," he ran violently home
at such a rate of speed that crowds followed him for miles. On
reaching his study, he ordered a cup of coffee, and plunged into
profound meditation upon the project. At length he called his
favourite Equerry, Captain Bowler, for whom he had a deep affection,
founded principally upon the shape of his whiskers.

"Bowler," he said, "isn't there some society of historical research,
or something of which I am an honorary member?"

"Yes, sir," said Captain Bowler, rubbing his nose, "you are a member
of 'The Encouragers of Egyptian Renaissance,' and 'The Teutonic Tombs
Club,' and 'The Society for the Recovery of London Antiquities,'
and..."

"That is admirable," said the King. "The London Antiquities does my
trick. Go to the Society for the Recovery of London Antiquities and
speak to their secretary, and their sub-secretary, and their
president, and their vice-president, saying, 'The King of England is
proud, but the honorary member of the Society for the Recovery of
London Antiquities is prouder than kings. I should like to tell you of
certain discoveries I have made touching the neglected traditions of
the London boroughs. The revelations may cause some excitement,
stirring burning memories and touching old wounds in Shepherd's Bush
and Bayswater, in Pimlico and South Kensington. The King hesitates,
but the honorary member is firm. I approach you invoking the vows of
my initiation, the Sacred Seven Cats, the Poker of Perfection, and the
Ordeal of the Indescribable Instant (forgive me if I mix you up with
the Clan-na-Gael or some other club I belong to), and ask you to
permit me to read a paper at your next meeting on the 'Wars of the
London Boroughs.' Say all this to the Society, Bowler. Remember it
very carefully, for it is most important, and I have forgotten it
altogether, and send me another cup of coffee and some of the cigars
that we keep for vulgar and successful people. I am going to write my
paper."

The Society for the Recovery of London Antiquities met a month after
in a corrugated iron hall on the outskirts of one of the southern
suburbs of London. A large number of people had collected there under
the coarse and flaring gas-jets when the King arrived, perspiring and
genial. On taking off his great-coat, he was perceived to be in
evening dress, wearing the Garter. His appearance at the small table,
adorned only with a glass of water, was received with respectful
cheering.

The chairman (Mr. Huggins) said that he was sure that they had all
been pleased to listen to such distinguished lecturers as they had
heard for some time past (hear, hear). Mr. Burton (hear, hear), Mr.
Cambridge, Professor King (loud and continued cheers), our old friend
Peter Jessop, Sir William White (loud laughter), and other eminent
men, had done honour to their little venture (cheers). But there were
other circumstances which lent a certain unique quality to the present
occasion (hear, hear). So far as his recollection went, and in
connection with the Society for the Recovery of London Antiquities it
went very far (loud cheers), he did not remember that any of their
lecturers had borne the title of King. He would therefore call upon
King Auberon briefly to address the meeting.

The King began by saying that this speech might be regarded as the
first declaration of his new policy for the nation. "At this supreme
hour of my life I feel that to no one but the members of the Society
for the Recovery of London Antiquities can I open my heart (cheers).
If the world turns upon my policy, and the storms of popular hostility
begin to rise (no, no), I feel that it is here, with my brave
Recoverers around me, that I can best meet them, sword in hand" (loud
cheers).

His Majesty then went on to explain that, now old age was creeping
upon him, he proposed to devote his remaining strength to bringing
about a keener sense of local patriotism in the various municipalities
of London. How few of them knew the legends of their own boroughs! How
many there were who had never heard of the true origin of the Wink of
Wandsworth! What a large proportion of the younger generation in
Chelsea neglected to perform the old Chelsea Chuff! Pimlico no longer
pumped the Pimlies. Battersea had forgotten the name of Blick.

There was a short silence, and then a voice said "Shame."

The King continued: "Being called, however unworthily, to this high
estate, I have resolved that, so far as possible, this neglect shall
cease. I desire no military glory. I lay claim to no constitutional
equality with Justinian or Alfred. If I can go down to history as the
man who saved from extinction a few old English customs, if our
descendants can say it was through this man, humble as he was, that
the Ten Turnips are still eaten in Fulham, and the Putney parish
councillor still shaves one half of his head I shall look my great
fathers reverently but not fearfully in the face when I go down to the
last house of Kings."

The King paused, visibly affected, but collecting himself, resumed
once more.

"I trust that to very few of you, at least, I need dwell on the
sublime origins of these legends. The very names of your boroughs bear
witness to them. So long as Hammersmith is called Hammersmith, its
people will live in the shadow of that primal hero, the Blacksmith,
who led the democracy of the Broadway into battle till he drove the
chivalry of Kensington before him and overthrew them at that place
which in honour of the best blood of the defeated aristocracy is still
called Kensington Gore. Men of Hammersmith will not fail to remember
that the very name of Kensington originated from the lips of their
hero. For at the great banquet of reconciliation held after the war,
when the disdainful oligarchs declined to join in the songs of the men
of the Broadway (which are to this day of a rude and popular
character), the great Republican leader, with his rough humour, said
the words which are written in gold upon his monument, 'Little birds
that can sing and won't sing, must be made to sing.' So that the
Eastern Knights were called Cansings or Kensings ever afterwards. But
you also have great memories, O men of Kensington! You showed that you
could sing, and sing great war-songs. Even after the dark day of
Kensington Gore, history will not forget those three Knights who
guarded your disordered retreat from Hyde Park (so called from your
hiding there), those three Knights after whom Knightsbridge is named.
Nor will it forget the day of your re-emergence, purged in the fire of
calamity, cleansed of your oligarchic corruptions, when, sword in
hand, you drove the Empire of Hammersmith back mile by mile, swept it
past its own Broadway, and broke it at last in a battle so long and
bloody that the birds of prey have left their name upon it. Men have
called it, with austere irony, the Ravenscourt. I shall not, I trust,
wound the patriotism of Bayswater, or the lonelier pride of Brompton,
or that of any other historic township, by taking these two special
examples. I select them, not because they are more glorious than the
rest, but partly from personal association (I am myself descended from
one of the three heroes of Knightsbridge), and partly from the
consciousness that I am an amateur antiquarian and cannot presume to
deal with times and places more remote and more mysterious. It is not
for me to settle the question between two such men as Professor Hugg
and Sir William Whisky as to whether Notting Hill means Nutting Hill
(in allusion to the rich woods which no longer cover it), or whether
it is a corruption of Nothing-ill, referring to its reputation among
the ancients as an Earthly Paradise. When a Podkins and a Jossy
confess themselves doubtful about the boundaries of West Kensington
(said to have been traced in the blood of Oxen), I need not be ashamed
to confess a similar doubt. I will ask you to excuse me from further
history, and to assist me with your encouragement in dealing with the
problem which faces us to-day. Is this ancient spirit of the London
townships to die out? Are our omnibus conductorsF and policemen to
lose altogether that light which we see so often in their eyes, the
dreamy light of

"'Old unhappy far-off things And battles long ago'

"to quote the words of a little-known poet who was a friend of my
youth? I have resolved, as I have said, so far as possible, to
preserve the eyes of policemen and omnibus conductors in their present
dreamy state. For what is a state without dreams? And the remedy I
propose is as follows:

"To-morrow morning at twenty-five minutes past ten, if Heaven spares
my life, I purpose to issue a Proclamation. It has been the work of my
life and is about half finished. With the assistance of a whisky and
soda, I shall conclude the other half to-night, and my people will
receive it to-morrow. All these boroughs where you were born, and hope
to lay your bones, shall be reinstated in their ancient
magnificence...Hammersmith, Kensington, Bayswater, Chelsea, Battersea,
Clapham, Balham, and a hundred others. Each shall immediately build a
city wall with gates to be closed at sunset. Each shall have a city
guard, armed to the teeth. Each shall have a banner, a coat-of-arms,
and, if convenient, a gathering cry. I will not enter into the details
now, my heart is too full. They will be found in the proclamation
itself. You will all, however, be subject to enrolment in the local
city guards, to be summoned together by a thing called the Tocsin, the
meaning of which I am studying in my researches into history.
Personally, I believe a tocsin to be some kind of highly paid
official. If, therefore, any of you happen to have such a thing as a
halberd in the house, I should advise you to practise with it in the
garden."

Here the King buried his face in his handkerchief and hurriedly left
the platform, overcome by emotions.

The members of the Society for the Recovery of London Antiquities rose
in an indescribable state of vagueness. Some were purple with
indignation; an intellectual few were purple with laughter; the great
majority found their minds a blank. There remains a tradition that one
pale face with burning blue eyes remained fixed upon the lecturer, and
after the lecture a red-haired boy ran out of the room.



CHAPTER II THE COUNCIL OF THE PROVOSTS



THE King got up early next morning and came down three steps at a time
like a schoolboy. Having eaten his breakfast hurriedly, but with an
appetite, he summoned one of the highest officials of the Palace, and
presented him with a shilling. "Go and buy me," he said, "a shilling
paint-box, which you will get, unless the mists of time mislead me, in
a shop at the corner of the second and dirtier street that leads out
of Rochester Row. I have already requested the Master of the
Buckhounds to provide me with cardboard. It seemed to me (I know not
why) that it fell within his department."

The King was happy all that morning with his cardboard and his paint-
box. He was engaged in designing the uniforms and coats-of-arms for
the various municipalities of London. They gave him deep and no
inconsiderable thought. He felt the responsibility.

"I cannot think," he said, "why people should think the names of
places in the country more poetical than those in London. Shallow
romanticists go away in trains and stop in places called Hugmy-in-the-
Hole, or Bumps-on-the-Puddle. And all the time they could, if they
liked, go and live at a place with the dim, divine name of St. John's
Wood. I have never been to St. John's Wood. I dare not. I should be
afraid of the innumerable night of fir trees, afraid to come upon a
blood-red cup and the beating of the wings of the Eagle. But all these
things can be imagined by remaining reverently in the Harrow train."

And he thoughtfully retouched his design for the head-dress of the
halberdier of St. John's Wood, a design in black and red, compounded
of a pine tree and the plumage of an eagle. Then he turned to another
card. "Let us think of milder matters," he said. "Lavender Hill! Could
any of your glebes and combes and all the rest of it produce so
fragrant an idea? Think of a mountain of lavender lifting itself in
purple poignancy into the silver skies and filling men's nostrils with
a new breath of life...a purple hill of incense. It is true that upon
my few excursions of discovery on a halfpenny tram I have failed to
hit the precise spot. But it must be there; some poet called it by its
name. There is at least warrant enough for the solemn purple plumes
(following the botanical formation of lavender) which I have required
people to wear in the neighbourhood of Clapham Junction. It is so
everywhere, after all. I have never been actually to Southfields, but
I suppose a scheme of lemons and olives represent their austral
instincts. I have never visited Parson's Green, or seen either the
Green or the Parson, but surely the pale-green shovel-hats I have
designed must be more or less in the spirit. I must work in the dark
and let my instincts guide me. The great love I bear to my people will
certainly save me from distressing their noble spirit, or violating
their great traditions."

As he was reflecting in this vein, the door was flung open, and an
official announced Mr. Barker and Mr. Lambert.

Mr. Barker and Mr. Lambert were not particularly surprised to find the
King sitting on the floor amid a litter of water-colour sketches. They
were not particularly surprised because the last time they had called
on him they had found him sitting on the floor, surrounded by a litter
of children's bricks, and the time before surrounded by a litter of
wholly unsuccessful attempts to make paper darts. But the trend of the
royal infant's remarks, uttered from amid this infantile chaos, was
not quite the same affair. For some time they let him babble on,
conscious that his remarks meant nothing. And then a horrible thought
began to steal over the mind of James Barker. He began to think that
the King's remarks did not mean nothing.

"In God's name, Auberon," he suddenly volleyed out, startling the
quiet hall, "you don't mean that you are really going to have these
city guards and city walls and things?"

"I am, indeed," said the infant, in a quiet voice. "Why shouldn't I
have them? I have modelled them precisely on your political
principles. Do you know what I've done, Barker? I've behaved like a
true Barkerian. I've... but perhaps it won't interest you, the account
of my Barkerian conduct."

"Oh, go on, go on," cried Barker.

"The account of my Barkerian conduct," said Auberon, calmly, "seems
not only to interest, but to alarm you. Yet it is very simple. It
merely consists in choosing all the provosts under any new scheme by
the same principle by which you have caused the central despot to be
appointed. Each provost, of each city, under my charter, is to be
appointed by rotation. Sleep, therefore, my Barker, a rosy sleep."

Barker's wild eyes flared.

"But, in God's name, don't you see, Quin, that the thing is quite
different? In the centre it doesn't matter so much, just because the
whole object of despotism is to get some sort of unity. But if any
damned parish can go to any damned man..."

"I see your difficulty," said King Auberon, calmly. "You feel that
your talents may be neglected. Listen!" And he rose with immense
magnificence. "I solemnly give to my liege subject, James Barker, my
special and splendid favour, the right to override the obvious text of
the Charter of the Cities, and to be, in his own right, Lord High
Provost of South Kensington. And now, my dear James, you are all
right. Good day."

"But..." began Barker.

"The audience is at an end, Provost," said the King, smiling.

How far his confidence was justified, it would require a somewhat
complicated description to explain. "The Great Proclamation of the
Charter of the Free Cities" appeared in due course that morning, and
was posted by bill-stickers all over the front of the Palace, the King
assisting them with animated directions, and standing in the middle of
the road, with his head on one side, contemplating the result. It was
also carried up and down the main thoroughfares by sandwichmen, and
the King was, with difficulty, restrained from going out in that
capacity himself, being, in fact, found by the Groom of the Stole and
Captain Bowler, struggling between two boards. His excitement had
positively to be quieted like that of a child.

The reception which the Charter of the Cities met at the hands of the
public may mildly be described as mixed. In one sense it was popular
enough. In many happy homes that remarkable legal document was read
aloud on winter evenings amid uproarious appreciation, when everything
had been learnt by heart from that quaint but immortal old classic,
Mr. W. W. Jacobs. But when it was discovered that the King had every
intention of seriously requiring the provisions to be carried out, of
insisting that the grotesque cities, with their tocsins and city
guards, should really come into existence, things were thrown into a
far angrier confusion. Londoners had no particular objection to the
King making a fool of himself, but they became indignant when it
became evident that he wished to make fools of them; and protests
began to come in.

The Lord High Provost of the Good and Valiant City of West Kensington
wrote a respectful letter to the King, explaining that upon State
occasions it would, of course, be his duty to observe what formalities
the King thought proper, but that it was really awkward for a decent
householder not to be allowed to go out and put a post-card in a
pillar-box without being escorted by five heralds, who announced, with
formal cries and blasts of a trumpet, that the Lord High Provost
desired to catch the post.

The Lord High Provost of North Kensington, who was a prosperous
draper, wrote a curt business note, like a man complaining of a
railway company, stating that definite inconvenience had been caused
him by the presence of the halberdiers, whom he had to take with him
everywhere. When attempting to catch an omnibus to the City, he had
found that while room could have been found for himself, the
halberdiers had a difficulty in getting into the vehicle-believe him,
theirs faithfuly.

The Lord High Provost of Shepherd's Bush said his wife did not like
men hanging round the kitchen.

The King was always delighted to listen to these grievances,
delivering lenient and kingly answers, but as he always insisted, as
the absolute sine qua non, that verbal complaints should be presented
to him with the fullest pomp of trumpets, plumes, and halberds, only a
few resolute spirits were prepared to run the gauntlet of the little
boys in the street.

Among these, however, was prominent the abrupt and business-like
gentleman who ruled North Kensington. And he had before long, occasion
to interview the King about a matter wider and even more urgent than
the problem of the halberdiers and the omnibus. This was the greatest
question which then and for long afterwards brought a stir to the
blood and a flush to the cheek of all the speculative builders and
house agents from Shepherd's Bush to the Marble Arch, and from
Westbourne Grove to High Street, Kensington. I refer to the great
affair of the improvements in Notting Hill. The scheme was conducted
chiefly by Mr. Buck, the abrupt North Kensington magnate, and by Mr.
Wilson, the Provost of Bayswater. A great thoroughfare was to be
driven through three boroughs, through West Kensington, North
Kensington and Notting Hill, opening at one end into Hammersmith
Broadway, and at the other into Westbourne Grove. The negotiations,
buyings, sellings, bullying and bribing took ten years, and by the end
of it Buck, who had conducted them almost single-handed, had proved
himself a man of the strongest type of material energy and material
diplomacy. And just as his splendid patience and more splendid
impatience had finally brought him victory, when workmen were already
demolishing houses and walls along the great line from Hammersmith, a
sudden obstacle appeared that had neither been reckoned with nor
dreamed of, a small and strange obstacle, which, like a speck of grit
in a great machine, jarred the whole vast scheme and brought it to a
standstill, and Mr. Buck, the draper, getting with great impatience
into his robes of office and summoning with indescribable disgust his
halberdiers, hurried over to speak to the King.

Ten years had not tired the King of his joke. There were still new
faces to be seen looking out from the symbolic head-gears he had
designed, gazing at him from amid the pastoral ribbons of Shepherd's
Bush or from under the sombre hoods of the Blackfriars Road. And the
interview which was promised him with the Provost of North Kensington
he anticipated with a particular pleasure, for "he never really
enjoyed," he said, "the full richness of the mediaeval garments unless
the people compelled to wear them were very angry and businesslike."

Mr. Buck was both. At the King's command the door of the audience-
chamber was thrown open and a herald appeared in the purple colours of
Mr. Buck's commonwealth emblazoned with the Great Eagle which the King
had attributed to North Kensington, in vague reminiscence of Russia,
for he always insisted on regarding North Kensington as some kind of
semi-arctic neighbourhood. The herald announced that the Provost of
that city desired audience of the King.

"From North Kensington?" said the King, rising graciously. "What news
does he bring from that land of high hills and fair women? He is
welcome."

The herald advanced into the room, and was immediately followed by
twelve guards clad in purple, who were followed by an attendant
bearing the banner of the Eagle, who was followed by another attendant
bearing the keys of the city upon a cushion, who was followed by Mr.
Buck in a great hurry. When the King saw his strong animal face and
steady eyes, he knew that he was in the presence of a great man of
business, and consciously braced himself.

"Well, well," he said, cheerily coming down two or three steps from a
dais, and striking his hands lightly together, "I am glad to see you.
Never mind, never mind. Ceremony is not everything."

"I don't understand your Majesty," said the Provost stolidly.

"Never mind, never mind," said the King, gaily. "A knowledge of Courts
is by no means an unmixed merit; you will do it next time, no doubt."

The man of business looked at him sulkily from under his black brows
and said again without show of civility:

"I don't follow you."

"Well, well," replied the King, good-naturedly, "if you ask me I don't
mind telling you, not because I myself attach any importance to these
forms in comparison with the Honest Heart. But it is usual...it is
usual...that is all, for a man when entering the presence of Royalty
to lie down on his back on the floor and elevating his feet towards
heaven (as the source of Royal power) to say three times 'Monarchical
institutions improve the manners.' But there, there-such pomp is far
less truly dignified than your simple kindliness."

The Provost's face was red with anger and he maintained silence.

"And now," said the King, lightly, and with the exasperating air of a
man softening a snub; "what delightful weather we are having! You must
find your official robes warm, my Lord. I designed them for your own
snow-bound land."

"They're as hot as hell," said Buck, briefly. "I came here on
business."

"Right," said the King, nodding a great number of times with quite
unmeaning solemnity; "right, right, right. Business, as the sad glad
old Persian said, is business. Be punctual. Rise early. Point the pen
to the shoulder. Point the pen to the shoulder, for you know not
whence you come nor why. Point the pen to the shoulder, for you know
not when you go nor where."

The Provost pulled a number of papers from his pocket and savagely
flapped them open.

"Your Majesty may have heard," he began, sarcastically, "of
Hammersmith and a thing called a road. We have been at work ten years
buying property and getting compulsory powers and fixing compensation
and squaring vested interests, and now at the very end, the thing is
stopped by a fool. Old Prout, who was Provost of Notting Hill, was a
business man, and we dealt with him quite satisfactorily. But he's
dead, and the cursed lot has fallen to a young man named Wayne, who's
up to some game that's perfectly incomprehensible to me. We offer him
a better price than any one ever dreamt of, but he won't let the road
go through. And his Council seem to be backing him up. It's midsummer
madness."

The King, who was rather inattentively engaged in drawing the
Provost's nose with his finger on the window-pane, heard the last two
words.

"What a perfect phrase that is," he said. "'Midsummer madness!'"

"The chief point is," continued Buck, doggedly, "that the only part
that is really in question is one dirty little street...Pump
Street...a street with nothing in it but a public house and a penny
toy-shop, and that sort of thing. All the respectable people of
Notting Hill have accepted our compensation. But the ineffable Wayne
sticks out over Pump Street. Says he's Provost of Notting Hill. He's
only Provost of Pump Street."

"A good thought," replied Auberon. "I like the idea of a Provost of
Pump Street. Why not let him alone?"

"And drop the whole scheme!" cried out Buck, with a burst of brutal
spirit. "I'll be damned if we do. No. I'm for sending in workmen to
pull down without more ado."

"Strike for the purple Eagle," cried the King, hot with historical
associations.

"I'll tell you what it is," said Buck, losing his temper altogether.
"If your Majesty would spend less time in insulting respectable people
with your silly coats-of-arms, and more time over the business of the
nation..."

The King's brow wrinkled thoughtfully.

"The situation is not bad," he said; "the haughty burgher defying the
King in his own Palace. The burgher's head should be thrown back and
the right arm extended; the left may be lifted towards Heaven, but
that I leave to your private religious sentiment. I have sunk back in
this chair, stricken with baffled fury. Now again, please."

Buck's mouth opened like a dog's, but before he could speak another
herald appeared at the door.

"The Lord High Provost of Bayswater," he said, "desires an audience."

"Admit him," said Auberon. "This is a jolly day."

The halberdiers of Bayswater wore a prevailing uniform of green, and
the banner which was borne after them was emblazoned with a green bay-
wreath on a silver ground, which the King, in the course of his
researches into a bottle of champagne, had discovered to be the quaint
old punning cognisance of the city of Bayswater.

"It is a fit symbol," said the King, "your immortal bay-wreath. Fulham
may seek for wealth, and Kensington for art, but when did the men of
Bayswater care for anything but glory?"

Immediately behind the banner, and almost completely hidden by it,
came the Provost of the city, clad in splendid robes of green and
silver with white fur and crowned with bay. He was an anxious little
man with red whiskers, originally the owner of a small sweet-stuff
shop.

"Our cousin of Bayswater," said the King, with delight; "what can we
get for you?" The King was heard also distinctly to mutter, "Cold
beef, cold 'am, cold chicken," his voice dying into silence.

"I came to see your Majesty," said the Provost of Bayswater, whose
name was Wilson, "about that Pump Street affair."

"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
himself 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 soul, never to be erased, you told me ever to turn my
sword against the enemies of my inviolate city. Like a priest pointing
to the altar, you pointed to the hill of Notting. 'So long,' you said,
'as you are ready to die for the sacred mountain, even if it were
ringed with all the armies of Bayswater.' I have not forgotten the
words, and I have reason now to remember them, for the hour is come
and the crown of your prophecy. The sacred hill is ringed with the
armies of Bayswater, and I am ready to die."

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

"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?"

The King's thoughts were in a kind of rout; he could not collect them.

"It is generally felt to be a little funny," he said, vaguely.

"I suppose," said Adam, turning on him with a fierce suddenness, "I
suppose you fancy crucifixion was a serious affair?"

"Well, I..." began Auberon, "I admit I have generally thought it had
its graver side."

"Then you are wrong," said Wayne, with incredible violence.
"Crucifixion is comic. It is exquisitely diverting. It was an absurd
and obscene kind of impaling reserved for people who were made to be
laughed at...for slaves and provincials...for dentists and small
tradesmen, as you would say. I have seen the grotesque gallows-shape,
which the little Roman gutter-boys scribbled on walls as a vulgar
joke, blazing on the pinnacles of the temples of the world. And shall
I turn back?"

The King made no answer.

Adam went on, his voice ringing in the roof.

"This laughter with which men tyrannize is not the great power you
think it. Peter was crucified, and crucified head downwards. What
could be funnier than the idea of a respectable old Apostle upside
down? What could be more in the style of your modern humour? But what
was the good of it? Upside down or right side up, Peter was Peter to
mankind. Upside down he still hangs over Europe, and millions move and
breathe only in the life of his church."

King Auberon got up absently.

"There is something in what you say," he said. "You seem to have been
thinking, young man."

"Only feeling, sire," answered the Provost. "I was born, like other
men, in a spot of the earth which I loved because I had played boys'
games there, and fallen in love, and talked with my friends through
nights that were nights of the gods. And I feel the riddle. These
little gardens where we told our loves. These streets where we brought
out our dead. Why should they be commonplace? Why should they be
absurd? Why should it be grotesque to say that a pillar-box is poetic
when for a year I could not see a red pillar-box against the yellow
evening in a certain street without being wracked with something of
which God keeps the secret, but which is stronger than sorrow or joy?
Why should any one be able to raise a laugh by saying 'the Cause of
Notting Hill'?...Notting Hill where thousands of immortal spirits
blaze with alternate hope and fear."

Auberon was flicking dust off his sleeve with quite a new seriousness
on his face, distinct from the owlish solemnity which was the pose of
his humour.

"It is very difficult," he said at last. "It is a damned difficult
thing. I see what you mean...I agree with you even up to a point...or
I should like to agree with you, if I were young enough to be a
prophet and poet. I feel a truth in everything you say until you come
to the words 'Notting Hill.' And then I regret to say that the old
Adam awakes roaring with laughter and makes short work of the new
Adam, whose name is Wayne."

For the first time Provost Wayne Was silent, and stood gazing dreamily
at the floor. Evening was closing in, and the room had grown darker.

"I know," he said, in a strange, almost sleepy voice, "there is truth
in what you say, too. It is hard not to laugh at the common names...I
only say we should not. I have thought of a remedy; but such thoughts
are rather terrible."

"What thoughts?" asked Auberon.

The Provost of Notting Hill seemed to have fallen into a kind of
trance; in his eyes was an elvish light.

"I know of a magic wand, but it is a wand that only one or two may
rightly use, and only seldom. It is a fairy wand of great fear,
stronger than those who use it...often frightful, often wicked to use.
But whatever is touched with it is never again wholly common. Whatever
is touched with it takes a magic from outside the world. If I touch,
with this fairy wand, the railways and the roads of Notting Hill, men
will love them, and be afraid of them for ever."

"What the devil are you talking about?" asked the King.

"It has made mean landscapes magnificent, and hovels outlast
cathedrals," went on the madman. "Why should it not make lampposts
fairer than Greek lamps, and an omnibus ride like a painted ship? The
touch of it is the finger of a strange perfection."

"What is your wand?" cried the King, impatiently.

"There it is," said Wayne; and pointed to the floor, where his sword
lay flat and shining.

"The sword!" cried the King; and sprang up straight on the dais.

"Yes, yes," cried Wayne, hoarsely. "The things touched by that are not
vulgar. The things touched by that..."

King Auberon made a gesture of horror.

"You will shed blood for that!" he cried. "For a cursed point of
view..."

"Oh, you kings, you kings," cried out Adam, in a burst of scorn. "How
humane you are, how tender, how considerate. You will make war for a
frontier, or the imports of a foreign harbour; you will shed blood for
the precise duty on lace, or the salute to an admiral. But for the
things that make life itself worthy or miserable...how humane you are.
I say here, and I know well what I speak of, there were never any
necessary wars but the religious wars. There were never any just wars
but the religious wars. There were never any humane wars but the
religious wars. For these men were fighting for something that
claimed, at least, to be the happiness of a man, the virtue of a man.
A Crusader thought, at least, that Islam hurt the soul of every man,
king or tinker, that it could really capture. I think Buck and Barker
and these rich vultures hurt the soul of every man, hurt every inch of
the ground, hurt every brick of the houses, that they can really
capture. Do you think I have no right to fight for Notting Hill, you
whose English Government has so often fought for tomfooleries? If, as
your rich friends say, there are no gods, and the skies are dark above
us, what should a man fight for, but the place where he had the Eden
of childhood and the short heaven of first love? If no temples and no
scriptures are sacred, what is sacred if a man's own youth is not
sacred?"

The King walked a little restlessly up and down the dais.

"It is hard," he said, biting his lips, "to assent to a view so
desperate...so responsible..."

As he spoke, the door of the audience chamber fell ajar, and through
the aperture came, like the sudden chatter of a bird, the high, nasal,
but well-bred voice of Barker.

"I said to him quite plainly...the public interests..."

Auberon turned on Wayne with violence.

"What the devil is all this? What am I saying? What are you saying?
Have you hypnotized me? Curse your uncanny blue eyes! Let me go. Give
me back my sense of humour. Give it me back. Give it me back, I say!"

"I solemnly assure you," said Wayne, uneasily, with a gesture, as if
feeling all over himself, "that I haven't got it."

The King fell back in his chair, and went into a roar of Rabelaisian
laughter.

"I don't think you have," he cried.




BOOK III



CHAPTER I THE MENTAL CONDITION OF ADAM WAYNE



A LITTLE while after the King's accession a small book of poems
appeared, called "Hymns of the Hill." They were not good poems, nor
was the book successful, but it attracted a certain amount of
attention from one particular school of critics. The King himself, who
was a member of the school, reviewed it in his capacity of literary
critic to "Straight from the Stables," a sporting journal. They were
known as the Hammock School, because it had been calculated
malignantly by an enemy that no less than thirteen of their delicate
criticisms had begun with the words, "I read this book in a hammock;
half asleep in the sleepy sunlight, I..."; after that there were
important differences. Under these conditions they liked everything,
but especially everything silly. "Next to authentic goodness in a
book," they said "next to authentic goodness in a book (and that,
alas! we never find) we desire a rich badness." Thus it happened that
their praise (as indicating the presence of a rich badness) was not
universally sought after, and authors became a little disquieted when
they found the eye of the Hammock School fixed upon them with peculiar
favour.

The peculiarity of "Hymns of the Hill" was the celebration of the
poetry of London as distinct from the poetry of the country. This
sentiment or affectation was, of course, not uncommon in the twentieth
century, nor was it, although sometimes exaggerated, and sometimes
artificial, by any means without a great truth at its root, for there
is one respect in which a town must be more poetical than the country,
since it is closer to the spirit of man; for London, if it be not one
of the masterpieces of man, is at least one of his sins. A street is
really more poetical than a meadow, because a street has a secret. A
street is going somewhere, and a meadow nowhere. But, in the case of
the book called "Hymns on the Hill," there was another peculiarity,
which the King pointed out with great acumen in his review. He was
naturally interested in the matter, for he had himself published a
volume of lyrics about London under his pseudonym of "Daisy Daydream."

This difference, as the King pointed out, consisted in the fact that,
while mere artificers like "Daisy Daydream" (on whose elaborate style
the King, over his signature of "Thunderbolt," was perhaps somewhat
too severe) thought to praise London by comparing it to the
country...using nature, that is, as a background from which all
poetical images had to be drawn...the more robust author of "Hymns of
the Hill" praised the country, or nature, by comparing it to the town,
and used the town itself as a background. "Take," said the critic,
"the typically feminine lines, 'To the Inventor of the Hansom Cab'"

'Poet, whose cunning carved this amorous shell, Where twain may
dwell.'

"Surely," wrote the King, "no one but a woman could have written those
lines. A woman has always a weakness for nature; with her, art is only
beautiful as an echo or shadow of it. She is praising the hansom cab
by theme and theory, but her soul is still a child by the sea, picking
up shells. She can never be utterly of the town, as a man can; indeed,
do we not speak (with sacred propriety) of 'a man about town'? Who
ever spoke of a woman about town? However much, physically, 'about
town' a woman may be, she still models herself on nature; she tries to
carry nature with her; she bids grasses to grow on her head, and furry
beasts to bite her about the throat. In the heart of a dim city, she
models her hat on a flaring cottage garden of flowers. We, with our
nobler civic sentiment, model ours on a chimney pot; the ensign of
civilization. And rather than be without birds, she will commit
massacre, that she may turn her head into a tree, with dead birds to
sing on it."

This kind of thing went on for several pages, and then the critic
remembered his subject, and returned to it. "Poet, whose cunning
carved this amorous shell, Where twain may dwell."

"The peculiarity of these fine though feminine lines," continued
"Thunderbolt," "is, as we have said, that they praise the hansom cab
by comparing it to the shell, to a natural thing. Now, hear the author
of 'Hymns of the Hill,' and how he deals with the same subject. In his
fine nocturne, entitled 'The Last Omnibus,' he relieves the rich and
poignant melancholy of the theme by a sudden sense of rushing at the
end 'The wind round the old street corner Swung sudden and quick as a
cab.'

"Here the distinction is obvious. 'Daisy Daydream' thinks it a great
compliment to a hansom cab to be compared to one of the spiral
chambers of the sea. And the author of 'Hymns on the Hill' thinks it a
great compliment to the immortal whirlwind to be compared to a hackney
coach. He surely is the real admirer of London. We have no space to
speak of all his perfect applications of the idea; of the poem in
which, for instance, a lady's eyes are compared, not to stars, but to
two perfect street-lamps guiding the wanderer. We have no space to
speak of the fine lyric, recalling the Elizabethan spirit, in which
the poet, instead of saying that the rose and the lily contend in her
complexion, says, with a purer modernism, that the red omnibus of
Hammersmith and the white omnibus of Fulham fight there for the
mastery. How perfect the image of two contending omnibuses!"

Here, somewhat abruptly, the review concluded, probably because the
King had to send off his copy at that moment, as he was in some want
of money. But the King was a very good critic, whatever he may have
been as King, and he had, to a considerable extent, hit the right nail
on the head. "Hymns on the Hill" was not at all like the poems
originally published in praise of the poetry of London. And the reason
was that it was really written by a man who had seen nothing else but
London, and who regarded it, therefore, as the universe. It was
written by a raw, red-headed lad of seventeen, named Adam Wayne, who
had been born in Notting Hill. An accident in his seventh year
prevented his being taken away to the seaside, and thus his whole life
had been passed in his own Pump Street, and in its neighbourhood. And
the consequence was, that he saw the street-lamps as things quite as
eternal as the stars; the two fires were mingled. He saw the houses as
things enduring, like the mountains, and so he wrote about them as one
would write about mountains. Nature puts on a disguise when she speaks
to every man; to this man she put on the disguise of Notting Hill.
Nature would mean to a poet born in the Cumberland hills, a stormy
skyline and sudden rocks. Nature would mean to a poet born in the
Essex flats, a waste of splendid waters and splendid sunsets. So
nature meant to this man Wayne a line of violet roofs and lemon lamps,
the chiaroscuro of the town. He did not think it clever or funny to
praise the shadows and colours of the town; he had seen no other
shadows or colours, and so he praised them...because they were shadows
and colours. He saw all this because he was a poet, though in practice
a bad poet. It is too often forgotten that just as a bad man is
nevertheless a man, so a bad poet is nevertheless a poet.

Mr. Wayne's little volume of verse was a complete failure; and he
submitted to the decision of fate with a quite rational humility, went
back to his work, which was that of a draper's assistant, and wrote no
more. He still retained his feeling about the town of Notting Hill,
because he could not possibly have any other feeling, because it was
the back and base of his brain. But he does not seem to have made any
particular attempt to express it or insist upon it.

He was a genuine natural mystic, one of those who live on the border
of fairyland. But he was perhaps the first to realize how often the
boundary of fairyland runs through a crowded city. Twenty feet from
him (for he was very short-sighted) the red and white and yellow suns
of the gas-lights thronged and melted into each other like an orchard
of fiery trees, the beginning of the woods of elf-land.

But, oddly enough, it was because he was a small poet that he came to
his strange and isolated triumph. It was because he was a failure in
literature that he became a portent in English history. He was one of
those to whom nature has given the desire without the power of
artistic expression. He had been a dumb poet from his cradle. He might
have been so to his grave, and carried unuttered into the darkness a
treasure of new and sensational song. But he was born under the lucky
star of a single coincidence. He happened to be at the head of his
dingy municipality at the time of the King's jest, at the time when
all municipalities were suddenly commanded to break out into banners
and flowers. Out of the long procession of the silent poets who have
been passing since the beginning of the world, this one man found
himself in the midst of an heraldic vision, in which he could act and
speak and live lyrically. While the author and the victims alike
treated the whole matter as a silly public charade, this one man, by
taking it seriously, sprang suddenly into a throne of artistic
omnipotence. Armour, music, stand