ARKCODEX
Book IV
1Mr. Buck, who, though retired, frequently went down to his big drapery stores in Kensington High Street, was locking up those premises, being the last to leave. It was a wonderful evening of green and gold, but that did not trouble him very much. If you had pointed it out, he would have agreed seriously, for the rich always desire to be artistic.
2He stepped out into the cool air, buttoning up his light yellow coat, and blowing great clouds from his cigar, when a figure dashed up to him in another yellow overcoat, but unbuttoned and flying behind him.
3“Hullo, Barker!” said the draper. “Any of our summer articles? You’re too late. Factory Acts, Barker. Humanity and progress, my boy.”
4“Oh, don’t chatter,” cried Barker, stamping. “We’ve been beaten.”
5“Beaten—by what?” asked Buck, mystified.
6“By Wayne.”
7Buck looked at Barker’s fierce white face for the first time, as it gleamed in the lamplight.
8“Come and have a drink,” he said.
9They adjourned to a cushioned and glaring buffet, and Buck established himself slowly and lazily in a seat, and pulled out his cigar-case.
10“Have a smoke,” he said.
11Barker was still standing, and on the fret, but after a moment’s hesitation, he sat down as if he might spring up again the next minute. They ordered drinks in silence.
12“How did it happen?” asked Buck, turning his big bold eyes on him.
13“How the devil do I know?” cried Barker. “It happened like—like a dream. How can two hundred men beat six hundred? How can they?”
14“Well,” said Buck, coolly, “how did they? You ought to know.”
15“I don’t know; I can’t describe,” said the other, drumming on the table. “It seemed like this. We were six hundred, and marched with those damned poleaxes of Auberon’s—the only weapons we’ve got. We marched two abreast. We went up Holland Walk, between the high palings which seemed to me to go straight as an arrow for Pump Street. I was near the tail of the line, and it was a long one. When the end of it was still between the high palings, the head of the line was already crossing Holland Park Avenue. Then the head plunged into the network of narrow streets on the other side, and the tail and myself came out on the great crossing. When we also had reached the northern side and turned up a small street that points, crookedly as it were, towards Pump Street, the whole thing felt different. The streets dodged and bent so much that the head of our line seemed lost altogether: it might as well have been in North America. And all this time we hadn’t seen a soul.”
16Buck, who was idly dabbing the ash of his cigar on the ashtray, began to move it deliberately over the table, making feathery grey lines, a kind of map.
17“But though the little streets were all deserted (which got a trifle on my nerves), as we got deeper and deeper into them, a thing began to happen that I couldn’t understand. Sometimes a long way ahead—three turns or corners ahead, as it were—there broke suddenly a sort of noise, clattering, and confused cries, and then stopped. Then, when it happened, something, I can’t describe it—a kind of shake or stagger went down the line, as if the line were a live thing, whose head had been struck, or had been an electric cord. None of us knew why we were moving, but we moved and jostled. Then we recovered, and went on through the little dirty streets, round corners, and up twisted ways. The little crooked streets began to give me a feeling I can’t explain—as if it were a dream. I felt as if things had lost their reason, and we should never get out of the maze. Odd to hear me talk like that, isn’t it? The streets were quite well-known streets, all down on the map. But the fact remains. I wasn’t afraid of something happening. I was afraid of nothing ever happening—nothing ever happening for all God’s eternity.”
18He drained his glass and called for more whisky. He drank it, and went on.
19“And then something did happen. Buck, it’s the solemn truth, that nothing has ever happened to you in your life. Nothing had ever happened to me in my life.”
20“Nothing ever happened!” said Buck, staring. “What do you mean?”
21“Nothing has ever happened,” repeated Barker, with a morbid obstinacy. “You don’t know what a thing happening means? You sit in your office expecting customers, and customers come; you walk in the street expecting friends, and friends meet you; you want a drink, and get it; you feel inclined for a bet, and make it. You expect either to win or lose, and you do either one or the other. But things happening!” and he shuddered ungovernably.
22“Go on,” said Buck, shortly. “Get on.”
23“As we walked wearily round the corners, something happened. When something happens, it happens first, and you see it afterwards. It happens of itself, and you have nothing to do with it. It proves a dreadful thing—that there are other things besides one’s self. I can only put it in this way. We went round one turning, two turnings, three turnings, four turnings, five. Then I lifted myself slowly up from the gutter where I had been shot half senseless, and was beaten down again by living men crashing on top of me, and the world was full of roaring, and big men rolling about like ninepins.”
24Buck looked at his map with knitted brows.
25“Was that Portobello Road?” he asked.
26“Yes,” said Barker—“yes; Portobello Road. I saw it afterwards; but, my God, what a place it was! Buck, have you ever stood and let a six foot of man lash and lash at your head with six feet of pole with six pounds of steel at the end? Because, when you have had that experience, as Walt Whitman says, ‘you reexamine philosophies and religions.’ ”
27“I have no doubt,” said Buck. “If that was Portobello Road, don’t you see what happened?”
28“I know what happened exceedingly well. I was knocked down four times; an experience which, as I say, has an effect on the mental attitude. And another thing happened, too. I knocked down two men. After the fourth fall (there was not much bloodshed—more brutal rushing and throwing—for nobody could use their weapons), after the fourth fall, I say, I got up like a devil, and I tore a poleaxe out of a man’s hand and struck where I saw the scarlet of Wayne’s fellows, struck again and again. Two of them went over, bleeding on the stones, thank God; and I laughed and found myself sprawling in the gutter again, and got up again, and struck again, and broke my halberd to pieces. I hurt a man’s head, though.”
29Buck set down his glass with a bang, and spat out curses through his thick moustache.
30“What is the matter?” asked Barker, stopping, for the man had been calm up to now, and now his agitation was far more violent than his own.
31“The matter?” said Buck, bitterly; “don’t you see how these maniacs have got us? Why should two idiots, one a clown and the other a screaming lunatic, make sane men so different from themselves? Look here, Barker; I will give you a picture. A very well-bred young man of this century is dancing about in a frock-coat. He has in his hands a nonsensical seventeenth-century halberd, with which he is trying to kill men in a street in Notting Hill. Damn it! don’t you see how they’ve got us? Never mind how you felt—that is how you looked. The King would put his cursed head on one side and call it exquisite. The Provost of Notting Hill would put his cursed nose in the air and call it heroic. But in Heaven’s name what would you have called it—two days before?”
32Barker bit his lip.
33“You haven’t been through it, Buck,” he said. “You don’t understand fighting—the atmosphere.”
34“I don’t deny the atmosphere,” said Buck, striking the table. “I only say it’s their atmosphere. It’s Adam Wayne’s atmosphere. It’s the atmosphere which you and I thought had vanished from an educated world forever.”
35“Well, it hasn’t,” said Barker; “and if you have any lingering doubts, lend me a poleaxe, and I’ll show you.”
36There was a long silence, and then Buck turned to his neighbour and spoke in that good-tempered tone that comes of a power of looking facts in the face—the tone in which he concluded great bargains.
37“Barker,” he said, “you are right. This old thing—this fighting, has come back. It has come back suddenly and taken us by surprise. So it is first blood to Adam Wayne. But, unless reason and arithmetic and everything else have gone crazy, it must be next and last blood to us. But when an issue has really arisen, there is only one thing to do—to study that issue as such and win in it. Barker, since it is fighting, we must understand fighting. I must understand fighting as coolly and completely as I understand drapery; you must understand fighting as coolly and completely as you understand politics. Now, look at the facts. I stick without hesitation to my original formula. Fighting, when we have the stronger force, is only a matter of arithmetic. It must be. You asked me just now how two hundred men could defeat six hundred. I can tell you. Two hundred men can defeat six hundred when the six hundred behave like fools. When they forget the very conditions they are fighting in; when they fight in a swamp as if it were a mountain; when they fight in a forest as if it were a plain; when they fight in streets without remembering the object of streets.”
38“What is the object of streets?” asked Barker.
39“What is the object of supper?” cried Buck, furiously. “Isn’t it obvious? This military science is mere common sense. The object of a street is to lead from one place to another; therefore all streets join; therefore street fighting is quite a peculiar thing. You advanced into that hive of streets as if you were advancing into an open plain where you could see everything. Instead of that, you were advancing into the bowels of a fortress, with streets pointing at you, streets turning on you, streets jumping out at you, and all in the hands of the enemy. Do you know what Portobello Road is? It is the only point on your journey where two side streets run up opposite each other. Wayne massed his men on the two sides, and when he had let enough of your line go past, cut it in two like a worm. Don’t you see what would have saved you?”
40Barker shook his head.
41“Can’t your ‘atmosphere’ help you?” asked Buck, bitterly. “Must I attempt explanations in the romantic manner? Suppose that, as you were fighting blindly with the red Notting Hillers who imprisoned you on both sides, you had heard a shout from behind them. Suppose, oh, romantic Barker! that behind the red tunics you had seen the blue and gold of South Kensington taking them in the rear, surrounding them in their turn and hurling them on to your halberds.”
42“If the thing had been possible,” began Barker, cursing.
43“The thing would have been as possible,” said Buck, simply, “as simple as arithmetic. There are a certain number of street entries that lead to Pump Street. There are not nine hundred; there are not nine million. They do not grow in the night. They do not increase like mushrooms. It must be possible, with such an overwhelming force as we have, to advance by all of them at once. In every one of the arteries, or approaches, we can put almost as many men as Wayne can put into the field altogether. Once do that, and we have him to demonstration. It is like a proposition of Euclid.”
44“You think that is certain?” said Barker, anxious, but dominated delightfully.
45“I’ll tell you what I think,” said Buck, getting up jovially. “I think Adam Wayne made an uncommonly spirited little fight; and I think I am confoundedly sorry for him.”
46“Buck, you are a great man!” cried Barker, rising also. “You’ve knocked me sensible again. I am ashamed to say it, but I was getting romantic. Of course, what you say is adamantine sense. Fighting, being physical, must be mathematical. We were beaten because we were neither mathematical nor physical nor anything else—because we deserved to be beaten. Hold all the approaches, and with our force we must have him. When shall we open the next campaign?”
47“Now,” said Buck, and walked out of the bar.
48“Now!” cried Barker, following him eagerly. “Do you mean now? It is so late.”
49Buck turned on him, stamping.
50“Do you think fighting is under the Factory Acts?” he said; and he called a cab. “Notting Hill Gate Station,” he said; and the two drove off.
51A genuine reputation can sometimes be made in an hour. Buck, in the next sixty or eighty minutes, showed himself a really great man of action. His cab carried him like a thunderbolt from the King to Wilson, from Wilson to Swindon, from Swindon to Barker again; if his course was jagged, it had the jaggedness of the lightning. Only two things he carried with him—his inevitable cigar and the map of North Kensington and Notting Hill. There were, as he again and again pointed out, with every variety of persuasion and violence, only nine possible ways of approaching Pump Street within a quarter of a mile round it; three out of Westbourne Grove, two out of Ladbroke Grove, and four out of Notting Hill High Street. And he had detachments of two hundred each, stationed at every one of the entrances before the last green of that strange sunset had sunk out of the black sky.
52The sky was particularly black, and on this alone was one false protest raised against the triumphant optimism of the Provost of North Kensington. He overruled it with his infectious common sense.
53“There is no such thing,” he said, “as night in London. You have only to follow the line of street lamps. Look, here is the map. Two hundred purple North Kensington soldiers under myself march up Ossington Street, two hundred more under Captain Bruce, of the North Kensington Guard, up Clanricarde Gardens.1 Two hundred yellow West Kensingtons under Provost Swindon attack from Pembridge Road. Two hundred more of my men from the eastern streets, leading away from Queen’s Road. Two detachments of yellows enter by two roads from Westbourne Grove. Lastly, two hundred green Bayswaters come down from the North through Chepstow Place, and two hundred more under Provost Wilson himself, through the upper part of Pembridge Road. Gentlemen, it is mate in two moves. The enemy must either mass in Pump Street and be cut to pieces; or they must retreat past the Gaslight & Coke Co., and rush on my four hundred; or they must retreat past St. Luke’s Church, and rush on the six hundred from the West. Unless we are all mad, it’s plain. Come on. To your quarters and await Captain Brace’s signal to advance. Then you have only to walk up a line of gas-lamps and smash this nonsense by pure mathematics. Tomorrow we shall all be civilians again.”
54His optimism glowed like a great fire in the night, and ran round the terrible ring in which Wayne was now held helpless. The fight was already over. One man’s energy for one hour had saved the city from war.
55For the next ten minutes Buck walked up and down silently beside the motionless clump of his two hundred. He had not changed his appearance in any way, except to sling across his yellow overcoat a case with a revolver in it. So that his light-clad modern figure showed up oddly beside the pompous purple uniforms of his halberdiers, which darkly but richly coloured the black night.
56At length a shrill trumpet rang from some way up the street; it was the signal of advance. Buck briefly gave the word, and the whole purple line, with its dimly shining steel, moved up the side alley. Before it was a slope of street, long, straight, and shining in the dark. It was a sword pointed at Pump Street, the heart at which nine other swords were pointed that night.
57A quarter of an hour’s silent marching brought them almost within earshot of any tumult in the doomed citadel. But still there was no sound and no sign of the enemy. This time, at any rate, they knew that they were closing in on it mechanically, and they marched on under the lamplight and the dark without any of that eerie sense of ignorance which Barker had felt when entering the hostile country by one avenue alone.
58“Halt—point arms!” cried Buck, suddenly, and as he spoke there came a clatter of feet tumbling along the stones. But the halberds were levelled in vain. The figure that rushed up was a messenger from the contingent of the North.
59“Victory, Mr. Buck!” he cried, panting; “they are ousted. Provost Wilson of Bayswater has taken Pump Street.”
60Buck ran forward in his excitement.
61“Then, which way are they retreating? It must be either by St. Luke’s to meet Swindon, or by the Gas Company to meet us. Run like mad to Swindon, and see that the yellows are holding the St. Luke’s Road. We will hold this, never fear. We have them in an iron trap. Run!”
62As the messenger dashed away into the darkness, the great guard of North Kensington swung on with the certainty of a machine. Yet scarcely a hundred yards further their halberd-points again fell in line gleaming in the gaslight; for again a clatter of feet was heard on the stones, and again it proved to be only the messenger.
63“Mr. Provost,” he said, “the yellow West Kensingtons have been holding the road by St. Luke’s for twenty minutes since the capture of Pump Street. Pump Street is not two hundred yards away; they cannot be retreating down that road.”
64“Then they are retreating down this,” said Provost Buck, with a final cheerfulness, “and by good fortune down a well-lighted road, though it twists about. Forward!”
65As they moved along the last three hundred yards of their journey, Buck fell, for the first time in his life, perhaps, into a kind of philosophical reverie, for men of his type are always made kindly, and as it were melancholy, by success.
66“I am sorry for poor old Wayne, I really am,” he thought. “He spoke up splendidly for me at that Council. And he blacked old Barker’s eye with considerable spirit. But I don’t see what a man can expect when he fights against arithmetic, to say nothing of civilisation. And what a wonderful hoax all this military genius is! I suspect I’ve just discovered what Cromwell discovered, that a sensible tradesman is the best general, and that a man who can buy men and sell men can lead and kill them. The thing’s simply like adding up a column in a ledger. If Wayne has two hundred men, he can’t put two hundred men in nine places at once. If they’re ousted from Pump Street they’re flying somewhere. If they’re not flying past the church they’re flying past the Works. And so we have them. We business men should have no chance at all except that cleverer people than we get bees in their bonnets that prevent them from reasoning properly—so we reason alone. And so I, who am comparatively stupid, see things as God sees them, as a vast machine. My God, what’s this?” and he clapped his hands to his eyes and staggered back.
67Then through the darkness he cried in a dreadful voice—
68“Did I blaspheme God? I am struck blind.”
69“What?” wailed another voice behind him, the voice of a certain Wilfred Jarvis of North Kensington.
70“Blind!” cried Buck; “blind!”
71“I’m blind too!” cried Jarvis, in an agony.
72“Fools, all of you,” said a gross voice behind them; “we’re all blind. The lamps have gone out.”
73“The lamps! But why? where?” cried Buck, turning furiously in the darkness. “How are we to get on? How are we to chase the enemy? Where have they gone?”
74“The enemy went—” said the rough voice behind, and then stopped doubtfully.
75“Where?” shouted Buck, stamping like a madman.
76“They went,” said the gruff voice, “past the Gas Works, and they’ve used their chance.”
77“Great God!” thundered Buck, and snatched at his revolver; “do you mean they’ve turned out—”
78But almost before he had spoken the words, he was hurled like a stone from catapult into the midst of his own men.
79“Notting Hill! Notting Hill!” cried frightful voices out of the darkness, and they seemed to come from all sides, for the men of North Kensington, unacquainted with the road, had lost all their bearings in the black world of blindness.
80“Notting Hill! Notting Hill!” cried the invisible people, and the invaders were hewn down horribly with black steel, with steel that gave no glint against any light.
81Buck, though badly maimed with the blow of a halberd, kept an angry but splendid sanity. He groped madly for the wall and found it. Struggling with crawling fingers along it, he found a side opening and retreated into it with the remnants of his men. Their adventures during that prodigious night are not to be described. They did not know whether they were going towards or away from the enemy. Not knowing where they themselves were, or where their opponents were, it was mere irony to ask where was the rest of their army. For a thing had descended upon them which London does not know—darkness, which was before the stars were made, and they were as much lost in it as if they had been made before the stars. Every now and then, as those frightful hours wore on, they buffeted in the darkness against living men, who struck at them and at whom they struck, with an idiot fury. When at last the grey dawn came, they found they had wandered back to the edge of the Uxbridge Road. They found that in those horrible eyeless encounters, the North Kensingtons and the Bayswaters and the West Kensingtons had again and again met and butchered each other, and they heard that Adam Wayne was barricaded in Pump Street.
82Journalism had become, like most other such things in England under the cautious government and philosophy represented by James Barker, somewhat sleepy and much diminished in importance. This was partly due to the disappearance of party government and public speaking, partly to the compromise or deadlock which had made foreign wars impossible, but mostly, of course, to the temper of the whole nation which was that of a people in a kind of backwater. Perhaps the most well known of the remaining newspapers was the Court Journal, which was published in a dusty but genteel-looking office just out of Kensington High Street. For when all the papers of a people have been for years growing more and more dim and decorous and optimistic, the dimmest and most decorous and most optimistic is very likely to win. In the journalistic competition which was still going on at the beginning of the twentieth century, the final victor was the Court Journal.
83For some mysterious reason the King had a great affection for hanging about in the Court Journal office, smoking a morning cigarette and looking over files. Like all ingrainedly idle men, he was very fond of lounging and chatting in places where other people were doing work. But one would have thought that, even in the prosaic England of his day, he might have found a more bustling centre.
84On this particular morning, however, he came out of Kensington Palace with a more alert step and a busier air than usual. He wore an extravagantly long frock-coat, a pale-green waistcoat, a very full and dégagé black tie, and curious yellow gloves. This was his uniform as Colonel of a regiment of his own creation, the 1st Decadents Green. It was a beautiful sight to see him drilling them. He walked quickly across the Park and the High Street, lighting his cigarette as he went, and flung open the door of the Court Journal office.
85“You’ve heard the news, Pally—you’ve heard the news?” he said.
86The Editor’s name was Hoskins, but the King called him Pally, which was an abbreviation of Paladium of our Liberties.
87“Well, your Majesty,” said Hoskins, slowly (he was a worried, gentlemanly looking person, with a wandering brown beard)—“well, your Majesty, I have heard rather curious things, but I—”
88“You’ll hear more of them,” said the King, dancing a few steps of a kind of negro shuffle. “You’ll hear more of them, my blood-and-thunder tribune. Do you know what I am going to do for you?”
89“No, your Majesty,” replied the Paladium, vaguely.
90“I’m going to put your paper on strong, dashing, enterprising lines,” said the King. “Now, where are your posters of last night’s defeat?”
91“I did not propose, your Majesty,” said the Editor, “to have any posters exactly—”
92“Paper, paper!” cried the King, wildly; “bring me paper as big as a house. I’ll do you posters. Stop, I must take my coat off.” He began removing that garment with an air of set intensity, flung it playfully at Mr. Hoskins’ head, entirely enveloping him, and looked at himself in the glass. “The coat off,” he said, “and the hat on. That looks like a subeditor. It is indeed the very essence of subediting. Well,” he continued, turning round abruptly, “come along with that paper.”
93The Paladium had only just extricated himself reverently from the folds of the King’s frock-coat, and said bewildered—
94“I am afraid, your Majesty—”
95“Oh, you’ve got no enterprise,” said Auberon. “What’s that roll in the corner? Wallpaper? Decorations for your private residence? Art in the home, Pally? Fling it over here, and I’ll paint such posters on the back of it that when you put it up in your drawing-room you’ll paste the original pattern against the wall.” And the King unrolled the wallpaper, spreading it over the whole floor. “Now give me the scissors,” he cried, and took them himself before the other could stir.
96He slit the paper into about five pieces, each nearly as big as a door. Then he took a big blue pencil, and went down on his knees on the dusty oilcloth and began to write on them, in huge letters—
97
“From the front.
General Buck defeated.
Darkness, danger, and death.
Wayne said to be in Pump Street.
Feeling in the city.”
98He contemplated it for some time, with his head on one side, and got up, with a sigh.
99“Not quite intense enough,” he said—“not alarming. I want the Court Journal to be feared as well as loved. Let’s try something more hard-hitting.” And he went down on his knees again. After sucking the blue pencil for some time, he began writing again busily. “How will this do?” he said—
100
“Wayne’s wonderful victory.”
101“I suppose,” he said, looking up appealingly, and sucking the pencil—“I suppose we couldn’t say ‘wictory’—‘Wayne’s wonderful wictory’? No, no. Refinement, Pally, refinement. I have it.”
102
“Wayne wins.
Astounding fight in the dark.
The gas-lamps in their courses fought against Buck.”
103“(Nothing like our fine old English translation.) What else can we say? Well, anything to annoy old Buck;” and he added, thoughtfully, in smaller letters—
104
“Rumoured Court-martial on General Buck.”
105“Those will do for the present,” he said, and turned them both face downwards. “Paste, please.”
106The Paladium, with an air of great terror, brought the paste out of an inner room.
107The King slabbed it on with the enjoyment of a child messing with treacle. Then taking one of his huge compositions fluttering in each hand, he ran outside, and began pasting them up in prominent positions over the front of the office.
108“And now,” said Auberon, entering again with undiminished vivacity—“now for the leading article.”
109He picked up another of the large strips of wallpaper, and, laying it across a desk, pulled out a fountain-pen and began writing with feverish intensity, reading clauses and fragments aloud to himself, and rolling them on his tongue like wine, to see if they had the pure journalistic flavour.
110“The news of the disaster to our forces in Notting Hill, awful as it is—awful as it is—(no, distressing as it is), may do some good if it draws attention to the what’s-his-name inefficiency (scandalous inefficiency, of course) of the government’s preparations. In our present state of information, it would be premature (what a jolly word!)—it would be premature to cast any reflections upon the conduct of General Buck, whose services upon so many stricken fields (ha, ha!), and whose honourable scars and laurels, give him a right to have judgment upon him at least suspended. But there is one matter on which we must speak plainly. We have been silent on it too long, from feelings, perhaps of mistaken caution, perhaps of mistaken loyalty. This situation would never have arisen but for what we can only call the indefensible conduct of the King. It pains us to say such things, but, speaking as we do in the public interests (I plagiarise from Barker’s famous epigram), we shall not shrink because of the distress we may cause to any individual, even the most exalted. At this crucial moment of our country, the voice of the People demands with a single tongue, ‘Where is the King?’ What is he doing while his subjects tear each other in pieces in the streets of a great city? Are his amusements and his dissipations (of which we cannot pretend to be ignorant) so engrossing that he can spare no thought for a perishing nation? It is with a deep sense of our responsibility that we warn that exalted person that neither his great position nor his incomparable talents will save him in the hour of delirium from the fate of all those who, in the madness of luxury or tyranny, have met the English people in the rare day of its wrath.”
111“I am now,” said the King, “going to write an account of the battle by an eyewitness.” And he picked up a fourth sheet of wallpaper. Almost at the same moment Buck strode quickly into the office. He had a bandage round his head.
112“I was told,” he said, with his usual gruff civility, “that your Majesty was here.”
113“And of all things on earth,” cried the King, with delight, “here is an eyewitness! An eyewitness who, I regret to observe, has at present only one eye to witness with. Can you write us the special article, Buck? Have you a rich style?”
114Buck, with a self-restraint which almost approached politeness, took no notice whatever of the King’s maddening geniality.
115“I took the liberty, your Majesty,” he said shortly, “of asking Mr. Barker to come here also.”
116As he spoke, indeed, Barker came swinging into the office, with his usual air of hurry.
117“What is happening now?” asked Buck, turning to him with a kind of relief.
118“Fighting still going on,” said Barker. “The four hundred from West Kensington were hardly touched last night. They hardly got near the place. Poor Wilson’s Bayswater men got cut about, though. They fought confoundedly well. They took Pump Street once. What mad things do happen in the world. To think that of all of us it should be little Wilson with the red whiskers who came out best.”
119The King made a note on his paper—
120
“Romantic Conduct of Mr. Wilson.”
121“Yes,” said Buck; “it makes one a bit less proud of one’s h’s.”
122The King suddenly folded or crumpled up the paper, and put it in his pocket.
123“I have an idea,” he said. “I will be an eyewitness. I will write you such letters from the Front as will be more gorgeous than the real thing. Give me my coat, Paladium. I entered this room a mere King of England. I leave it, Special War Correspondent of the Court Journal. It is useless to stop me, Pally; it is vain to cling to my knees, Buck; it is hopeless, Barker, to weep upon my neck. ‘When duty calls’—the remainder of the sentiment escapes me. You will receive my first article this evening by the eight-o’clock post.”
124And, running out of the office, he jumped upon a blue Bayswater omnibus that went swinging by.
125“Well,” said Barker, gloomily, “well.”
126“Barker,” said Buck, “business may be lower than politics, but war is, as I discovered last night, a long sight more like business. You politicians are such ingrained demagogues that even when you have a despotism you think of nothing but public opinion. So you learn to tack and run, and are afraid of the first breeze. Now we stick to a thing and get it. And our mistakes help us. Look here! at this moment we’ve beaten Wayne.”
127“Beaten Wayne,” repeated Barker.
128“Why the dickens not?” cried the other, flinging out his hands. “Look here. I said last night that we had them by holding the nine entrances. Well, I was wrong. We should have had them but for a singular event—the lamps went out. But for that it was certain. Has it occurred to you, my brilliant Barker, that another singular event has happened since that singular event of the lamps going out?”
129“What event?” asked Barker.
130“By an astounding coincidence, the sun has risen,” cried out Buck, with a savage air of patience. “Why the hell aren’t we holding all those approaches now, and passing in on them again? It should have been done at sunrise. The confounded doctor wouldn’t let me go out. You were in command.”
131Barker smiled grimly.
132“It is a gratification to me, my dear Buck, to be able to say that we anticipated your suggestions precisely. We went as early as possible to reconnoitre the nine entrances. Unfortunately, while we were fighting each other in the dark, like a lot of drunken navvies, Mr. Wayne’s friends were working very hard indeed. Three hundred yards from Pump Street, at every one of those entrances, there is a barricade nearly as high as the houses. They were finishing the last, in Pembridge Road, when we arrived. Our mistakes,” he cried bitterly, and flung his cigarette on the ground. “It is not we who learn from them.”
133There was a silence for a few moments, and Barker lay back wearily in a chair. The office clock ticked exactly in the stillness.
134At length Barker said suddenly—
135“Buck, does it ever cross your mind what this is all about? The Hammersmith to Maida Vale thoroughfare was an uncommonly good speculation. You and I hoped a great deal from it. But is it worth it? It will cost us thousands to crush this ridiculous riot. Suppose we let it alone?”
136“And be thrashed in public by a red-haired madman whom any two doctors would lock up?” cried out Buck, starting to his feet. “What do you propose to do, Mr. Barker? To apologise to the admirable Mr. Wayne? To kneel to the Charter of the Cities? To clasp to your bosom the flag of the Red Lion? To kiss in succession every sacred lamppost that saved Notting Hill? No, by God! My men fought jolly well—they were beaten by a trick. And they’ll fight again.”
137“Buck,” said Barker, “I always admired you. And you were quite right in what you said the other day.”
138“In what?”
139“In saying,” said Barker, rising quietly, “that we had all got into Adam Wayne’s atmosphere and out of our own. My friend, the whole territorial kingdom of Adam Wayne extends to about nine streets, with barricades at the end of them. But the spiritual kingdom of Adam Wayne extends, God knows where—it extends to this office, at any rate. The red-haired madman whom any two doctors would lock up is filling this room with his roaring, unreasonable soul. And it was the red-haired madman who said the last word you spoke.”
140Buck walked to the window without replying. “You understand, of course,” he said at last, “I do not dream of giving in.”
141The King, meanwhile, was rattling along on the top of his blue omnibus. The traffic of London as a whole had not, of course, been greatly disturbed by these events, for the affair was treated as a Notting Hill riot, and that area was marked off as if it had been in the hands of a gang of recognised rioters. The blue omnibuses simply went round as they would have done if a road were being mended, and the omnibus on which the correspondent of the Court Journal was sitting swept round the corner of Queen’s Road, Bayswater.
142The King was alone on the top of the vehicle, and was enjoying the speed at which it was going.
143“Forward, my beauty, my Arab,” he said, patting the omnibus encouragingly, “fleetest of all thy bounding tribe. Are thy relations with thy driver, I wonder, those of the Bedouin and his steed? Does he sleep side by side with thee—”
144His meditations were broken by a sudden and jarring stoppage. Looking over the edge, he saw that the heads of the horses were being held by men in the uniform of Wayne’s army, and heard the voice of an officer calling out orders.
145King Auberon descended from the omnibus with dignity. The guard or picket of red halberdiers who had stopped the vehicle did not number more than twenty, and they were under the command of a short, dark, clever-looking young man, conspicuous among the rest as being clad in an ordinary frock-coat, but girt round the waist with a red sash and a long seventeenth-century sword. A shiny silk hat and spectacles completed the outfit in a pleasing manner.
146“To whom have I the honour of speaking?” said the King, endeavouring to look like Charles I, in spite of personal difficulties.
147The dark man in spectacles lifted his hat with equal gravity.
148“My name is Bowles,” he said. “I am a chemist. I am also a captain of O company of the army of Notting Hill. I am distressed at having to incommode you by stopping the omnibus, but this area is covered by our proclamation, and we intercept all traffic. May I ask to whom I have the honour—Why, good gracious, I beg your Majesty’s pardon. I am quite overwhelmed at finding myself concerned with the King.”
149Auberon put up his hand with indescribable grandeur.
150“Not with the King,” he said; “with the special war correspondent of the Court Journal.”
151“I beg your Majesty’s pardon,” began Mr. Bowles, doubtfully.
152“Do you call me Majesty? I repeat,” said Auberon, firmly, “I am a representative of the press. I have chosen, with a deep sense of responsibility, the name of Pinker. I should desire a veil to be drawn over the past.”
153“Very well, sir,” said Mr. Bowles, with an air of submission, “in our eyes the sanctity of the press is at least as great as that of the throne. We desire nothing better than that our wrongs and our glories should be widely known. May I ask, Mr. Pinker, if you have any objection to being presented to the Provost and to General Turnbull?”
154“The Provost I have had the honour of meeting,” said Auberon, easily. “We old journalists, you know, meet everybody. I should be most delighted to have the same honour again. General Turnbull, also, it would be a gratification to know. The younger men are so interesting. We of the old Fleet Street gang lose touch with them.”
155“Will you be so good as to step this way?” said the leader of O company.
156“I am always good,” said Mr. Pinker. “Lead on.”
157The article from the special correspondent of the Court Journal arrived in due course, written on very coarse copy-paper in the King’s arabesque of handwriting, in which three words filled a page, and yet were illegible. Moreover, the contribution was the more perplexing at first, as it opened with a succession of erased paragraphs. The writer appeared to have attempted the article once or twice in several journalistic styles. At the side of one experiment was written, “Try American style,” and the fragment began—
158“The King must go. We want gritty men. Flapdoodle is all very … ;” and then broke off, followed by the note, “Good sound journalism safer. Try it.”
159The experiment in good sound journalism appeared to begin—
160“The greatest of English poets has said that a rose by any …”
161This also stopped abruptly. The next annotation at the side was almost undecipherable, but seemed to be something like—
162“How about old Steevens and the mot juste? E.g. …”
163“Morning winked a little wearily at me over the curt edge of Campden Hill and its houses with their sharp shadows. Under the abrupt black cardboard of the outline, it took some little time to detect colours; but at length I saw a brownish yellow shifting in the obscurity, and I knew that it was the guard of Swindon’s West Kensington army. They are being held as a reserve, and lining the whole ridge above the Bayswater Road. Their camp and their main force is under the great Waterworks Tower on Campden Hill. I forgot to say that the Waterworks Tower looked swart.
164“As I passed them and came over the curve of Silver Street, I saw the blue cloudy masses of Barker’s men blocking the entrance to the high road like a sapphire smoke (good). The disposition of the allied troops, under the general management of Mr. Wilson, appears to be as follows: The Yellow army (if I may so describe the West Kensingtonians) lies, as I have said, in a strip along the ridge, its furthest point westward being the west side of Campden Hill Road, its furthest point eastward the beginning of Kensington Gardens. The Green army of Wilson lines the Notting Hill High Road itself from Queen’s Road to the corner of Pembridge Road, curving round the latter, and extending some three hundred yards up towards Westbourne Grove. Westbourne Grove itself is occupied by Barker of South Kensington. The fourth side of this rough square, the Queen’s Road side, is held by some of Buck’s Purple warriors.
165“The whole resembles some ancient and dainty Dutch flowerbed. Along the crest of Campden Hill lie the golden crocuses of West Kensington. They are, as it were, the first fiery fringe of the whole. Northward lies our hyacinth Barker, with all his blue hyacinths. Round to the southwest run the green rushes of Wilson of Bayswater, and a line of violet irises (aptly symbolised by Mr. Buck) complete the whole. The argent exterior … (I am losing the style. I should have said ‘Curving with a whisk’ instead of merely ‘Curving.’ Also I should have called the hyacinths ‘sudden.’ I cannot keep this up. War is too rapid for this style of writing. Please ask office-boy to insert mots justes.)
166“The truth is that there is nothing to report. That commonplace element which is always ready to devour all beautiful things (as the Black Pig in the Irish Mythology will finally devour the stars and gods); that commonplace element, as I say, has in its Black Piggish way devoured finally the chances of any romance in this affair; that which once consisted of absurd but thrilling combats in the streets, has degenerated into something which is the very prose of warfare—it has degenerated into a siege. A siege may be defined as a peace plus the inconvenience of war. Of course Wayne cannot hold out. There is no more chance of help from anywhere else than of ships from the moon. And if old Wayne had stocked his street with tinned meats till all his garrison had to sit on them, he couldn’t hold out for more than a month or two. As a matter of melancholy fact, he has done something rather like this. He has stocked his street with food until there must be uncommonly little room to turn round. But what is the good? To hold out for all that time and then to give in of necessity, what does it mean? It means waiting until your victories are forgotten, and then taking the trouble to be defeated. I cannot understand how Wayne can be so inartistic.
167“And how odd it is that one views a thing quite differently when one knows it is defeated! I always thought Wayne was rather fine. But now, when I know that he is done for, there seem to be nothing else but Wayne. All the streets seem to point at him, all the chimneys seem to lean towards him. I suppose it is a morbid feeling; but Pump Street seems to be the only part of London that I feel physically. I suppose, I say, that it is morbid. I suppose it is exactly how a man feels about his heart when his heart is weak. ‘Pump Street’—the heart is a pump. And I am drivelling.
168“Our finest leader at the front is, beyond all question, General Wilson. He has adopted alone among the other Provosts the uniform of his own halberdiers, although that fine old sixteenth-century garb was not originally intended to go with red side-whiskers. It was he who, against a most admirable and desperate defence, broke last night into Pump Street and held it for at least half an hour. He was afterwards expelled from it by General Turnbull, of Notting Hill, but only after desperate fighting and the sudden descent of that terrible darkness which proved so much more fatal to the forces of General Buck and General Swindon.
169“Provost Wayne himself, with whom I had, with great good fortune, a most interesting interview, bore the most eloquent testimony to the conduct of General Wilson and his men. His precise words are as follows: ‘I have bought sweets at his funny little shop when I was four years old, and ever since. I never noticed anything, I am ashamed to say, except that he talked through his nose, and didn’t wash himself particularly. And he came over our barricade like a devil from hell.’ I repeated this speech to General Wilson himself, with some delicate improvements, and he seemed pleased with it. He does not, however, seem pleased with anything so much just now as he is with the wearing of a sword. I have it from the front on the best authority that General Wilson was not completely shaved yesterday. It is believed in military circles that he is growing a moustache. …
170“As I have said, there is nothing to report. I walk wearily to the pillar-box at the corner of Pembridge Road to post my copy. Nothing whatever has happened, except the preparations for a particularly long and feeble siege, during which I trust I shall not be required to be at the Front. As I glance up Pembridge Road in the growing dusk, the aspect of that road reminds me that there is one note worth adding. General Buck has suggested, with characteristic acumen, to General Wilson that, in order to obviate the possibility of such a catastrophe as overwhelmed the allied forces in the last advance on Notting Hill (the catastrophe, I mean, of the extinguished lamps), each soldier should have a lighted lantern round his neck. This is one of the things which I really admire about General Buck. He possesses what people used to mean by ‘the humility of the man of science,’ that is, he learns steadily from his mistakes. Wayne may score off him in some other way, but not in that way. The lanterns look like fairy lights as they curve round the end of Pembridge Road.
171“Later.—I write with some difficulty, because the blood will run down my face and make patterns on the paper. Blood is a very beautiful thing; that is why it is concealed. If you ask why blood runs down my face, I can only reply that I was kicked by a horse. If you ask me what horse, I can reply with some pride that it was a warhorse. If you ask me how a warhorse came on the scene in our simple pedestrian warfare, I am reduced to the necessity, so painful to a special correspondent, of recounting my experiences.
172“I was, as I have said, in the very act of posting my copy at the pillar-box, and of glancing as I did so up the glittering curve of Pembridge Road, studded with the lights of Wilson’s men. I don’t know what made me pause to examine the matter, but I had a fancy that the line of lights, where it melted into the indistinct brown twilight, was more indistinct than usual. I was almost certain that in a certain stretch of the road where there had been five lights there were now only four. I strained my eyes; I counted them again, and there were only three. A moment after there were only two; an instant after only one; and an instant after that the lanterns near to me swung like jangled bells, as if struck suddenly. They flared and fell; and for the moment the fall of them was like the fall of the sun and stars out of heaven. It left everything in a primal blindness. As a matter of fact, the road was not yet legitimately dark. There were still red rays of a sunset in the sky, and the brown gloaming was still warmed, as it were, with a feeling as of firelight. But for three seconds after the lanterns swung and sank, I saw in front of me a blackness blocking the sky. And with the fourth second I knew that this blackness which blocked the sky was a man on a great horse; and I was trampled and tossed aside as a swirl of horsemen swept round the corner. As they turned I saw that they were not black, but scarlet; they were a sortie of the besieged, Wayne riding ahead.
173“I lifted myself from the gutter, blinded with blood from a very slight skin-wound, and, queerly enough, not caring either for the blindness or for the slightness of the wound. For one mortal minute after that amazing cavalcade had spun past, there was dead stillness on the empty road. And then came Barker and all his halberdiers running like devils in the track of them. It had been their business to guard the gate by which the sortie had broken out; but they had not reckoned, and small blame to them, on cavalry. As it was, Barker and his men made a perfectly splendid run after them, almost catching Wayne’s horses by the tails.
174“Nobody can understand the sortie. It consists only of a small number of Wayne’s garrison. Turnbull himself, with the vast mass of it, is undoubtedly still barricaded in Pump Street. Sorties of this kind are natural enough in the majority of historical sieges, such as the siege of Paris in 1870, because in such cases the besieged are certain of some support outside. But what can be the object of it in this case? Wayne knows (or if he is too mad to know anything, at least Turnbull knows) that there is not, and never has been, the smallest chance of support for him outside; that the mass of the sane modern inhabitants of London regard his farcical patriotism with as much contempt as they do the original idiocy that gave it birth—the folly of our miserable King. What Wayne and his horsemen are doing nobody can even conjecture. The general theory round here is that he is simply a traitor, and has abandoned the besieged. But all such larger but yet more soluble riddles are as nothing compared to the one small but unanswerable riddle: Where did they get the horses?
175“Later.—I have heard a most extraordinary account of the origin of the appearance of the horses. It appears that that amazing person, General Turnbull, who is now ruling Pump Street in the absence of Wayne, sent out, on the morning of the declaration of war, a vast number of little boys (or cherubs of the gutter, as we pressmen say), with half-crowns in their pockets, to take cabs all over London. No less than a hundred and sixty cabs met at Pump Street; were commandeered by the garrison. The men were set free, the cabs used to make barricades, and the horses kept in Pump Street, where they were fed and exercised for several days, until they were sufficiently rapid and efficient to be used for this wild ride out of the town. If this is so, and I have it on the best possible authority, the method of the sortie is explained. But we have no explanation of its object. Just as Barker’s Blues were swinging round the corner after them, they were stopped, but not by an enemy; only by the voice of one man, and he a friend. Red Wilson of Bayswater ran alone along the main road like a madman, waving them back with a halberd snatched from a sentinel. He was in supreme command, and Barker stopped at the corner, staring and bewildered. We could hear Wilson’s voice loud and distinct out of the dusk, so that it seemed strange that the great voice should come out of the little body. ‘Halt, South Kensington! Guard this entry, and prevent them returning. I will pursue. Forward, the Green Guards!’
176“A wall of dark blue uniforms and a wood of poleaxes was between me and Wilson, for Barker’s men blocked the mouth of the road in two rigid lines. But through them and through the dusk I could hear the clear orders and the clank of arms, and see the green army of Wilson marching by towards the west. They were our great fighting-men. Wilson had filled them with his own fire; in a few days they had become veterans. Each of them wore a silver medal of a pump, to boast that they alone of all the allied armies had stood victorious in Pump Street.
177“I managed to slip past the detachment of Barker’s Blues, who are guarding the end of Pembridge Road, and a sharp spell of running brought me to the tail of Wilson’s green army as it swung down the road in pursuit of the flying Wayne. The dusk had deepened into almost total darkness; for some time I only heard the throb of the marching pace. Then suddenly there was a cry, and the tall fighting men were flung back on me, almost crushing me, and again the lanterns swung and jingled, and the cold nozzles of great horses pushed into the press of us. They had turned and charged us.
178“ ‘You fools!’ came the voice of Wilson, cleaving our panic with a splendid cold anger. ‘Don’t you see? the horses have no riders!’
179“It was true. We were being plunged at by a stampede of horses with empty saddles. What could it mean? Had Wayne met some of our men and been defeated? Or had he flung these horses at us as some kind of ruse or mad new mode of warfare, such as he seemed bent on inventing? Or did he and his men want to get away in disguise? Or did they want to hide in houses somewhere?
180“Never did I admire any man’s intellect (even my own) so much as I did Wilson’s at that moment. Without a word, he simply pointed the halberd (which he still grasped) to the southern side of the road. As you know, the streets running up to the ridge of Campden Hill from the main road are peculiarly steep, they are more like sudden flights of stairs. We were just opposite Aubrey Road, the steepest of all; up that it would have been far more difficult to urge half-trained horses than to run up on one’s feet.
181“ ‘Left wheel!’ hallooed Wilson. ‘They have gone up here,’ he added to me, who happened to be at his elbow.
182“ ‘Why?’ I ventured to ask.
183“ ‘Can’t say for certain,’ replied the Bayswater General. ‘They’ve gone up here in a great hurry, anyhow. They’ve simply turned their horses loose, because they couldn’t take them up. I fancy I know. I fancy they’re trying to get over the ridge to Kensingston or Hammersmith, or somewhere, and are striking up here because it’s just beyond the end of our line. Damned fools, not to have gone further along the road, though. They’ve only just shaved our last outpost. Lambert is hardly four hundred yards from here. And I’ve sent him word.’
184“ ‘Lambert!’ I said. ‘Not young Wilfrid Lambert—my old friend.’
185“ ‘Wilfrid Lambert’s his name,’ said the General; ‘used to be a “man about town;” silly fellow with a big nose. That kind of man always volunteers for some war or other; and what’s funnier, he generally isn’t half bad at it. Lambert is distinctly good. The yellow West Kensingtons I always reckoned the weakest part of the army; but he has pulled them together uncommonly well, though he’s subordinate to Swindon, who’s a donkey. In the attack from Pembridge Road the other night he showed great pluck.’
186“ ‘He has shown greater pluck than that,’ I said. ‘He has criticised my sense of humour. That was his first engagement.’
187“This remark was, I am sorry to say, lost on the admirable commander of the allied forces. We were in the act of climbing the last half of Aubrey Road, which is so abrupt a slope that it looks like an old-fashioned map leaning up against the wall. There are lines of little trees, one above the other, as in the old-fashioned map.
188“We reached the top of it, panting somewhat, and were just about to turn the corner by a place called (in chivalrous anticipation of our wars of sword and axe) Tower Creçy, when we were suddenly knocked in the stomach (I can use no other term) by a horde of men hurled back upon us. They wore the red uniform of Wayne; their halberds were broken; their foreheads bleeding; but the mere impetus of their retreat staggered us as we stood at the last ridge of the slope.
189“ ‘Good old Lambert!’ yelled out suddenly the stolid Mr. Wilson of Bayswater, in an uncontrollable excitement. ‘Damned jolly old Lambert! He’s got there already! He’s driving them back on us! Hurrah! hurrah! Forward, the Green Guards!’
190“We swung round the corner eastwards, Wilson running first, brandishing the halberd—
191“Will you pardon a little egotism? Everyone likes a little egotism, when it takes the form, as mine does in this case, of a disgraceful confession. The thing is really a little interesting, because it shows how the merely artistic habit has bitten into men like me. It was the most intensely exciting occurrence that had ever come to me in my life; and I was really intensely excited about it. And yet, as we turned that corner, the first impression I had was of something that had nothing to do with the fight at all. I was stricken from the sky as by a thunderbolt, by the height of the Waterworks Tower on Campden Hill. I don’t know whether Londoners generally realise how high it looks when one comes out, in this way, almost immediately under it. For the second it seemed to me that at the foot of it even human war was a triviality. For the second I felt as if I had been drunk with some trivial orgy, and that I had been sobered by the shock of that shadow. A moment afterwards, I realised that under it was going on something more enduring than stone, and something wilder than the dizziest height—the agony of man. And I knew that, compared to that, this overwhelming tower was itself a triviality; it was a mere stalk of stone which humanity could snap like a stick.
192“I don’t know why I have talked so much about this silly old Waterworks Tower, which at the very best was only a tremendous background. It was that, certainly, a sombre and awful landscape, against which our figures were relieved. But I think the real reason was, that there was in my own mind so sharp a transition from the tower of stone to the man of flesh. For what I saw first when I had shaken off, as it were, the shadow of the tower, was a man, and a man I knew.
193“Lambert stood at the further corner of the street that curved round the tower, his figure outlined in some degree by the beginning of moonrise. He looked magnificent, a hero; but he looked something much more interesting than that. He was, as it happened, in almost precisely the same swaggering attitude in which he had stood nearly fifteen years ago, when he swung his walking-stick and struck it into the ground, and told me that all my subtlety was drivel. And, upon my soul, I think he required more courage to say that than to fight as he does now. For then he was fighting against something that was in the ascendant, fashionable, and victorious. And now he is fighting (at the risk of his life, no doubt) merely against something which is already dead, which is impossible, futile; of which nothing has been more impossible and futile than this very sortie which has brought him into contact with it. People nowadays allow infinitely too little for the psychological sense of victory as a factor in affairs. Then he was attacking the degraded but undoubtedly victorious Quin; now he is attacking the interesting but totally extinguished Wayne.
194“His name recalls me to the details of the scene. The facts were these. A line of red halberdiers, headed by Wayne, were marching up the street, close under the northern wall, which is, in fact, the bottom of a sort of dyke or fortification of the Waterworks. Lambert and his yellow West Kensingtons had that instant swept round the corner and had shaken the Waynites heavily, hurling back a few of the more timid, as I have just described, into our very arms. When our force struck the tail of Wayne’s, everyone knew that all was up with him. His favourite military barber was struck down. His grocer was stunned. He himself was hurt in the thigh, and reeled back against the wall. We had him in a trap with two jaws. ‘Is that you?’ shouted Lambert, genially, to Wilson, across the hemmed-in host of Notting Hill. ‘That’s about the ticket,’ replied General Wilson; ‘keep them under the wall.’
195“The men of Notting Hill were falling fast. Adam Wayne threw up his long arms to the wall above him, and with a spring stood upon it; a gigantic figure against the moon. He tore the banner out of the hands of the standard-bearer below him, and shook it out suddenly above our heads, so that it was like thunder in the heavens.
196“ ‘Round the Red Lion!’ he cried. ‘Swords round the Red Lion! Halberds round the Red Lion! They are the thorns round rose.’
197“His voice and the crack of the banner made a momentary rally, and Lambert, whose idiotic face was almost beautiful with battle, felt it as by an instinct, and cried—
198“ ‘Drop your public-house flag, you footler! Drop it!’
199“ ‘The banner of the Red Lion seldom stoops,’ said Wayne, proudly, letting it out luxuriantly on the night wind.
200“The next moment I knew that poor Adam’s sentimental theatricality had cost him much. Lambert was on the wall at a bound, his sword in his teeth, and had slashed at Wayne’s head before he had time to draw his sword, his hands being busy with the enormous flag. He stepped back only just in time to avoid the first cut, and let the flagstaff fall, so that the spear-blade at the end of it pointed to Lambert.
201“ ‘The banner stoops,’ cried Wayne, in a voice that must have startled streets. ‘The banner of Notting Hill stoops to a hero.’ And with the words he drove the spear-point and half the flagstaff through Lambert’s body and dropped him dead upon the road below, a stone upon the stones of the street.
202“ ‘Notting Hill! Notting Hill!’ cried Wayne, in a sort of divine rage. ‘Her banner is all the holier for the blood of a brave enemy! Up on the wall, patriots! Up on the wall! Notting Hill!’
203“With his long strong arm he actually dragged a man up on to the wall to be silhouetted against the moon, and more and more men climbed up there, pulled themselves and were pulled, till clusters and crowds of the half-massacred men of Pump Street massed upon the wall above us.
204“ ‘Notting Hill! Notting Hill!’ cried Wayne, unceasingly.
205“ ‘Well, what about Bayswater?’ said a worthy workingman in Wilson’s army, irritably. ‘Bayswater forever!’
206“ ‘We have won!’ cried Wayne, striking his flagstaff in the ground. ‘Bayswater forever! We have taught our enemies patriotism!’
207“ ‘Oh, cut these fellows up and have done with it!’ cried one of Lambert’s lieutenants, who was reduced to something bordering on madness by the responsibility of succeeding to the command.
208“ ‘Let us by all means try,’ said Wilson, grimly; and the two armies closed round the third.
209“I simply cannot describe what followed. I am sorry, but there is such a thing as physical fatigue, as physical nausea, and, I may add, as physical terror. Suffice it to say that the above paragraph was written about 11 p.m., and that it is now about 2 a.m., and that the battle is not finished, and is not likely to be. Suffice it further to say that down the steep streets which lead from the Waterworks Tower to the Notting Hill High Road, blood has been running, and is running, in great red serpents, that curl out into the main thoroughfare and shine in the moon.
210“Later.—The final touch has been given to all this terrible futility. Hours have passed; morning has broken; men are still swaying and fighting at the foot of the tower and round the corner of Aubrey Road; the fight has not finished. But I know it is a farce.
211“News has just come to show that Wayne’s amazing sortie, followed by the amazing resistance through a whole night on the wall of the Waterworks, is as if it had not been. What was the object of that strange exodus we shall probably never know, for the simple reason that everyone who knew will probably be cut to pieces in the course of the next two or three hours.
212“I have heard, about three minutes ago, that Buck and Buck’s methods have won after all. He was perfectly right, of course, when one comes to think of it, in holding that it was physically impossible for a street to defeat a city. While we thought he was patrolling the eastern gates with his Purple army; while we were rushing about the streets and waving halberds and lanterns; while poor old Wilson was scheming like Moltke and fighting like Achilles to entrap the wild Provost of Notting Hill—Mr. Buck, retired draper, has simply driven down in a hansom cab and done something about as plain as butter and about as useful and nasty. He has gone down to South Kensington, Brompton, and Fulham, and by spending about four thousand pounds of his private means, has raised an army of nearly as many men; that is to say, an army big enough to beat, not only Wayne, but Wayne and all his present enemies put together. The army, I understand, is encamped along High Street, Kensington, and fills it from the Church to Addison Road Bridge. It is to advance by ten different roads uphill to the north.
213“I cannot endure to remain here. Everything makes it worse than it need be. The dawn, for instance, has broken round Campden Hill; splendid spaces of silver, edged with gold, are torn out of the sky. Worse still, Wayne and his men feel the dawn; their faces, though bloody and pale, are strangely hopeful … insupportably pathetic. Worst of all, for the moment they are winning. If it were not for Buck and the new army they might just, and only just, win.
214“I repeat, I cannot stand it. It is like watching that wonderful play of old Maeterlinck’s (you know my partiality for the healthy, jolly old authors of the nineteenth century), in which one has to watch the quiet conduct of people inside a parlour, while knowing that the very men are outside the door whose word can blast it all with tragedy. And this is worse, for the men are not talking, but writhing and bleeding and dropping dead for a thing that is already settled—and settled against them. The great grey masses of men still toil and tug and sway hither and thither around the great grey tower; and the tower is still motionless, as it will always be motionless. These men will be crushed before the sun is set; and new men will arise and be crushed, and new wrongs done, and tyranny will always rise again like the sun, and injustice will always be as fresh as the flowers of spring. And the stone tower will always look down on it. Matter, in its brutal beauty, will always look down on those who are mad enough to consent to die, and yet more mad, since they consent to live.”
215Thus ended abruptly the first and last contribution of the Special Correspondent of the Court Journal to that valued periodical.
216The Correspondent himself, as has been said, was simply sick and gloomy at the last news of the triumph of Buck. He slouched sadly down the steep Aubrey Road, up which he had the night before run in so unusual an excitement, and strolled out into the empty dawn-lit main road, looking vaguely for a cab. He saw nothing in the vacant space except a blue-and-gold glittering thing, running very fast, which looked at first like a very tall beetle, but turned out, to his great astonishment, to be Barker.
217“Have you heard the good news?” asked that gentleman.
218“Yes,” said Quin, with a measured voice. “I have heard the glad tidings of great joy. Shall we take a hansom down to Kensington? I see one over there.”
219They took the cab, and were, in four minutes, fronting the ranks of the multitudinous and invincible army. Quin had not spoken a word all the way, and something about him had prevented the essentially impressionable Barker from speaking either.
220The great army, as it moved up Kensington High Street, calling many heads to the numberless windows, for it was long indeed—longer than the lives of most of the tolerably young—since such an army had been seen in London. Compared with the vast organisation which was now swallowing up the miles, with Buck at its head as leader, and the King hanging at its tail as journalist, the whole story of our problem was insignificant. In the presence of that army the red Notting Hills and the green Bayswaters were alike tiny and straggling groups. In its presence the whole struggle round Pump Street was like an anthill under the hoof of an ox. Every man who felt or looked at that infinity of men knew that it was the triumph of Buck’s brutal arithmetic. Whether Wayne was right or wrong, wise or foolish, was quite a fair matter for discussion. But it was a matter of history. At the foot of Church Street, opposite Kensington Church, they paused in their glowing good humour.
221“Let us send some kind of messenger or herald up to them,” said Buck, turning to Barker and the King. “Let us send and ask them to cave in without more muddle.”
222“What shall we say to them?” said Barker, doubtfully.
223“The facts of the case are quite sufficient,” rejoined Buck. “It is the facts of the case that make an army surrender. Let us simply say that our army that is fighting their army, and their army that is fighting our army, amount altogether to about a thousand men. Say that we have four thousand. It is very simple. Of the thousand fighting, they have at the very most, three hundred, so that, with those three hundred, they have now to fight four thousand seven hundred men. Let them do it if it amuses them.”
224And the Provost of North Kensington laughed.
225The herald who was despatched up Church Street in all the pomp of the South Kensington blue and gold, with the Three Birds on his tabard, was attended by two trumpeters.
226“What will they do when they consent?” asked Barker, for the sake of saying something in the sudden stillness of that immense army.
227“I know my Wayne very well,” said Buck, laughing. “When he submits he will send a red herald flaming with the Lion of Notting Hill. Even defeat will be delightful to him, since it is formal and romantic.”
228The King, who had strolled up to the head of the line, broke silence for the first time.
229“I shouldn’t wonder,” he said, “if he defied you, and didn’t send the herald after all. I don’t think you do know your Wayne quite so well as you think.”
230“All right, your Majesty,” said Buck, easily; “if it isn’t disrespectful, I’ll put my political calculations in a very simple form. I’ll lay you ten pounds to a shilling the herald comes with the surrender.”
231“All right,” said Auberon. “I may be wrong, but it’s my notion of Adam Wayne that he’ll die in his city, and that, till he is dead, it will not be a safe property.”
232“The bet’s made, your Majesty,” said Buck.
233Another long silence ensued, in the course of which Barker alone, amid the motionless army, strolled and stamped in his restless way.
234Then Buck suddenly leant forward.
235“It’s taking your money, your Majesty,” he said. “I knew it was. There comes the herald from Adam Wayne.”
236“It’s not,” cried the King, peering forward also. “You brute, it’s a red omnibus.”
237“It’s not,” said Buck, calmly; and the King did not answer, for down the centre of the spacious and silent Church Street was walking, beyond question, the herald of the Red Lion, with two trumpeters.
238Buck had something in him which taught him how to be magnanimous. In his hour of success he felt magnanimous towards Wayne, whom he really admired; magnanimous towards the King, off whom he had scored so publicly; and, above all, magnanimous towards Barker, who was the titular leader of this vast South Kensington army, which his own talent had evoked.
239“General Barker,” he said, bowing, “do you propose now to receive the message from the besieged?”
240Barker bowed also, and advanced towards the herald.
241“Has your master, Mr. Adam Wayne, received our request for surrender?” he asked.
242The herald conveyed a solemn and respectful affirmative.
243Barker resumed, coughing slightly, but encouraged.
244“What answer does your master send?”
245The herald again inclined himself submissively, and answered in a kind of monotone.
246“My message is this. Adam Wayne, Lord High Provost of Notting Hill, under the charter of King Auberon and the laws of God and all mankind, free and of a free city, greets James Barker, Lord High Provost of South Kensington, by the same rights free and honourable, leader of the army of the South. With all friendly reverence, and with all constitutional consideration, he desires James Barker to lay down his arms, and the whole army under his command to lay down their arms also.”
247Before the words were ended the King had run forward into the open space with shining eyes. The rest of the staff and the forefront of the army were literally struck breathless. When they recovered they began to laugh beyond restraint; the revulsion was too sudden.
248“The Lord High Provost of Notting Hill,” continued the herald, “does not propose, in the event of your surrender, to use his victory for any of those repressive purposes which others have entertained against him. He will leave you your free laws and your free cities, your flags and your governments. He will not destroy the religion of South Kensington, or crush the old customs of Bayswater.”
249An irrepressible explosion of laughter went up from the forefront of the great army.
250“The King must have had something to do with this humour,” said Buck, slapping his thigh. “It’s too deliciously insolent. Barker, have a glass of wine.”
251And in his conviviality he actually sent a soldier across to the restaurant opposite the church and brought out two glasses for a toast.
252When the laughter had died down, the herald continued quite monotonously—
253“In the event of your surrendering your arms and dispersing under the superintendence of our forces, these local rights of yours shall be carefully observed. In the event of your not doing so, the Lord High Provost of Notting Hill desires to announce that he has just captured the Waterworks Tower, just above you, on Campden Hill, and that within ten minutes from now, that is, on the reception through me of your refusal, he will open the great reservoir and flood the whole valley where you stand in thirty feet of water. God save King Auberon!”
254Buck had dropped his glass and sent a great splash of wine over the road.
255“But—but—” he said; and then by a last and splendid effort of his great sanity, looked the facts in the face.
256“We must surrender,” he said. “You could do nothing against fifty thousand tons of water coming down a steep hill, ten minutes hence. We must surrender. Our four thousand men might as well be four. Vicisti Galilaee! Perkins, you may as well get me another glass of wine.”
257In this way the vast army of South Kensington surrendered and the Empire of Notting Hill began. One further fact in this connection is perhaps worth mentioning—the fact that, after his victory, Adam Wayne caused the great tower on Campden Hill to be plated with gold and inscribed with a great epitaph, saying that it was the monument of Wilfrid Lambert, the heroic defender of the place, and surmounted with a statue, in which his large nose was done something less than justice to.