"Well," said the King, wearily, "the conference is at an end at last."
And he went out of the room before any one else could stir.
Forty workmen, a hundred Bayswater Halberdiers, two hundred from South, and three from North Kensington, a.s.sembled at the foot of Holland Walk and marched up it, under the general direction of Barker, who looked flushed and happy in full dress. At the end of the procession a small and sulky figure lingered like an urchin. It was the King.
"Barker," he said at length, appealingly, "you are an old friend of mine--you understand my hobbies as I understand yours. Why can"t you let it alone? I hoped that such fun might come out of this Wayne business. Why can"t you let it alone? It doesn"t really so much matter to you--what"s a road or so? For me it"s the one joke that may save me from pessimism. Take fewer men and give me an hour"s fun. Really and truly, James, if you collected coins or humming-birds, and I could buy one with the price of your road, I would buy it. I collect incidents--those rare, those precious things. Let me have one. Pay a few pounds for it. Give these Notting Hillers a chance. Let them alone."
"Auberon," said Barker, kindly, forgetting all royal t.i.tles in a rare moment of sincerity, "I do feel what you mean. I have had moments when these hobbies have hit me. I have had moments when I have sympathised with your humours. I have had moments, though you may not easily believe it, when I have sympathised with the madness of Adam Wayne.
But the world, Auberon, the real world, is not run on these hobbies.
It goes on great brutal wheels of facts--wheels on which you are the b.u.t.terfly; and Wayne is the fly on the wheel."
Auberon"s eyes looked frankly at the other"s.
"Thank you, James; what you say is true. It is only a parenthetical consolation to me to compare the intelligence of flies somewhat favourably with the intelligence of wheels. But it is the nature of flies to die soon, and the nature of wheels to go on for ever. Go on with the wheel. Good-bye, old man."
And James Barker went on, laughing, with a high colour, slapping his bamboo on his leg.
The King watched the tail of the retreating regiment with a look of genuine depression, which made him seem more like a baby than ever.
Then he swung round and struck his hands together.
"In a world without humour," he said, "the only thing to do is to eat.
And how perfect an exception! How can these people strike dignified att.i.tudes, and pretend that things matter, when the total ludicrousness of life is proved by the very method by which it is supported? A man strikes the lyre, and says, "Life is real, life is earnest," and then goes into a room and stuffs alien substances into a hole in his head. I think Nature was indeed a little broad in her humour in these matters. But we all fall back on the pantomime, as I have in this munic.i.p.al affair. Nature has her farces, like the act of eating or the shape of the kangaroo, for the more brutal appet.i.te. She keeps her stars and mountains for those who can appreciate something more subtly ridiculous." He turned to his equerry. "But, as I said "eating," let us have a picnic like two nice little children. Just run and bring me a table and a dozen courses or so, and plenty of champagne, and under these swinging boughs, Bowler, we will return to Nature."
It took about an hour to erect in Holland Lane the monarch"s simple repast, during which time he walked up and down and whistled, but still with an unaffected air of gloom. He had really been done out of a pleasure he had promised himself, and had that empty and sickened feeling which a child has when disappointed of a pantomime. When he and the equerry had sat down, however, and consumed a fair amount of dry champagne, his spirits began mildly to revive.
"Things take too long in this world," he said. "I detest all this Barkerian business about evolution and the gradual modification of things. I wish the world had been made in six days, and knocked to pieces again in six more. And I wish I had done it. The joke"s good enough in a broad way, sun and moon and the image of G.o.d, and all that, but they keep it up so d.a.m.nably long. Did you ever long for a miracle, Bowler?"
"No, sir," said Bowler, who was an evolutionist, and had been carefully brought up.
"Then I have," answered the King. "I have walked along a street with the best cigar in the cosmos in my mouth, and more Burgundy inside me than you ever saw in your life, and longed that the lamp-post would turn into an elephant to save me from the h.e.l.l of blank existence.
Take my word for it, my evolutionary Bowler, don"t you believe people when they tell you that people sought for a sign, and believed in miracles because they were ignorant. They did it because they were wise, filthily, vilely wise--too wise to eat or sleep or put on their boots with patience. This seems delightfully like a new theory of the origin of Christianity, which would itself be a thing of no mean absurdity. Take some more wine."
The wind blew round them as they sat at their little table, with its white cloth and bright wine-cups, and flung the tree-tops of Holland Park against each other, but the sun was in that strong temper which turns green into gold. The King pushed away his plate, lit a cigar slowly, and went on--
"Yesterday I thought that something next door to a really entertaining miracle might happen to me before I went to amuse the worms. To see that red-haired maniac waving a great sword, and making speeches to his incomparable followers, would have been a glimpse of that Land of Youth from which the Fates shut us out. I had planned some quite delightful things. A Congress of Knightsbridge with a treaty, and myself in the chair, and perhaps a Roman triumph, with jolly old Barker led in chains. And now these wretched prigs have gone and stamped out the exquisite Mr. Wayne altogether, and I suppose they will put him in a private asylum somewhere in their d.a.m.ned humane way.
Think of the treasures daily poured out to his unappreciative keeper!
I wonder whether they would let me be his keeper. But life is a vale.
Never forget at any moment of your existence to regard it in the light of a vale. This graceful habit, if not acquired in youth--"
The King stopped, with his cigar lifted, for there had slid into his eyes the startled look of a man listening. He did not move for a few moments; then he turned his head sharply towards the high, thin, and lath-like paling which fenced certain long gardens and similar s.p.a.ces from the lane. From behind it there was coming a curious scrambling and sc.r.a.ping noise, as of a desperate thing imprisoned in this box of thin wood. The King threw away his cigar, and jumped on to the table.
From this position he saw a pair of hands hanging with a hungry clutch on the top of the fence. Then the hands quivered with a convulsive effort, and a head shot up between them--the head of one of the Bayswater Town Council, his eyes and whiskers wild with fear. He swung himself over, and fell on the other side on his face, and groaned openly and without ceasing. The next moment the thin, taut wood of the fence was struck as by a bullet, so that it reverberated like a drum, and over it came tearing and cursing, with torn clothes and broken nails and bleeding faces, twenty men at one rush. The King sprang five feet clear off the table on to the ground. The moment after the table was flung over, sending bottles and gla.s.ses flying, and the _debris_ was literally swept along the ground by that stream of men pouring past, and Bowler was borne along with them, as the King said in his famous newspaper article, "like a captured bride." The great fence swung and split under the load of climbers that still scaled and cleared it. Tremendous gaps were torn in it by this living artillery; and through them the King could see more and more frantic faces, as in a dream, and more and more men running. They were as miscellaneous as if some one had taken the lid off a human dustbin. Some were untouched, some were slashed and battered and b.l.o.o.d.y, some were splendidly dressed, some tattered and half naked, some were in the fantastic garb of the burlesque cities, some in the dullest modern dress. The King stared at all of them, but none of them looked at the King. Suddenly he stepped forward.
"Barker," he said, "what is all this?"
"Beaten," said the politician--"beaten all to h.e.l.l!" And he plunged past with nostrils shaking like a horse"s, and more and more men plunged after him.
Almost as he spoke, the last standing strip of fence bowed and snapped, flinging, as from a catapult, a new figure upon the road. He wore the flaming red of the halberdiers of Notting Hill, and on his weapon there was blood, and in his face victory. In another moment ma.s.ses of red glowed through the gaps of the fence, and the pursuers, with their halberds, came pouring down the lane. Pursued and pursuers alike swept by the little figure with the owlish eyes, who had not taken his hands out of his pockets.
The King had still little beyond the confused sense of a man caught in a torrent--the feeling of men eddying by. Then something happened which he was never able afterwards to describe, and which we cannot describe for him. Suddenly in the dark entrance, between the broken gates of a garden, there appeared framed a flaming figure.
Adam Wayne, the conqueror, with his face flung back, and his mane like a lion"s, stood with his great sword point upwards, the red raiment of his office flapping round him like the red wings of an archangel. And the King saw, he knew not how, something new and overwhelming. The great green trees and the great red robes swung together in the wind.
The sword seemed made for the sunlight. The preposterous masquerade, born of his own mockery, towered over him and embraced the world. This was the normal, this was sanity, this was nature; and he himself, with his rationality and his detachment and his black frock-coat, he was the exception and the accident--a blot of black upon a world of crimson and gold.
BOOK IV
CHAPTER I--_The Battle of the Lamps_
Mr. 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.
He stepped out into the cool air, b.u.t.toning up his light yellow coat, and blowing great clouds from his cigar, when a figure dashed up to him in another yellow overcoat, but unb.u.t.toned and flying behind him.
"Hullo, Barker!" said the draper. "Any of our summer articles? You"re too late. Factory Acts, Barker. Humanity and progress, my boy."
"Oh, don"t chatter," cried Barker, stamping. "We"ve been beaten."
"Beaten--by what?" asked Buck, mystified.
"By Wayne."
Buck looked at Barker"s fierce white face for the first time, as it gleamed in the lamplight.
"Come and have a drink," he said.
They adjourned to a cushioned and glaring buffet, and Buck established himself slowly and lazily in a seat, and pulled out his cigar-case.
"Have a smoke," he said.
Barker was still standing, and on the fret, but after a moment"s hesitation, he sat down as if he might spring up again the next minute. They ordered drinks in silence.
"How did it happen?" asked Buck, turning his big bold eyes on him.
"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?"
"Well," said Buck, coolly, "how did they? You ought to know."
"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 d.a.m.ned 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."
[Ill.u.s.tration: Map of the SEAT of WAR.]
Buck, who was idly dabbing the ash of his cigar on the ash-tray, began to move it deliberately over the table, making feathery grey lines, a kind of map.