"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 n.o.ble 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.
"Oh, 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? G.o.d, what have I done? I thought I would have a joke, and I have created a pa.s.sion. 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 cla.s.sic 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? Oh, Lord! Oh, 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 tyrannise 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 stills 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 G.o.ds. 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 G.o.d 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 d.a.m.ned 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 lamp-posts 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 das.
"Yes, yes," cried Wayne, hoa.r.s.ely. "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 G.o.ds, 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 das.
"It is hard," he said, biting his lips, "to a.s.sent to a view so desperate--so responsible...."