The Napoleon of Notting Hill

by Gilbert Keith Chesterton

  A roar of cheers broke in upon his words, and further speech was impossible. Pale to the lips, the great patriot tried again and again to speak; but even his authority could not keep down the dark and roaring masses in the street below him. He said something further, but it was not audible. He descended at last sadly from the garret in which he lived, and mingled with the crowd at the foot of the houses. Finding General Turnbull, he put his hand on his shoulder with a queer affection and gravity, and said:

  “To-morrow, old man, we shall have a new experience, as fresh as the flowers of spring. We shall be defeated. You and I have been through three battles together, and have somehow or other missed this peculiar delight. It is unfortunate that we shall not probably be able to exchange our experiences, because, as it most annoyingly happens, we shall probably both be dead.”

  Turnbull looked dimly surprised.

  “I don’t mind so much about being dead,” he said, “but why should you say that we shall be defeated?”

  “The answer is very simple,” replied Wayne, calmly. “It is because we ought to be defeated. We have been in the most horrible holes before now; but in all those I was perfectly certain that the stars were on our side, and that we ought to get out. Now, I know that we ought not to get out; and that takes away from me everything with which I won.”

  As Wayne spoke he started a little, for both men became aware that a third figure was listening to them...a small figure with wondering eyes.

  “Is it really true, my dear Wayne,” said the King, interrupting, “that you think you will be beaten to-morrow?”

  “There can be no doubt about it whatever,” replied Adam Wayne; “the real reason is the one of which I have just spoken. But as a concession to your materialism, I will add that they have an organized army of a hundred allied cities against our one. That in itself, however, would be unimportant.”

  Quin, with his round eyes, seemed strangely insistent.

  “You are quite sure,” he said, “that you must be beaten?”

  “I am afraid,” said Turnbull, gloomily, “that there can be no doubt about it.”

  “Then,” cried the King, flinging out his arms, “give me a halberd! Give me a halberd, somebody! I desire all men to witness that I, Auberon, King of England, do here and now abdicate and implore the Provost of Notting Hill to permit me to enlist in his army. Give me a halberd!”

  He seized one from some passing guard, and, shouldering it, stamped solemnly after the shouting columns of halberdiers which were, by this time, parading the streets. He had, however, nothing to do with the wrecking of the statue of General Wilson, which took place before morning.

  CHAPTER II

  THE LAST BATTLE

  THE day was cloudy when Wayne went down to die with all his army in Kensington Gardens; it was cloudy again when that army had been swallowed up by the vast armies of a new world. There had been an almost uncanny interval of sunshine, in which the Provost of Notting Hill, with all the placidity of an onlooker, had gazed across to the hostile armies on the great spaces of verdure opposite; the long strips of green and blue and gold lay across the park in squares and oblongs like a proposition in Euclid wrought in a rich embroidery. But the sunlight was a weak and, as it were, a wet sunlight, and was soon swallowed up. Wayne spoke to the King, with a queer sort of coldness and languor, as to the military operations. It was as he had said the night before, that being deprived of his sense of an impracticable rectitude he was, in effect, being deprived of everything. He was out of date, and at sea in a mere world of compromise and competition, of Empire against Empire, of the tolerably right and the tolerably wrong. When his eye fell on the King, however, who was marching very gravely with a top hat and a halberd, it brightened slightly.

  “Well, your Majesty,” he said, “you at least ought to be proud to-day. If your children are fighting each other, at least those who win are your children. Other kings have distributed justice, you have distributed life. Other kings have ruled a nation, you have created nations. Others have made kingdoms, you have begotten them. Look at your children, father.” And he stretched his hand out towards the enemy.

  Auberon did not raise his eyes.

  “See how splendidly,” cried Wayne, “the new cities come on...the new cities from across the river. See where Battersea advances over there...under the flag of the Lost Dog; and Putney...don’t you see the Man on the White Boar shining on their standard as the sun catches it? It is the coming of a new age, your Majesty. Notting Hill is not a common empire; it is a thing like Athens, the mother of a mode of life, of a manner of living, which shall renew the youth of the world...a thing like Nazareth. When I was young I remember, in the old dreary days, wiseacres used to write books about how trains would get faster, and all the world would be one empire, and tram-cars go to the moon. And even as a child I used to say to myself, ‘Far more likely that we shall go on the crusades again, or worship the gods of the city.’ And so it has been. And I am glad, though this is my last battle.”

  Even as he spoke there came a crash of steel from the left, and he turned his head.

  “Wilson!” he cried, with a kind of joy. “Red Wilson has charged our left. No one can hold him; he eats swords. He is as keen a soldier as Turnbull, but less patient...less really great. Ha! and Barker is moving. How Barker has improved; how handsome he looks. It is not all having plumes; it is also having a soul in one’s daily life. Ha!”

  And another crash of steel on the right showed that Barker had closed with Notting Hill on the other side.

  “Turnbull is there!” cried Wayne. “See him hurl them back! Barker is checked! Turnbull charges...wins! But our left is broken. Wilson has smashed Bowles and Mead, and may turn our flank. Forward, the Provost’s Guard!”

  And the whole centre moved forward, Wayne’s face and hair and sword flaming in the van.

  The King ran suddenly forward.

  The next instant a great jar that went through it told that it had met the enemy. And right over against them through the wood of their own weapons Auberon saw the Purple Eagle of Buck of North Kensington.

  On the left Red Wilson was storming the broken ranks, his little green figure conspicuous even in the tangle of men and weapons, with the flaming red moustaches and the crown of laurel. Bowles slashed at his head and tore away some of the wreath, leaving the rest bloody, and, with a roar like a bull’s, Wilson sprang at him, and, after a rattle of fencing, plunged his point into the chemist, who fell, crying “Notting Hill!” Then the Notting Hillers wavered, and Bayswater swept them back in confusion. Wilson had carried everything before him.

  On the right, however, Turnbull had carried the Red Lion banner with a rush against Barker’s men, and the banner of the Golden Birds bore up with difficulty against it. Barker’s men fell fast. In the centre Wayne and Buck were engaged, stubborn and confused. So far as the fighting went, it was precisely equal. But the fighting was a farce. For behind the three small armies with which Wayne’s small army was engaged lay the great sea of the allied armies, which looked on as yet as scornful spectators, but could have broken all four armies by moving a finger.

  Suddenly they did move. Some of the front contingents, the pastoral chiefs from Shepherd’s Bush, with their spears and fleeces, were seen advancing, and the rude clans from Paddington Green. They were advancing for a very good reason. Buck, of North Kensington, was signalling wildly; he was surrounded, and totally cut off. His regiments were a struggling mass of people, islanded in a red sea of Notting Hill.

  The allies had been too careless and confident. They had allowed Barker’s force to be broken to pieces by Turnbull, and the moment that was done, the astute old leader of Notting Hill swung his men round and attacked Buck behind and on both sides. At the same moment Wayne cried “Charge!” and struck him in front like a thunderbolt.

  Two-thirds of Buck’s men were cut to pieces before their allies could reach them. Then the sea of cities came on with their banners like breakers, and swallowed Notti
ng Hill for ever. The battle was not over, for not one of Wayne’s men would surrender, and it lasted till sundown, and long after. But it was decided; the story of Notting Hill was ended.

  When Turnbull saw it, he ceased a moment from fighting, and looked round him. The evening sunlight struck his face; it looked like a child’s.

  “I have had my youth,” he said. Then snatching an axe from a man, he dashed into the thick of the spears of Shepherd’s Bush, and died somewhere far in the depths of their reeling ranks. Then the battle roared on; every man of Notting Hill was slain before night.

  Wayne was standing by a tree alone after the battle. Several men approached him with axes. One struck at him. His foot seemed partly to slip; but he flung his hand out, and steadied himself against the tree.

  Barker sprang after him, sword in hand, and shaking with excitement.

  “How large now, my lord,” he cried, “is the Empire of Notting Hill?”

  Wayne smiled in the gathering dark.

  “Always as large as this,” he said, and swept his sword round in a semicircle of silver.

  Barker dropped, wounded in the neck; and Wilson sprang over his body like a tiger-cat, rushing at Wayne. At the same moment there came behind the Lord of the Red Lion a cry and a flare of yellow, and a mass of the West Kensington halberdiers ploughed up the slope, knee-deep in grass, bearing the yellow banner of the city before them, and shouting aloud.

  At the same second Wilson went down under Wayne’s sword, seemingly smashed like a fly. The great sword rose again like, a bird, but Wilson seemed to rise with it, and, his sword being broken, sprang at Wayne’s throat like a dog. The foremost of the yellow halberdiers had reached the tree and swung his axe above the struggling Wayne. With a curse the King whirled up his own halberd and dashed the blade in the man’s face. He reeled, and rolled, down the slope, just as the furious Wilson was flung on his back again. And again he was on his feet, and again at Wayne’s throat. Then he was flung again, but this time laughing triumphantly. Grasped in his hand was the red and yellow favour that Wayne wore as Provost of Notting Hill. He had torn it from the place where it had been carried for twenty-five years.

  With a shout the West Kensington men closed round Wayne, the great yellow banner flapping over his head.

  “Where is your favour now, Provost?” cried the West Kensington leader. And a laugh went up.

  Adam struck at the standard-bearer and brought him reeling forward. As the banner stooped, he grasped the yellow folds and tore off a shred. A halberdier struck him on the shoulder, wounding bloodily.

  “Here is one colour!” he cried, pushing the yellow into his belt; “and here!” he cried, pointing to his own blood, “Here is the other.”

  At the same instant the shock of a sudden and heavy halberd laid the King stunned or dead. In the wild visions of vanishing consciousness, he saw again something that belonged to an utterly forgotten time, something that he had seen somewhere long ago in a restaurant. He saw, with his swimming eyes, red and yellow, the colours of Nicaragua.

  Quin did not see the end. Wilson, wild with joy, sprang again at Adam Wayne, and the great sword of Notting Hill was whirled above once more. Then men ducked instinctively at the rushing noise of the sword coming down out of the sky, and Wilson of Bayswater was smashed and wiped down upon the floor like a fly. Nothing was left of him but a wreck; but the blade that had broken him was broken. In dying he had snapped the great sword and the spell of it; the sword of Wayne was broken, at the hilt. One rush of the enemy carried Wayne by force against the tree. They were too close to use halberd or even sword; they were breast to breast, even nostrils to nostrils. But Buck got his dagger free.

  “Kill him!” he cried, in a strange stifled voice. “Kill him! Good or bad, he is none of us! Do not be blinded by the face! ... God! have we not been blinded all along!” and he drew his arm back for a stab and seemed to close his eyes.

  Wayne did not drop the hand that hung on to the tree-branch. But a mighty heave went over his breast, and his whole huge figure, like an earthquake over great hills. And with that convulsion of effort he rent the branch out of the tree, with tongues of torn wood. And swaying it once only, he let the splintered club fall on Buck, breaking his neck. The planner of the Great Road fell face foremost dead, with his dagger in a grip of steel.

  “For you and me, and for all brave men, my brother,” said Wayne, in his strange chant, “there is good wine poured in the inn at the end of the world.”

  The packed men made another lurch or heave towards him; it was almost too dark to fight clearly. He caught hold of the oak again, this time getting his hand into a wide crevice and grasping, as it were, the bowels of the tree. The whole crowd, numbering some thirty men, made a rush to tear him away from it; they hung on with all their weight and numbers, and nothing stirred. A solitude could not have been stiller than that group of straining men. Then there was a faint sound.

  “His hand is slipping,” cried two men in exultation.

  “You don’t know much of him,” said another, grimly (a man of the old war). “More likely his bone cracks.”

  “It is neither...by God, it is neither!” said one of the first two.

  “What is it, then?” asked the second.

  “The tree is falling,” he replied.

  “As the tree falleth, so shall it lie,” said Wayne’s voice out of the darkness, and it had the same sweet and yet horrible air that it had had throughout, of coming from a great distance, from before or after the event. Even when he was struggling like an eel or battering like a madman, he spoke like a spectator, “As the tree falleth, so shall it lie,” he said. “Men have called that a gloomy text. It is the essence of all exultation. I am doing now what I have done all my life, what is the only happiness, what is the only universality. I am clinging to something. Let it fall, and there let it lie. Fools, you go about and see the kingdoms of the earth, and are liberal, and wise, and cosmopolitan, which is all that the devil can give you...all that he could offer to Christ only to be spurned away. I am doing what the truly wise do. When a child goes out into the garden and takes hold of a tree, saying, ‘Let this tree be all I have,’ that moment its roots take hold on hell and its branches on the stars. The joy I have is what the lover knows when a woman is everything. It is what a savage knows when his idol is everything. It is what I know when Notting Hill is everything. I have a city. Let it stand or fall.”

  As he spoke the turf lifted itself like a living thing, and out of it rose slowly, like crested serpents, the roots of the oak. Then the great head of the tree, that seemed a green cloud among grey ones, swept the sky suddenly like a broom, and the whole tree heeled over like a ship, smashing every one in its fall.

  CHAPTER III

  TWO VOICES

  IN a place in which there was total darkness for hours, there was also for hours total silence. Then a voice spoke out of the darkness, no one could have told from where, and said aloud:

  “So ends the Empire of Notting Hill. As it began in blood, so it ended in blood, and all things are always the same.”

  And there was silence again, and then again there was a voice, but it had not the same tone; it seemed that it was not the same voice.

  “If all things are always the same, it is because they are always heroic. If all things are always the same, it is because they are always new. To each man one soul only is given; to each soul only is given a little power...the power at some moments to outgrow and swallow up the stars. If age after age that power comes upon men, whatever gives it to them is great. Whatever makes men feel old is mean...an empire or a skin-flint shop. Whatever makes men feel young is great...a great war or a love story. And in the darkest of the books of God there is written a truth that is also a riddle. It is of the new things that men tire...of fashions and proposals and improvements and change. It is the old things that startle and intoxicate. It is the old things that are young. There is no sceptic who does not feel that many have doubted before. There is no
rich and fickle man who does not feel that all his novelties are ancient. There is no worshipper of change who does not feel upon his neck the vast weight of the weariness of the universe. But we who do the old things are fed by nature with a perpetual infancy. No man who is in love thinks that any one has been in love before. No woman who has a child thinks that there have been such things as children. No people that fight for their own city are haunted with the burden of the broken empires. Yes, oh dark voice, the world is always the same, for it is always unexpected.”