CHAPTER III
ENTER A LUNATIC
THE King of the Fairies, who was, it is to be presumed, the godfather of King Auberon, must have been very favourable on this particular day to his fantastic godchild, for with the entrance of the guard of the Provost of Notting Hill there was a certain more or less inexplicable addition to his delight. The wretched navvies and sandwich-men who carried the colours of Bayswater or South Kensington, engaged merely for the day to satisfy the Royal hobby, slouched into the room with a comparatively hang-dog air, and a great part of the King’s intellectual pleasure consisted in the contrast between the arrogance of their swords and feathers and the meek misery of their faces. But these Notting Hill halberdiers in their red tunics belted with gold had the air rather of an absurd gravity. They seemed, so to speak, to be taking part in the joke. They marched and wheeled into position with an almost startling dignity, and discipline.
They carried a yellow banner with a great red lion, named by the King as the Notting Hill emblem, after a small public-house in the neighbourhood, which he once frequented.
Between the two lines of his followers there advanced towards the King a tall, red-haired young man, with high features, and bold blue eyes. He would have been called handsome, but that a certain indefinable air of his nose being too big for his face, and his feet for his legs, gave him a look of awkwardness and extreme youth. His robes were red, according to the King’s heraldry, and alone among the Provosts, he was girt with a great sword. This was Adam Wayne, the intractable Provost of Notting Hill.
The King flung himself back in his chair, and rubbed his hands.
“What a day, what a day!” he said to himself. “Now there’ll be a row. I’d no idea it would be such fun as it is. These Provosts are so very indignant, so very reasonable, so very right. This fellow, by the look in his eyes, is even more indignant than the rest. No sign in those large blue eyes, at any rate, of ever having heard of a joke. He’ll remonstrate with the others, and they’ll remonstrate with him, and they’ll all make themselves sumptuously happy remonstrating with me.”
“Welcome, my Lord,” he said aloud. “What news from the Hill of a Hundred Legends? What have you for the ear of your King? I know that troubles have arisen between you and these others, our cousins, but these troubles it shall be our pride to compose. And I doubt not, and cannot doubt, that your love for me is not less tender, no less ardent than theirs.”
Mr. Buck made a bitter face, and James Barker’s nostrils curled; Wilson began to giggle faintly, and the Provost of West Kensington followed in a smothered way. But the big blue eyes of Adam Wayne never changed, and he called out in an odd, boyish voice down the hall:
“I bring homage to my King. I bring him the only thing I have...my sword.”
And with a great gesture he flung it down on the ground, and knelt on one knee behind it.
There was a dead silence.
“I beg your pardon,” said the King, blankly.
“You speak well, sire,” said Adam Wayne, “as you ever speak, when you say that my love is not less than the love of these. Small would it be if it were not more. For I am the heir of your scheme...the child of the great Charter. I stand here for the rights the Charter gave me, and I swear, by your sacred crown, that where I stand, I stand fast.”
The eyes of all five men stood out of their heads.
Then Buck said, in his jolly, jarring voice: “Is the whole world mad?”
The King sprang to his feet, and his eyes blazed.
“Yes,” he cried, in a voice of exultation, “the whole world is mad, but Adam Wayne and me. It is true as death what I told you long ago, James Barker, seriousness sends men mad. You are mad, because you care for politics, as mad as a man who collects tram tickets. Buck is mad, because he cares for money, as mad as a man who lives on opium. Wilson is mad, because he thinks himself right, as mad as a man who thinks himself God Almighty. The Provost of West Kensington is mad, because he thinks he is respectable, as mad as a man who thinks he is a chicken. All men are mad, but the humourist, who cares for nothing and possesses everything. I thought that there was only one humourist in England. Fools!...dolts!...open your cows’ eyes; there are two! In Notting Hill... in that unpromising elevation...there has been born an artist! You thought to spoil my joke, and bully me out of it, by becoming more and more modern, more and more practical, more and more bustling and rational. Oh, what a feast it was to answer you by becoming more and more august, more and more gracious, more and more ancient and mellow! But this lad has seen how to bowl me out. He has answered me back, vaunt for vaunt, rhetoric for rhetoric. He has lifted the only shield I cannot break, the shield of an impenetrable pomposity. Listen to him. You have come, my Lord, about Pump Street?”
“About the city of Notting Hill,” answered Wayne, proudly. “Of which Pump Street is a living and rejoicing part.”
“Not a very large part,” said Barker, contemptuously.
“That which is large enough for the rich to covet,” said Wayne, drawing up his head, “is large enough for the poor to defend.”
The King slapped both his legs, and waved his feet for a second in the air.
“Every respectable person in Notting Hill,” cut in Buck, with his cold, coarse voice, “is for us and against you. I have plenty of friends in Notting Hill.”
“Your friends are those who have taken your gold for other men’s hearthstones, my Lord Buck,” said Provost Wayne. “I can well believe they are your friends.”
“They’ve never sold dirty toys, anyhow,” said Buck, laughing shortly.
“They’ve sold dirtier things,” said Wayne, calmly; “they have sold themselves.”
“It’s no good, my Buckling,” said the King, rolling about on his chair. “You can’t cope with this chivalrous eloquence. You can’t cope with an artist. You can’t cope with the humourist of Notting Hill. O, Nunc dimittis...that I have lived to see this day! Provost Wayne, you stand firm?”
“Let them wait and see,” said Wayne. “If I stood firm before, do you think I shall weaken now that I have seen the face of the King? For I fight for something greater, if greater there can be, than the hearthstones of my people and the Lordship of the Lion. I fight for your royal vision, for the great dream you dreamt of the League of the Free Cities. You have given me this liberty. If I had been a beggar and you had flung me a coin, if I had been a peasant in a dance and you had flung me a favour, do you think I would have let it be taken by any ruffians on the road? This leadership and liberty of Notting Hill is a gift from your Majesty. And if it is taken from me, by God! it shall be taken in battle, and the noise of that battle shall be heard in the flats of Chelsea and in the studios of St. John’s Wood.”
“It is too much...it is too much,” said the King. “Nature is weak. I must speak to you, brother artist, without further disguise. Let me ask you a solemn question. Adam Wayne, Lord High Provost of Notting Hill, don’t you think it splendid?”
“Splendid!” cried Adam Wayne. “It has the splendour of God.”
“Bowled out again,” said the King. “You will keep up the pose. Funnily, of course, it is serious. But seriously, isn’t it funny?”
“What?” asked Wayne, with the eyes of a baby.
“Hang it all, don’t play any more. The whole business...the Charter of the Cities. Isn’t it immense?”
“Immense is no unworthy word for that glorious design.”
“Oh, hang you...but, of course, I see. You want me to clear the room of these reasonable sows. You want the two humourists alone together. Leave us, gentlemen.”
Buck threw a sour look at Barker, and at a sullen signal the whole pageant of blue and green, of red, gold and purple rolled out of the room, leaving only two in the great hall, the King sitting in his seat on the dais, and the red-clad figure still kneeling on the floor before his fallen sword.