The Napoleon of Notting Hill - G. K. Chesterton (best books to read now .txt) 📗

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 humorist, who cares for nothing and possesses everything. I thought that there was only one humorist 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 humorist of Notting Hill. Oh, 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