Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 121
At length a shrill trumpet rang from some way up the street; it was the signal of advance. Buck briefly gave the word, and the whole purple line, with its dimly shining steel, moved up the side alley. Before it was a slope of street, long, straight, and shining in the dark. It was a sword pointed at Pump Street, the heart at which nine other swords were pointed that night.
A quarter of an hour’s silent marching brought them almost within earshot of any tumult in the doomed citadel. But still there was no sound and no sign of the enemy. This time, at any rate, they knew that they were closing in on it mechanically, and they marched on under the lamplight and the dark without any of that eerie sense of ignorance which Barker had felt when entering the hostile country by one avenue alone.
“Halt — point arms!” cried Buck, suddenly, and as he spoke there came a clatter of feet tumbling along the stones. But the halberds were levelled in vain. The figure that rushed up was a messenger from the contingent of the North.
“Victory, Mr. Buck!” he cried, panting; “they are ousted. Provost Wilson of Bayswater has taken Pump Street.”
Buck ran forward in his excitement.
“Then, which way are they retreating? It must be either by St. Luke’s to meet Swindon, or by the Gas Company to meet us. Run like mad to Swindon, and see that the yellows are holding the St. Luke’s Road. We will hold this, never fear. We have them in an iron trap. Run!”
As the messenger dashed away into the darkness, the great guard of North Kensington swung on with the certainty of a machine. Yet scarcely a hundred yards further their halberd-points again fell in line gleaming in the gaslight; for again a clatter of feet was heard on the stones, and again it proved to be only the messenger.
“Mr. Provost,” he said, “the yellow West Kensingtons have been holding the road by St. Luke’s for twenty minutes since the capture of Pump Street. Pump Street is not two hundred yards away; they cannot be retreating down that road.”
“Then they are retreating down this,” said Provost Buck, with a final cheerfulness, “and by good fortune down a well-lighted road, though it twists about. Forward!”
As they moved along the last three hundred yards of their journey, Buck fell, for the first time in his life, perhaps, into a kind of philosophical reverie, for men of his type are always made kindly, and as it were melancholy, by success.
“I am sorry for poor old Wayne, I really am,” he thought. “He spoke up splendidly for me at that Council. And he blacked old Barker’s eye with considerable spirit. But I don’t see what a man can expect when he fights against arithmetic, to say nothing of civilisation. And what a wonderful hoax all this military genius is! I suspect I’ve just discovered what Cromwell discovered, that a sensible tradesman is the best general, and that a man who can buy men and sell men can lead and kill them. The thing’s simply like adding up a column in a ledger. If Wayne has two hundred men, he can’t put two hundred men in nine places at once. If they’re ousted from Pump Street they’re flying somewhere. If they’re not flying past the church they’re flying past the Works. And so we have them. We business men should have no chance at all except that cleverer people than we get bees in their bonnets that prevent them from reasoning properly — so we reason alone. And so I, who am comparatively stupid, see things as God sees them, as a vast machine. My God, what’s this?” and he clapped his hands to his eyes and staggered back.
Then through the darkness he cried in a dreadful voice —
“Did I blaspheme God? I am struck blind.”
“What?” wailed another voice behind him, the voice of a certain Wilfred Jarvis of North Kensington.
“Blind!” cried Buck; “blind!”
“I’m blind too!” cried Jarvis, in an agony.
“Fools, all of you,” said a gross voice behind them; “we’re all blind. The lamps have gone out.”
“The lamps! But why? where?” cried Buck, turning furiously in the darkness. “How are we to get on? How are we to chase the enemy? Where have they gone?”
“The enemy went—” said the rough voice behind, and then stopped doubtfully.
“Where?” shouted Buck, stamping like a madman.
“They went,” said the gruff voice, “past the Gas Works, and they’ve used their chance.”
“Great God!” thundered Buck, and snatched at his revolver; “do you mean they’ve turned out—”
But almost before he had spoken the words, he was hurled like a stone from catapult into the midst of his own men.
“Notting Hill! Notting Hill!” cried frightful voices out of the darkness, and they seemed to come from all sides, for the men of North Kensington, unacquainted with the road, had lost all their bearings in the black world of blindness.
“Notting Hill! Notting Hill!” cried the invisible people, and the invaders were hewn down horribly with black steel, with steel that gave no glint against any light.
Buck, though badly maimed with the blow of a halberd, kept an angry but splendid sanity. He groped madly for the wall and found it. Struggling with crawling fingers along it, he found a side opening and retreated into it with the remnants of his men. Their adventures during that prodigious night are not to be described. They did not know whether they were going towards or away from the enemy. Not knowing where they themselves were, or where their opponents were, it was mere irony to ask where was the rest of their army. For a thing had descended upon them which London does not know — darkness, which was before the stars were made, and they were as much lost in it as if they had been made before the stars. Every now and then, as those frightful hours wore on, they buffeted in the darkness against living men, who struck at them and at whom they struck, with an idiot fury. When at last the grey dawn came, they found they had wandered back to the edge of the Uxbridge Road. They found that in those horrible eyeless encounters, the North Kensingtons and the Bayswaters and the West Kensingtons had again and again met and butchered each other, and they heard that Adam Wayne was barricaded in Pump Street.
Chapter II — The Correspondent of the Court Journal
Journalism had become, like most other such things in England under the cautious government and philosophy represented by James Barker, somewhat sleepy and much diminished in importance. This was partly due to the disappearance of party government and public speaking, partly to the compromise or dead-lock which had made foreign wars impossible, but mostly, of course, to the temper of the whole nation which was that of a people in a kind of back-water. Perhaps the most well known of the remaining newspapers was the Court Journal, which was published in a dusty but genteel-looking office just out of Kensington High Street. For when all the papers of a people have been for years growing more and more dim and decorous and optimistic, the dimmest and most decorous and most optimistic is very likely to win. In the journalistic competition which was still going on at the beginning of the twentieth century, the final victor was the Court Journal.
For some mysterious reason the King had a great affection for hanging about in the Court Journal office, smoking a morning cigarette and looking over files. Like all ingrainedly idle men, he was very fond of lounging and chatting in places where other people were doing work. But one would have thought that, even in the prosaic England of his day, he might have found a more bustling centre.
On this particular morning, however, he came out of Kensington Palace with a more alert step and a busier air than usual. He wore an extravagantly long frock-coat, a pale-green waistcoat, a very full and dégagé black tie, and curious yellow gloves. This was his uniform as Colonel of a regiment of his own creation, the 1st Decadents Green. It was a beautiful sight to see him drilling them. He walked quickly across the Park and the High Street, lighting his cigarette as he went, and flung open the door of the Court Journal office.
“You’ve heard the news, Pally — you’ve heard the news?” he said.
The Editor’s name was Hoskins, but the King called him Pally, which was an abbreviation of Paladium of our Liberties.
“Well, your Majesty,” said Hoskins, slowly (he was a worried, gentlemanly looking person, with a wandering brown beard)— “well, your Majesty, I have heard rather curious things, but I—”
“You’ll hear more of them,” said the King, dancing a few steps of a kind of negro shuffle. “You’ll hear more of them, my blood-and-thunder tribune. Do you know what I am going to do for you?”
“No, your Majesty,” replied the Paladium, vaguely.
“I’m going to put your paper on strong, dashing, enterprising lines,” said the King. “Now, where are your posters of last night’s defeat?”
“I did not propose, your Majesty,” said the Editor, “to have any posters exactly—”
“Paper, paper!” cried the King, wildly; “bring me paper as big as a house. I’ll do you posters. Stop, I must take my coat off.” He began removing that garment with an air of set intensity, flung it playfully at Mr. Hoskins’ head, entirely enveloping him, and looked at himself in the glass. “The coat off,” he said, “and the hat on. That looks like a sub-editor. It is indeed the very essence of sub-editing. Well,” he continued, turning round abruptly, “come along with that paper.”
The Paladium had only just extricated himself reverently from the folds of the King’s frock-coat, and said bewildered —
“I am afraid, your Majesty—”
“Oh, you’ve got no enterprise,” said Auberon. “What’s that roll in the corner? Wall-paper? Decorations for your private residence? Art in the home, Pally? Fling it over here, and I’ll paint such posters on the back of it that when you put it up in your drawing-room you’ll paste the original pattern against the wall.” And the King unrolled the wall-paper, spreading it over the whole floor. “Now give me the scissors,” he cried, and took them himself before the other could stir.
He slit the paper into about five pieces, each nearly as big as a door. Then he took a big blue pencil, and went down on his knees on the dusty oil-cloth and began to write on them, in huge letters —
“FROM THE FRONT.
GENERAL BUCK DEFEATED.
DARKNESS, DANGER, AND DEATH.
WAYNE SAID TO BE IN PUMP STREET.
FEELING IN THE CITY.”
He contemplated it for some time, with his head on one side, and got up, with a sigh.
“Not quite intense enough,” he said— “not alarming. I want the Court Journal to be feared as well as loved. Let’s try something more hard-hitting.” And he went down on his knees again. After sucking the blue pencil for some time, he began writing again busily. “How will this do?” he said —
WAYNE’S WONDERFUL VICTORY.”
“I suppose,” he said, looking up appealingly, and sucking the pencil— “I suppose we couldn’t say ‘wictory’— ‘Wayne’s wonderful wictory’? No, no. Refinement, Pally, refinement. I have it.”
“WAYNE WINS.
ASTOUNDING FIGHT IN THE DARK.
The gas-lamps in their courses fought against Buck.”
“(Nothing like our fine old English translation.) What else can we say? Well, anything to annoy old Buck;” and he added, thoughtfully, in smaller letters —
“Rumoured Court-martial on General Buck.”
“Those will do for the present,” he said, and turned them both face downwards. “Paste, please.”
The Paladium, with an air of great terror, brought the paste out of an inner room.
The King slabbed it on with the enjoyment of a child messing with treacle. Then taking one of his huge compositions fluttering in each hand, he ran outside, and began pasting them up in prominent positions over the front of the office.
“And now,” said Auberon, entering again with undiminished vivacity— “now for the leading article.”
He picked up another of the large strips of wall-paper, and, laying it across a desk, pulled out a fountain-pen and began writing with feverish intensity, reading clauses and fragments aloud to himself, and rolling them on his tongue like wine, to see if they had the pure journalistic flavour.
“The news of the disaster to our forces in Notting Hill, awful as it is — awful as it is — (no, distressing as it is), may do some good if it draws attention to the what’s-his-name inefficiency (scandalous inefficiency, of course) of the Government’s preparations. In our present state of information, it would be premature (what a jolly word!) — it would be premature to cast any reflections upon the conduct of General Buck, whose services upon so many stricken fields (ha, ha!), and whose honourable scars and laurels, give him a right to have judgment upon him at least suspended. But there is one matter on which we must speak plainly. We have been silent on it too long, from feelings, perhaps of mistaken caution, perhaps of mistaken loyalty. This situation would never have arisen but for what we can only call the indefensible conduct of the King. It pains us to say such things, but, speaking as we do in the public interests (I plagiarise from Barker’s famous epigram), we shall not shrink because of the distress we may cause to any individual, even the most exalted. At this crucial moment of our country, the voice of the People demands with a single tongue, ‘Where is the King?’ What is he doing while his subjects tear each other in pieces in the streets of a great city? Are his amusements and his dissipations (of which we cannot pretend to be ignorant) so engrossing that he can spare no thought for a perishing nation? It is with a deep sense of our responsibility that we warn that exalted person that neither his great position nor his incomparable talents will save him in the hour of delirium from the fate of all those who, in the madness of luxury or tyranny, have met the English people in the rare day of its wrath.”
“I am now,” said the King, “going to write an account of the battle by an eye-witness.” And he picked up a fourth sheet of wall-paper. Almost at the same moment Buck strode quickly into the office. He had a bandage round his head.
“I was told,” he said, with his usual gruff civility, “that your Majesty was here.”
“And of all things on earth,” cried the King, with delight, “here is an eye-witness! An eye-witness who, I regret to observe, has at present only one eye to witness with. Can you write us the special article, Buck? Have you a rich style?”
Buck, with a self-restraint which almost approached politeness, took no notice whatever of the King’s maddening geniality.
“I took the liberty, your Majesty,” he said shortly, “of asking Mr. Barker to come here also.”
As he spoke, indeed, Barker came swinging into the office, with his usual air of hurry.
“What is happening now?” asked Buck, turning to him with a kind of relief.
“Fighting still going on,” said Barker. “The four hundred from West Kensington were hardly touched last night. They hardly got near the place. Poor Wilson’s Bayswater men got cut about, though. They fought confoundedly well. They took Pump Street once. What mad things do happen in the world. To think that of all of us it should be little Wilson with the red whiskers who came out best.”
The King made a note on his paper —
“Romantic Conduct of Mr. Wilson.”
“Yes,” said Buck; “it makes one a bit less proud of one’s h’s.”
The King suddenly folded or crumpled up the paper, and put it in his pocket.
“I have an idea,” he said. “I will be an eye-witness. I will write you such letters from the Front as will be more gorgeous than the real thing. Give me my coat, Paladium. I entered this room a mere King of England. I leave it, Special War Correspondent of the Court Journal. It is useless to stop me, Pally; it is vain to cling to my knees, Buck; it is hopeless, Barker, to weep upon my neck. ‘When duty calls’ — the remainder of the sentiment escapes me. You will receive my first article this evening by the eight-o’clock post.”
And, running out of the office, he jumped upon a blue Bayswater omnibus that went swinging by.
“Well,” said Barker, gloomily, “well.”
“Barker,” said Buck, “business may be lower than politics, but war is, as I discovered last night, a long sight more like business. You politicians are such ingrained demagogues that even when you have a despotism you think of nothing but public opinion. So you learn to tack and run, and are afraid of the first breeze. Now we stick to a thing and get it. And our mistakes help us. Look here! at this moment we’ve beaten Wayne.”
“Beaten Wayne,” repeated Barker.
“Why the dickens not?” cried the other, flinging out his hands. “Look here. I said last night that we had them by holding the nine entrances. Well, I was wrong. We should have had them but for a singular event — the lamps went out. But for that it was certain. Has it occurred to you, my brilliant Barker, that another singular event has happened since that singular event of the lamps going out?”
“What event?” asked Barker.
“By an astounding coincidence, the sun has risen,” cried out Buck, with a savage air of patience. “Why the hell aren’t we holding all those approaches now, and passing in on them again? It should have been done at sunrise. The confounded doctor wouldn’t let me go out. You were in command.”
Barker smiled grimly.
“It is a gratification to me, my dear Buck, to be able to say that we anticipated your suggestions precisely. We went as early as possible to reconnoitre the nine entrances. Unfortunately, while we were fighting each other in the dark, like a lot of drunken navvies, Mr. Wayne’s friends were working very hard indeed. Three hundred yards from Pump Street, at every one of those entrances, there is a barricade nearly as high as the houses. They were finishing the last, in Pembridge Road, when we arrived. Our mistakes,” he cried bitterly, and flung his cigarette on the ground. “It is not we who learn from them.”
There was a silence for a few moments, and Barker lay back wearily in a chair. The office clock ticked exactly in the stillness.
At length Barker said suddenly —
“Buck, does it ever cross your mind what this is all about? The Hammersmith to Maida Vale thoroughfare was an uncommonly good speculation. You and I hoped a great deal from it. But is it worth it? It will cost us thousands to crush this ridiculous riot. Suppose we let it alone?”
