On the evening of the third of October, twenty years after the great victory of Notting Hill, which gave it the dominion of London, King Auberon came, as of old, out of Kensington Palace.
He had changed little, save for a streak or two of grey in his hair, for his face had always been old, and his step slow, and, as it were, decrepit.
If he looked old, it was not because of anything physical or mental. It was because he still wore, with a quaint conservatism, the frock-coat and high hat of the days before the great war. “I have survived the Deluge,” he said. “I am a pyramid, and must behave as such.”
As he passed up the street the Kensingtonians, in their picturesque blue smocks, saluted him as a King, and then looked after him as a curiosity. It seemed odd to them that men had once worn so elvish an attire.
The King, cultivating the walk attributed to the oldest inhabitant (“Gaffer Auberon” his friends were now confidentially desired to call him), went toddling northward. He paused, with reminiscence in his eye, at the Southern Gate of Notting Hill, one of those nine great gates of bronze and steel, wrought with reliefs of the old battles, by the hand of Chiffy himself.
“Ah!” he said, shaking his head and assuming an unnecessary air of age, and a provincialism of accent —“Ah! I mind when there warn’t none of this here.”
He passed through the Ossington Gate, surmounted by a great lion, wrought in red copper on yellow brass, with the motto, “Nothing Ill.” The guard in red and gold saluted him with his halberd.
It was about sunset, and the lamps were being lit. Auberon paused to look at them, for they were Chiffy’s finest work, and his artistic eye never failed to feast on them. In memory of the Great Battle of the Lamps, each great iron lamp was surmounted by a veiled figure, sword in hand, holding over the flame an iron hood or extinguisher, as if ready to let it fall if the armies of the South and West should again show their flags in the city. Thus no child in Notting Hill could play about the streets without the very lamp-posts reminding him of the salvation of his country in the dreadful year.
“Old Wayne was right in a way,” commented the King. “The sword does make things beautiful. It has made the whole world romantic by now. And to think people once thought me a buffoon for suggesting a romantic Notting Hill. Deary me, deary me! (I think that is the expression)— it seems like a previous existence.”
Turning a corner, he found himself in Pump Street, opposite the four shops which Adam Wayne had studied twenty years before. He entered idly the shop of Mr. Mead, the grocer. Mr. Mead was somewhat older, like the rest of the world, and his red beard, which he now wore with a moustache, and long and full, was partly blanched and discoloured. He was dressed in a long and richly embroidered robe of blue, brown, and crimson, interwoven with an Eastern complexity of pattern, and covered with obscure symbols and pictures, representing his wares passing from hand to hand and from nation to nation. Round his neck was the chain with the Blue Argosy cut in turquoise, which he wore as Grand Master of the Grocers. The whole shop had the sombre and sumptuous look of its owner. The wares were displayed as prominently as in the old days, but they were now blended and arranged with a sense of tint and grouping, too often neglected by the dim grocers of those forgotten days. The wares were shown plainly, but shown not so much as an old grocer would have shown his stock, but rather as an educated virtuoso would have shown his treasures. The tea was stored in great blue and green vases, inscribed with the nine indispensable sayings of the wise men of China. Other vases of a confused orange and purple, less rigid and dominant, more humble and dreamy, stored symbolically the tea of India. A row of caskets of a simple silvery metal contained tinned meats. Each was wrought with some rude but rhythmic form, as a shell, a horn, a fish, or an apple, to indicate what material had been canned in it.
“Your Majesty,” said Mr. Mead, sweeping an Oriental reverence. “This is an honour to me, but yet more an honour to the city.”
Auberon took off his hat.
“Mr. Mead,” he said, “Notting Hill, whether in giving or taking, can deal in nothing but honour. Do you happen to sell liquorice?”
“Liquorice, sire,” said Mr. Mead, “is not the least important of our benefits out of the dark heart of Arabia.”
And going reverently towards a green and silver canister, made in the form of an Arabian mosque, he proceeded to serve his customer.
“I was just thinking, Mr. Mead,” said the King, reflectively, “I don’t know why I should think about it just now, but I was just thinking of twenty years ago. Do you remember the times before the war?”
The grocer, having wrapped up the liquorice sticks in a piece of paper (inscribed with some appropriate sentiment), lifted his large grey eyes dreamily, and looked at the darkening sky outside.
“Oh yes, your Majesty,” he said. “I remember these streets before the Lord Provost began to rule us. I can’t remember how we felt very well. All the great songs and the fighting change one so; and I don’t think we can really estimate all we owe to the Provost; but I can remember his coming into this very shop twenty-two years ago, and I remember the things he said. The singular thing is that, as far as I remember, I thought the things he said odd at that time. Now it’s the things that I said, as far as I can recall them, that seem to me odd — as odd as a madman’s antics.”
“Ah!” said the King; and looked at him with an unfathomable quietness.
“I thought nothing of being a grocer then,” he said. “Isn’t that odd enough for anybody? I thought nothing of all the wonderful places that my goods come from, and wonderful ways that they are made. I did not know that I was for all practical purposes a king with slaves spearing fishes near the secret pool, and gathering fruits in the islands under the world. My mind was a blank on the thing. I was as mad as a hatter.”
The King turned also, and stared out into the dark, where the great lamps that commemorated the battle were already flaming.
“And is this the end of poor old Wayne?” he said, half to himself. “To inflame every one so much that he is lost himself in the blaze. Is this his victory that he, my incomparable Wayne, is now only one in a world of Waynes? Has he conquered and become by conquest commonplace? Must Mr. Mead, the grocer, talk as high as he? Lord! what a strange world in which a man cannot remain unique even by taking the trouble to go mad!”
And he went dreamily out of the shop.
He paused outside the next one almost precisely as the Provost had done two decades before.
A FINE EVENING, SIR, SAID THE CHEMIST.
"A fine evening, sir," said the chemist.
“How uncommonly creepy this shop looks!” he said. “But yet somehow encouragingly creepy, invitingly creepy. It looks like something in a jolly old nursery story in which you are frightened out of your skin, and yet know that things always end well. The way those low sharp gables are carved like great black bat’s wings folded down, and the way those queer-coloured bowls underneath are made to shine like giants eye-balls. It looks like a benevolent warlock’s hut. It is apparently a chemist’s .”
Almost as he spoke, Mr. Bowles, the chemist, came to his shop door in a long black velvet gown and hood, monastic as it were, but yet with a touch of the diabolic. His hair was still quite black, and his face even paler than of old. The only spot of colour he carried was a red star cut in some precious stone of strong tint, hung on his breast. He belonged to the Society of the Red Star of Charity, founded on the lamps displayed by doctors and chemists.
“A fine evening, sir,” said the chemist. “Why, I can scarcely be mistaken in supposing it to be your Majesty. Pray step inside and share a bottle of sal-volatile, or anything that may take your fancy. As it happens, there is an old acquaintance of your Majesty’s in my shop carousing (if I may be permitted the term) upon that beverage at this moment.”
The King entered the shop, which was an Aladdin’s garden of shades and hues, for as the chemist’s scheme of colour was more brilliant than the grocer’s scheme, so it was arranged with even more delicacy and fancy. Never, if the phrase may be employed, had such a nosegay of medicines been presented to the artistic eye.
But even the solemn rainbow of that evening interior was rivalled or even eclipsed by the figure standing in the centre of the shop. His form, which was a large and stately one, was clad in a brilliant blue velvet, cut in the richest Renaissance fashion, and slashed so as to show gleams and gaps of a wonderful lemon or pale yellow. He had several chains round his neck, and his plumes, which were of several tints of bronze and gold, hung down to the great gold hilt of his long sword. He was drinking a dose of sal-volatile, and admiring its opal tint. The King advanced with a slight mystification towards the tall figure, whose face was in shadow; then he said —
“By the Great Lord of Luck, Barker!”
The figure removed his plumed cap, showing the same dark head and long, almost equine face which the King had so often seen rising out of the high collar of Bond Street. Except for a grey patch on each temple, it was totally unchanged.
“Your Majesty,” said Barker, “this is a meeting nobly retrospective, a meeting that has about it a certain October gold. I drink to old days;” and he finished his sal-volatile with simple feeling.
“I am delighted to see you again, Barker,” said the King. “It is indeed long since we met. What with my travels in Asia Minor, and my book having to be written (you have read my ‘Life of Prince Albert for Children,’ of course?), we have scarcely met twice since the Great War. That is twenty years ago.”
“I wonder,” said Barker, thoughtfully, “if I might speak freely to your Majesty?”
“Well,” said Auberon, “it’s rather late in the day to start speaking respectfully. Flap away, my bird of freedom.”
“Well, your Majesty,” replied Barker, lowering his voice, “I don’t think it will be so long to the next war.”
“What do you mean?” asked Auberon.
“We will stand this insolence no longer,” burst out Barker, fiercely. “We are not slaves because Adam Wayne twenty years ago cheated us with a water-pipe. Notting Hill is Notting Hill; it is not the world. We in South Kensington, we also have memories — ay, and hopes. If they fought for these trumpery shops and a few lamp-posts, shall we not fight for the great High Street and the sacred Natural History Museum?”
“Great Heavens!” said the astounded Auberon. “Will wonders never cease? Have the two greatest marvels been achieved? Have you turned altruistic, and has Wayne turned selfish? Are you the patriot, and he the tyrant?”
“It is not from Wayne himself altogether that the evil comes,” answered Barker. “He, indeed, is now mostly wrapped in dreams, and sits with his old sword beside the fire. But Notting Hill is the tyrant, your Majesty. Its Council and its crowds have been so intoxicated by the spreading over the whole city of Wayne’s old ways and visions, that they try to meddle with every one, and rule every one, and civilise every one, and tell every one what is good for him. I do not deny the great impulse which his old war, wild as it seemed............