Kabanata Kabanata 9 · The Experiment of Mr. Buck_

. The Experiment of Mr. Buck_

An earnest and eloquent petition was sent up to the King signed with

the names of Wilson, Barker, Buck, Swindon, and others. It urged that

at the forthcoming conference to be held in his Majesty's presence

touching the final disposition of the property in Pump Street, it

might be held not inconsistent with political decorum and with the

unutterable respect they entertained for his Majesty if they appeared

in ordinary morning dress, without the costume decreed for them as

Provosts. So it happened that the company appeared at that council in

frock-coats and that the King himself limited his love of ceremony to

appearing (after his not unusual manner), in evening dress with one

order--in this case not the Garter, but the button of the Club of Old

Clipper's Best Pals, a decoration obtained (with difficulty) from a

halfpenny boy's paper. Thus also it happened that the only spot of

colour in the room was Adam Wayne, who entered in great dignity with

the great red robes and the great sword.

"We have met," said Auberon, "to decide the most arduous of modern

problems. May we be successful." And he sat down gravely.

Buck turned his chair a little, and flung one leg over the other.

"Your Majesty," he said, quite good-humouredly, "there is only one

thing I can't understand, and that is why this affair is not settled

in five minutes. Here's a small property which is worth a thousand to

us and is not worth a hundred to any one else. We offer the thousand.

It's not business-like, I know, for we ought to get it for less, and

it's not reasonable and it's not fair on us, but I'm damned if I can

see why it's difficult."

"The difficulty may be very simply stated," said Wayne. "You may offer

a million and it will be very difficult for you to get Pump Street."

"But look here, Mr. Wayne," cried Barker, striking in with a kind of

cold excitement. "Just look here. You've no right to take up a

position like that. You've a right to stand out for a bigger price,

but you aren't doing that. You're refusing what you and every sane man

knows to be a splendid offer simply from malice or spite--it must be

malice or spite. And that kind of thing is really criminal; it's

against the public good. The King's Government would be justified in

forcing you."

With his lean fingers spread on the table, he stared anxiously at

Wayne's face, which did not move.

"In forcing you ... it would," he repeated.

"It shall," said Buck, shortly, turning to the table with a jerk. "We

have done our best to be decent."

Wayne lifted his large eyes slowly.

"Was it my Lord Buck," he inquired, "who said that the King of England

'shall' do something?"

Buck flushed and said testily--

"I mean it must--it ought to. As I say, we've done our best to be

generous; I defy any one to deny it. As it is, Mr. Wayne, I don't want

to say a word that's uncivil. I hope it's not uncivil to say that you

can be, and ought to be, in gaol. It is criminal to stop public works

for a whim. A man might as well burn ten thousand onions in his front

garden or bring up his children to run naked in the street, as do what

you say you have a right to do. People have been compelled to sell

before now. The King could compel you, and I hope he will."

"Until he does," said Wayne, calmly, "the power and government of

this great nation is on my side and not yours, and I defy you to defy

it."

"In what sense," cried Barker, with his feverish eyes and hands, "is

the Government on your side?"

With one ringing movement Wayne unrolled a great parchment on the

table. It was decorated down the sides with wild water-colour sketches

of vestrymen in crowns and wreaths.

"The Charter of the Cities," he began.

Buck exploded in a brutal oath and laughed.

"That tomfool's joke. Haven't we had enough--"

"And there you sit," cried Wayne, springing erect and with a voice

like a trumpet, "with no argument but to insult the King before his

face."

Buck rose also with blazing eyes.

"I am hard to bully," he began--and the slow tones of the King struck

in with incomparable gravity--

"My Lord Buck, I must ask you to remember that your King is present.

It is not often that he needs to protect himself among his subjects."

Barker turned to him with frantic gestures.

"For God's sake don't back up the madman now," he implored. "Have

your joke another time. Oh, for Heaven's sake--"

"My Lord Provost of South Kensington," said King Auberon, steadily, "I

do not follow your remarks, which are uttered with a rapidity unusual

at Court. Nor do your well-meant efforts to convey the rest with your

fingers materially assist me. I say that my Lord Provost of North

Kensington, to whom I spoke, ought not in the presence of his

Sovereign to speak disrespectfully of his Sovereign's ordinances. Do

you disagree?"

Barker turned restlessly in his chair, and Buck cursed without

speaking. The King went on in a comfortable voice--

"My Lord Provost of Notting Hill, proceed."

Wayne turned his blue eyes on the King, and to every one's surprise

there was a look in them not of triumph, but of a certain childish

distress.

"I am sorry, your Majesty," he said; "I fear I was more than equally

to blame with the Lord Provost of North Kensington. We were debating

somewhat eagerly, and we both rose to our feet. I did so first, I am

ashamed to say. The Provost of North Kensington is, therefore,

comparatively innocent. I beseech your Majesty to address your rebuke

chiefly, at least, to me. Mr. Buck is not innocent, for he did no

doubt, in the heat of the moment, speak disrespectfully. But the rest

of the discussion he seems to me to have conducted with great good

temper."

Buck looked genuinely pleased, for business men are all simple-minded,

and have therefore that degree of communion with fanatics. The King,

for some reason, looked, for the first time in his life, ashamed.

"This very kind speech of the Provost of Notting Hill," began Buck,

pleasantly, "seems to me to show that we have at least got on to a

friendly footing. Now come, Mr. Wayne. Five hundred pounds have been

offered to you for a property you admit not to be worth a hundred.

Well, I am a rich man and I won't be outdone in generosity. Let us say

fifteen hundred pounds, and have done with it. And let us shake

hands;" and he rose, glowing and laughing.

"Fifteen hundred pounds," whispered Mr. Wilson of Bayswater; "can we

do fifteen hundred pounds?"

"I'll stand the racket," said Buck, heartily. "Mr. Wayne is a

gentleman and has spoken up for me. So I suppose the negotiations are

at an end."

Wayne bowed.

"They are indeed at an end. I am sorry I cannot sell you the

property."

"What?" cried Mr. Barker, starting to his feet.

"Mr. Buck has spoken correctly," said the King.

"I have, I have," cried Buck, springing up also; "I said--"

"Mr. Buck has spoken correctly," said the King; "the negotiations are

at an end."

All the men at the table rose to their feet; Wayne alone rose without

excitement.

"Have I, then," he said, "your Majesty's permission to depart? I have

given my last answer."

"You have it," said Auberon, smiling, but not lifting his eyes from

the table. And amid a dead silence the Provost of Notting Hill passed

out of the room.

"Well?" said Wilson, turning round to Barker--"well?"

Barker shook his head desperately.

"The man ought to be in an asylum," he said. "But one thing is

clear--we need not bother further about him. The man can be treated as

mad."

"Of course," said Buck, turning to him with sombre decisiveness.

"You're perfectly right, Barker. He is a good enough fellow, but he

can be treated as mad. Let's put it in simple form. Go and tell any

twelve men in any town, go and tell any doctor in any town, that there

is a man offered fifteen hundred pounds for a thing he could sell

commonly for four hundred, and that when asked for a reason for not

accepting it he pleads the inviolate sanctity of Notting Hill and

calls it the Holy Mountain. What would they say? What more can we have

on our side than the common sense of everybody? On what else do all

laws rest? I'll tell you, Barker, what's better than any further

discussion. Let's send in workmen on the spot to pull down Pump

Street. And if old Wayne says a word, arrest him as a lunatic. That's

all."

Barker's eyes kindled.

"I always regarded you, Buck, if you don't mind my saying so, as a

very strong man. I'll follow you."

"So, of course, will I," said Wilson.

Buck rose again impulsively.

"Your Majesty," he said, glowing with popularity, "I beseech your

Majesty to consider favourably the proposal to which we have committed

ourselves. Your Majesty's leniency, our own offers, have fallen in

vain on that extraordinary man. He may be right. He may be God. He

may be the devil. But we think it, for practical purposes, more

probable that he is off his head. Unless that assumption were acted

on, all human affairs would go to pieces. We act on it, and we propose

to start operations in Notting Hill at once."

The King leaned back in his chair.

"The Charter of the Cities ...," he said with a rich intonation.

But Buck, being finally serious, was also cautious, and did not again

make the mistake of disrespect.

"Your Majesty," he said, bowing, "I am not here to say a word against

anything your Majesty has said or done. You are a far better educated

man than I, and no doubt there were reasons, upon intellectual

grounds, for those proceedings. But may I ask you and appeal to your

common good-nature for a sincere answer? When you drew up the Charter

of the Cities, did you contemplate the rise of a man like Adam Wayne?

Did you expect that the Charter--whether it was an experiment, or a

scheme of decoration, or a joke--could ever really come to this--to

stopping a vast scheme of ordinary business, to shutting up a road,

to spoiling the chances of cabs, omnibuses, railway stations, to

disorganising half a city, to risking a kind of civil war? Whatever

were your objects, were they that?"

Barker and Wilson looked at him admiringly; the King more admiringly

still.

"Provost Buck," said Auberon, "you speak in public uncommonly well. I

give you your point with the magnanimity of an artist. My scheme did

not include the appearance of Mr. Wayne. Alas! would that my poetic

power had been great enough."

"I thank your Majesty," said Buck, courteously, but quickly. "Your

Majesty's statements are always clear and studied; therefore I may

draw a deduction. As the scheme, whatever it was, on which you set

your heart did not include the appearance of Mr. Wayne, it will

survive his removal. Why not let us clear away this particular Pump

Street, which does interfere with our plans, and which does not, by

your Majesty's own statement, interfere with yours."

"Caught out!" said the King, enthusiastically and quite impersonally,

as if he were watching a cricket match.

"This man Wayne," continued Buck, "would be shut up by any doctors in

England. But we only ask to have it put before them. Meanwhile no

one's interests, not even in all probability his own, can be really

damaged by going on with the improvements in Notting Hill. Not our

interests, of course, for it has been the hard and quiet work of ten

years. Not the interests of Notting Hill, for nearly all its educated

inhabitants desire the change. Not the interests of your Majesty, for

you say, with characteristic sense, that you never contemplated the

rise of the lunatic at all. Not, as I say, his own interests, for the

man has a kind heart and many talents, and a couple of good doctors

would probably put him righter than all the free cities and sacred

mountains in creation. I therefore assume, if I may use so bold a

word, that your Majesty will not offer any obstacle to our proceeding

with the improvements."

And Mr. Buck sat down amid subdued but excited applause among the

allies.

"Mr. Buck," said the King, "I beg your pardon, for a number of

beautiful and sacred thoughts, in which you were generally classified

as a fool. But there is another thing to be considered. Suppose you

send in your workmen, and Mr. Wayne does a thing regrettable indeed,

but of which, I am sorry to say, I think him quite capable--knocks

their teeth out?"

"I have thought of that, your Majesty," said Mr. Buck, easily, "and I

think it can simply be guarded against. Let us send in a strong guard

of, say, a hundred men--a hundred of the North Kensington Halberdiers"

(he smiled grimly), "of whom your Majesty is so fond. Or say a hundred

and fifty. The whole population of Pump Street, I fancy, is only about

a hundred."

"Still they might stand together and lick you," said the King,

dubiously.

"Then say two hundred," said Buck, gaily.

"It might happen," said the King, restlessly, "that one Notting Hiller

fought better than two North Kensingtons."

"It might," said Buck, coolly; "then say two hundred and fifty."

The King bit his lip.

"And if they are beaten too?" he said viciously.

"Your Majesty," said Buck, and leaned back easily in his chair,

"suppose they are. If anything be clear, it is clear that all fighting

matters are mere matters of arithmetic. Here we have a hundred and

fifty, say, of Notting Hill soldiers. Or say two hundred. If one of

them can fight two of us--we can send in, not four hundred, but six

hundred, and smash him. That is all. It is out of all immediate

probability that one of them could fight four of us. So what I say is

this. Run no risks. Finish it at once. Send in eight hundred men and

smash him--smash him almost without seeing him. And go on with the

improvements."

And Mr. Buck pulled out a bandanna and blew his nose.

"Do you know, Mr. Buck," said the King, staring gloomily at the table,

"the admirable clearness of your reason produces in my mind a

sentiment which I trust I shall not offend you by describing as an

aspiration to punch your head. You irritate me sublimely. What can it

be in me? Is it the relic of a moral sense?"

"But your Majesty," said Barker, eagerly and suavely, "does not refuse

our proposals?"

"My dear Barker, your proposals are as damnable as your manners. I

want to have nothing to do with them. Suppose I stopped them

altogether. What would happen?"

Barker answered in a very low voice--

"Revolution."

The King glanced quickly at the men round the table. They were all

looking down silently: their brows were red.

He rose with a startling suddenness, and an unusual pallor.

"Gentlemen," he said, "you have overruled me. Therefore I can speak

plainly. I think Adam Wayne, who is as mad as a hatter, worth more

than a million of you. But you have the force, and, I admit, the

common sense, and he is lost. Take your eight hundred halberdiers and

smash him. It would be more sportsmanlike to take two hundred."

"More sportsmanlike," said Buck, grimly, "but a great deal less

humane. We are not artists, and streets purple with gore do not catch

our eye in the right way."

"It is pitiful," said Auberon. "With five or six times their number,

there will be no fight at all."

"I hope not," said Buck, rising and adjusting his gloves. "We desire

no fight, your Majesty. We are peaceable business men."

"Well," said the King, wearily, "the conference is at an end at last."

And he went out of the room before any one else could stir.

* * * * *

Forty workmen, a hundred Bayswater Halberdiers, two hundred from

South, and three from North Kensington, assembled at the foot of

Holland Walk and marched up it, under the general direction of Barker,

who looked flushed and happy in full dress. At the end of the

procession a small and sulky figure lingered like an urchin. It was

the King.

"Barker," he said at length, appealingly, "you are an old friend of

mine--you understand my hobbies as I understand yours. Why can't you

let it alone? I hoped that such fun might come out of this Wayne

business. Why can't you let it alone? It doesn't really so much matter

to you--what's a road or so? For me it's the one joke that may save me

from pessimism. Take fewer men and give me an hour's fun. Really and

truly, James, if you collected coins or humming-birds, and I could buy

one with the price of your road, I would buy it. I collect

incidents--those rare, those precious things. Let me have one. Pay a

few pounds for it. Give these Notting Hillers a chance. Let them

alone."

"Auberon," said Barker, kindly, forgetting all royal titles in a rare

moment of sincerity, "I do feel what you mean. I have had moments when

these hobbies have hit me. I have had moments when I have sympathised

with your humours. I have had moments, though you may not easily

believe it, when I have sympathised with the madness of Adam Wayne.

But the world, Auberon, the real world, is not run on these hobbies.

It goes on great brutal wheels of facts--wheels on which you are the

butterfly; and Wayne is the fly on the wheel."

Auberon's eyes looked frankly at the other's.

"Thank you, James; what you say is true. It is only a parenthetical

consolation to me to compare the intelligence of flies somewhat

favourably with the intelligence of wheels. But it is the nature of

flies to die soon, and the nature of wheels to go on for ever. Go on

with the wheel. Good-bye, old man."

And James Barker went on, laughing, with a high colour, slapping his

bamboo on his leg.

The King watched the tail of the retreating regiment with a look of

genuine depression, which made him seem more like a baby than ever.

Then he swung round and struck his hands together.

"In a world without humour," he said, "the only thing to do is to eat.

And how perfect an exception! How can these people strike dignified

attitudes, and pretend that things matter, when the total

ludicrousness of life is proved by the very method by which it is

supported? A man strikes the lyre, and says, 'Life is real, life is

earnest,' and then goes into a room and stuffs alien substances into a

hole in his head. I think Nature was indeed a little broad in her

humour in these matters. But we all fall back on the pantomime, as I

have in this municipal affair. Nature has her farces, like the act of

eating or the shape of the kangaroo, for the more brutal appetite. She

keeps her stars and mountains for those who can appreciate something

more subtly ridiculous." He turned to his equerry. "But, as I said

'eating,' let us have a picnic like two nice little children. Just run

and bring me a table and a dozen courses or so, and plenty of

champagne, and under these swinging boughs, Bowler, we will return to

Nature."

It took about an hour to erect in Holland Lane the monarch's simple

repast, during which time he walked up and down and whistled, but

still with an unaffected air of gloom. He had really been done out of

a pleasure he had promised himself, and had that empty and sickened

feeling which a child has when disappointed of a pantomime. When he

and the equerry had sat down, however, and consumed a fair amount of

dry champagne, his spirits began mildly to revive.

"Things take too long in this world," he said. "I detest all this

Barkerian business about evolution and the gradual modification of

things. I wish the world had been made in six days, and knocked to

pieces again in six more. And I wish I had done it. The joke's good

enough in a broad way, sun and moon and the image of God, and all

that, but they keep it up so damnably long. Did you ever long for a

miracle, Bowler?"

"No, sir," said Bowler, who was an evolutionist, and had been

carefully brought up.

"Then I have," answered the King. "I have walked along a street with

the best cigar in the cosmos in my mouth, and more Burgundy inside me

than you ever saw in your life, and longed that the lamp-post would

turn into an elephant to save me from the hell of blank existence.

Take my word for it, my evolutionary Bowler, don't you believe people

when they tell you that people sought for a sign, and believed in

miracles because they were ignorant. They did it because they were

wise, filthily, vilely wise--too wise to eat or sleep or put on their

boots with patience. This seems delightfully like a new theory of the

origin of Christianity, which would itself be a thing of no mean

absurdity. Take some more wine."

The wind blew round them as they sat at their little table, with its

white cloth and bright wine-cups, and flung the tree-tops of Holland

Park against each other, but the sun was in that strong temper which

turns green into gold. The King pushed away his plate, lit a cigar

slowly, and went on--

"Yesterday I thought that something next door to a really entertaining

miracle might happen to me before I went to amuse the worms. To see

that red-haired maniac waving a great sword, and making speeches to

his incomparable followers, would have been a glimpse of that Land of

Youth from which the Fates shut us out. I had planned some quite

delightful things. A Congress of Knightsbridge with a treaty, and

myself in the chair, and perhaps a Roman triumph, with jolly old

Barker led in chains. And now these wretched prigs have gone and

stamped out the exquisite Mr. Wayne altogether, and I suppose they

will put him in a private asylum somewhere in their damned humane way.

Think of the treasures daily poured out to his unappreciative keeper!

I wonder whether they would let me be his keeper. But life is a vale.

Never forget at any moment of your existence to regard it in the light

of a vale. This graceful habit, if not acquired in youth--"

The King stopped, with his cigar lifted, for there had slid into his

eyes the startled look of a man listening. He did not move for a few

moments; then he turned his head sharply towards the high, thin, and

lath-like paling which fenced certain long gardens and similar spaces

from the lane. From behind it there was coming a curious scrambling

and scraping noise, as of a desperate thing imprisoned in this box of

thin wood. The King threw away his cigar, and jumped on to the table.

From this position he saw a pair of hands hanging with a hungry clutch

on the top of the fence. Then the hands quivered with a convulsive

effort, and a head shot up between them--the head of one of the

Bayswater Town Council, his eyes and whiskers wild with fear. He swung

himself over, and fell on the other side on his face, and groaned

openly and without ceasing. The next moment the thin, taut wood of the

fence was struck as by a bullet, so that it reverberated like a drum,

and over it came tearing and cursing, with torn clothes and broken

nails and bleeding faces, twenty men at one rush. The King sprang five

feet clear off the table on to the ground. The moment after the table

was flung over, sending bottles and glasses flying, and the _debris_

was literally swept along the ground by that stream of men pouring

past, and Bowler was borne along with them, as the King said in his

famous newspaper article, "like a captured bride." The great fence

swung and split under the load of climbers that still scaled and

cleared it. Tremendous gaps were torn in it by this living artillery;

and through them the King could see more and more frantic faces, as in

a dream, and more and more men running. They were as miscellaneous as

if some one had taken the lid off a human dustbin. Some were

untouched, some were slashed and battered and bloody, some were

splendidly dressed, some tattered and half naked, some were in the

fantastic garb of the burlesque cities, some in the dullest modern

dress. The King stared at all of them, but none of them looked at the

King. Suddenly he stepped forward.

"Barker," he said, "what is all this?"

"Beaten," said the politician--"beaten all to hell!" And he plunged

past with nostrils shaking like a horse's, and more and more men

plunged after him.

Almost as he spoke, the last standing strip of fence bowed and

snapped, flinging, as from a catapult, a new figure upon the road. He

wore the flaming red of the halberdiers of Notting Hill, and on his

weapon there was blood, and in his face victory. In another moment

masses of red glowed through the gaps of the fence, and the pursuers,

with their halberds, came pouring down the lane. Pursued and pursuers

alike swept by the little figure with the owlish eyes, who had not

taken his hands out of his pockets.

The King had still little beyond the confused sense of a man caught in

a torrent--the feeling of men eddying by. Then something happened

which he was never able afterwards to describe, and which we cannot

describe for him. Suddenly in the dark entrance, between the broken

gates of a garden, there appeared framed a flaming figure.

Adam Wayne, the conqueror, with his face flung back, and his mane like

a lion's, stood with his great sword point upwards, the red raiment of

his office flapping round him like the red wings of an archangel. And

the King saw, he knew not how, something new and overwhelming. The

great green trees and the great red robes swung together in the wind.

The sword seemed made for the sunlight. The preposterous masquerade,

born of his own mockery, towered over him and embraced the world. This

was the normal, this was sanity, this was nature; and he himself,

with his rationality and his detachment and his black frock-coat, he

was the exception and the accident--a blot of black upon a world of

crimson and gold.

BOOK IV