Chương Chương 8 · The Remarkable Mr. Turnbull_

. The Remarkable Mr. Turnbull_

After two more interviews with shopmen, however, the patriot's

confidence in his own psychological diplomacy began vaguely to wane.

Despite the care with which he considered the peculiar rationale and

the peculiar glory of each separate shop, there seemed to be something

unresponsive about the shopmen. Whether it was a dark resentment

against the uninitiate for peeping into their masonic magnificence, he

could not quite conjecture.

His conversation with the man who kept the shop of curiosities had

begun encouragingly. The man who kept the shop of curiosities had,

indeed, enchanted him with a phrase. He was standing drearily at the

door of his shop, a wrinkled man with a grey pointed beard, evidently

a gentleman who had come down in the world.

"And how does your commerce go, you strange guardian of the past?"

said Wayne, affably.

"Well, sir, not very well," replied the man, with that patient voice

of his class which is one of the most heart-breaking things in the

world. "Things are terribly quiet."

Wayne's eyes shone suddenly.

"A great saying," he said, "worthy of a man whose merchandise is human

history. Terribly quiet; that is in two words the spirit of this age,

as I have felt it from my cradle. I sometimes wondered how many other

people felt the oppression of this union between quietude and terror.

I see blank well-ordered streets and men in black moving about

inoffensively, sullenly. It goes on day after day, day after day, and

nothing happens; but to me it is like a dream from which I might wake

screaming. To me the straightness of our life is the straightness of a

thin cord stretched tight. Its stillness is terrible. It might snap

with a noise like thunder. And you who sit, amid the _debris_ of the

great wars, you who sit, as it were, upon a battlefield, you know that

war was less terrible than this evil peace; you know that the idle

lads who carried those swords under Francis or Elizabeth, the rude

Squire or Baron who swung that mace about in Picardy or Northumberland

battles, may have been terribly noisy, but were not like us, terribly

quiet."

Whether it was a faint embarrassment of conscience as to the original

source and date of the weapons referred to, or merely an engrained

depression, the guardian of the past looked, if anything, a little

more worried.

"But I do not think," continued Wayne, "that this horrible silence of

modernity will last, though I think for the present it will increase.

What a farce is this modern liberality! Freedom of speech means

practically, in our modern civilisation, that we must only talk about

unimportant things. We must not talk about religion, for that is

illiberal; we must not talk about bread and cheese, for that is

talking shop; we must not talk about death, for that is depressing; we

must not talk about birth, for that is indelicate. It cannot last.

Something must break this strange indifference, this strange dreamy

egoism, this strange loneliness of millions in a crowd. Something must

break it. Why should it not be you and I? Can you do nothing else but

guard relics?"

The shopman wore a gradually clearing expression, which would have led

those unsympathetic with the cause of the Red Lion to think that the

last sentence was the only one to which he had attached any meaning.

"I am rather old to go into a new business," he said, "and I don't

quite know what to be, either."

"Why not," said Wayne, gently having reached the crisis of his

delicate persuasion--"why not be a colonel?"

It was at this point, in all probability, that the interview began to

yield more disappointing results. The man appeared inclined at first

to regard the suggestion of becoming a colonel as outside the sphere

of immediate and relevant discussion. A long exposition of the

inevitable war of independence, coupled with the purchase of a

doubtful sixteenth-century sword for an exaggerated price, seemed to

resettle matters. Wayne left the shop, however, somewhat infected with

the melancholy of its owner.

That melancholy was completed at the barber's.

"Shaving, sir?" inquired that artist from inside his shop.

"War!" replied Wayne, standing on the threshold.

"I beg your pardon," said the other, sharply.

"War!" said Wayne, warmly. "But not for anything inconsistent with the

beautiful and the civilised arts. War for beauty. War for society. War

for peace. A great chance is offered you of repelling that slander

which, in defiance of the lives of so many artists, attributes

poltroonery to those who beautify and polish the surface of our lives.

Why should not hairdressers be heroes? Why should not--"

"Now, you get out," said the barber, irascibly. "We don't want any of

your sort here. You get out."

And he came forward with the desperate annoyance of a mild person when

enraged.

Adam Wayne laid his hand for a moment on the sword, then dropped it.

"Notting Hill," he said, "will need her bolder sons;" and he turned

gloomily to the toy-shop.

It was one of those queer little shops so constantly seen in the side

streets of London, which must be called toy-shops only because toys

upon the whole predominate; for the remainder of goods seem to consist

of almost everything else in the world--tobacco, exercise-books,

sweet-stuff, novelettes, halfpenny paper clips, halfpenny pencil

sharpeners, bootlaces, and cheap fireworks. It also sold newspapers,

and a row of dirty-looking posters hung along the front of it.

"I am afraid," said Wayne, as he entered, "that I am not getting on

with these tradesmen as I should. Is it that I have neglected to rise

to the full meaning of their work? Is there some secret buried in each

of these shops which no mere poet can discover?"

He stepped to the counter with a depression which he rapidly conquered

as he addressed the man on the other side of it,--a man of short

stature, and hair prematurely white, and the look of a large baby.

"Sir," said Wayne, "I am going from house to house in this street of

ours, seeking to stir up some sense of the danger which now threatens

our city. Nowhere have I felt my duty so difficult as here. For the

toy-shop keeper has to do with all that remains to us of Eden before

the first wars began. You sit here meditating continually upon the

wants of that wonderful time when every staircase leads to the stars,

and every garden-path to the other end of nowhere. Is it

thoughtlessly, do you think, that I strike the dark old drum of peril

in the paradise of children? But consider a moment; do not condemn me

hastily. Even that paradise itself contains the rumour or beginning of

that danger, just as the Eden that was made for perfection contained

the terrible tree. For judge childhood, even by your own arsenal of

its pleasures. You keep bricks; you make yourself thus, doubtless,

the witness of the constructive instinct older than the destructive.

You keep dolls; you make yourself the priest of that divine idolatry.

You keep Noah's Arks; you perpetuate the memory of the salvation of

all life as a precious, an irreplaceable thing. But do you keep only,

sir, the symbols of this prehistoric sanity, this childish rationality

of the earth? Do you not keep more terrible things? What are those

boxes, seemingly of lead soldiers, that I see in that glass case? Are

they not witnesses to that terror and beauty, that desire for a lovely

death, which could not be excluded even from the immortality of Eden?

Do not despise the lead soldiers, Mr. Turnbull."

"I don't," said Mr. Turnbull, of the toy-shop, shortly, but with great

emphasis.

"I am glad to hear it," replied Wayne. "I confess that I feared for my

military schemes the awful innocence of your profession. How, I

thought to myself, will this man, used only to the wooden swords that

give pleasure, think of the steel swords that give pain? But I am at

least partly reassured. Your tone suggests to me that I have at least

the entry of a gate of your fairyland--the gate through which the

soldiers enter, for it cannot be denied--I ought, sir, no longer to

deny, that it is of soldiers that I come to speak. Let your gentle

employment make you merciful towards the troubles of the world. Let

your own silvery experience tone down our sanguine sorrows. For there

is war in Notting Hill."

The little toy-shop keeper sprang up suddenly, slapping his fat hands

like two fans on the counter.

"War?" he cried. "Not really, sir? Is it true? Oh, what a joke! Oh,

what a sight for sore eyes!"

Wayne was almost taken aback by this outburst.

"I am delighted," he stammered. "I had no notion--"

He sprang out of the way just in time to avoid Mr. Turnbull, who took

a flying leap over the counter and dashed to the front of the shop.

"You look here, sir," he said; "you just look here."

He came back with two of the torn posters in his hand which were

flapping outside his shop.

"Look at those, sir," he said, and flung them down on the counter.

Wayne bent over them, and read on one--

"LAST FIGHTING.

REDUCTION OF THE CENTRAL DERVISH CITY.

REMARKABLE, ETC."

On the other he read--

"LAST SMALL REPUBLIC ANNEXED.

NICARAGUAN CAPITAL SURRENDERS AFTER A

MONTH'S FIGHTING.

GREAT SLAUGHTER."

Wayne bent over them again, evidently puzzled; then he looked at the

dates. They were both dated in August fifteen years before.

"Why do you keep these old things?" he said, startled entirely out of

his absurd tact of mysticism. "Why do you hang them outside your

shop?"

"Because," said the other, simply, "they are the records of the last

war. You mentioned war just now. It happens to be my hobby."

Wayne lifted his large blue eyes with an infantile wonder.

"Come with me," said Turnbull, shortly, and led him into a parlour at

the back of the shop.

In the centre of the parlour stood a large deal table. On it were set

rows and rows of the tin and lead soldiers which were part of the

shopkeeper's stock. The visitor would have thought nothing of it if it

had not been for a certain odd grouping of them, which did not seem

either entirely commercial or entirely haphazard.

"You are acquainted, no doubt," said Turnbull, turning his big eyes

upon Wayne--"you are acquainted, no doubt, with the arrangement of the

American and Nicaraguan troops in the last battle;" and he waved his

hand towards the table.

"I am afraid not," said Wayne. "I--"

"Ah! you were at that time occupied too much, perhaps, with the

Dervish affair. You will find it in this corner." And he pointed to a

part of the floor where there was another arrangement of children's

soldiers grouped here and there.

"You seem," said Wayne, "to be interested in military matters."

"I am interested in nothing else," answered the toy-shop keeper,

simply.

Wayne appeared convulsed with a singular, suppressed excitement.

"In that case," he said, "I may approach you with an unusual degree

of confidence. Touching the matter of the defence of Notting Hill,

I--"

"Defence of Notting Hill? Yes, sir. This way, sir," said Turnbull,

with great perturbation. "Just step into this side room;" and he led

Wayne into another apartment, in which the table was entirely covered

with an arrangement of children's bricks. A second glance at it told

Wayne that the bricks were arranged in the form of a precise and

perfect plan of Notting Hill. "Sir," said Turnbull, impressively, "you

have, by a kind of accident, hit upon the whole secret of my life. As

a boy, I grew up among the last wars of the world, when Nicaragua was

taken and the dervishes wiped out. And I adopted it as a hobby, sir,

as you might adopt astronomy or bird-stuffing. I had no ill-will to

any one, but I was interested in war as a science, as a game. And

suddenly I was bowled out. The big Powers of the world, having

swallowed up all the small ones, came to that confounded agreement,

and there was no more war. There was nothing more for me to do but to

do what I do now--to read the old campaigns in dirty old newspapers,

and to work them out with tin soldiers. One other thing had occurred

to me. I thought it an amusing fancy to make a plan of how this

district or ours ought to be defended if it were ever attacked. It

seems to interest you too."

"If it were ever attacked," repeated Wayne, awed into an almost

mechanical enunciation. "Mr. Turnbull, it is attacked. Thank Heaven, I

am bringing to at least one human being the news that is at bottom the

only good news to any son of Adam. Your life has not been useless.

Your work has not been play. Now, when the hair is already grey on

your head, Turnbull, you shall have your youth. God has not destroyed,

He has only deferred it. Let us sit down here, and you shall explain

to me this military map of Notting Hill. For you and I have to defend

Notting Hill together."

Mr. Turnbull looked at the other for a moment, then hesitated, and

then sat down beside the bricks and the stranger. He did not rise

again for seven hours, when the dawn broke.

* * * * *

The headquarters of Provost Adam Wayne and his Commander-in-Chief

consisted of a small and somewhat unsuccessful milk-shop at the corner

of Pump Street. The blank white morning had only just begun to break

over the blank London buildings when Wayne and Turnbull were to be

found seated in the cheerless and unswept shop. Wayne had something

feminine in his character; he belonged to that class of persons who

forget their meals when anything interesting is in hand. He had had

nothing for sixteen hours but hurried glasses of milk, and, with a

glass standing empty beside him, he was writing and sketching and

dotting and crossing out with inconceivable rapidity with a pencil and

a piece of paper. Turnbull was of that more masculine type in which a

sense of responsibility increases the appetite, and with his

sketch-map beside him he was dealing strenuously with a pile of

sandwiches in a paper packet, and a tankard of ale from the tavern

opposite, whose shutters had just been taken down. Neither of them

spoke, and there was no sound in the living stillness except the

scratching of Wayne's pencil and the squealing of an aimless-looking

cat. At length Wayne broke the silence by saying--

"Seventeen pounds eight shillings and ninepence."

Turnbull nodded and put his head in the tankard.

"That," said Wayne, "is not counting the five pounds you took

yesterday. What did you do with it?"

"Ah, that is rather interesting!" replied Turnbull, with his mouth

full. "I used that five pounds in a kindly and philanthropic act."

Wayne was gazing with mystification in his queer and innocent eyes.

"I used that five pounds," continued the other, "in giving no less

than forty little London boys rides in hansom cabs."

"Are you insane?" asked the Provost.

"It is only my light touch," returned Turnbull. "These hansom-cab

rides will raise the tone--raise the tone, my dear fellow--of our

London youths, widen their horizon, brace their nervous system, make

them acquainted with the various public monuments of our great city.

Education, Wayne, education. How many excellent thinkers have pointed

out that political reform is useless until we produce a cultured

populace. So that twenty years hence, when these boys are grown up--"

"Mad!" said Wayne, laying down his pencil; "and five pounds gone!"

"You are in error," explained Turnbull. "You grave creatures can never

be brought to understand how much quicker work really goes with the

assistance of nonsense and good meals. Stripped of its decorative

beauties, my statement was strictly accurate. Last night I gave forty

half-crowns to forty little boys, and sent them all over London to

take hansom cabs. I told them in every case to tell the cabman to

bring them to this spot. In half an hour from now the declaration of

war will be posted up. At the same time the cabs will have begun to

come in, you will have ordered out the guard, the little boys will

drive up in state, we shall commandeer the horses for cavalry, use the

cabs for barricade, and give the men the choice between serving in our

ranks and detention in our basements and cellars. The little boys we

can use as scouts. The main thing is that we start the war with an

advantage unknown in all the other armies--horses. And now," he said,

finishing his beer, "I will go and drill the troops."

And he walked out of the milk-shop, leaving the Provost staring.

A minute or two afterwards, the Provost laughed. He only laughed once

or twice in his life, and then he did it in a queer way as if it were

an art he had not mastered. Even he saw something funny in the

preposterous coup of the half-crowns and the little boys. He did not

see the monstrous absurdity of the whole policy and the whole war. He

enjoyed it seriously as a crusade, that is, he enjoyed it far more

than any joke can be enjoyed. Turnbull enjoyed it partly as a joke,

even more perhaps as a reversion from the things he hated--modernity

and monotony and civilisation. To break up the vast machinery of

modern life and use the fragments as engines of war, to make the

barricade of omnibuses and points of vantage of chimney-pots, was to

him a game worth infinite risk and trouble. He had that rational and

deliberate preference which will always to the end trouble the peace

of the world, the rational and deliberate preference for a short life

and a merry one.