The Napoleon of Notting Hill G. K. Chesterton (best book club books for discussion .TXT) 📖

He drained his glass and called for more whisky. He drank it, and went on.

“And then something did happen. Buck, it’s the solemn truth, that nothing has ever happened to you in your life. Nothing had ever happened to me in my life.”

“Nothing ever happened!” said Buck, staring. “What do you mean?”

“Nothing has ever happened,” repeated Barker, with a morbid obstinacy. “You don’t know what a thing happening means? You sit in your office expecting customers, and customers come; you walk in the street expecting friends, and friends meet you; you want a drink, and get it; you feel inclined for a bet, and make it. You expect either to win or lose, and you do either one or the other. But things happening!” and he shuddered ungovernably.

“Go on,” said Buck, shortly. “Get on.”

“As we walked wearily round the corners, something happened. When something happens, it happens first, and you see it afterwards. It happens of itself, and you have nothing to do with it. It proves a dreadful thing⁠—that there are other things besides one’s self. I can only put it in this way. We went round one turning, two turnings, three turnings, four turnings, five. Then I lifted myself slowly up from the gutter where I had been shot half senseless, and was beaten down again by living men crashing on top of me, and the world was full of roaring, and big men rolling about like ninepins.”

Buck looked at his map with knitted brows.

“Was that Portobello Road?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Barker⁠—“yes; Portobello Road. I saw it afterwards; but, my God, what a place it was! Buck, have you ever stood and let a six foot of man lash and lash at your head with six feet of pole with six pounds of steel at the end? Because, when you have had that experience, as Walt Whitman says, ‘you reexamine philosophies and religions.’ ”

“I have no doubt,” said Buck. “If that was Portobello Road, don’t you see what happened?”

“I know what happened exceedingly well. I was knocked down four times; an experience which, as I say, has an effect on the mental attitude. And another thing happened, too. I knocked down two men. After the fourth fall (there was not much bloodshed⁠—more brutal rushing and throwing⁠—for nobody could use their weapons), after the fourth fall, I say, I got up like a devil, and I tore a poleaxe out of a man’s hand and struck where I saw the scarlet of Wayne’s fellows, struck again and again. Two of them went over, bleeding on the stones, thank God; and I laughed and found myself sprawling in the gutter again, and got up again, and struck again, and broke my halberd to pieces. I hurt a man’s head, though.”

Buck set down his glass with a bang, and spat out curses through his thick moustache.

“What is the matter?” asked Barker, stopping, for the man had been calm up to now, and now his agitation was far more violent than his own.

“The matter?” said Buck, bitterly; “don’t you see how these maniacs have got us? Why should two idiots, one a clown and the other a screaming lunatic, make sane men so different from themselves? Look here, Barker; I will give you a picture. A very well-bred young man of this century is dancing about in a frock-coat. He has in his hands a nonsensical seventeenth-century halberd, with which he is trying to kill men in a street in Notting Hill. Damn it! don’t you see how they’ve got us? Never mind how you felt⁠—that is how you looked. The King would put his cursed head on one side and call it exquisite. The Provost of Notting Hill would put his cursed nose in the air and call it heroic. But in Heaven’s name what would you have called it⁠—two days before?”

Barker bit his lip.

“You haven’t been through it, Buck,” he said. “You don’t understand fighting⁠—the atmosphere.”

“I don’t deny the atmosphere,” said Buck, striking the table. “I only say it’s their atmosphere. It’s Adam Wayne’s atmosphere. It’s the atmosphere which you and I thought had vanished from an educated world forever.”

“Well, it hasn’t,” said Barker; “and if you have any lingering doubts, lend me a poleaxe, and I’ll show you.”

There was a long silence, and then Buck turned to his neighbour and spoke in that good-tempered tone that comes of a power of looking facts in the face⁠—the tone in which he concluded great bargains.

“Barker,” he said, “you are right. This old thing⁠—this fighting, has come back. It has come back suddenly and taken us by surprise. So it is first blood to Adam Wayne. But, unless reason and arithmetic and everything else have gone crazy, it must be next and last blood to us. But when an issue has really arisen, there is only one thing to do⁠—to study that issue as such and win in it. Barker, since it is fighting, we must understand fighting. I must understand fighting as coolly and completely as I understand drapery; you must understand fighting as coolly and completely as you understand politics. Now, look at the facts. I stick without hesitation to my original formula. Fighting, when we have the stronger force, is only a matter of arithmetic. It must be. You asked me just now how two hundred men could defeat six hundred. I can tell you. Two hundred men can defeat six hundred when the six hundred behave like fools. When they forget the very conditions they are fighting in; when they fight in a swamp as if it were a mountain; when they fight in a forest as if it were a plain; when they fight in streets without remembering the object of streets.”

“What is the object of streets?” asked Barker.

“What is the object of supper?” cried Buck, furiously. “Isn’t it obvious? This military science is mere common sense. The object of a