The Napoleon of Notting Hill, G. K. Chesterton [latest books to read .TXT] 📗

frock-coats except as dragons walking backwards. He explained afterwards, quite tactfully and nicely, to his two official friends, that (while feeling an inexpressible regard for each of them) he could not seriously regard the face of either of them as anything but a kind of tail. It was, he admitted, a handsome tail⁠—a tail elevated in the air. But if, he said, any true friend of theirs wished to see their faces, to look into the eyes of their soul, that friend must be allowed to walk reverently round behind them, so as to see them from the rear. There he would see the two black dragons with the blind eyes.

But when first the two black dragons sprang out of the fog upon the small clerk, they had merely the effect of all miracles⁠—they changed the universe. He discovered the fact that all romantics know⁠—that adventures happen on dull days, and not on sunny ones. When the chord of monotony is stretched most tight, then it breaks with a sound like song. He had scarcely noticed the weather before, but with the four dead eyes glaring at him he looked round and realised the strange dead day.

The morning was wintry and dim, not misty, but darkened with that shadow of cloud or snow which steeps everything in a green or copper twilight. The light there is on such a day seems not so much to come from the clear heavens as to be a phosphorescence clinging to the shapes themselves. The load of heaven and the clouds is like a load of waters, and the men move like fishes, feeling that they are on the floor of a sea. Everything in a London street completes the fantasy; the carriages and cabs themselves resemble deep-sea creatures with eyes of flame. He had been startled at first to meet two dragons. Now he found he was among deep-sea dragons possessing the deep sea.

The two young men in front were like the small young man himself, well-dressed. The lines of their frock-coats and silk hats had that luxuriant severity which makes the modern fop, hideous as he is, a favourite exercise of the modern draughtsman; that element which Mr. Max Beerbohm has admirably expressed in speaking of “certain congruities of dark cloth and the rigid perfection of linen.”

They walked with the gait of an affected snail, and they spoke at the longest intervals, dropping a sentence at about every sixth lamppost.

They crawled on past the lampposts; their mien was so immovable that a fanciful description might almost say, that the lampposts crawled past the men, as in a dream. Then the small man suddenly ran after them and said⁠—

“I want to get my hair cut. I say, do you know a little shop anywhere where they cut your hair properly? I keep on having my hair cut, but it keeps on growing again.”

One of the tall men looked at him with the air of a pained naturalist.

“Why, here is a little place,” cried the small man, with a sort of imbecile cheerfulness, as the bright bulging window of a fashionable toilet-saloon glowed abruptly out of the foggy twilight. “Do you know, I often find hairdressers when I walk about London. I’ll lunch with you at Cicconani’s. You know, I’m awfully fond of hairdressers’ shops. They’re miles better than those nasty butchers’.” And he disappeared into the doorway.

The man called James continued to gaze after him, a monocle screwed into his eye.

“What the devil do you make of that fellow?” he asked his companion, a pale young man with a high nose.

The pale young man reflected conscientiously for some minutes, and then said⁠—

“Had a knock on his head when he was a kid, I should think.”

“No, I don’t think it’s that,” replied the Honourable James Barker. “I’ve sometimes fancied he was a sort of artist, Lambert.”

“Bosh!” cried Mr. Lambert, briefly.

“I admit I can’t make him out,” resumed Barker, abstractedly; “he never opens his mouth without saying something so indescribably half-witted that to call him a fool seems the very feeblest attempt at characterisation. But there’s another thing about him that’s rather funny. Do you know that he has the one collection of Japanese lacquer in Europe? Have you ever seen his books? All Greek poets and medieval French and that sort of thing. Have you ever been in his rooms? It’s like being inside an amethyst. And he moves about in all that and talks like⁠—like a turnip.”

“Well, damn all books. Your blue books as well,” said the ingenuous Mr. Lambert, with a friendly simplicity. “You ought to understand such things. What do you make of him?”

“He’s beyond me,” returned Barker. “But if you asked me for my opinion, I should say he was a man with a taste for nonsense, as they call it⁠—artistic fooling, and all that kind of thing. And I seriously believe that he has talked nonsense so much that he has half bewildered his own mind and doesn’t know the difference between sanity and insanity. He has gone round the mental world, so to speak, and found the place where the East and the West are one, and extreme idiocy is as good as sense. But I can’t explain these psychological games.”

“You can’t explain them to me,” replied Mr. Wilfrid Lambert, with candour.

As they passed up the long streets towards their restaurant the copper twilight cleared slowly to a pale yellow, and by the time they reached it they stood discernible in a tolerable winter daylight. The Honourable James Barker, one of the most powerful officials in the English government (by this time a rigidly official one), was a lean and elegant young man, with a blank handsome face and bleak blue eyes. He had a great amount of intellectual capacity, of that peculiar kind which raises a man from throne to throne and lets him die loaded with honours without having either amused or enlightened the mind of a single man. Wilfrid Lambert, the youth with the nose which appeared to impoverish