When Tric-Trac had satisfied himself concerning the situation, he returned to devour his food.
“Flute! Zut! Mince!” he observed; “you and your bad manners, they sicken me—tiens!”
The Lizard, flat on his stomach, lay with the massive steel box under his chin, patiently turning the needle from figure to figure.
“Wonderful! wonderful!” sneered Tric-Trac. “Continue, my friend, to put out your eyes with your fingers!”
The Lizard continued to turn the needle backward and forward around the face of the dial. Once, when he twirled it impatiently, a tiny chime rang out from within the box, but the steel lid did not open.
“It’s the Angelus,” said Tric-Trac, with a grimace. “Let us pray, my friend, for a cold-chisel—when my friend Buckhurst returns.”
Still the Lizard lay, unmoved, turning the needle round and round.
Tric-Trac having devoured the cheese, bread, and an entire pheasant, made a bundle of the remaining food, emptied the cider-jug, wiped his beardless face with his cap, and announced that he would be pleased to “broil” a cigarette.
“Do you want the gendarmes to scent tobacco?” said the Lizard.
“Are the ’Flics’ out already?” asked Tric-Trac, astonished.
“They’re in Paradise, setting the whole Department by the ears. But they can’t look sideways at me; I’m going to be exempt.”
“It strikes me,” observed Tric-Trac, “that you take great precautions for your own skin.”247
“I do,” said the Lizard.
“What about me?”
The poacher looked around at the young ruffian. Those muscles in the human face which draw back the upper lip are not the muscles used for laughter. Animals employ them when they snarl. And now the Lizard laughed that way; his upper lip shrank from the edge of his yellow teeth, and he regarded Tric-Trac with oblique and burning eyes.
“What about me?” repeated Tric-Trac, in an offended tone. “Am I to live in fear of the Flics?”
The Lizard laughed again, and Tric-Trac, disgusted, stood up, settled his cap over his wide ears, humming a song as he loosened his trousers-belt:
“Si vous t’nez à vot’ squeletteNe fait’ pas comme Bibi!Claquer plutôt dans vot’ litQue de claquer à la Roquette!”—
“Who are you gaping at?” he added, abruptly. “Bon; c’est ma geule. Et après? Drop that box!”
“Come,” replied the Lizard, coldly, placing the box on the moss, “you’d better not quarrel with me.”
“Oh, that’s a threat, is it?” sneered Tric-Trac. He walked over to the steel box, lifted it, placed it in the iron-edged case, and sat down on the case.
“I want you to comprehend,” he added, “that you have pushed your nose into an affair that does not concern you. The next time you come here to sell your snared pheasants, come like a man, nom de Dieu! and not like a cat of the Glacière!—or I’ll find a way to stop your curiosity.”
The dull-red color surged into the poacher’s face and heavy neck; for a moment he stood as though stunned. Then he dragged out his knife.248
Tric-Trac sat looking at him insolently, one hand thrust into the bosom of his greasy coat.
“I’ve got a toy under my cravate that says ‘Papa!’ six times—pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! Papa!” he continued, calmly; “so there’s no use in your turning red and swelling the veins in your neck. Go to the devil! Do you think I can’t live without you? Go to the devil with your traps and partridges and fish-hooks—and that fagot-knife in your fist—and if you try to throw it at me you’ll make a sad mistake!”
The Lizard’s half-raised hand dropped as Tric-Trac, with a movement like lightning, turned a revolver full on him, talking all the while in his drawling whine.
“C’est çà! Now you are reasonable. Get out of this forest, my friend—or stay and join us. Eh! That astonishes you? Why? Idiot, we want men like you. We want men who have nothing to lose and—millions to gain! Ah, you are amazed! Yes, millions—I say it. I, Tric-Trac of the Glacière, who have done my time in Noumea, too! Yes, millions.”
The young ruffian laughed and slowly passed his tongue over his thin lips. The Lizard slowly returned his knife to its sheath, looked all around, then deliberately sat down on the moss cross-legged. I could have hugged him.
“A million? Where?” he asked, vacantly.
“Parbleu! Naturally you ask where,” chuckled Tric-Trac. “Tiens! A supposition that it’s in this box!”
“The box is too small,” said the Lizard, patiently.
Tric-Trac roared. “Listen to him! Listen to the child!” he cried, delighted. “Too small to hold gold enough for you? Very well—but isa ship big enough?”
“A big ship is.”
Tric-Trac wriggled in convulsions of laughter.
“Oh, listen! He wants a big ship! Well—say a249ship as big as that ugly, black iron-clad sticking up out of the sea yonder, like a Usine-de-gaz!”
“I think that ship would be big enough,” said the poacher, seriously.
Tric-Trac did not laugh; his little eyes narrowed, and he looked steadily at the poacher.
“Do you mean what I mean?” he asked, deliberately.
“Well,” said the Lizard, “what do you mean?”
“I mean that France is busy stitching on a new flag.”
“Black?”
“Red—first.”
“Oh-h!” mused the poacher. “When does France hoist that new red flag?”
“When Paris falls.”
The poacher rested his chin on his doubled fist and leaned forward across his gathered knees. “I see,” he drawled.
“Under the commune there can be no more poverty,” said Tric-Trac; “you comprehend that.”
“Exactly.”
“And no more aristocrats.”
“Exactly.”
“Well,” said Tric-Trac, his head on one side, “how does that programme strike you?”
“It is impossible, your programme,” said the poacher, rising to his feet impatiently.
“You think so? Wait a few days! Wait, my friend,” cried Tric-Trac, eagerly; “and say!—come back here next Monday! There will be a few of us here—a few friends. And keep your mouth shut tight. Here! Wait. Look here, friend, don’t let a little pleasantry stand between comrades. Your fagot-knife against my little flute that sings pa-pa!—that leaves matters balanced, eh?”
The young ruffian had followed the Lizard and caught him by his stained velvet coat.250
“Voyons,” he persisted, “do you think the commune is going to let a comrade starve for lack of Badinguet’s lozenges? Here, take a few of these!” and the rascal thrust out a dirty palm full of twenty-franc gold pieces.
“What are these for?” muttered the Lizard, sullenly.
“For your beaux yeux, imbecile!” cried Tric-Trac, gayly. “Come back when you want more. My comrade, Citizen Buckhurst, will be glad to see you next Monday. Adieu, my friend. Don’t chatter to the Flics!”
He picked up his box and the packet of provisions, dropped his revolver into the side-pocket of his jacket, cocked his greasy cap, blew a kiss to the Lizard, and started off straight into the forest. After a dozen steps he hesitated, turned, and looked back at the poacher for a moment in silence. Then he made a friendly grimace.
“You are not a fool,” he said, “so you won’t follow me. Come again Monday. It will really be worth while, dear friend.” Then, as on an impulse, he came all the way back, caught the Lizard by the sleeve, raised his meagre body on tip-toe, and whispered.
The Lizard turned perfectly white; Tric-Trac trotted away into the woods, hugging his box and smirking.
The Lizard and I walked back together. By the time we reached Paradise bridge I understood him better, and he understood me. And when we arrived at the circus tent, and when Speed came up, handing me a telegram from Chanzy refusing my services, the Lizard turned to me like an obedient hound to take my orders—now that I was not to re-enter the Military Police.
I ordered him to disobey the orders from Lorient and from the mayor of Paradise; to take to the woods as though to avoid the conscription; to join Buckhurst’s franc-company of ruffians, and to keep me fully informed.251
“And, Lizard,” I said, “you may be caught and hanged for it by the police, or stabbed by Tric-Trac.”
“Bien,” he said, coolly.
“But it is a brave thing you do; a soldierly thing!”
He was silent.
“It is for France,” I said.
He shrugged his shoulders.
“And we’ll catch this Tric-Trac red-handed,” I suggested.
“Ah—yes!” His eyes glowed as though lighted up from behind. “And another who is high in the police, and a friend of this Tric-Trac!”
“Was it that man’s name he whispered to you when you turned so white?” I said, suddenly.
The Lizard turned his glowing eyes on me.
“Was the man’s name—Mornac?” I asked, at a hopeless venture.
The Lizard shivered; I needed no reply, not even his hoarse, “Are you the devil, that you know all things?”
I looked at him wonderingly. What wrong could Mornac have done a ragged outcast here on the Breton coast? And where was Mornac? Had he left Paris in time to avoid the Prussian trap? Was he here in this country, rubbing elbows with Buckhurst?
“Did Tric-Trac tell you that Mornac was at the head of that band?” I demanded.
“Why do you ask me?” stammered the Lizard; “you know everything—even when it is scarcely whispered!”
The superstitious astonishment of the man, his utter collapse and his evident fear of me, did not suit me. Treachery comes through that kind of fear; I meant to rule him in another and safer manner. I meant to be absolutely honest with him.
It was difficult to persuade him that I had only guessed252the name whispered; that, naturally, I should think of Mornac as a high officer of police, and particularly so since I knew him to be a villain, and had also divined his relations with Buckhurst.
I drew from the poacher that Tric-Trac had named Mornac as head of the communistic plot in Brittany; that Mornac was coming to Paradise very soon, and that then something gay might be looked for.
And that night I took Speed into my confidence and finally Kelly Eyre, our balloonist.
And we talked the matter over until long after midnight.
253XVFOREWARNED
The lions had now begun to give me a great deal of trouble. Timour Melek, the old villain, sat on his chair, snarling and striking at me, but still going through his paces; Empress Khatoun was a perfect devil of viciousness, and refused to jump her hoops; even poor little Aïcha, my pet, fed by me soon after her foster-mother, a big Newfoundland, had weaned her, turned sullen in the pyramid scene. I roped her and trimmed her claws; it was high time.
Oh, they knew, and I knew, that matters had gone wrong with me; that I had, for a time, at least, lost the intangible something which I once possessed—that occult right to dominate.
It worried me; it angered me. Anger in authority, which is a weakness, is quickly discovered by beasts.
Speed’s absurd superstition continued to recur to me at inopportune moments; in my brain his voice was ceaselessly sounding—“A man in love, a man in love, a man in love”—until a flash of temper sent my lions scurrying and snarling into a pack, where they huddled and growled, staring at me with yellow, mutinous eyes.
Yet, strangely, the greater the risk, and the plainer to me that my lions were slipping out of my control, the more my apathy increased, until even Byram began to warn me.
Still I never felt the slightest physical fear; on the254contrary, as my irritation increased my disdain grew. It seemed a monstrous bit of insolence on the part of these overgrown cats to meditate an attack on me. Even though I began to feel that it was only a question of time when the moment must arrive, even though I gradually became certain that the first false move on my part would precipitate an attack, the knowledge left me almost indifferent.
That morning, as I left the training-cage—where, among others, Kelly Eyre stood looking on—I suddenly remembered Sylvia Elven and her message to Eyre, which I had never delivered.
We strolled towards the stables together; he was a pleasant, clean-cut, fresh-faced young fellow, a man I had never known very well, but one whom I was inclined to respect and trust.
“My son,” said I, politely, “do you think you have arrived at an age sufficiently mature to warrant my delivering to you a message from a pretty girl?”
“There’s no harm in attempting it, my venerable friend,” he replied, laughing.
“This is the message,'' I said: “On Sunday the book-stores are closed in Paris.”
“Who gave you that message, Scarlett?” he stammered.
I looked at him curiously, brutally; a red, hot blush had covered his face from neck to hair.
“In case you asked, I was to inform you,” said I, “that a Bretonne at Point Paradise sent the message.”
“A Bretonne!” he repeated, as though scared.
“A Bretonne!”
“But I don’t know any!”
I shrugged my shoulders discreetly.
“Are you certain she was a Bretonne?” he asked. His nervousness surprised me.
“Does she not say so?” I replied.255
“I know—I know—but that message—there is only one woman who could have sent it—” He hesitated, red as a pippin.
He was so young, so manly, so unspoiled, and so red, that on an impulse I said: “Kelly, it was Mademoiselle Elven who sent you the message.”
His face expressed troubled astonishment.
“Is that her name?” he asked.
“Well—it’s one of them, anyway,” I replied, beginning to feel troubled in my turn. “See here, Kelly, it’s not my business, but you won’t mind if I speak plainly, will you? The times are queer—you understand. Everybody is suspicious; everybody is under suspicion in these days. And I want to say that the young lady who sent that curious message to you is as clever as twenty men like you and me.”
He was silent.
“If it is a love affair, I’ll stop now—not a question, you understand. If it is not—well, as an older and more battered and world-worn man, I’m going to make a suggestion to you—with your permission.”
“Make it,” he said, quietly.
“Then I will. Don’t talk to Mademoiselle Elven. You, Speed, and I know something about a certain conspiracy; we are going to know more before we inform the captain of that cruiser out there beyond Point Paradise. I know Mademoiselle Elven—slightly. I am afraid of her—and I have not yet decided why. Don’t talk to her.”
“But—I don’t know her,” he said; “or, at least I don’t know her by that name.”
After a moment I said: “Is the person in question the companion of the Countess de Vassart?”
“If she is I do not know it,” he replied.
“Was she once an actress?”
“It would astonish me to believe it!” he said.256
“Then who do you believe sent you that message, Kelly?”
His cheeks began to burn again, and he gave me an uncomfortable look. A silence, and he sat down in my dressing-room, his boyish head buried in his hands. After a glance at him I began changing my training-suit for riding-clothes, whistling the while softly to myself. As I buttoned a fresh collar he looked up.
“Mr. Scarlett, you are well-born and—you are here in the circus with the rest of us. You know what we are—you know that two or three of us have seen better days,... that something has gone wrong with us to bring us here,... but we never speak of it,... and never ask questions.... But I should like to tell you about myself;... you are a gentleman, you know,... and I was not born to anything in particular.... I was a clerk in the consul’s office in Paris when Monsieur Tissandier took a fancy to me, and I entered his balloon ateliers to learn to assist him.”
He hesitated. I tied my necktie very carefully before a bit of broken mirror.
“Then the government began to make much of us,... you remember? We started experiments for the army.... I was intensely interested, and ... there was not much talk about secrecy then,... and my salary was large, and I was received at the Tuileries. My head was turned;... life was easy, brilliant. I made an invention—a little electric screw which steered a balloon ... sometimes...” He laughed, a mirthless laugh, and looked at me. All the color had gone from his face.
“There was a woman—” I turned partly towards him.
“We met first at the British Embassy,... then elsewhere,... everywhere.... We skated together at the club in the Bois at that celebrated fête,... you know?—the Emperor was there—”257
“I know,” I said.
He looked at me dreamily, passed his hand over his face, and went on:
“Somehow we always talked about military balloons. And that evening ... she was so interested in my work ... I brought some little sketches I had made—”
“I understand,” I said.
He looked at me miserably. “She was to return the sketches to me at Calman’s—the fashionable book-store,... next day.... I never thought that the next day was to be Sunday.... The book-stores of Paris are not open on Sunday—but the War Office is.”
I began to put on my coat.
“And the sketches were asked for?” I suggested—“and you naturally told what had become of them?”
“I refused to name her.”
“Of course; men of our sort can’t do that.”
“I am not of your sort—you know it.”
“Oh yes, you are, my friend—and the same kind of fool, too. There’s only one kind of man in this world.”
He looked at me listlessly.
“So they sent you to a fortress?” I asked.
“To New Caledonia,... four years.... I was only twenty, Scarlett,... and ruined.... I joined Byram in Antwerp and risked the tour through France.”
After a moment’s thought I said: “In your opinion, what nation profited by your sketches? Italy? Spain? Prussia? Bavaria? England?... Perhaps Russia?”
“Do you mean that this woman was a foreign spy?”
“Perhaps. Perhaps she was only careless, or capricious,... or inconstant.... You never saw her again?”
“I was under arrest on Sunday. I do not know.... I like to believe that she went to the book-store on258Monday,... that she made an innocent mistake,... but I never knew, Scarlett,... I never knew.”
“Suppose you ask her?” I said.
He reddened furiously.
“I cannot.... If she did me a wrong, I cannot reproach her; if she was innocent—look at me, Scarlett!—a ragged, ruined mountebank in a travelling circus,... and she is—”
“An honest woman that a man might care for?”
“That is ... my belief.”
“If she is,” I said, “go and ask her about those drawings.”
“But if she is not,... I cannot tellyou!” he flashed out.
“Let us shake hands, Kelly,” I said,... “and be very good friends. Will you?”
He gave me his hand rather shyly.
“We will never speak of her again,” I said,... “unless you desire it. You have had a terrible lesson in caution; I need say no more. Only remember that I have trusted you with a secret concerning Buckhurst’s conspiracy.”
His firm hand tightened on mine, then he walked away, steadily, head high. And I went out to saddle my horse for a canter across the moor to Point Paradise.
It was a gray day, with a hint of winter in the air, and a wind that set the gorse rustling like tissue-paper. Up aloft the sun glimmered, a white spot in a silvery smother; pale lights lay on moorland and water; the sea tumbled over the bar, boiling like a flood of liquid lead from which the spindrift curled and blew into a haze that buried the island of Groix and turned the anchored iron-clad to a phantom.
A day for a gallop, if ever there was such a day!—a day to wash out care from a troubled mind and cleanse it in the whipping, reeking, wet east wind—a day for a259fox! And I rose in my saddle and shouted aloud as a red fox shot out of the gorse and galloped away across the endless moorland, with the feathers of a mallard still sticking to his whiskers.
Oh, what a gallop, with risk enough, too; for I did not know the coast moors; and the deep clefts from the cliffs cut far inland, so that eye and ear and bridle-hand were tense and ready to catch danger ere it ingulfed us in some sea-churned crevice hidden by the bracken. And how the gray gulls squealed, high whirling over us, and the wild ducks in the sedge rose with clapping wings, craning their necks, only to swing overhead in circles, whimpering, and drop, with pendent legs and wings aslant, back into the bog from which we startled them.
A ride into an endless gray land, sweet with sea-scents, rank with the perfume of salty green things; a ride into a land of gushing winds, wet as spray, strong and caressing, too, and full of mischief; winds that set miles of sedge rippling; sudden winds, that turned still pools to geysers and set the yellow gorse flowers flying; winds that rushed up with a sea-roar like the sound in shells, then, sudden, died away, to leave the furrowed clover motionless and the tall reeds still as death.
So, by strange ways and eccentric circles, like the aërial paths of homing sea-birds, I came at last to the spot I had set out for, consciously; yet it surprised me to find I had come there.
Before I crossed the little bridge I scented the big orange-tinted tea-roses and the pinks. Leaves on apricots were falling; the fig-tree was bare of verdure, and the wind chased the big, bronzed leaves across the beds of herbs, piling them into heaps at the base of the granite wall.
A boy took my horse; a servant in full Breton costume260admitted me; the velvet humming of Sylvia Elven’s spinning-wheel filled the silence, like the whirring of a great, soft moth imprisoned in a room:
“Woe to the Maids of Paradise,Yvonne!Twice have the Saxons landed—twice!Yvonne!Yet shall Paradise see them thrice!Yvonne! Yvonne! Marivonik!“Fair is their hair and blue their eyes,Yvonne!Body o’ me! their words are lies,Yvonne!Maids of Paradise, oh, be wise!Yvonne! Yvonne! Marivonik!”
The door swung open noiselessly; the whir of the wheel and the sound of the song filled the room for an instant, then was shut out as the Countess de Vassart closed the door and came forward to greet me.
In her pretty, soft gown, with a tint of blue ribbon at the neck and shoulders, she seemed scarcely older than a school-girl, so radiant, so sweet and fresh she stood there, giving me her little hand to touch in friendship.
“It was so good of you to come,” she said; “I know you made it a duty and gave up a glorious gallop to be amiable to me. Did you?”
I tried to say something, but her loveliness confused me.
Somebody brought tea—I don’t know who; all I could see clearly was her gray eyes meeting mine—the light from the leaded window touching her glorious, ruddy hair.
As for the tea, I took whatever she offered; doubtless I drank it, but I don’t remember. Nor do I remember what she said at first, for somehow I began thinking about my lions, and the thought obsessed me even while261striving to listen to her, even in the tingling maze of other thoughts which kept me dumb under the exquisite spell of this intimacy with her.
The delicate odor of ripened herbs stole into the room from the garden; far away, through the whispering whir of the spinning-wheel, I heard the sea.
“Do you like Sylvia’s song?” she asked, turning her head to listen. “It is a very old song—a very, very old one—centuries old. It’s all about the English, how they came to harry our coasts in those days—and it has almost a hundred verses!” Something of the Bretonne came into her eyes for a moment, that shadow of sadness, that patient fatalism in which, too, there is something of distrust. The next instant her eyes cleared and she smiled.
“The Trécourts suffered much from the English raiders. I am a Trécourt, you know. That song was made about us—about a young girl, Yvonne de Trécourt, who was carried away by the English. She was foolish; she had a lover among the Saxons,... and she set a signal for him, and they came and sacked the town, and carried her away, and that was what she got for her folly.”
She bent her head thoughtfully; the sound of the sea grew louder in the room; a yellow light stole out of the west and touched the window-panes, slowly deepening to orange; against it the fruit trees stood, a leafless tracery of fragile branches.
“It is the winter awaking, very far away,” she said, under her breath.
Something in the hollow monotone of the sea made me think again of the low grumble of restless lions. The sound was hateful. Why should it steal in here—why haunt me even in this one spot in all the world where a world-tired man had found a moment’s peace in a woman’s eyes.
“Are you troubled?” she asked, then colored at her262own question, as though deeming the impulse to speak unwarranted.
“No, not troubled. Happiness is often edged with a shadow. I am content to be here.”
She bent her head and looked at the heavy rose lying in solitary splendor on the table. The polished wood reflected it in subdued tints of saffron.
“It is a strange friendship,” I said.
“Ours?... yes.”
I said, musing: “To me it is like magic. I scarce dare speak, scarce breathe, lest the spell break.”
She was silent.
“—Lest the spell break—and this house, this room, fade away, leaving me alone, staring at the world once more.”
“If there is a spell, you have cast it,” she said, laughing at my sober face. “A wizard ought to be able to make his spells endure.”
Then her face grew graver. “You must forget the past,” she said; “you must forget all that was cruel and false and unhappy,... will you not?”
“Yes, madame.”
“I, too,” she said, “have much to forget and much to hope for; and you taught me how to forget and how to hope.”
“I, madame?”
“Yes,... at La Trappe, at Morsbronn, and here. Look at me. Have I not changed?”
“Yes,” I said, fascinated.
“I know I have,” she said, as though speaking to herself. “Life means more now. Somehow my childhood seems to have returned, with all its hope of the world and all its confidence in the world, and its certainty that all will be right. Years have fallen from my shoulders like a released burden that was crushing me to my knees. I have awakened from a dream263that was not life at all,... a dream in which I, alone, staggered through darkness, bearing the world on my shoulders—the world doubly weighted with the sorrows of mankind,... a dream that lasted years, but...youawoke me.”
She leaned forward and lifted the rose, touching her face with it.
“It was so simple, after all—this secret of the world’s malady. You read it for me. I know now what is written on the eternal tablets—to live one’s own life as it is given, in honor, charity, without malice; to seek happiness where it is offered; to share it when possible; to uplift. But, most of all, to be happy and accept happiness as a heavenly gift that is to be shared with as many as possible. And this I have learned since ... I knew you.”
The light in the room had grown dimmer; I leaned forward to see her face.
“Am I not right?” she asked.
“I think so.... I am learning from you.”
“But you taught this creed to me!” she cried.
“No, you are teaching it to me. And the first lesson was a gift,... your friendship.”
“Freely given, gladly given,” she said, quickly. “And yours I have in return,... and will keep always—always—”
She crushed the rose against her mouth, looking at me with inscrutable gray eyes, as I had seen her look at me once at La Trappe, once in Morsbronn.
I picked up my gloves and riding-crop; as I rose she stood up in the dusk, looking straight at me.
I said something about Sylvia Elven and my compliments to her, something else about the happiness I felt at coming to the château again, something about her own goodness to me—Heaven knows what!—and she gave me her hand and I held it a moment.264
“Will you come again?” she asked.
I stammered a promise and made my way blindly to the door which a servant threw open, flung myself astride my horse, and galloped out into the waste of moorland, seeing nothing, hearing nothing save the low roar of the sea, like the growl of restless lions.
265XVIA RESTLESS MAN
When I came into camp, late that afternoon, I found Byram and Speed groping about among a mass of newspapers and letters, the first mail we circus people had received for nearly two months.
There were letters for all who were accustomed to look for letters from families, relatives, or friends at home. I never received letters—I had received none of that kind in nearly a score of years, yet that curious habit of expectancy had not perished in me, and I found myself standing with the others while Byram distributed the letters, one by one, until the last home-stamped envelope had been given out, and all around me the happy circus-folk were reading in homesick contentment. I know of no lonelier man than he who lingers empty-handed among those who pore over the home mail.
But there were newspapers enough and to spare—French, English, American; and I sat down by my lion’s cage and attempted to form some opinion of the state of affairs in France. And, as far as I could read between the lines, this is what I gathered, partly from my own knowledge of past events, partly from the foreign papers, particularly the English:
When, on the 3d of September, the humiliating news arrived that the Emperor was a prisoner and his army annihilated, the government, for the first time in its266existence, acted with promptness and decision in a matter of importance. Secret orders were sent by couriers to the Bank of France, to the Louvre, and to the Invalides; and, that same night, train after train rushed out of Paris loaded with the battle-flags from the Invalides, the most important pictures and antique sculptures from the Louvre, the greater part of the gold and silver from the Bank of France, and, last but by no means least, the crown and jewels of France.
This Speed and I already knew.
These trains were despatched to Brest, and at the same time a telegram was directed to the admiral commanding the French iron-clad fleet in the Baltic to send an armored cruiser to Brest with all haste possible, there to await further orders, but to be fully prepared in any event to take on board certain goods designated in cipher. This we knew in a general way, though Speed understood that Lorient was to be the port of departure.
The plan was a good one and apparently simple; and there seemed to be no doubt that jewels, battle-flags, pictures, and coin were already beyond danger from the German armies, now plodding cautiously southward toward the capital, which was slowly recovering from its revolutionary convulsions and preparing for a siege.
The plan, then, was simple; but, for an equally simple reason, it miscarried in the following manner. Early in August, while the French armies from the Rhine to the Meuse were being punished with frightful regularity and precision, the French Mediterranean squadron had sailed up and down that interesting expanse of water, apparently in patriotic imitation of the historic
“King of France and twenty thousand men.”
267
For, it now appeared, the French admiral was afraid that the Spanish navy might aid the German ships in harassing the French transports, which at that time were frantically engaged in ferrying a sea-sick Algerian army across the Mediterranean to the mother country.
Of course there was no ground for the admiral’s suspicions. The German war-ships stayed in their own harbors, the Spaniards made no offensive alliance with Prussia, and at length the French admiral sailed triumphantly away with his battleships and cruisers.
On the 7th of August the squadron of four battleships, two armored corvettes, and a despatch-boat steamed out of Brest, picking up on its way northward three more iron-clad frigates, and several cruisers and despatch-boats; and on the 11th of August, 1870, the squadron anchored off Heligoland, from whence Admiral Fourichon proclaimed the blockade of the German coast.
It must have been an imposing sight! There lay the great iron-clads, theMagnanime, theHéroine, theProvence, theValeureuse, theRevanche, theInvincible, theCouronne! There lay the cruisers, theAtalante, theRenaud, theCosmao, theDecrès! There, too, lay the single-screw despatch-boatsReine-Hortense,Renard, andDayot. And upon their armored decks, three by three, stalked the French admirals. Yet, without cynicism, it may be said that the admirals of France fought better, in 1870, on dry land than they did on the ocean.
However, the German ships stayed peacefully inside their fortified ports, and the three French admirals pranced peacefully up and down outside, until the God of battles intervened and trouble naturally ensued.
On the 6th of September all the seas of Europe were set clashing under a cyclone that rose to a howling hurricane. The British iron-cladCaptainfoundered268off Finistère; the French fleet in the Baltic was scattered to the four winds.
In the midst of the tempest a French despatch-boat, theHirondelle, staggered into sight, signalling the flag-ship. Then the French admiral for the first time learned the heart-breaking news of Sedan, and as the tempest-tortured battle-ship drove seaward the signals went up: “Make for Brest!” The blockade of the German coast was at an end.
On the 4th of September the treasure-laden trains had left Paris for Brest. On the 5th theHirondellesteamed out towards the fleet with the news from Sedan and the orders for the detachment of a cruiser to receive the crown jewels. On the 6th the news and the orders were signalled to the flag-ship; but the God of battles unchained a tempest which countermanded the order and hurled the iron-clads into outer darkness.
Some of the ships crept into English ports, burning their last lumps of coal, some drifted into Dunkerque; but the flag-ship disappeared for nine long days, at last to reappear off Cherbourg, a stricken thing with a stricken crew and an admiral broken-hearted.
So, for days and days, the treasure-laden trains must have stood helpless in the station at Brest, awaiting the cruiser that did not come.
On the 17th of September the French Channel squadron, of seven heavy iron-clads, unexpectedly steamed into Lorient harbor and dropped anchor amid thundering salutes from the forts; and the next day one of the treasure-trains came flying into Lorient, to the unspeakable relief of the authorities in the beleaguered capital.
Speed and I already knew the secret orders sent. The treasures, including the crown diamonds, were to be stored in the citadel, and an armored cruiser was to lie off the arsenal with banked fires, ready to receive269the treasures at the first signal and steam to the French fortified port of Saïgon in Cochin China, by a course already determined.
Why on earth those orders had been changed so that the cruiser was to lie off Groix I could not imagine, unless some plot had been discovered in Lorient which had made it advisable to shift the location of the treasures for the third time.
Pondering there at the tent door, amid my heap of musty newspapers, I looked out into the late, gray afternoon and saw the maids of Paradise passing and repassing across the bridge with a clicking of wooden shoes and white head-dresses glimmering in the dusk of the trees.
The town had filled within a day or two; the Paradise coiffe was not the only coiffe to be seen in the square; there was the delicate-winged head-dress of Faöuet, the beautiful coiffes of Rosporden, Sainte-Anne d’Auray, and Pont Aven; there, too, flashed the scarlet skirts of Bannalec and the gorgeous embroidered bodices of the interior; there were the men of Quimperlé in velvet, the men of Penmarch, the men of Faöuet with their dark, Spanish-like faces and their sombreros, and their short yellow jackets and leggings. All in holiday costume, too, for the maids were stiff in silver and lace, and the men wore carved sabots and embroidered gilets.
“Governor,” I called out to Byram, “the town is filling fast. It’s like a Pardon in Morbihan; we’ll pack the old tent to the nigger’s-heaven!”
“It’s a fact,” he said, pushing his glasses up over his forehead and fanning his face with his silk hat. “We’re going to open to a lot of money, Mr. Scarlett, and ... I ain’t goin’ to forgit them that stood by me, neither.”
He placed a heavy hand on my shoulder, and, stooping, peered into my face.270
“Air you sick, m’ friend?” he asked.
“I, governor? Why, no.”
“Ain’t been bit by that there paltry camuel nor nothin’, hev ye?”
“No; do I look ill?”
“Peaked—kind o’ peaked. White, with dark succles under your eyes. Air you nervous?”
“About the lions? Oh no. Don’t worry about me, governor.”
He sighed, adjusted his spectacles, and blew his nose.
“Mr. Speed—he’s worriting, too; he says that Empress Khatoun means to hev ye one o’ these days.”
“You tell Mr. Speed to worry over his own affairs—that child, Jacqueline, for instance. I suppose she made her jump without trouble to-day? I was too nervous to stay and watch her.”
“M’ friend,” said Byram, in solemn ecstasy, “I take off my hat to that there kid!” And he did so with a flourish. “You orter seen her; she hung on that flying trap, jest as easy an’ sassy! We was all half crazy. Speed he grew blue around the gills; Miss Crystal, a-swingin’ there in the riggin’ by her knees, kept a swallerin’ an’ lickin’ her lips, she was that scared.
“‘Ready?’ she calls out in a sort o’ quaver.
“‘Ready!’ sez little Jacqueline, cool as ice, swingin’ by her knees. ‘Go!’ sez Miss Crystal, an’ the kid let go, an’ Miss Crystal grabbed her by the ankles. ‘Ready?’ calls up Speed, beside the tank.
“‘Ready!’ sez the kid, smilin’. ‘Drop!’ cries Speed. An’ Jacqueline shot down like a blazing star—whir! swish! splash! All over! An’ that there nervy kid a floatin’ an’ a sportin’ like a minnie-fish at t’other end o’ the tank! Oh, gosh, but it was grand! It was jest—”271
Speech failed; he walked away, waving his arms, his rusty silk hat on the back of his head.
A few moments later drums began to roll from the square. Speed, passing, called out to me that the conscripts were leaving for Lorient; so I walked down to the bridge, where the crowd had gathered and where a tall gendarme stood, his blue-and-white uniform distinct in the early evening light. The mayor was there, too, dressed in his best, waddling excitedly about, and buttonholing at intervals a young lieutenant of infantry, who appeared to be extremely bored.
There were the conscripts of the Garde Mobile, an anxious peasant rabble, awkward, resigned, docile as cattle. Here stood a farmer, reeking of his barnyard; here two woodsmen from the forest, belted and lean; but the majority were men of the sea, heavy-limbed, sun-scorched fellows, with little, keen eyes always half closed, and big, helpless fists hanging. Some carried their packets slung from hip to shoulder, some tied their parcels to the muzzles of their obsolete muskets. A number wore the boatman’s smock, others the farmer’s blouse of linen, but the greater number were clad in the blue-wool jersey and cloth béret of the sailor.
Husbands, sons, lovers, looked silently at the women. The men uttered no protest, no reproach; the women wept very quietly. In their hearts that strange mysticism of the race predominated—the hopeless acceptance of a destiny which has, for centuries, left its imprint in the sad eyes of the Breton. Generations of martyrdom leave a cowed and spiritually fatigued race which breeds stoics.
Like great white blossoms, the spotless head-dresses of the maids of Paradise swayed and bowed above the crowd.
A little old woman stood beside a sailor, saying272to anybody who would listen to her: “My son—they are taking my son. Why should they take my son?”
Another said: “They are taking mine, too, but he cannot fight on land. He knows the sea; he is not afraid at sea. Can nobody help us? He cannot fight on land; he does not know how!”
A woman carrying a sleeping baby stood beside the drummers at the fountain. Five children dragged at her skirts and peered up at the mayor, who shrugged his shoulders and shook his fat head.
“What can I do? He must march with the others, your man,” said the mayor, again and again. But the woman with the baby never ceased her eternal question: “What can we live on if you take him? I do not mean to complain too much, but we have nothing. What can we live on, m’sieu the mayor?”
But now the drummers had stepped out into the centre of the square and were drawing their drum-sticks from the brass sockets in their baldricks.
“Good-bye! Good-bye!” sobbed the maids of Paradise, giving both hands to their lovers. “We will pray for you!”
“Pray for us,” said the men, holding their sweethearts’ hands.
“Attention!” cried the officer, a slim, hectic lieutenant from Lorient.
The mayor handed him the rolls, and the lieutenant, facing the shuffling single rank, began to call off:
“Roux of Bannalec?”
“Here, monsieur—”
“Don’t say, ‘Here, monsieur!’ Say, ‘Present!’ Now, Roux?”
“Present, monsieur—”
“Idiot! Kedrec?”
“Present!”273
“That’s right! Penmarch?”
“Present!”
“Rhuis of Sainte-Yssel?”
“Present!”
“Hervé of Paradise Beacon?”
“Present!”
“Laenec?”
“Present!”
“Duhamel?”
“Present!”
The officer moistened his lips, turned the page, and continued:
“Carnac of Alincourt?”
There was a silence, then a voice cried, “Crippled!”
“Mark him off, lieutenant,” said the mayor, pompously; “he’s our little hunchback.”
“Shall I mark you in his place?” asked the lieutenant, with a smile that turned the mayor’s blood to water. “No? You would make a fine figure for a forlorn hope.”
A man burst out laughing, but he was half crazed with grief, and his acrid mirth found no response. Then the roll-call was resumed:
“Gestel?”
“Present!”
“Garenne!”
There was another silence.
“Robert Garenne!” repeated the officer, sharply. “Monsieur the mayor has informed me that you are liable for military duty. If you are present, answer to your name or take the consequences!”
The poacher, who had been lounging on the bridge, slouched slowly forward and touched his cap.
“I am organizing a franc corps,” he said, with a deadly sidelong glance at the mayor, who now stood beside the lieutenant.274
“You can explain that at Lorient,” replied the lieutenant. “Fall in there!”
“But I—”
“Fall in!” repeated the lieutenant.
The poacher’s visage became inflamed. He hesitated, looking around for an avenue of escape. Then he caught my disgusted eye.
“For the last time,” said the lieutenant, coolly drawing his revolver, “I order you to fall in!”
The poacher backed into the straggling rank, glaring.
“Now,” said the lieutenant, “you may go to your house and get your packet. If we have left when you return, follow and report at the arsenal in Lorient. Fall out! March!”
The poacher backed out to the rear of the rank, turned on his heel, and strode away towards the coast, clinched fists swinging by his side.
There were not many names on the roll, and the call was quickly finished. And now the infantry drummers raised their sticks high in the air, there was a sharp click, a crash, and the square echoed.
“March!” cried the officer; and, drummers ahead, the long single rank shuffled into fours, and the column started, enveloped in a throng of women and children.
“Good-bye!” sobbed the women. “We will pray!”
“Good-bye! Pray!”
The crowd pressed on into the dusk. Far up the darkening road the white coiffes of the women glimmered; the drum-roll softened to a distant humming.
The children, who did not understand, had gathered around a hunchback, the exempt cripple of the roll-call.
“Ho! Fois!” I heard him say to the crowd of wondering little ones, “if I were not exempt I’d teach these Prussians to dance the farandole to my biniou! Oui, dame! And perhaps I’ll do it yet, spite of the275crooked back I was not born with—as everybody knows! Oui, dame! Everybody knows I was born as straight as the next man!”
The children gaped, listening to the distant drumming, now almost inaudible.
The cripple rose, lighted a lantern, and walked slowly out toward the cliffs, carrying himself with that uncanny dignity peculiar to hunchbacks. And as he walked he sang, in his thin, sharp voice, the air of “The Three Captains”:
“J’ai eu dans son cœur la plac’ la plus belle,La plac’ la plus belle.J’ai passé trois ans, trois ans avec elle,Trois ans avec elle.J’ai eu trois enfants qui sont capitaines,Qui sont capitaines.L’un est à Bordeaux, l’autre à la Rochelle,L’autre à la Rochelle.Le troisième ici, caressent les belles,Caressent les belles.”
Far out across the shadowy cliffs I heard his lingering, strident chant, and caught the spark of his lantern; then silence and darkness fell over the deserted square; the awed children, fingers interlocked, crept homeward through the dusk; there was no sound save the rippling wash of the river along the quay of stone.
Tired, a trifle sad, thinking perhaps of those home letters which had come to all save me, I leaned against the river wall, staring at the darkness; and over me came creeping that apathy which I had already learned to recognize and even welcome as a mental anæsthetic which set that dark sentinel, care, a-drowsing.
What did I care, after all? Life had stopped for me years before; there was left only a shell in which that unseen little trickster, the heart, kept tap-tapping away against a tired body. Was that what we call life? The sorry parody!276
A shape slunk near me through the dusk, furtive, uncertain. “Lizard,” I said, indifferently. He came up, my gun on his ragged shoulder.
“You go with your class?” I asked.
“No, I go to the forest,” he said, hoarsely. “You shall hear from me.”
I nodded.
“Are you content?” he demanded, lingering.
The creature wanted sympathy, though he did not know it. I gave him my hand and told him he was a brave man; and he went away, noiselessly, leaving me musing by the river wall.
After a long while—or it may only have been a few minutes—the square began to fill again with the first groups of women, children, and old men who had escorted the departing conscripts a little way on their march to Lorient. Back they came, the maids of Paradise silent, tearful, pitifully acquiescent; the women of Bannalec, Faöuet, Rosporden, Quimperlé chattering excitedly about the scene they had witnessed. The square began to fill; lanterns were lighted around the fountain; the two big lamps with their brass reflectors in front of the mayor’s house illuminated the pavement and the thin tree-foliage with a yellow radiance.
The chatter grew louder as new groups in all sorts of gay head-dresses arrived; laughter began to be heard; presently the squealing of the biniou pipes broke out from the bowling-green, where, high on a bench supported by a plank laid across two cider barrels, the hunchback sat, skirling the farandole. Ah, what a world entire was this lost little hamlet of Paradise, where merrymakers trod on the mourners’ heels, where the scream of the biniou drowned the floating note of the passing bell, where Misery drew the curtains of her bed and lay sleepless, listening to Gayety277dancing breathless to the patter of a coquette’s wooden shoes!
Long tables were improvised in the square, piled up with bread, sardines, puddings, hams, and cakes. Casks of cider, propped on skids, dotted the outskirts of the bowling-green, where the mayor, enthroned in his own arm-chair, majestically gave his orders in a voice thickened by pork, onions, and gravy.
Truly enough, half of Finistère and Morbihan was gathering at Paradise for a fête. The slow Breton imagination had been fired by our circus bills and posters; ancient Armorica was stirring in her slumber, roused to consciousness by the Yankee bill-poster.
At the inn all rooms were taken; every house had become an inn; barns, stables, granaries had their guests; fishermen’s huts on coast and cliff were bright with coiffes and embroidered jerseys.
In their misfortune, the lonely women of Paradise recognized in this influx a godsend—a few francs to gain with which to face those coming wintry months while their men were absent. And they opened their tiny houses to those who asked a lodging.
The crowds which had earlier in the evening gathered to gape at our big tent were now noisiest in the square, where the endless drone of the pipes intoned the farandole.
A few of our circus folk had come down to enjoy the picturesque spectacle. Speed, standing with Jacqueline beside me, began to laugh and beat time to the wild music. A pretty maid of Bannalec, white coiffe and scarlet skirts a-flutter, called out with the broad freedom of the chastest of nations: “There is the lover I could pray for—if he can dance the farandole!”
“I’ll show you whether I can dance the farandole, ma belle!” cried Speed, and caught her hand, but she278snatched her brown fingers away and danced off, laughing: “He who loves must follow, follow, follow the farandole!”
Speed started to follow, but Jacqueline laid a timid hand on his arm.
“I dance, M’sieu Speed,” she said, her face flushing under her elf-locks.
“You blessed child,” he cried, “you shall dance till you drop to your knees on the bowling-green!” And, hand clasping hand, they swung out into the farandole. For an instant only I caught a glimpse of Jacqueline’s blissful face, and her eyes like blue stars burning; then they darkened into silhouettes against the yellow glare of the lanterns and vanished.
Byram rambled up for a moment, to comment on the quaint scene from a showman’s point of view. “It would fill the tent in old Noo York, but it’s n. g. in this here country, where everybody’s either a coryphee or a clown or a pantaloon! Camuels ain’t no rara avises in the Sairy, an’ no niggers go to burnt-cork shows. Phylosophy is the thing, Mr. Scarlett! Ruminate! Ruminate!”
I promised to do so, and the old man rambled away, coat and vest on his arm, silk hat cocked over his left eye, the lamp-light shining on the buckles of his suspenders. Dear old governor!—dear, vulgar incarnation of those fast vanishing pioneers who invented civilization, finding none; who, self-taught, unashamed taught their children the only truths they knew, that the nation was worthy of all good, all devotion, and all knowledge that her sons could bring her to her glory that she might one day fulfil her destiny as greatest among the great on earth.
The whining Breton bagpipe droned in my ears; the dancers flew past; laughter and cries arose from the tables in the square where the curate of St. Julien stood,279forefinger wagging, soundly rating an intoxicated but apologetic Breton in the costume of Faöuet.
I was tired—tired of it all; weary of costumes and strange customs, weary of strange tongues, of tinsel and mummers, and tarnished finery; sick of the sawdust and the rank stench of beasts—and the vagabond life—and the hopeless end of it all—the shabby end of a useless life—a death at last amid strangers! Soldiers in red breeches, peasants in embroidered jackets, strolling mountebanks all tinselled and rouged—they were all one to me.... I wanted my own land.... I wanted my own people.... I wanted to go home ... home!—and die, when my time came, under the skies I knew as a child,... under that familiar moon which once silvered my nursery windows....
I turned away across the bridge out into the dark road. Long before I came to the smoky, silent camp I heard the monotonous roaring of my lions, pacing their shadowy dens.