A Tatter of Scarlet: Adventurous Episodes of the Commune in the Midi 1871

The Chief and I returned very mournfully to the Mairie. I could see that his reflections were bitter.

"They do not understand the Commune or what it means – they do not know the spirit of the Internationale here. They care nothing except for their little municipal quarrels. They cherish wild, vague hopes about the works, and would attack the man upon whose charity they are living. But of the fact that France will one day speak to them with a voice of authority – nay, is now speaking in warning – to that they will pay no heed. At the Commune meeting to-day a whole day was wasted arguing for or against an extra duty on potatoes when brought across the bridge from the Protestant department of the Deux Rives. Protestant potatoes, Catholic and Roman potatoes! What irony, when the dusky signal-men are crawling from hill to hill ever nearer, and any day may bring our doom upon us!"

I let it sink well in, for I could see that Keller Bey was at last conscious of the mistake he had made.

"You must go," he said, "I cannot fairly keep you longer. Go to your friends and advise the good women of them to accept a safe conduct across the river. I have still enough authority for that, if I promise an ultimatum and an assault on the works to follow. It would make me happy to think of these kind folk who welcomed Alida and Linn so warmly, safely lodged under your father's roof as in a city of refuge."

He paused and looked pensively out on the uniformed groups of National Guard lounging and smoking in the white courtyard of Fontveille stone.

"As for me," he said, "there is no room for any going back. The Government would accept no resignation or belated repentance. I have dreamed my dream. I thought (as thought Carl Marx) that these working men were ready for an ideal reform, for government over themselves. I saw other cities joining themselves to us, the good seed sown over the country from department to department, till all should work for all and no man only for himself. Now I see that the nature of man cannot be changed by a theory or a form of government. Go, young man, to your friends. I, Keller Bey, bid you! Be kind to Linn and to Alida, my master's daughter. Perhaps all this has come because I disobeyed him for the first time when he sent the prince of the house of Ali to bring home his daughter. I may be justly punished, yet, nevertheless, the will of Alida is nearer to my heart than that of the Emir Abd-el-Kader in his house at Brousse!"

CHAPTER XXIX

WITHIN THE PALE

It was indeed high time that I went away from the perils of Aramon-les-Ateliers. Indeed, Keller Bey was in greater danger and condemned to greater isolation owing to my stay. At first he had counted it a happiness to talk with me of things outside his unfortunate office as head of the Commune. But even Père Félix and the more dependable of the little band of members of the Government, faithful to their head, showed something like the cold shoulder when Keller withdrew regularly to find me in his parlour as soon as the séance was over.

I waited most of a dark and moonless night for the coming of Jack Jaikes to the corner of the wall. At the first sound of my voice he threw over a rope to help me to scramble up. He himself was astride the top when I got there and we were inside the fortifications within thirty seconds.

And lo! how easy it all was – and what a difference! I seemed a thousand miles away from everyone on the town side, and now only a few rods divided me from the house of friends – from the sudden breaking ires of Dennis Deventer and the quiet smiles of his wife, a mistress within her own domain. Yes, and from Rhoda Polly – though I have left her to the last, I had not forgotten Rhoda Polly.

"Well," said Jack Jaikes, "ye've come at last, as ye had much better have done at the first, biding there among anarchists' trash and breakers of God's beautiful machinery. God knows I am as good a Liberal as ever voted for what Maister Gladstone said was right – yes, me and my faither before me. But before I would mix mysel' up with such a lazy, unclean, unsatisfied, cankered crew – sakes alive, I wad raither turn Tory at yince and lose my self-respect!"

This was a terrible threat for Jack Jaikes, who had brought away from Scotland no particular religion, except (as was common in these years) that unbounded adoration of Mr. Gladstone, which culminated in 1880.

For that night Jack Jaikes made me a shake-down among his own gang, and urged me to get the Chief to let me serve there.

"Man, I could be doing wi' ye fine," he said, "even though ye do not ken one end of a gun from anither till she goes off! But there's a headpiece on ye and they tell me that ye are fair bursting with the mathematics!"

I told him I was better at classics, and he was, I think, more desirous of my company than ever.

"My brither passed for the kirk and was something of a dab at the Greek. You learned yours here in France – will that be the same sort? It will? That's grand. Ye can gie me a bit help, then? I have some o' his auld college buiks in my box. I hae put in heaps o' spadewark at readin' them, but it is a dreary business by yersel'! For ane foot that ye gang forward, ye slip back twa, as the Irishman said aboot the road covered with ice!"

Above my head great steel armatures rose high in the air. The flitting lanterns brought out now the brass knobs of a governor, now the dim glistening bulk of a huge fly-wheel away up near the roof of the shed which Jack Jaikes and his men used as a dormitory. There was one fixed light which shone upon the instrument attached to a little field telegraph. Jack Jaikes had given up his idea of a wholesale electrocution of an attacking force – that is, Dennis Deventer had compelled him to give it up. But he had perfected a kind of burglar alarm applied to a wider area, which completely encircled the works and (separately) protected the Château and its grounds. If anyone interfered with his wires at any point, Jack Jaikes could instantly warn the nearest post to the disturbance, and the men would swarm out like wasps.

The plan had its little inconveniences. Cats in particular loved and were loved upon the great factory wall. But Jack Jaikes devised means, by "stinging them up a bit" electrically, to make them "leave that," as he expressed it.

Rooks also came to perch and left with a whoop of terror, or clung desperately head down with paralysed claws firmly knotted till the men plucked them off and threw them into a corner to recover.

But the first company of the Avengers, tentatively scrambling about the north-west corner to see what sort of watch the English kept, were promptly checked by a dozen bayonets thrust down from above, and having received information, they departed without standing on ceremony.

Let it not be thought that I slept much in the power-house. It was altogether too picturesque and vivid for me. My heart beat with a rousing and incommunicable joy. I was again among my own kind. I had done my best to sympathise with those others over the wall. I had tried to help and understand Keller Bey, but though I might wear the red cardigan, follow Garibaldi, run up the "tatter of scarlet" under Keller Bey's orders, my heart beat with the after-guard. My instincts were "yellow" – the rest was but the rash of the blood which came with youth and would pass like a malady of childhood.

Small wonder I did not sleep. Into that entrancing and mysterious hangar, hooded and cloaked men stole from nowhere in particular. Each gave a kick or a shake in passing to other men, who, silently rising, cloaked themselves, seized arms, adjusted belts, and so wordlessly clanked away into the dark. Then the new-comers would go over to the embers of the fire on the forge in the corner, where the red glow would reveal him as a pleasant-faced English lad, munching ardently his bread and sausage, or heating his coffee on the coals. In the gloom of the dormitory shake-downs men would talk rapidly, muttering in their sleep. If a man snored too vigorously, Jack Jaikes, or a lieutenant of that considerable sub-chief, would turn him over on his side, or, in extreme case, send him to the boiler-room, where the men had room to snore one against the other. These Jack Jaikes, always reminiscent of Glasgow, called the "Partick Social Warblers," in memory of a certain church glee-club soirée, to enter which he had once paid a "silver collection" in the unfulfilled expectation of "tea and a bag."

But that night as I lay I kept awake for the pure joy of knowing myself alive. I loved the breathing of the men about me, the ordered mystery of the comings and goings, the clicking of the telegraphic machine as Jack Jaikes bent over it, even the little circle of golden light which the lamp shed, and the bristly way his moustache had of standing out beyond the wicks of his grimly humorous mouth.

I wondered if he ever slept. Certainly he lay down. He had a blanket with which he covered himself, head and all. It was not much of a blanket, being pierced in the centre so that it could be worn with the head thrust through, poncho-wise, as he stalked about. It was full of burnt holes, showing where he had thrown himself down on cinders, some of which had proved too recent.

About four there came a shrill tirr-r-r-r of the small call-bell and every sleeper was instantly on his feet. How Jack Jaikes got to the ticker I do not know, but long before the men had their belts snapped, he was reading off to them the location of the alarm.

"Between posts 48 and 49, Norwell and Omand warned. Ready there, file out!"

The dark figures passed one by one out of the faint copper glow of the forge, stood each a moment against the blue-black mystery of the night framed in the doorway, and were then lost in the obscurity.

I thought of following, but first of all I was afraid of Jack Jaikes, who had made no sign to me, and secondly and chiefly, in a yard and among defences so sown with dangers and (for all I knew) corded with live wires, I might easily do myself much harm, and the general welfare of the cause little good. So, sorely against the grain, I stayed where I was.

Presently the men came laughingly back, their humour quite vanished. Two of the town goats – for Aramon was near enough to the mountains and to Spain to possess many of these – had chosen to contest the narrow way to the factory wall, from a pure point of honour as gentlemen should, for there was no lady in the case. They had died fighting, and a bayonet's point had been requisitioned to dislodge them both. They were now brought in and handed over to the cook for preparation. Both had been hard fighters in their time, and looked as if they would furnish what Caroline in "The Heir at Law" calls "not an inviting meal."

Everybody was now fully waked up, and no one thought any more of sleep. The night was still of the indigo dark peculiar to the South, and outside, I could see the stars sinking one by one. The glow on the forge-hearth was set blazing, tea billies were soon boiling, and there was a fragrant smell of coffee in the air. The clean, appetising hiss of frying bacon struck a joyous note. Someone set a big globe of electric light flaring, when, whisk-whisk, a quartette of bullets tore through the shed and knocked it to flinders.

Then in like an avenging genie entered Jack Jaikes.

"If I kenned wha that idiot was that set yon infernal thing blazing, I would knock the amazing friskiness out o' him. Have I not telled ye a score o' times that ye are no to make exhibitions o' yerselves? Exhibitions, did I say, waur nor that, juist blank eediot targets that the Frenchmen haena sense enough to hit!"

He made a silence about him, for all knew that his angers were black and that he would stick at nothing, but, if provoked, strike with what came nearest to his hand.

But the mood passed, the globe and carbons were renewed, and by the end of their early breakfast his good-humour also was quite restored. The men moved easily again without casting furtive eyes to see how the black dog was riding Jack Jaikes. They knew him for an incomparable fighting leader, an engineer without rival in the camp, but there was no doubt that he needed humouring when, as he would have said himself, "his birse was up." It had been remarked, even before he left the Clyde, that he was "far ower handy wi' a spanner," and that might have been the reason why he had tried Bristol and the Tyne before finding his master in Dennis Deventer of the Arms Factory of Aramon.

I broke in upon the Deventers at breakfast – a meal which in defiance of all local custom they took together as they had been used to do far away in Barrow under the Cumberland fells. Or rather it was Jack Jaikes himself who did the breaking. He could not deny himself that.

We heard the noise and clatter as we mounted the stairs.

"A fight," chuckled Jack Jaikes, half to himself, "but two to one on Rhoda Polly, anyway."

But he had his little effect to make. He flung the door open, grounded his rifle with a ringing clash, and announced in a stentorian voice:

"A deserter!"

The clamour ceased instantly. Every face was turned towards the door, Dennis Deventer half rose, his napkin in his hand. I could see the pale, clear-cut features of Rhoda Polly, her red lips parted, peering over her father's shoulder.

Dennis Deventer received me with a friendly push that sent me in the direction of Hugh, who "cleared" like a goal-keeper, and I fell into a chair beside Rhoda Polly.

"Come in, Jack Jaikes – what will you take? Try those kidneys – they are rather good. No, no, your chaps can't want you so soon. You are not hatching them out there, you know!"

These and other cries at last persuaded Jack Jaikes to do what he was yearning to do – sit down and eat a second breakfast with his master's family. His grin was at once triumphant and sardonic, yet he left me to answer for myself. His pleasure was not to talk much at these festivals of his soul. I think he was fearful of what he called "langwage" – such as he used occasionally in the works – escaping his control. At any rate he was a happy listener, and the few words he uttered were always destined to foment a discussion, acerbate a verbal quarrel, so that he could lay mental bets upon his admired Rhoda Polly. When she made a good hit, he felt inclined (as he confessed) to rise up and yell, "like a gallery student on an opera night" – a set of savages whom he had known during the college days of his brother, now a creditable and responsible "placed" minister in Scotland.

When I announced that I had come to stay Rhoda Polly nearly trod my foot off under the table, a vulgar disgrace to our comradeship for which she apologised afterwards.

"I had to do it," she said, "or I should have been blubbering on your shoulder with my arms about your neck! How would you have liked that, Angus my lad?"

I answered, that before company I should have liked it ill enough, but proffered my shoulder for the purpose since we were in private. Rhoda Polly in her turn cried shame upon me. If I could not remember our compact, she would not forget it. She also reminded me of saying of my own accord that she and I had put away childish things. In vain I represented to her that I had just returned from great danger and that if she had been so overwhelmed with joy at breakfast as to make pemmican of my foot, she must have still some remaining for which a suitable expression might be found without looking out the word in the dictionary.

But Rhoda Polly would have none of my suggestions. She was glad she had shown her feelings, however irregularly, but now if I pleased we would resume our good old talks together, at least when the incidents of the siege permitted.

Her father did not allow her to run round the yard or about the posts with the men, as she had been wont to do during the first January difficulties.

"Oh, it isn't that," she said, answering a question in my eyes which was also an accusation; "of course some of them think I'm nice and all that. But it isn't that! I'm not Liz! Only father says that there are snipers on the towers – the cathedral, St. Servan's, St. Marthe's, and St. Crispin's – and he doesn't want any accidents happening to his eldest daughter. But I am sure the boys miss me. I know Jack Jaikes does. He told me so when he came in to arrange mother's sewing machine, which I 'wrongulated' on purpose to hear the news."