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

"He has seen us sitting sleeping on the roof, hand in hand, when the sunlight was two hours old, and you will see that neither you nor I will ever get farther than we are at present under the consulship of Jack Jaikes. He considers us in the light of a good joke, all because of that unhappy rencontre!"

I was not ambitious like Rhoda Polly, and my position as confidential lieutenant to Jack Jaikes suited me exactly. I do not mean that he ever consulted me, or asked for my opinion on matters of business. But he liked a listener and he loved to thresh out every question immediately and to put down the contradictor. I must have been an immense comfort to him, for I contradicted regularly, with or without conviction, and as regularly allowed myself to be beaten down. That was what I was there for!

Dennis Deventer had placed Jack Jaikes over the whole of the Works, as distinct from the defences of the Château – which, as the less defensible and the more likely to be attacked, he kept in his own hand. He strengthened the wall of the orchard with palisades, and established posts at either end with a machine gun to sweep its length. In spite of all, the Old Orchard remained the weak spot in our defences, and the sight of it with the enemy's posts so near put an idea into my head.

I went directly to Dennis Deventer. He was sitting placidly watching the "assembling" of a new machine gun, the parts of which had been all ready before the stoppage of the Works. He looked on critically, but without needing to put in a word. Penman, Brown, and the rest were far too good engineers to need even a suggestion. All the same they doubtless knew themselves to be under the eye of the master.

"Chief," said I, "we took Keller Bey and Alida across the water for safety, and I saw them into my father's care at Gobelet, where Hugh remains as a guard. Now the real weakness of our position here is the presence in our midst of Mrs. Deventer and your two daughters!"

"Two daughters – I have three!" said he, but I thought somewhat quizzically and as if comprehending very well.

"Oh, I do not include Rhoda Polly," I answered, "she is as good a soldier as any of us, and could be trusted in all circumstances, even if she were rushed – "

"Rushed?" he said sharply. "How that? How trusted?" I spoke and I saw him wince. Then, in a moment, he answered me, "You are quite right – ten times right. And you mean that the others – could not!"

"I am speaking of what I pray God may never happen, but yet – the odds against us are great. If it were as I suggested – with the other three women – that would be your duty!"

He drew in his breath, hissing, between his teeth, like one who feels the first sharp incision of the knife. His hands clenched and something like a groan came from the strong man. I pursued my advantage.

"You might not be there, Mr. Deventer – you might be lying as I saw Allerdyce along the top of your gun. So might I – so might anyone you dared delegate."

"God forgive you – you put water into my veins. How could any man 'delegate' such a thing!"

"No," said I, "I feel as you do, and for that reason I beg of you to let me escort your wife and daughters to the care of my father."

"And suppose," he said, "that our friends the enemy, finding us a hard nut to crack and probably with little kernel when cracked, should take it into their heads to cross the bridge and plunder the houses on the hill of St. André?"

"I think not, sir," I answered steadily. "There are Government troops in Aramon le Vieux. The National Guard there is all against the revolutionists. In the old town the tricolour has never been in the least danger. The whole department would move upon them if they attempted such a thing."

"Well argued, my Cicero," said he, "you are your father's son. But these black-a-vised rogues of ours defy reasoning. They may do the very thing all wisdom shows that they ought not to do. And a visit to Gobelet on the hill is one of these temptations which may prove too much for the gaol birds who shelter themselves under the black flag of anarchy. I do not see that the danger would be much lessened, considering the devil's crew with whom we have to deal. A raid across the water, made by night, would be an exploit worthy of them."

So my proposition was for the time rejected, but I did not despair. For I knew, or thought I knew, that the absence of the women would relieve us who were fighting the lines of the Château and Factory from an almost intolerable fear. In this respect I now think I was wrong. For the idea of the girls and their mother being entrusted to them to defend, made every man behind the defences hate the enemy with a deep steady hatred. Each became in his own eyes charged with the care of Liz or Hannah, of Rhoda Polly or their mother, according to where, or in what relation of life – sweetheart, sister, or mother – their hearts were tenderest.

Outside the situation changed but slowly. The Committee of Public Safety had taken possession of the Mairie after Keller Bey had been abandoned by his colleagues – and when with Alida he had come forth to make a last effort at conciliation. Except the desperate Chanot, none of the leaders of the Revolt-against-the-Revolt had taken any part in the fighting. Barrès, Chardon, even Bonnot had sat and directed operations from the safe shelter of the Hôtel de Ville.

It was not cowardice, the scoundrels were brave enough, as they showed afterwards – but they had reached what seemed a haven of peace, and the share of the plunder which had been claimed by the "administration" assured them of good restaurant meals and such joyous company as was to be found in Aramon.

Speaking to Chardon, his lieutenant Chanot treated the whole business lightly.

"Why should we not take the best of life we can? It may not be for long," he said, referring to this period. "You people of the Château had taken toll of our numbers. Well, I do not complain. There was the more left for the rest. We had appropriated, and who had a better right to spend? There was no more cant of liberty and individualism among us, and each man being a law and a religion to himself, we stole from one another when we could. That is, if we found a friend's cash-box in a place where a hand might grasp it, we thought how much good it would do him to drink of his own brewing. So we 'individually expropriated' him. That is why Lasalle of St. Gilles was killed by Auroy. Auroy found him mixed up with a roll of bank-notes he had hidden in his mattress. There had been a new election for the Quartier St. Marthe, and as nobody thought of voting, we nominated Eusèbe le Plan who had lost an arm in the fighting and would be a long time in hospital. This made the plums go still farther round."

"The old 'reds'? Oh, they were in the town mostly, hidden in garrets, passing their time like Troppman in reading 'The Picturesque Magazine'" (here he laughed), "and listening for our footsteps and the grounding of our rifle-butts before their doors. They thought we wanted them. What in the devil's name should we want with such feeble, broken, bellowing cattle? They had brought nothing to the office. They had been content with their fifteen pence a day. Not one of them had a sou to rub against another, and their wives hardly knew where the next day's soup was to come from. Oh, yes, I know now, that which had I known then, some blood would have splashed the garden walls – that Dennis Deventer had his own folk among them who distributed money and food. They were his best workmen and it was an agreed thing that when all this had blown over and when we who had turned them out were all shot or beheaded, he should enlist them again, and they would go back in the 'shops' to speak with deference and sobriety as becomes an inferior to his superior!"

* * * * *

I do not mean that there was any regular truce – rather a kind of inaction and exhaustion. The first ardours of the political brigands had been cooled by machine gun practice – Napoleon's old prescription of "the whiff of grapeshot." A good many of this miscellaneous collection of rascals, especially those who had done well in the earlier work of incendiarism among the villas along the riverside, tailed off without crying a warning. They made their way, some to Marseilles, where the troops were just putting down the rule of Gaston Cremieux, some to Narbonne, which was still in the wildest revolt, while others scattered over the country, committing crimes in lonely places, hiding in the forests by day and tramping by night, till for the most part they managed to get themselves out of the country into Germany, Switzerland, or Spain – wherever, indeed, they were least known.

But those who were left behind at Aramon waxed all the more deadly and desperate because of these desertions. If only they had guessed how severe our losses had been, they would have attacked with more vigour than they did, but I think they judged that the "scourging" inflicted upon them by Jack Jaikes had been almost without loss to ourselves. Alas, besides the mound in the Orchard, the double row of graves in the beaten earth of the courtyard told another tale! I do not think anyone ever passed the spot without lifting his hat to Allerdyce and his troop of gallant men, to whom the noble May days and the starry nights of the last days of our siege mattered so little.

CHAPTER XXXVI

LEFT-HANDED MATTHEW

It was about this time that Matteo le Gaucher – Matteo the Left-handed – began to interest himself in our concerns. At first sight nothing was more unlikely than that Matteo could ever make the slightest difference to the fate of any human soul. Yet great and even final events hung upon Matteo le Gaucher. He was an Italian from Arquà, and, as was said by his comrades, a "spiteful toad." He was deformed in body, and of course carried with him the repute of a jettatore. The evil eye certainly looked out from under his low brows, but it was with his evil tongue that he could actually do the most mischief.

He had been employed by Arcadius in his garden. He was not a bad workman. "The ground," as he said, "was not too far off for him." He could work when he chose, better than anyone at the task of the day. But he was a born fault-finder, a born idler, insolent and quarrelsome. The four who were his room-mates and who worked with him bore longer with him because of his bodily infirmity and also because of the Evil Eye, which they mocked at but devoutly believed in. At last he aroused Arcadius, across whose path he had always been loath to come.

Arcadius found a fault. Matteo found a knife. All men knew the light gardening hoe which seldom left the hand of Arcadius. Well, the master's eye was accurate, and Matteo went to the town hospital with a broken wrist and a right hand almost hagged off. Let no one for a moment be sorry for Matteo. In that comprehensive interval he began to plot many things rendered natural by years of vendetta practice.

Directly, he could not hurt Arcadius. He had tried that and Chanot had only laughed at him. No, even to please him, the Committee of Public Safety would not shoot the man who sent them their finest, indeed their only, early fruits. Arcadius had no store of gold hid in his chimney. He had spent it all with Chanot's uncle the notary, buying new land, ever more and more – and some still not paid for – but all regularly being covered instalment and interest. This Chanot knew, because in his days of (oh, so dull) respectability, Chanot had had to make out the receipts. And how he hated the thought of the long days of deskwork.

Matteo mourned over his broken wrist, which hurt the more abominably whenever he hated anyone and could in no wise wreck his hatred. He must think out something else. He retired into his pillows, turned his face to the wall, and for a day and a night thought by what means he could best hurt Arcadius or the friends of the master-gardener.

He had been in the corner of the hangar-dormitory that night when the four Tuscans had been called up to follow the lantern of Arcadius. The Toad, with the venom attributed to him for centuries, had risen quietly and from behind the great arbutus, had seen the boat with Keller Bey lying stark on his stretcher, and the beautiful girl watching over him, push out into the night.

On their return the Tuscans had exhibited their newly earned gold, and all innocently had striven to set his cupidity wild by tales of the wonderful paradise of fertility and riches under the brow of the hill of Mont St. André.

Matteo le Gaucher snarled at them, denying that the coins were good, or, if good, that they had been won (as they asserted) by merely carrying a sick man up a hill.

Not for such service did men give gold Napoleons. They lied, Carlo, Beppo, Lorenzo, and the oaf from San Ghomigniano of the Seven Towers. They all lied, and Matteo, who was certainly in most evil humour that day, tried to knock up the hand in which the Tuscan was jingling them. He of the City of the Seven Towers felled Matteo, who would never have forgiven him, if the bone-splintering blow of the mattock in the hand of Arcadius had not come to fill the hater with the hope of a greater vengeance.

Nevertheless the thought of the rich man who dwelt on the slopes of Mont St. André, with sacks of golden Napoleons on either side of every room, kept haunting him. Matteo could neither eat nor sleep till he had seen. So he took a half-holiday without asking permission (the beginning of his quarrel with the huge Arcadius) and, stealing a skiff from a neighbouring landing, scrambled up the steep face of Mont St. André.

Fortune willed that he should meet the junior lycéens out for a walk, two and two, with only a weak pion to restrain them. Naturally Matteo was mocked and mobbed. Matteo drew a knife, and grinned like a wild cat, but recognised his error in time, accepted the situation, and with the hate of hell in his heart, began to show the juniors knife tricks – how to let it fall always with the point down, how to send it whizzing like a gleam of light deep into the heart of a tree, which might just as well have been the heart of a man.

At last he got clear of them, smiling and bowing, till the sober-coated little rascals were lost to sight on the high path. Then he brandished his knife in fury, and vowed that if he could he would cut the throat of every wretched imp among them.

But at the sound of voices he subdued his anger, and, humbly asking his way from this passer-by and that other, he at last made his way to Gobelet. He knocked long for admission at the porter's lodge, but the porteress seeing such a calumny on God's handiwork outside, and scenting appeals for charity, eyed him disfavourably through the little cross-barred spy-window and let him knock.

A little farther down the road, he was quite as unsuccessful at the tower port of the Garden Cottage, over which the Tessiers had been wont to sleep.

There was no one in the house at all, yet Matteo le Gaucher quickly running to the top of the bank opposite, imagined he saw faces mocking him at every window.

It chanced that for his sins (whatever they may have been) my father was at that moment coming leisurely down the hill, his hands behind his back. He had been up to call upon his friend Renard before his siesta, and they two had argued over-long as to the purport of the fourteenth chapter of the Koran.

Suddenly full in his path he found Matteo grovelling before him, his hands and knees covered with blood, foam from his lips, and to all appearance in a state of extreme exhaustion. Now my father, Gordon Cawdor, was a man of very simple and direct mind, so far as the actions of those about him went. He believed that what he saw was the reality. Indeed, so transparent was his honesty that men took fright at it, counting it as the last achievement of duplicity, so that on an average he was as seldom deceived as any other man in the country.

Now he cried out for help, and after one or two shouts Saunders McKie and Hugh Deventer came through the gate and took up the seeming epileptic.

Saunders was wholly sceptical and when ordered by his master to wash the froth from the sufferer's mouth prospected with such good will for soap within that Matteo, had he dared, would gladly have bitten the finger off. He was compelled to swallow what might have served him another time.

"Dowse him wi' a bucket o' water, and let him gang his ways. I like not the look o' the speldron. He is like the Brownie that my Uncle Jock yince saw on the Lang Hill o' Lowden – a fearsome taed it was, juist like this Eytalian."

"Hold your peace, Saunders," commented my father. "You, he, and I are as God made us, and little that matters. What is written of us in the Book, that alone shall praise or condemn us!"

"Lord's sake, Maister Cawdor," said Saunders, who always wilted before my father in his moments of spiritual reproof, "I was sayin' and thinkin' no different. The Book and What is Written Therein! That's the rub, an' no to be spoken o' lichtly. And after a' the craitur's a craitur, though I will say – "

"Say nothing, Saunders, till you have given the unfortunate to eat and drink. Then when he is recovered I shall speak with him a moment."