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

"Bit of buccaneer blood in that fellow," said Dennis Deventer, "a hard horse to hold in sober times, but deuced dependable in an emergency. Hates the Frenchmen, however, and does not get on with them. Mostly I have to keep him on special duty, or in the office, though he is a capital engineer, and a capital 'driver' with Englishmen or Scots of his own breed who understand him. But if he is not careful he will get something for himself one of these days – a knife between the shoulder-blades as like as not."

Gentle Mrs. Dennis had her lament to make.

"I wish you would give him to me to look after. He can do almost anything. He mended my spare sewing-machine which has not worked for years, and made the missing parts himself. I believe some of them were given to Liz to play with when she was a little girl, and I have never seen them since."

"By all means have Jack Jaikes to tinker at your embroidery frames – that is, if you can tame him. For myself I do not see him in the rôle of family emergency man. But you must wait till we get the things all fixed here and the shops running handily. Then I dare say it may be just as well for Jaikes to eclipse himself for a day or two. If you can persuade him to spend his time in the Château without coming into the works till things cool off a bit, it will be best for all of us. He will not find himself exactly popular for a while."

"Of course I can, Dennis," said his wife, who never doubted her powers of persuasion. "There are hundreds of things that need to be done, and the girls and I can easily find him work for a year. The place is going to rack and ruin. High or low hardly a bolt will slide. Not a door will lock except the outer ones which you yourself have had looked to recently. What do you say, girls?"

"It is quite true, father," said Rhoda Polly. "I was trying to get Hugh to do some little things down in the kitchen yesterday, but whatever they teach him up at St. André, to make himself useful is certainly not among them. He was as dense as a French plum-pudding, and I had far more idea of how to handle a tool, for all he is older and twice my size."

Both Hannah and Liz agreed that there was a decided missionary call for the assistance of Jack Jaikes in the Château as soon as possible. Something in the tone of his youngest daughter touched Dennis Deventer's educated ear.

He looked up sharply from his plate.

"Now, Liz," he said, "I will have no nonsense of that kind!"

Liz blushed and dimpled, but kept her eyes well on her knife and fork without a word. But there was a smile which lurked about the corners of her mouth which said that her father, though a wise and masterful man in his own house, could not control what was in the mind of a young girl.

It was a family tradition that at table Dennis Deventer should not be argued with. Their mother might say inconsequent things in her purring fashion, but only Rhoda Polly was allowed to stand up to their Old Man. Even she rarely interfered, except in case of flagrant injustice or misunderstanding, or when the subject matter under discussion had been agreed upon beforehand in the family conclave. In Liz's case Rhoda Polly judged there was no cause to interfere. It had become too much Liz's habit to count all males coming to the house as "her meat," hardly excluding the halt, the maimed, and the blind. If her father had noticed this growing peculiarity, he had done so "off his own bat," and on the whole it was a good thing. The knowledge that she was under suspicion at head-quarters might do something to keep Liz within bounds. At least if she did get tangled up in her own snares, she would not have the face to go to their father for pity or demands for disentanglement. Rhoda Polly hoped that this would put some of the iron which was in her own blood into that of her more temperamental and impulsive younger sister.

The turmoil, the constant clatter of knives, forks, and plates, the discussion which swayed from one side of the table to the other, the well-worn family jests, which, because I held no key to their origin, shut me out from the shouts of merriment they provoked – all produced on me a feeling of dazed isolation. I liked the Deventers singly, especially Rhoda Polly and her father. I could talk to each with ease and an honest eye to my own profit or amusement. But I will not hide it from you that I found the entire Deventer family, taken together, too much for me.

I think I inherit my father's feeling for a "twa-handed crack" as the only genuine method of intercourse among reasoning beings. More than three in a conversation only serves to darken counsel by words without knowledge. In a company of four my father is reduced to complete silence, unless, indeed, he assumes his gown professorial and simply prelects. In this way alone, and on condition that nobody says a word, my father could be induced to give forth of his wisdom in company.

But a sympathetic touch on the shoulder from Rhoda Polly, one of whose peculiarities was that she understood things without being told, delivered me from my awkwardness.

"I don't think you have been here since we all grew up," she said, with a smile. "We are rather assommant, I admit. We stun people with our trick of throwing ourselves at each other's heads. But you will soon get used to the clamour. Meantime, if I were you, I should go out and walk in the acacia avenue. It is a good place to be quiet in, and I have it in my mind that you may learn something there" – she paused a moment – "something that will take the taste of Jack Jaikes' threatenings and slaughters out of your mouth."

She had moved back her chair a little so as to let me slip out, and then with a nod and half-smile she launched herself into the fiercest of the fray. So keen was challenge and réplique just at that moment that I was outside the fine old tapestried dining-room without being perceived by anyone.

I ran downstairs and reported to the sentinel on duty at the front door. I told him that I did not feel well and was going to take the air. He asked if I had my revolvers with me, and was only pacified at sight of them. He had gone often with messages from the Chief to my father at Gobelet, and so took an interest in me.

I skirted the house, and was just plunging into a belt of woodland through which I could gain the acacia walk without being seen, when I was hailed from the roof by Jack Jaikes. He wanted to know where I was going, and what I was going to do when I got there.

Instead of being rude and obvious I made him the reply which I knew would baffle him.

"Ask Rhoda Polly!" I said, and he swore aloud. If he had not been safe on the roof he would have come after me at once. As it was I advised him that he had as much responsibility as one man could safely shoulder, and that he would do wisely not to fret about me.

With that I waved my hand and stepped into the thickest of the bushes. The little wood ran round an artificial lake, and was prolonged right to the great wall of the Château policies half a mile away. It was the part of the grounds most distant from the works, and from what might be called the centre of disturbance.

I climbed a young but good-sized plane which overtopped the wall. It had been pollarded, and the step from the tree to the top of the wall was rather a long one. I managed it, however, without difficulty, thanks to the bough of an acacia which came swaying and trembling over from the highway beyond. The next moment I had dropped like a cat out of the acacia boughs into the road. A young man was sitting on a fallen tree trunk, pensively smoking a cigarette, his hat pulled low on his brow, and his eyes on the road.

I had no chance to escape his notice, for the sound of my feet attracted him and he looked up at once. He rose smilingly and held out his hand. It was Gaston Cremieux.

CHAPTER IX

A REUNION OF THE REDS

"Did Rhoda Polly send you?" Cremieux asked, though I am sure he knew.

"She bade me come here, saying that perhaps I might learn something to my advantage."

He looked at me queerly, and with a shade of suspicion which I quite misunderstood.

"Then I may take it that she does not mean to come herself?"

"I am sure she has not the least idea of that. She was in the very thick of a discussion upon the possibility of factories and ateliers being run entirely by working men. The whole family had taken sides, and when I came away I expected every moment to see them leap at each other's throats."

"They are extraordinary, but quite admirable," he said, throwing away his cigarette and rising. "We cannot breed anything of the kind in France. Our spirit of family discipline forbids it. We have the cult of ancestor worship as in China, only we do not get farther back than father and mother. It is mainly the mother who leads the young men of France. We have them among us too, these good mothers, women who teach their sons to fight to the death for the great Day of Freedom. But they are scarce. Our women are still under the heel of the priesthood, and the young men, though they may follow us, still keep the inmost corner of their hearts for their mothers; and one day when we most want them, we may find them missing at roll-call. His mother cannot bear that her son should be outcast and accursed. He need not go to Mass, but if he will only see her favourite priest a moment in secret, she is sure that he will stay at home with her. Like you, Rossel is a Protestant and has not this to put up with. He is now in Metz with Bazaine, but he will return, and then you and the world will see a man."

I asked him what the men meant to do, and if he thought he could not prevent further fighting and burning.

Before he had time to answer a bell began clanging furiously in the town.

"That is the signal," he said; "the Commune of Aramon is to meet in general assembly. Will you come? You will be quite safe with me, even though I am going to make them very angry. And besides, as Rhoda Polly says, you will learn something to your advantage."

"Do you think she meant that?" I asked.

"Ah, you may go far and look long before you find out all that is in Rhoda Polly's mind, but at any rate I suppose she meant that you would be safe with me, and might hear a few things that are not included in the curriculum of the Lycée St. André."

We took our way towards the clanging bell, and it had the weirdest effect as we topped a knoll, where the noise came so fierce and angry as to put a stop to our conversation. Anon descending into deep dells out of which the pines shot straight upwards like darts, sheer trunks for a hundred feet before the first branch was poised delicately outwards as if to grasp the light, we lost the sound of the rebellious tocsin, or it came to our ears soft as the Angelus floated over the fields to a worshipping peasantry in days that were yet of faith.

But Gaston Cremieux kept on his way without paying much notice to the woodland sights about him. His colour rose, and his shoulders were bent forward with a certain eagerness. The bell seemed to be calling him, and I doubt not he was thinking of the responsibility of guiding aright these darkened souls. His convictions, his aspirations were theirs. But their volcanic outbursts of destructive energy, sudden, spiteful, and inexplicable, vexed and troubled him.

Yet the reason plainly was that they had been hurt by those in authority over them, and they struck back as naturally and instinctively as bees fly out to sting when their hive is overturned. That the affair is partly an accident does not matter either to bee or workman.

Presently we began to pass little villas – "Mon Plaisir," "Mont Dore," and "Château des Roses." The mountain path among the pines began to widen into a made road, and to carry traces of wheelmarks. My leader quickened his pace, and after a few minutes of threading our way among the houses of New Aramon, we turned aside and entered a wide space in the centre of which was a hall roofed with corrugated iron. Doors wide and high as those of a barn stood open, and in the interior we could see many people, men and women, already seated on rude benches.

There were also groups outside, but these were mostly younger men, sullen-faced and furtive of eye. To me it seemed as if they regarded my companion with no favourable looks. Several had been wounded in the fighting, and now carried bandaged arms or white-wrapped heads. Somehow I knew at once that this was the dangerous element, and I knew that the whirring machine guns behind which glanced the pitiless eye of Jack Jaikes, had had something to say to them.

Outwardly the Reunion of the Reds had nothing to distinguish it from other political gatherings in the Midi. Indeed the type had been struck out in the earlier pre-Robespierre period of the great Revolution, improved upon in 1830 and 1848, and had now imposed itself even upon the anarchists.

A president was appointed, who had his pair of vice-presidents and a couple of secretaries to prepare a report of the proceedings exactly as you may find described in Mirabeau's Courier de Provence.

The Hall of the People at Aramon had been an old riding-school in the days before Solferino, when the scheming Emperor was hotly preparing for his campaign across the Milanese plains. It was now a rather dimly lighted, well-ventilated meeting-place, with a clean light-varnished platform in front for speakers, and behind a broader space on which cane chairs had been set out for the "assessors" – as we would say "members of committee." These were being filled as we entered the hall. Names were called out, and sturdy fathers of families rose from beside their spouses to tramp up to the "assessors" chairs, not without a certain conscious dignity as citizens whose worth was unexpectedly made apparent to all men. I have seen the same expression since on the faces of men pressed to become members of a municipality, or even a village council, and I suppose Cabinet Ministers look like that when the new Prime Minister hints at the object of his visit.

The entrance of Gaston Cremieux called forth a kind of shrill cheer, but the Latin races had not at that time learned the full-bodied roar which greets and encourages a favourite orator in England or America.

I was seated at the right of the speaker's platform, and a little behind in shadow – which was as well, for there I could see without being seen. And what I saw astonished me. There were nearly a couple of thousand people in the riding-school by the time that Gaston Cremieux had shaken hands with the President and taken his seat. The iron galleries which ran round contained the younger people, many girls and their sweethearts, while at the far end were a score or two of long-limbed fellows clustered together – probably day labourers whose dusky tints and clustering black curls indicated their Italian origin.

So long as the great doors remained open, I could see outside the restless hither and thither of the young men who had scowled at us as we came into the court.

It was not long before the President and Bureau of Workmen of the Ateliers des Armes at Aramon declared that this properly called and constituted general meeting was open.

It was evident that some of the elder men were ready enough to speak, and a grave-faced grey-headed man rose to make his way towards the speaker's platform. But long before he reached the estrade, it had already been taken possession of by a young man with a shaggy head and wild beady eyes. This was Georges Barrès, a moulder in the new big gun factory. He had but recently arrived from St. Etienne, and had instantly become a notable firebrand.

The speech into which he plunged was a fierce denunciation of the masters and managers, through which ran the assertion that all property was theft. The workers, therefore, were justified in redressing their wrongs with the strong hand, and he and his companions would see to it that they did not die of starvation with so many rich and fine houses all about them. As for Monsieur Deventer and his English vermin of overseers, they must be killed out like rats. Only so would the town be purified. Only so would their dead comrades be avenged, and a solid foundation be laid for the Free Commune in which the works and all within them, the profits and everything included in the year's trading, should belong absolutely to the workers.