A Tatter of Scarlet Part 27

"Why, why, why?" he gasped, poking his head through the door--"who gave you the liberty? Ah, Keller Bey--I beg your pardon. I was not aware of your presence."

"This young man has brought us important information," said Keller Bey.

"He has discovered a semaph.o.r.e signal newly erected on a spur among the olive trees. The enemy have a post there, and are busily sending messages to corresponding bodies making an advance southward upon this side."

By this time I had the gla.s.s into position, and was moving gingerly out of the way to let in the ex-engineer of Avignon, when the little cobbler fairly rushed at the vacant seat, catching a foot on one of the legs of the tripod and, of course, entirely losing the semaph.o.r.e on the opposite bank of the Rhone.

"I can see nothing--there is nothing to see!" he cried, gesticulating fiercely with fingers like claws, "it is the lies of the English. I know them. They have always lied to us. Dennis Deventer lies. There is no message--no semaph.o.r.e. There is no regiment nearer than Lyons or Ma.r.s.eilles, and there I warrant Gaston Cremieux, Procureur-General like myself, is giving them as much as they can think about."

With extreme difficulty Keller persuaded the acrid little man to allow me to try.

"I will send him to the Central Prison if he has been bringing us false news--and of course he has. What a blessing! I have a committal form with me."

I did not shrink from the test, and while Keller Bey maintained the cobbler-magistrate in some degree of quiet on the other side of the platform, the expert deserter quickly got his eye on the signalling apparatus.

"I have it," he cried, his brow glued to the eyepiece and his hand signalling for stillness. "Oh, do be quiet!"

Raoux's dancing feet were shaking the crazy platform.

"The devil is in the fellow's legs," said Keller Bey. "Will you be quiet, Raoux, or shall I drop you over to the glory of your patron saint?"

He held him for a moment asprawl over the edge with a drop of two hundred feet clear upon the packed causeway stones. Something of helplessness in the grip of Keller Bey for a moment took the madness out of Raoux.

He kept fairly still when Keller placed him again on the floor of the platform, and with a pair of huge hands, one on each shoulder, held him in place. Without taking his eyes from the spygla.s.s the engineer searched and found a dirty note-book to which was attached by a string a stump of pencil. Presently he began to spell out a message from one side of the river to the other. I could see his fingers shaking with excitement as he jotted down the letters.

"Why," he exclaimed at the first pause, "it's our fellows from Avignon, and they are not even troubling to code the message--shows what they think of us."

"Tell us what they say," said Keller Bey.

"One moment--they are beginning again," and the pencil stub began to travel.

"_Gun platform can be laid out on spur mountain, 250 feet above present shelter trenches. Will command bridge-head of Aramon--possibly also rebel headquarters._"

I saw Keller Bey turn pale to the lips. He understood well enough. He had campaigned against those same invisible, tireless French engineers for many desperate African years, and he knew that in the long run they always made out to do the task set for them.

But Raoux the cobbler-procureur was quite unmoved.

"They are playing with levels and angle-machines as they used to do when I was at Avignon. They went out every day clean and came back dirty. The colonel could find nothing better for them to do. To-morrow we shall send half a column of ours and shoot a few. Then the rest will keep further up the river where they belong."

"As you will," said Keller Bey, "but you had better send a battalion at least with provisions for three days."

"Provisions for three days--absurd nonsense!" foamed the little man, for this was touching his tenderest spot, "our citizen soldiers are the National Guard of Aramon, and will not consent to sleep away from their houses, not for all the wig-wagging engineers and railway signalling in France! We are not slaves but freemen. No, no, a day's excursion to brush away these impudent land surveyors with a volley from our patriotic rifles--and then back again before dark with victory on our untarnished banners--that is what you can expect from the lion hearts of our young men. We defend the Commune. We do not make war outside it. And why should we when the chief strength of the enemy remains una.s.saulted and untaken within our walls?"

Keller Bey called off the ex-engineer. With such a war method as that which was evidently popular in Aramon, it was no use wasting time reading semaph.o.r.e messages.

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 munic.i.p.al 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 a.s.sault 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 Pere Felix 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 seance 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 G.o.d's beautiful machinery. G.o.d 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 cla.s.sics, and he was, I think, more desirous of my company than ever.

"My brither pa.s.sed 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 bra.s.s k.n.o.bs 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 Chateau 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sing 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 soiree, to enter which he had once paid a "silver collection"

in the unfulfilled expectation of "tea and a bag."