A Tatter of Scarlet Part 33

"I proclaim a truce in the name of the Internationale!"

Mocking laughter answered him. The Internationale! What did they care for the Internationale? They were out to kill and to take.

Little groups began to gather at the dark alley mouths. I could see the glitter of rifles and bayonets. Present fear was arrested when they saw us withdrawing our guns. Hope sprang into their minds that they might capture the mitrailleuse abandoned halfway up. Their losses stung them to a wild and reckless fury.

I do not know whence the first bullets came--I think from the north end of the Cours Nationale, where some men had been busy removing their dead and wounded. At any rate it was the signal for a general discharge. The streets and alley-ways vomited fire. The crackle of rifle shots sprang from the windows of houses. Somehow we found ourselves outside on the Cours. We had abandoned the gun. Jack Jaikes seemed to be giving some kind of instructions, but I could not make out what he was saying. What I saw was too terrible--Keller Bey on the ground, the white flag of truce stained with blood, and Alida kneeling beside him.

"Take them up!" yelled Jack Jaikes, "run for it!"

Before me strode Hugh Deventer, huge and blond like a Viking. He caught up Alida and would have marched off with her, but that Jack Jaikes barred the way.

"Idiot," he cried, "who can carry a man of Keller's size but you? Give the girl to Cawdor!"

I think at that moment Hugh could have killed him, but he gave me Alida as bidden, and bending he shouldered the dead weight of the wounded man.

"Put him higher, then, you fool," he shouted to Jack Jaikes.

"I can't, they are coming at us with the white weapon. Heave him yourself," yelled back Jack Jaikes. I heard no more for Alida, waking suddenly to her position, fought desperately in my arms, escaped, and ran up the broken stones past the abandoned machine gun till I lost sight of her in the dusk of the broken gateway. Hugh Deventer, stumbling after with Keller Bey, cursed me for getting in his road. We did and said a number of things that night which can't well go in a log book, not even now.

I turned and in a moment was with the small band which Jack Jaikes had gathered about the gun. At any cost we must not lose that. There were too many men in Aramon who knew how to make ammunition for any purpose.

Yes, they were coming. They were so near that I had just time to snap in my bayonet and get beside Jack Jaikes. I saw him shake something wet from his hand.

"Are you wounded?" I asked anxiously, for that would have been the crown of our misfortunes.

"No, that's Allerdyce!" he answered, with ghastly brevity, but nevertheless the thing somehow nerved me. We all might be even as Allerdyce, but in the meantime we must stop that ugly black rush--the charge "with the white" as they called a bayonet charge. Behind was the gun--Allerdyce's gun--and beyond that the open defenceless port, the waiting men clewed there by their duty--and the girls!

Lord, how slow they were--these running men!

"Now then, one volley," said Jack Jaikes, "scourge them and then steady for the steel! Remember we are taller men and we have on an average a foot longer reach than they have. You, Gregory, keep behind and blow holes in anybody you can see running."

I cannot remember very clearly this part. How could I? I rather think we did not stand very firm. I seem to remember charging out to meet them--the others too--and Jack Jaikes laying about him in front of everybody with clubbed rifle, grunting like a man who fells bullocks.

The lines met with a clash of steel. I remember the click and lunge perfectly. Then suddenly we seemed to be all back to back, and somehow or other the centre of a terrible mixed business, a sort of whirlpool of fighting. Men quite unknown to us had appeared mysteriously from the direction of the Mairie. They were attacking our a.s.sailants on the flank. It was warm there under the trees of the promenade for a few minutes. But after a volley or two, as if they had come to seek for Keller Bey, our new allies decided to retire without him. They sucked back firing as they went, and taking with them the red mayoral flag they had carried.

We were left with our own battle to fight. But they had done something.

The solidity of the attack had been somewhat fused down. We were not now so closely surrounded.

"Glory, the tucker's out of them!" cried Jack Jaikes, "give them a volley--Henry rifles to the front. Scourge them!"

It was his word--"scourge them." And that to the best of our ability was what we did. The shooting was not very good, or we should have been rid of the enemy much more quickly.

"Stand clear, there!" commanded a voice from above our heads. Rhoda Polly had got a team of men together to lever up Allerdyce's machine gun. She was now bending over it, and those who remained of the dead man's crew bent themselves to the task of getting it in order.

"To right and left, and fire as they run. Now then----!" commanded Rhoda Polly.

"Re-r-r-r-rach-rach-rach!"

The mitrailleuse spat hate and revenge over our heads. The young "second-in-command," trained by Allerdyce, stood calmly to his post and swept the muzzle wherever he saw a cl.u.s.ter of a.s.sailants.

"Allerdyce! Allerdyce!" yelled the crew of No. 4. They did not mean him to hear. Allerdyce would never hear anything again--neither the voice of his native Doon, running free over the shallows, nor the raucous voice of his beloved gun, nor even the shouting of his men as they wrote their vengeance for a dead leader across the Cours of Aramon in letters of blood.

This happened almost at the end of the battle, but what I remember best of it all, in all that unknown and unknowable turmoil of death, is the half-wild, half-quixotic, altogether heroic figure of Jack Jaikes, dancing and vapouring under the splendours of the moonlight.

"Come back and fecht!" he yelled. "Come back and fecht for the sowl o'

Allerdyce! On'y ten o' ye. I tell ye I'll slay ye for the sake o'

Allerdyce! Ye made what's no human o' him. Come back and I will choke ye wi' my bare hands. We were chums, Allerdyce and me, at the Clydebank yaird. G.o.d curdle your blood for what ye did to Allerdyce. Come back and fecht, ye hounds o' h.e.l.l, come back and fecht!"

CHAPTER x.x.xIV

THE Pa.s.sING OF KELLER BEY

We were hard put to it before we got the madman in, and then it was worse than ever. For he, our master, the bravest man that I ever saw or think to see, sat down beside his friend and wept like a child. He did not even look at us when we took up Allerdyce and buried him in a long trench with the others who had fallen--five in all, a heavy loss for us who were so few.

"I never want to see Greenock again!" wailed Jack Jaikes, "we were that pack, Allerdyce and me----"

"Go and fetch your father, Rhoda Polly," said I, "this will never do. It would be no use to telegraph. He would never believe the like of Jack Jaikes."

"May G.o.d grant he can come!" said Rhoda Polly, and darted off. I went into the outhouse where Keller Bey lay. Harold Wilson was bending over him, a steel probe in his hand. He stood up as I came in, looking narrowly at the point.

"I think we shall pull him through, but so long as we have that young lady"--he pointed at Alida, who was exhausting herself in a long outburst of Oriental sorrow--"I fear we can do nothing radical."

"Wait till Rhoda Polly comes back," I said, "she will get her friend away."

"I do not think so," he said, "she has been trying for some time."

"Could he be moved?"

"Far?" queried the doctor.

"Well, across the river in a boat, and up the hill to my father's house."

Wilson winced. "That is rather a responsibility," he said dubiously; "still, the man is unconscious and will probably remain so for many hours. It certainly would be a good thing if we could be rid of him and of that young woman--though in ordinary circ.u.mstances we should not be in such a hurry to send her off."

He grinned pleasantly, and asked how I proposed to set about the business. I told him it would be easy to get Keller Bey down to the nursery gardens by the waterside. Here I would rout out my friend the patron Arcadius, who would do as much for three or four of his gardeners--Italians all, and not touched with local politics. My boat was there, and the gardener lads would carry the stretcher up the hill.

They did harder tasks every day of their lives.

"Well, but you see I can't leave all these--where's your doctor?"

I told him I could bring down the resident from the college hospital.

"Oh, I know him, Vallier, a very decent fellow for an _interne_. He'll do. Well, off with you. I will give you a note for him."

"We must wait till we get this stopped." I pointed to Jack Jaikes. "You can't do anything I suppose?"

He shook his head. "No, it needs moral authority for that. He would care as little for me as for you--less perhaps. But here comes Mr. Deventer!"