Produced by David Clarke and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
A TATTER OF SCARLET
A TATTER OF
SCARLET
ADVENTUROUS EPISODES OF THE
COMMUNE IN THE MIDI
1871
BY
S. R. CROCKETT
SECOND EDITION
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO
_Printed in 1913_
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I
HOW THE TRICOLOUR CAME DOWN 1
CHAPTER II
KITH AND KIN 9
CHAPTER III
THE LAUNDRY DOOR 13
CHAPTER IV
THROUGH THE ENEMY'S LINES 21
CHAPTER V
THE DEVENTER GIRLS 30
CHAPTER VI
AN OLD MAN MASTERFUL 34
CHAPTER VII
OUR FIRST COMMUNARD 44
CHAPTER VIII
I SEE THE SCARLET TATTER NEAR AT HAND 50
CHAPTER IX
A REUNION OF THE REDS 57
CHAPTER X
JEANNE'S VELVET EYES 65
CHAPTER XI
HOW MEN SEE RED 73
CHAPTER XII
"GOOD-BYE, RHODA POLLY" 78
CHAPTER XIII
WE SEEK GARIBALDI 84
CHAPTER XIV
"THE CHILDREN" 96
CHAPTER XV
FIRST BLOOD 101
CHAPTER XVI
THE COMING OF ALIDA 107
CHAPTER XVII
A DESERT PRINCESS 117
CHAPTER XVIII
THE PRINCESS COMMANDS 126
CHAPTER XIX
KELLER BEY COMES TO ARAMON 132
CHAPTER XX
I PLAY "THREE'S COMPANY" 138
CHAPTER XXI
THE GOLDEN HEART OF RHODA POLLY 145
CHAPTER XXII
IN THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW 149
CHAPTER XXIII
THE MISGIVINGS OF ALIDA 156
CHAPTER XXIV
PEACE BEFORE STORM 169
CHAPTER XXV
THE PROCLAMATION 175
CHAPTER XXVI
KELLER BEY, INSURGENT 185
CHAPTER XXVII
UNDER WHICH KING, BEZONIAN? 199
CHAPTER XXVIII
STORM GATHERING 208
CHAPTER XXIX
WITHIN THE PALE 216
CHAPTER XXX
DEVIL'S TALK 226
CHAPTER XXXI
THE BLACK BAND 233
CHAPTER XXXII
"READY!" 239
CHAPTER XXXIII
"HELL UPSIDE DOWN!" 251
CHAPTER XXXIV
THE PASSING OF KELLER BEY 259
CHAPTER XXXV
A CAPTAIN OF BRIGANDS 266
CHAPTER XXXVI
LEFT-HANDED MATTHEW 273
CHAPTER XXXVII
LOOT 284
CHAPTER XXXVIII
THE LAST ADVENTURE OF THE BLACK BAND 291
CHAPTER XXXIX
THE CONVERSION OF CHANOT 306
CHAPTER XL
THE LAST OF THE "TATTER OF SCARLET" 312
A TATTER OF SCARLET
CHAPTER I
HOW THE TRICOLOUR CAME DOWN
Deventer and I leaned on the parapet and watched the curious things
which were happening in Aramon across the river. We were the biggest
boys in the school and kept even the Seniors in awe, being "Les Anglais"
to them--and so familiar with the "boxe"--though Deventer was an
Irishman, and I, Angus Cawdor, a Scot of the Scots.
We had explained the difference to them many times by arguments which
may have temporarily persuaded some, but without in the least affecting
the fixed French notion that all English-speaking people are of English
race.
Behind us circulated the usual menagerie-promenade of the "Grands,"
gabbling and whispering tremendous secrets in files of two and three.
Hugh Deventer was a great hulk of a fellow who would take half a dozen
French Seniors and rub their heads together if I told him, laughing
loudly at their protestations as to loss of honour. He had been
challenged several times to fight duels with small swords, but the
Frenchmen had given that up now. For Deventer spat on his palms and
pursued the seconds who came with the challenge round and round the
playground till he caught and smacked them. Whereat he laughed again.
His father was chief of the Small Arms Factory, which of late years had
been added to the arsenal works of New Aramon opposite to us on the left
bank of the Rhone.
My own father was a clergyman, who for the sake of his health had
retired to the dry sunny Rhone valley, and had settled in a green and
white villa at Aramon because of the famous _lycee_ which was perched up
on the heights of Aramon le Vieux.
There was not much to distinguish Aramon the Old from Aramon the New,
that is, from a distance. Both glowed out startingly white and
delicately creamy between the burnished river and the flawless sapphire
of the Provencal sky. It was still winter time by the calendar, but the
sun beat on our bowed shoulders as we bent over the solid masonry of the
breastwork, and the stones were hotter than in English dog-days as we
plucked away our hands from it.
Deventer and I looked across at the greater New Aramon where his father
lived. It was the Aramon of shops and hotels and factories, while Aramon
le Vieux, over which our great _lycee_ throned it like a glorified
barracks, was a place of crumbling walls, ancient arcaded streets,
twelfth-century palaces let as tenements, and all the interesting
_debris_ of a historical city on the verges of Languedoc.
Our French _lyceens_ were too used to all this beauty and antiquity to
care anything about it, but we English did. We were left pretty much to
ourselves on our rare days of liberty, and as the professors, and
especially the _proviseur_, knew that we were to be trusted, we were
allowed to poke about the old Languedocian outpost much as we pleased.
It was the month of January, 1871. France was invaded, beaten, but not
conquered; but here in the far South, though tongues wagged fiercely, in
his heart the good bourgeois was glad to be out of it all.
At any rate, the _lycee_ was carried on just as usual. Punishments were
dealt out and tasks exacted. _Pions_ watched constantly over our
unstable morals, and occasionally reported misdemeanours of a milder
kind, not daring to make their position worse by revealing anything that
really mattered.
But, generally speaking, Aramon le Vieux dreamed away the hours,
blinking in the sunshine. The war did not touch it save in the fierce
clatter of _cafe_ dispute. Only in the forts that rose about the arsenal
of the newer city opposite to us a feeble guard of artillery and
linesmen lingered as a protection for the Small Arms Factory.
For the new Paris Government was still far from stable, and some feared
a renewal of the White Terror of 1815, and others the Red of the Commune
of 1848. The workmen of the arsenal, hastily gathered from all quarters,
were mostly sealed to the "Internationale," but it was supposed that the
field-pieces in Fort St. Andre could easily account for any number of
these hot-heads.
Besides Hugh Deventer and I there were several other English boys, but
they were still screeching like seagulls somewhere in the Lower School
and so did not count, except when an anxious mamma besought us with
tears in her voice to look after her darling, abandoned all day to his
fate among these horrid French.
To "look after" them Deventer and I could not do, but we gathered them
into a sort of fives team, and organised a poor feckless game in the
windowless angle of the refectory. We also got hockey sticks and
bastinadoed their legs for their souls' good to the great marvel of the
natives. Deventer had even been responsible for a trial of lacrosse, but
good missionaries though we were, we made no French converts.
The Juniors squealed like driven piglings when the ball came their way,
while the Seniors preferred walking up and down their paved cattle-pen,
interminably talking with linked arms and lips close to the ear of a
chosen friend.
Always one or two read as they walked alone, memorising fiercely against
next Saturday's examination.
The pariah _pion_ or outcast usher, a most unhappy out-at-elbows youth,
was expected to keep us all under his eye, but we saw to it early that
that eye passed leniently over Deventer and myself. Otherwise he counted
for nothing.
The War--the War--nothing but talk of the War came to our ears from the
murmuring throng behind us. How "France has been betrayed." "How the new
armies of the Third Republic would liberate Paris and sweep the
Prussians back to Berlin. From every side brave patriots were even now
closing in upon the beleaguered city. Ha, then the spiked helmets would
see!"
Still, a few facts grew more clear to us. At Lyons and Grenoble,
Bourbaki was organising the army of the South-East. There came a sound
from nowhere in particular that this army was to be joined and led by
Garibaldi himself with thirty thousand of his red jackets from Italy.
Deventer and I were immensely excited. We made plans for immediate
invasion. We would fight for France and wear a red cardigan in the
Foreign Legion. But the _Lycee_ St. Andre was well guarded, and so far
no one had succeeded in escaping. I do not know that they tried very
hard. They were French lads and brave--as many of them showed
afterwards--but they were of the Midi, and even then the Midi was
proverbially hard to budge. Not as in the North and East had the iron of
the invasion entered the soul.
The parapet upon which we leaned was of very ancient masonry, solid
blocks laid clean and Cyclopean with very little visible cement. It had
formed part of the defences of an ancient castle, long since overwhelmed
by the college buildings, the materials of which had mostly been
quarried from its imposing mass.
Beneath us ran the Rhone in a fine, broad, half-mile-wide sweep, five or
six miles an hour, yet save for the heaped hillocks of water about the
bridge piers, and the swirl where the far bank curved over, as smooth as
a mirror.
Hugh Deventer and I had been talking of the great '61 campaign of
Garibaldi in Sicily and through Naples--a thousand red-shirts and a
kingdom in the dust! Ah, the glory of that time!
But as we leaned and looked we fell silent. We saw Aramon the New
opposite to us, as it were at our feet, across only that span of water.
The factories were curiously silent, and from one fort after another
darted the white spurt of smoke which meant artillery practice.
We listened, knowing that in a little we should hear the report.
_Boom! Boom! Rattle-rattle-chirr!_
Fighting--they were fighting in Aramon! Deventer's father would be in
the thick of it. We looked and longed, but the way was closed. What
could it be?
Deventer knew that there were continually troubles between the
operatives and the "masters," or rather the representatives of the
masters of whom his father was the chief.
The great _Compagnie d'Armes de Guerre Aramoise_ was not distinguished
for generosity. The men were well lodged but poorly paid. In these war
times they had been over-driven. So many hundreds of rifles to turn out
daily--field artillery, too, and a new department to be set up for the
manufacture of mitrailleuses.
Outside, Dennis Deventer said little about the politics of the works,
nothing at all to his son Hugh.
We of the _lycee_ knew that France was already fairly evenly divided
between true Republicans and those others who looked upon Gambetta's
republic as a step to a monarchy or even the restoration of the
Napoleons. The sons of functionaries mostly held the latter opinion. The
scions of the aristocratic families of the neighbourhood, the old Whites
of the Midi, prayed for the Bourbon flag and the coming of Henry V to
his own again.
So when we heard the ripple of musketry fire and the sullen boom of the
artillery, Deventer and I supposed that a mutiny of sorts had broken out
at the works, or that news had come from Paris of some sudden change of
government.
We were not far from the mark. There had been news from Paris and a
mutiny had broken out. At any rate, they were fighting over in Aramon,
and we must find out what it was all about.
For the moment this was impossible for us. The cliff was too sheer on
the side of our recreation ground. There were over many eyes upon us. We
must wait for the night, and in the meantime Deventer could only sniff
the battle from afar, and hold in the desire to set off and help his
father.
"The Dad doesn't want me," he said. "Of course, I know that. He would
most likely tan me well for breaking bounds, but I can't bear being
cooped up here doing silly mathematics when over yonder----But listen to
them!"
A patter of what might have been heavy rain on a tin roof came faintly
to our ears. A little white cloud hung over the statue in the market
square, and presently flung down devilish fingers earthward. We did not
then know the signs of the explosion of shrapnel.
By this time the school was crowding about us, as curious as ourselves.
The bell clanged for classes to resume, but no one moved. The _pion_
screamed impotently in the rear. None took any notice, and the windows
above were black with the gowns of the professors.
Some thought that the noise was only the letting off of blasts in the
Pierre de Montagne quarries, but it was pointed out that such explosions
took place only at eight, one, and four, the hours when the men would be
out of the quarries at their meals. Besides, the crackle of small fire
was unaccounted for, and each moment it became more lively.
Practice at the Chassepot factories? Very likely--but at human targets.
Finally the college authorities caused discipline to prevail, and
Deventer and I watched alone by the parapet. We had both passed our
_bachot_, and were an honour to the college. So the strictness of rule
and line was relaxed in our case.
Our hearts beat, and in the instancy of our watch we would not have
turned our heads if the _proviseur_ himself had been at our side.
Presently we could see soldiers marching, the flash of bayonets, and
groups of a dozen, as if pushed beyond their patience, turning and
firing with rapid irregularity. All this in flashes of vision, mostly at
the bridge-end, or at the intersection of two streets. Through the
northern gate a kind of uncertain retreat began to dribble--the red
breeches of the linesmen, the canter of the artillery horses attacking
the hill, with stragglers here and there looking about for their
regiments.
Neither Deventer nor I knew enough to explain these things.
"There are no Germans nearer than Toul or Besancon," he said, with a
puzzled anxiety.
The field guns answered him smartly. From all the houses about the
northern gate a storm of rifle fire broke out. The soldiers on foot
hastened their retreat. The artillerymen, better led or of firmer
courage, faced about, and with one volley pitted the facades of the
houses from which the attack had come. They withdrew regularly, covering
the retreat of the infantry, and spat out their little devils' claws of
shrapnel over every group which showed itself outside the wall. Slowly
the soldiers passed out of sight. The artillery bucketed over the knolls
of the Montagne of Aramon among the evergreen odoriferous plants and the
faint traces of the last snow wreaths.
There was nothing left for us to see now except the town of Aramon, its
green and white houses sleeping in the sun, the tall chimney of the
Small Arms Factory, now smokeless--and the broad Rhone sweeping grave
and placid between them and us.
Nevertheless we waited alone on the recreation ground, our heads a
little dizzy. The swooning hum of the class-rooms awoke behind us, but
we heeded not at all.
We saw the tricolour of the Republic come down with a run from the tall
flagstaff on Fort St. Andre, and presently, irregularly tugged, rising a
few feet at a time, a red flag fluttered out, probably an improvised
table-cover or bedspread. It flapped out bravely in the brisk breeze off
the water.
We had had our first glimpse of "The Tatter of Scarlet."