PUPPETS
“Ah! It goes. It goes already!”
The speaker--the Citizen Morot--slowly rubbed his white hands one over
the other.
He was standing at the window of a small house in an insignificant
street on the southern side of the Seine. He was remarkably calm--quite
the calmest man within the radius of a mile; for the insignificant
little street was in an uproar. There was a barricade at each end of it.
Such a barricade as Parisians love. It was composed of a few overturned
omnibuses; for the true Parisian is a cynic. He likes overturned things,
and he loves to see objects of peace converted to purposes of war. He is
not content that ploughshares be beaten into swords. He prefers
altar-rails. And so this little street was blocked at either end by a
barricade of overturned omnibuses, of old hampers and empty boxes, of a
few loads of second-hand bricks and paving-stones brought from the scene
of some drainage operations round the corner.
In the street between the barricades, surged, hooted, and yelled that
wildest and most dangerous of incomprehensibles--a Paris mob.
Half-a-dozen orators were speaking at once, and no one was listening to
them. Here and there amidst the rabble a voice was raised at times with
suspicious persistence.
“_Vive le Roi!_” it cried. “Long live the King!”
A few took up the refrain, but the general tone was negative. It was not
so much a question of upholding anything as of throwing down that which
was already up.
“Down with the Republic!” was the favourite cry. “Down with the
President! Down with everything!”
And each man cried down his favourite enemy.
The Citizen Morot listened, and his contemptuous mouth was twisted with
a delicate, subtle smile.
“Ah!” he muttered. “The voice of the people. The howling of the wolves.
Go on, go on, my braves. Cry 'Long live the King,' and soon you will
begin to believe that you mean it. They are barking now. Let them bark.
Soon we shall teach them to bite, and then--then, who knows?”
His voice dropped almost to a whisper, and he stood there amidst the din
and hubbub--dreaming. At last he raised his hand to his forehead--a
prominent, rounded forehead, flat as the palm of one's hand from eyebrow
to eyebrow, and curving at either side, sharply, back to deep-sunken
temples.
“Ah!” he exclaimed, with a little laugh; and he drew from an inner
pocket a delicately scented pocket-handkerchief, with which he wiped his
brow. “If I get excited now, what will it be when they begin--to bite?”
All this while the orators were shouting their loudest, and the voices
dispersed throughout the crowd raised at intervals their short, sharp
cry of--
“Long live the King!”
And the police? There were only two agents attached to the immediate
neighbourhood, and they were smoking cigars and drinking absinthe in two
separate cellars, with the door locked on the outside. They were
prisoners of war of the most resigned type. The room in which stood the
Citizen Morot was dark, and wisely so. For the Parisian street
politician can make very pretty practice of a lighted petroleum-lamp
with an empty bottle or half a brick. The window was wide open, and the
wooden shutters were hooked back.
The attitude of the man was interested and slightly self-satisfied. It
suggested that of the manager of a theatre looking down from an
upper-tier box upon a full house and a faultless stage. At the same time
he was keeping what sailors call a very “bright look-out” towards either
end of the street. From his elevated position he was able to see over
the barricades, and he watched with intense interest the movements of
two women (or perhaps men disguised as such) who stood in the centre of
the street just beyond each obstruction.
There was something dramatic in the motionless attitude of these two
women, standing guard alone in the deserted street, on the wrong side of
the barricades.
At times Morot leant well out of the window and listened. Then he stood
back again and contemplated the crowd.
Each orator was illuminated by a naphtha “flare,” which, being held in
unsteady hands, flickered and wavered, casting strange gleams of light
over the evil faces upturned towards it. At times one speaker would
succeed in raising a laugh or extracting a groan, and when he did so
those listening to his rivals turned and surged towards him. There was
plenty of movement. It was what the newspapers call an animated
scene--or a disgraceful scene--according to their political bias.
The Citizen Morot could not hear the jokes nor distinguish the cause of
the groaning. But he did not seem to mind much. The speeches were not of
the description to be given in full in the morning papers. There were,
fortunately, no reporters present. It was the frank eloquence of the
slaughter-house--the unclad humour of the market.
Suddenly one of the women--she who was posted at the southern end of the
street--raised both her arms, and the Citizen leant far out of the
window. He was very eager, and his hawk-like eyes blinked perpetually.
His hand was raised to his mouth, and the lights of the orators gleamed
on something that he held in his fingers--something that looked like
silver.
The woman held her two arms straight up into the air for some moments,
then she suddenly crossed them twice, turning at the same moment and
scrambling over the barricade. A long shrill whistle rang out over the
heads of the mob, and its effect was almost instantaneous. The “flares”
disappeared like magic. Dark figures swarmed up the lamp-posts and
extinguished the feeble lights. The voice of the orator was still.
Silence and darkness reigned over that insignificant little street on
the southern side of the Seine. Then came the clatter of cavalry--the
rattle of horses' feet, and the ominous clank of empty scabbards against
spur and buckle. A word of command, and a scrambling halt. Then silence
again, broken only by the shuffling of feet (not too well clad) in the
darkness between the barricades.
The Citizen Morot leant recklessly out of the window, peering into
the gloom. He forgot to make use of the delicately scented
pocket-handkerchief now, and the drops of perspiration trickled slowly
down his face.
The soldiers shuffled in their saddles. Some of the spirited little
Arabs pawed the pavement. One of them squealed angrily, and there was a
slight commotion somewhere in the rear ranks--an equine difference of
opinion. The officers had come forward to the barricade and were
consulting together. The question was--what was there behind that
barricade? It might be nothing--it might be everything. In Paris one can
never tell. At last one of them determined to see for himself. He
scrambled up, putting his foot through the window of an omnibus in
passing. Against the dim light of the street-lamp beyond, his slight,
straight figure stood out in bold relief. It was a splendid mark for a
man with chalked sights to his rifle.
“Ah!” muttered the Citizen, “you are all right this time--master, the
young officer. They are only barking. Next time perhaps it will be quite
another history.”
The officer turned and disappeared. After the lapse of a few moments a
dozen words of command were shouted, and upon them followed the sharp
click of hilt on scabbard as the sabres fell home.
After a pause it became evident that the barricade was being destroyed.
And then lights flashed here and there. In a compact column the cavalry
advanced at a trot. The street was empty.
Citizen Morot turned away and sat down on a chair that happened to be
placed near the window. His finely-drawn eyebrows were raised with a
questioning weariness.
“Pretty work!” he ejaculated. “Pretty work for--my father's son! So
grand, so open, so noble!”
He waited there, in the darkness, until the cavalry had been withdrawn
and the local firemen were at work upon the barricade. Then, when order
was fully restored, he left the house, walking quietly down the length
of the insignificant little street.
Ten minutes later he entered the tobacco-shop in the Rue St. Gingolphe.
Mr. Jacquetot was at his post, behind the counter near the window, with
the little tin box containing postage-stamps in front of him upon his
desk. He was always there--like the poor. He laid aside the _Petit
Journal_ and wished the new-comer a courteous, though breathless,
good evening.
The salutation was returned gravely and pleasantly. The Citizen Morot
lingered a moment and remarked that it was a warm evening. He never
seemed to be in a hurry. Then he passed on into the little room behind
the shop.
There he found Lerac, the foreman of the slaughter-house. The butcher
was pale with excitement. His rough clothing was dishevelled; his
stringy black hair stood up uncouthly in the centre of his head, while
over his temples it was plastered down with perspiration and suet
pleasingly mingled.
“Well?” he exclaimed, with triumphant interrogation.
“Good,” said Morot. “Very good. It marches, my friend. It marches
already.”
“Ah! But you are right. The People see you--it is a power!”
“It is,” acquiesced Morot fervently.
How he hated this man!
“And you stayed to the last?” inquired Lerac. He was rather white about
the lips for a brave man.
“Till the last,” echoed Morot, taking up some letters addressed to him
which lay on the table.
“And the street was quite clear before they broke through the barrier?”
“Quite--the People did not wait.” He seemed to resign himself to
conversation, for he put the letters into his pocket and sat down. “Had
you,” he inquired, “any difficulty in getting them away?”
“Oh no,” somewhat loftily and quite unsuspicious of irony. “The passages
were narrow, of course; but we had allowed for that in our organisation.
Organisation and the People, see you--”
“Yes,” replied Morot. “Organisation and the People.” Like Lerac, he
stopped short, apparently lost in the contemplation of the vast
possibilities presented to his mental vision by the mere thought of such
a combination.
“Well!” exclaimed the butcher energetically, “I must move on. I have
meetings. I merely wished to hear from you that all was right--that no
one was caught.”
He was bubbling over with excitement and the sense of his own huge
importance.
The Citizen Morot raised his secretive eyes.
“Good-night,” he said, with an insolence far too fine for the butcher's
comprehension.
“Well--good-night. We may congratulate ourselves, I think, Citizen!”
“I congratulate you,” said Morot. “Good-night.”
“Good-night.”
It is probable that, had Lerac looked back, there would have been murder
done in the small room behind the tobacco-shop. But the contemptuous
smile soon vanished from the face of the Citizen Morot. No smile
lingered there long. It was not built upon smiling lines at all.
Then he took up his letters. There were only two of them: one bearing
the postmark of a small town in Morbihan, the other hailing from
England.
He replaced the first in his pocket unread; the second he opened. It was
written in French.
“There are difficulties,” it said. “Can you come to me? Cross from
Cherbourg to Southampton--train from thence to this place, and ask for
Signor Bruno, an Italian refugee, living at the house of Mrs. Potter, a
_ci-devant_ laundress.”
The Citizen Morot rubbed his chin thoughtfully with the back of his
hand, making a sharp, grating sound.
“That old man,” he said, “is getting past his work. He is losing nerve;
and nerve is a thing that we cannot afford to lose.”
Then he turned to the letter again.
“Ah!” he exclaimed suddenly; “St. Mary Western. He is there--how very
strange. What a singular coincidence!”
He fell into a reverie with the letter before him.
“Carew is dead--but still I can manage it. Perhaps it is just as well
that he is dead. I was always afraid of Carew.”
Then he wrote a letter, which he addressed to “Signor Bruno, care of
Mrs. Potter, St. Mary Western, Dorset.”
“I shall come,” he wrote, “but not in the way you suggest. I have a
better plan. You must not know me when we meet.”
He purchased a twenty-five centime stamp from Mr. Jacquetot, and posted
the letter with his own hand in the little wall-box at the corner of the
Rue St. Gingolphe.