There is more folly than sin in the world—but an evil man takes folly
and uses it—and in the process makes it evil.
These factory workers came and drank at Louis Blanc’s buvette. They
talked and talked extravagantly as some men talk after a war—and there
were bad men among them. Mademoiselle Barbe, who was as clever and as
careful as a cat, and who had nothing but scorn for eloquent fools, kept
her eyes in particular on Pompom Crapaud and Lazare Ledoux.
Little Crapaud was as ugly as his name, an undersized little devil with
a broken nose and dissipated blue eyes. He was always laughing, and when
he laughed he made a noise like a goat. Crapaud had been in prison for
some particularly filthy crime. He had worked on “munitions” during the
war.
Ledoux was different. He was like a lean dog that had been flayed alive,
and was all red flesh and staring eyes. He was raw both within and
without. He gave the impression of a man who was always leaning forward
to seize something or to spit in an enemy’s face. He talked like a
“flame-thrower,” and his eyes grew more and more red as he talked. You
could see the venom swelling in that long, lean throat of his—his hands
clawed ready to tear and to destroy. His black hair seemed to stand on
end—electrified. He was always dirty, and smelt of stale sweat.
Ledoux was a “Red.” He had been born and bred a “Red”; it was his
natural colour. He had an infinite capacity for hating anything and
everything that smelt a little sweeter than himself. He called all
clean, good-natured, orderly people “capitalists” or “bourgeois.” He
hated anyone who worked hard, or who was thrifty. He hated all peasants,
especially those peasants who owned land.
That chance gossip with old Cordonnier had given Bibi an idea, and in
the bitter darkness of these summer days he sat there like a spider
spinning a web. He listened to these roughs talking “communism.” Ledoux
was an orator; he made speeches—malignant, violent speeches that were
very pleasant to discontented men who preferred the new humanitarian
theories to the merciless facts of life. Ledoux had all the old
clap-trap dogmas, and Crapaud—who was his dog—yapped applause.
“The workers create everything with their hands. All capitalists are
thieves. Everything should belong to the workers.”
He had the usual sentimental view of the noble workman joyfully pouring
forth sweat for the sake of all the other workers in the world.
“Never will you see such labour—such wonderful things done, such a mass
of riches for everybody.”
Bibi listened to Ledoux. He was one great silent sneer, but he never let
Ledoux know that he was sneering. At night, when the men had gone off
and the buvette was shut up, he and Barbe would discuss Ledoux and roar
with laughter. Barbe was a mimic. She knew exactly what life was, and
what men are, and that Ledoux would have been much less of a fool if he
had not been so repulsive to women.
“What nonsense!” she said; “that fellow has never been allowed to kiss a
pretty girl. I should say that women don’t like him—so he is one of the
mangy dogs with a sore head.”
She had placed her finger on the inflamed core of Lazare Ledoux’s
discontent. He had failed to get what he had thirsted for in life, and
his red eyes had blazed. He preached love, love of the people who were
like himself—and he was the very essence of hatred. The blood of his
ideals was envy.
It is easy for a bad man to understand the nonsensical malignity of such
a theorist’s dogmatism. Good-natured people are apt to be moved by the
fanatic’s enthusiasm, his burning words, his apparent altruism. He
offers freedom, noble and more spacious lives. He talks of the “children
of to-morrow.” And Bibi, rogue that he was, laughed at Ledoux, and his
laughter was justified.
“Voilà!” he said; “give these gentlemen their food and their wine and
other people’s houses—and then ask them to sweat for the good of
humanity! How much work will they do? Precious little. They will loaf
about and talk all day, and make the shopkeepers clean the
streets. . . .”
“Most men are lazy,” said Barbe, “it is the women and the children who
matter. An empty stomach is man’s master.”
But if Bibi despised Ledoux and Crapaud and the crowd who listened to
them, he saw that it might be possible for him to make use of their
passions. These men were firebrands, wolves. They talked
internationalism, worshipped Lenin, yet hated the Germans. Ledoux was
more venomous than usual when he spoke of the German Socialists. He had
not forgotten what he had suffered in the trenches—for Ledoux was a
physical coward and sordid fear does not breed love. He was ready to
scream at his brethren across the Rhine: “Yes, you behaved like swine.
You were ready to help the shopkeepers when you thought you were going
to plunder our shops. And you let your honest men be put in prison.”
If Bibi had the civic morals of a house-agent, he was almost as
successful as the house-agent in trading on the good nature and the
carelessness of the average man and woman. He could create an
atmosphere, spin a web, and wait for the flies to arrive. He set himself
to create an atmosphere about the Café de la Victoire. When Ledoux raged
against the capitalists and the shopkeepers, Bibi would say, “You are
quite right, monsieur; we have them here. I keep a shop and sell wine;
but what can a blind man do?”
He would tap the ribbon of the Croix de Guerre that he wore on his coat.
“Anyhow, I would work if I could, and I picked up this in the war.”
They fell upon Bibi’s neck and reassured him. He was “bon enfant”; he
could tell a good tale, and he sold them wine. He did not give himself
airs. Even Ledoux liked the swaggering frankness of the man who called
the peasants “the muck of the land.”
Bibi spun one thread at a time.
“Of course, the shopkeepers will do anything. Now look at these people
in the café over there. Do you know how they got their material?”
The buvette asked, “How?”
“Stole it. They came back to the village before any of the others. There
were some army huts in a field. They pulled two of them to pieces and
used the stuff.”
This made Ledoux furious.
“That’s individualism. The huts belonged to the community.”
“That’s what I say. Now, take this hut of mine; I bought it; I look on
it as a sort of pension, a box for an old soldier.”
“There is nothing wrong in that.”
Bibi smiled at them all.
“And the boys are kind to me and drink my wine. Now those people at the
café are capitalists, and their capital gave them a start of everybody
else. Is not that so, monsieur?”
He turned his face towards Ledoux.
“There’s the infamy!” Ledoux was standing and reaching out with his
hands. “Even in a place like this the capitalist has all the advantages.
Look—a ruined village, all the poor people coming back! Everybody ought
to start on equal terms—but no! Back comes your capitalist and your
shopkeeper, and they have their feet half-way up the ladder. All capital
should be confiscated.”
“What about the factory?” said a voice.
“It ought to belong to us. Who is putting it in order? Who gives the
sweat?”
“That’s right,” shouted little Crapaud; “old Goblet ought to be paid a
salary—or wages—by us. Why should he have fifty thousand francs a year
for sitting in an office?”
“Then there is that fellow Durand,” put in someone else.
Bibi waved his arms.
“A wash-out! He only amuses himself; he is one of the sentimental fools
who is getting rid of his money. But what makes me savage is the
smugness of the people.” He was working to bring the conversation back
to the Café de la Victoire.
“Smug! Mon Dieu! They look down on us; we are not good enough to mix
with them. Soon they will be calling their place an hotel. Why, I would
bet you that if a couple of you boys walked into that place and asked
for a drink, they would not serve you.”
This created an uproar.
“Let us try it,” shouted little Crapaud. “Here, Lazare, you and I will
go round to-morrow and put the wind up these aristos.”
Ledoux showed his teeth.
“I have no objection.”
“You will be turned out,” said Bibi.
Crapaud and the orator put Bibi’s prophecy to an experimental test. They
strolled in the cool of the evening to Manon’s café, and saw Manon
herself standing on the path admiring the new sign-board that Paul had
put up that very morning. Brent was working in the garden, and the wall
hid him from view.
It was Crapaud who did the talking. Ledoux was useless with women, being
too uncouth and too sombre a beast.
“Good evening, madame; we have come to try your wine.”
Manon looked at them. She had never seen these two men before.
“I am sorry, monsieur, but my café has been closed for a week. We have
been too busy.”
Crapaud winked at his comrade.
“Then what is that sign doing up there? All that gold lettering looks
very inviting.”
She did not reply to Crapaud, but entered the house with the finality of
a Frenchwoman who does not argue about her authority in her own home.
Ledoux’s red eyes looked evil, but then Ledoux was a coward.
“Bourgeoise——!” He used a foul word.
Pompom Crapaud had the physical audacity that Ledoux lacked. He jumped
up on to the path, entered the café, and, walking into the kitchen, sat
down in Paul’s arm-chair. A minute later Manon found him there, a
cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth, and his cap over one
eye.
“What do you want, monsieur?”
“A drink.”
Manon kept her temper.
“I have told you that my café is not open, and this is my kitchen.”
“You had better take that board down,” said Crapaud; “I protest that I
have the right to sit here as long as it remains up.”
Manon looked at him, and went for Paul. She explained the situation to
him, and Brent attacked it good-temperedly. He walked into the kitchen
and smiled at Pompom Crapaud.
“I think you have made a mistake, monsieur.”
Brent’s smile annoyed the pirate.
“It is your sign-board that is making the mistake.”
“Even the sign-board does not give you the right to sit in madame’s
kitchen.”
“I sit here,” was Crapaud’s retort. “Make what you can of that.”
Brent made so little of it that he took Crapaud by the collar and
transferred him to the street. The little man had no more strength than
a half-grown chicken, and he went quietly enough.
But he swore at Ledoux.
“Here, you are a pretty pal; you are bigger than he is.”
Ledoux glanced at Brent, and fidgeted his hands in his pockets, but he
did not attack.
“Well, we have found them out, haven’t we?”
“Name of a dog—but—I—found them in!”
They went off quarrelling up the street.
Other and more sinister incidents enlarged and filled in the outlines of
the feud that was growing in Beaucourt. There was the affair of the Bois
du Renard, an outrage that made old Anatole Durand go down and deliver a
speech in the Place de l’Eglise. A few nights later there was a
scrimmage in the Rue Bonnière in which young François Guiveau had his
jaw broken. It was followed by the incident of the attack on Luce
Philipon as she was walking home alone in the dark along the Rosières
road. Her father had gone to meet her, and he caught the two louts
trying to drag the girl into a field. The blacksmith was a very powerful
man, and he beat both these young roughs senseless with his fists. One
of them had tried to knife him, and Beaucourt never forgot that picture
of Philipon trailing the lout by the arm all the way up the Rue de
Picardie and along the Bonnière road to the factory. There was a crowd
outside Bibi’s buvette, but no one tried to rescue the trailing, bumping
figure. Philipon threw the fellow over the factory gate. He was pulp,
and had to be taken to Amiens in a waggon.
Lefèbre and Durand deplored these happenings. They turned their eyes
towards Louis Blanc’s buvette, and saw in it a storm-centre, a Pandora’s
box, a pest-house.
“We shall have to try and get rid of that fellow.”
Durand’s hair bristled.
“And Goblet’s men will start a riot. I think we are strong enough to
give them a surprise. I wish I could buy that factory.”