IN THE MACQUIS
“Before man made us citizens, great Nature made us men.”
The Abbé Susini had no money, but he was a charitable man in a hasty
and impulsive way. Even the very poor may be charitable: they can think
kindly of the rich. It was not the rich of whom the abbé had a friendly
thought, but the foolish and the stubborn. For this fiery little
priest knew more of the unwritten history of the macquis than any in
Corsica--infinitely more than those whose business it was.
It is the custom at Ajaccio, and in a smaller way at Bastia, to ignore
the darker side of Corsican politics, and the French officials are
content with the endeavour to get through their term of office with a
whole skin. It is not, as in other islands of the Mediterranean, the
gospel of “mañana” which holds good here, but rather the gospel of “So I
found it--it will last my time.” So, from the préfet to the humblest
gendarme, they come, they serve, and they go back rejoicing to France.
They strike when absolutely forced to do so, but they commit the most
fatal of all administrative errors--they strike gently.
The faults are not all on one side; for the islanders are at once
turbulent and sullen. There are many who “keep the country,” as the local
saying is, and wander year after year in the mountain fastnesses, far
above road or pathway, beyond the feeble reach of the law, rather than
pay a trifling fine or bend their pride to face a week's imprisonment.
In the macquis, as in better society, there are grades of evil. Some
are hiding from their own pride, others are evading a lifelong sentence,
while many know that if the gendarme sees them he will shoot at
sight--running, standing, sleeping, as a keeper kills vermin. Only a few
months ago, on a road over which many tourists must have travelled, a
young man of twenty-three was “destroyed” (the official term) by the
gendarmes who wanted him for eleven murders. It is commonly asserted that
these bandits are not dangerous, that they have no grievance against
travellers. A starving man has a grievance against the whole world, and a
condemned fratricide is not likely to pick and choose his next victim if
tempted by a little money and the chance of escape therewith from the
island.
It is, moreover, usual for a man to take to the macquis the moment that
he finds himself involved in some trouble, or, it may be, merely under
suspicion. From his retreat in the mountains he enters into negotiations
with his lawyer, with the local magistrate, with his witnesses, even with
the police. He distrusts justice itself, and only gives himself up or
faces the tribunal when he has made sure of acquittal or such a sentence
as his pride may swallow. Which details of justice as understood in a
province of France at the beginning of the century may be read at the
Assize terms in those great newspapers, _Le Petit Bastiais_ or _Le Paoli
Pascal_, by any who have a halfpenny to spend on literature.
It would appear easy enough to exterminate the bandits as one would
exterminate wolves or other large game; but in such a country as Corsica,
almost devoid of roads, thinly populated, heavily wooded, the expense
would be greater than the administration is prepared to incur. It would
mean putting an army into the field, prepared and equipped for a long
campaign which might ultimately reach the dignity of a civil war. The
bandits are not worth it. The whole country is not worth exploiting.
Corsica is a small open wound on the great back of France, carefully
concealed and only tended spasmodically from time to time at such periods
as the health of the whole frame is sufficiently good to permit of
serious attention being given to so small a sore. And such times, as the
wondering world knows, are few and far between in the history of France.
The law-abiding natives, or such natives as the law has not found out,
regard the denizens of the macquis with a tender pity not unmixed with
respect. As often as not the bandit is a man with a real grievance, and
the poor have a soft place in their hearts for a man with a grievance.
And all Corsicans are poor. So all are for the bandits, and every man's
hand is secretly or openly against the gendarme. Even in enmity, there is
a certain sense of honour among these naïve people. A man will shoot his
foe in the back, but he will not betray him to the gendarme. Among a
primitive people a man commands respect who has had the courage to take
the law into his own hands. Amidst a subject population, he who rebels is
not without honour.
It was among these and such as these that the Abbé Susini sought from
time to time his lost sheep. He took a certain pleasure in donning the
peasant clothes that his father had worn, and in going to the mountains
as his forefathers had doubtless done before him. For every man worthy of
the name has lurking in his being a remnant of the barbarian which makes
him revolt occasionally against the life of the city and the crowded
struggle of the streets, which sends him out to the waste places of the
world where God's air is at all events untainted, where he may return to
the primitive way of living, to kill and gather with his own hands that
which must satisfy his own hunger.
The abbé had never known a very highly refined state of civilization. The
barbarian was not buried very deep. To him the voice of the wind through
the trees, the roar of the river, the fine, free air of the mountains had
a charm which he could not put into words. He hungered for them as the
exile hungers for the sight of his own home. The air of houses choked
him, as sooner or later it seems to choke sailors and wanderers who have
known what it is to be in the open all night, sleeping or waking beneath
the stars, not by accident as an adventure, but by habit. Then the abbé
would disappear for days together from Olmeta, and vanish into that
mystic, silent, prowling world of the macquis. The sights he saw there,
the men he met there, were among those things which the villagers said
the abbé knew, but of which he never spoke.
During the stirring events of August and September the priest at Olmeta,
and Colonel Gilbert at Bastia, watched each, in his individual way, the
effect of the news upon a very sensitive populace. The abbé stood on the
high-road one night within a stone's throw of Perucca, and, looking down
into the great valley, watched the flickering flames consume all that
remained of the old Château de Vasselot. Colonel Gilbert, in his little
rooms in the bastion at Bastia, knew almost as soon that the château was
burning, and only evinced his usual easy-going surprise. The colonel
always seemed to be wondering that any should have the energy to do
active wrong; for virtue is more often passive, and therefore less
trouble.
The abbé was puzzled.
“An empty house,” he muttered, “does not set itself on fire. Who has done
this? and why?”
For he knew every drift and current of feeling amid his turbulent flock,
and the burning of the château of Vasselot seemed to serve no purpose,
and to satisfy no revenge. There was some influence at work which the
Abbé Susini did not understand.
He understood well enough that a hundred grievances--a hundred
unsatisfied vengeances--had suddenly been awakened by the events of the
last months. The grip of France was for a moment relaxed, and all Corsica
arose from its sullen sleep, not in organized revolt, but in the desire
to satisfy personal quarrels--to break in one way or another the law
which had made itself so dreaded. The burning of the Château de Vasselot
might be the result of some such feeling; but the abbé thought otherwise.
He went to Perucca, where all seemed quiet, though he did not actually
ring the great bell and speak to the widow Andrei.
A few hours later, after nightfall, he set off on foot by the road that
leads to the Lancone Defile. But he did not turn to the left at the
cross-roads. He went straight on instead, by the track which ultimately
leads to Corte, in the middle of the island, and amidst the high
mountains. This is one of the loneliest spots in all the lonely island,
where men may wander for days and never see a human being. The macquis is
thin here, and not considered a desirable residence. In fact, the mildest
malefactor may have a whole mountain to himself without any demonstration
of violence whatever.
This was not the abbé's destination. He was going farther, where the
ordinary traveller would fare worse, and hurried along without looking to
the left or right. A half-moon was peeping through an occasional rift in
those heavy clouds which precede the autumn rains in these latitudes, and
gather with such astonishing slowness and deliberation. It was not a dark
night, and the air was still. The abbé had mounted considerably since
leaving the cross-roads. His path now entered a valley between two
mountains. On either side rose a sharp slope, broken, and rendered
somewhat inaccessible by boulders, which had at one time been spilled
down the mountain-side by some great upheaval, and now seemed poised in
patient expectance of the next disturbance.
Suddenly the priest stopped, and stood rooted. A faint sound, inaudible
to a townsman's ear, made him turn sharply to the right, and face the
broken ground. A stone no bigger than a hazel nut had been dislodged
somewhere above him, and now rolled down to his feet. The dead silence of
the mountains closed over him again. There was, of course, no one in
sight.
“It is Susini of Olmeta,” he said, speaking quietly, as if he were in a
room.
There was a moment's pause, and then a man rose from behind a rock, and
came silently on bare feet down to the pathway. His approach was heralded
by a scent which would have roused any sporting dog to frenzy. This man
was within measurable distance of the beasts of the forests. As he came
into the moonlight it was perceivable that he was hatless, and that his
tangled hair and beard were streaked with white. His face was apparently
black, and so were his hands. He had obviously not washed himself for
years.
“You here,” said the abbé, recognizing one who had for years and years
been spoken of as a sort of phantom, living in the summits--the life of
an animal--alone.
The other nodded.
“Then you have heard that the gendarmes are being drafted into the army,
and sent to France?”
The man nodded again. He had done so long without speech that he had no
doubt come to recognize its uselessness in the majority of human
happenings. The abbé felt in his pocket, and gave the man a packet of
tobacco. The Corsicans, unlike nearly all other races of the
Mediterranean, are smokers of wooden pipes.
“Thanks,” said the man, in an odd, soft voice, speaking for the first
time.
“I am going up into the mountains,” said the abbé, slowly, knowing no
doubt that men who have lived long with Nature are slow to understand
words, “to seek an old man who has recently gone there. He is travelling
with a man called Jean, who has the evil eye.”
“The Count de Vasselot,” said the outlaw, quietly. He touched his
forehead with one finger and made a vague wandering gesture of the hand.
“I have seen him. You go the wrong way. He is down there, near the
entrance to the Lancone Defile with others.”
He paused and looked round him with the slow and distant glance which any
may perceive in the eyes of a caged wild beast.
“They are all down from the mountains,” he said.
Even the Abbé Susini glanced uneasily over his shoulder. These still,
stony valleys were peopled by the noiseless, predatory Ishmaels of the
macquis. They were, it is true, not numerous at this time, but those who
had escaped the clutch of the imperial law were necessarily the most
cunning and desperate.
“Buon,” he said, turning to retrace his steps. “I shall go down to the
Lancone Defile. God be with you, my friend.”
The man gave a queer laugh. He evidently thought that the abbé expected
too much.
The abbé walked until midnight, and then being tired he found a quiet
spot between two great rocks, and lying down slept there until morning.
In the leather saddle-bag which formed his pillow he had bread and some
meat, which he ate as he walked on towards the Lancone Defile. Once, soon
after daylight, he paused to listen, and the sound that had faintly
reached him was repeated. It was the warning whistle of the steamer, the
old _Persévérance_, entering Bastia harbour ten miles away. He was still
in the shade of the great heights that lay between him and the Eastern
coast, and hurried while the day was cool. Then the sun leapt up behind
the hazy summits above Biguglia. The abbé looked at his huge silver
watch. It was nearly eight o'clock. When he was near to the entrance of
the defile he stood in the middle of the road and gave, in his high clear
voice, the cry of the goat-herd calling his flock. He gave it twice, and
then repeated it. If there were any in the macquis within a mile of him
they could not fail to see him as he stood on the dusty road in the
sunlight.
He was not disappointed. In a few minutes the closely-set arbutus bushes
above the road were pushed aside and a boy came out--an evil-faced youth
with a loose mouth.
“It is Jean of the Evil Eye who has sent me,” he said glibly, with an eye
on the abbé's hands in case there should be a knife. “He is up there with
a broken leg. He has with him the old man.”
“The old man?” repeated the abbé, interrogatively.
“Yes, he who is foolish.”
“Show me the way,” said Susini. “You need not look at my hands; I have
nothing in them.”
They climbed the steep slope that overhung the road, forcing their way
through the thick brushwood, stumbling over the chaos of stones. Quite
suddenly they came upon a group of men sitting round a smouldering fire
where a tin coffee-pot stood amid the ashes. One man had his leg roughly
tied up in sticks. It was Jean of the Evil Eye, who looked hard at the
Abbé Susini, and then turning, indicated with a nod the Count de Vasselot
who sat leaning against a tree. The count recognized Susini and nodded
vaguely. His face, once bleached by long confinement, was burnt to a deep
red; his eyes were quite irresponsible.
“He is worse,” said Jean, without lowering his voice. “Sometimes I can
only keep him here by force. He thinks the whole island is looking for
him--he never sleeps.”
Jean was interrupted by the evil-faced boy, who had risen, and was
peering down towards the gates of the defile.
“There is a carriage on the road,” he said.
They all listened. There were three other men whom the abbé knew by sight
and reputation. One by one they rose to their feet and slowly cocked
their old-fashioned single-barrelled guns.
“It is the carriage from Olmeta--must be going to Perucca,” reported the
boy.
And at the word Perucca, the count scrambled to his feet, only to be
dragged back by Jean. The old man's eyes were alight with fear and
hatred. He was grasping Jean's gun. The abbé rose and peered down through
the bushes. Then he turned sharply and wrenched Jean's firearm from the
count's hands.
“They are friends of mine,” he said. “The man who shoots will be shot by
me.”
All turned and looked at him. They knew the abbé and the gun. And while
they looked, Denise and Mademoiselle Brun drove past in safety.