THE STORY OF JEAN PETIT.
To get a better conception of one of our characters we must change the
scene.
It is a long harkening from an island in the Clarence to the Faubourg St.
Antoine of Paris. But the threads in the wool of Life run far and wide.
In the Faubourg St. Antoine, twenty years before, dwelt one Jean Petit.
Petit’s mother had belonged to the lowest class of French criminals; his
father was a person understood.
Bred in the gutters of that City by the Seine, where sit the seven devils
of Christendom, with the collected devils of Heathendom to keep the
watches when they go below—Jean Petit developed in crime.
Let it be said that the criminals of Paris are at once the most degraded
and the cleverest in the world. London, New York, and Melbourne produce
ruffians and rogues, but these be as little children to the sons of the
sewers by the Seine.
The French criminal has all the cunning and the cruelty of the wild beast
in addition to his own. In fact, he is more often than not a human
tiger, preying not as tigers do upon the outside world, but upon his own
kind.
He is steeped to the lips in the vices of his breed, a wild biped
prowling the mazes of a great city; an obscene devil-worshipper who
cracks indecent jokes at the very steps of the guillotine; a midnight
murderer, who does not hesitate to redden his hands for a few sous.
Such was Jean Petit.
He had existed by thieving since he was little more than seven years of
age. At twelve he was apprenticed to one of the worst house-breaking
gangs in Paris; at seventeen he had taken his diploma, and at twenty-two
he was a master of arts in the College of Crime.
For three years Petit reigned in his native city as an Emperor of
Thieves. He was the most daring of the Black Confraternity, the hero of a
thousand nefarious escapades; the pivot on which the world of ruffianism
revolved. Again and again he eluded capture. His robberies were so
cleverly organised and carried out that he appeared to be more than a
match for the detectives, even to those astute officers who devote their
lives to the study of Jean Petits and their methods.
But at last, as must happen, the perpetrator of a catalogue of crimes, in
which arson and murder found a place, fell a victim to a slight personal
miscalculation.
In escaping from a window by means of a rope ladder, he dropped into
the arms of four gendarmes, and, despite a stubborn resistance, was
overpowered.
Various offences were proven against Jean Petit at his trial, and the
upshot of the matter was that he took a voyage to the island of New
Caledonia in company with some other citizens for whom the French
Republic had no use.
Petit escaped the guillotine, but he was transported to Noumea for life.
It had happened that in the struggle with the gendarmes the robber
received a heavy blow on the base of the skull. The consequence of this
was that he lost much of the pantherine vivacity which had been a part of
his character, and became of a more morose, hyæna-like nature.
He was feared by the prisoners with whom he was associated, and always
regarded as a possible source of danger by the authorities.
Unlike those well-bred ruffians whose money or antecendents make them the
pets of Convict New Caledonia, and a source of revenue in lower official
quarters, Petit was compelled to undergo all the rigours of his sentence.
The man who had ever scorned the idea of labour, who had lived for twenty
five years by the labours of others, was set to the quarrying of stone!
So the thoughts of Jean Petit,—who had everything to gain and nothing to
lose by the attempt—shaped themselves time after time towards escape.
Petit had heard that Australia was a good country, and he longed to go
there.
One difficulty, and one only, stood in his way—opportunity.
Twice in ten years he had endeavoured to escape, and each time the
attempt had proved a failure.
He had been pronounced an incurable criminal. The Republic had
experimented on him in vain. He was beyond hope, outside the pale. It
was only necessary, therefore, to see that he secured no opportunities
to commit crime. Like the wild beast in its cage, it was no longer a
question of what would happen if he got out.
But Jean Petit, to whom liberty was as much as to the imprisoned tiger,
watched and waited.
It is said that everything comes to him who waits, and after many years,
in which the morose criminal-lunatic had grown grizzled, hard of flesh,
and still harder of heart, time brought him his opportunity.
Petit, watching Fate from the corner of a red eye, saw the road open.
“At the most,” he explained to the three comrades, “we can but die, and
be damned into hell. From the hell here to the hell there—it is but a
passage.”
The comrades being each desperate criminals like himself, were agreed.
So they succeeded in stealing a whaleboat, and having matured their
schemes, they fled one night for liberty, leaving fresh blood-stains
behind them.
At sunrise in the morning Jean Petit and his three friends found
themselves, with a scanty supply of provisions and water, afloat on the
Pacific without either chart or compass.
Petit assumed the leadership without formality of election. He was
captain and commander. His word, supported by the sharp knife in his
belt, became law.
He sat sullenly at the tiller, and as the sun rose at the sea margin,
headed the boat south by west.
Thus commenced one of the strangest voyages in history.
All that day, and the next, and the next, and the next, the boat, with
its crew of four, headed south, south and south by west.
They had taken count of food and water, and to each was apportioned his
share.
Each morning Jean Petit, at whose feet lay the provisions, grimly doled
out the scanty portions.
At the end of the week a change had come over the four.
They were lean and weatherbeaten; their hands and faces were blistered
by the sun. Their cheeks were sunken. There was an anxious look in their
hollow eyes.
At the end of fourteen days the change was still more remarkable.
Their hair and beards had grown strangely long; their hands had taken
the appearance of claws, tipped with long sharp, carnivorous-looking
fingernails. Their lips were dry and broken, and their skins had turned
from bronze to an ugly yellow.
For ten days there had fallen not a drop of rain; they had left but a
pint and a half of impure water.
On the morning of the fifteenth day Jean Petit divided this, together
with the remnant of the food, into four even portions!
Never had the grim red-eyed man at the stern been more exact and precise.
“It is well, comrades,” said he, weighing the last crumb of bread, “that
we pronounce a benediction. ‘Eat, drink, and be merry!’” he cried
solemnly, “‘for to-morrow we die.’”
The morrow fell and the next morrow.
Upon the rim of the Lower Immensity the rim of the Upper Immensity
rested, without break in either of sail or cloud.
The next day Jean Petit leaned forward towards the gaunt, motionless,
skeletons which gazed with fixed, burning eyes towards the south.
Jean Petit leaned forward, with his hand upon the haft of his knife, and
spake.
His words sounded dull and hollow—coming as it were, from the depths of a
vault in the awful underworld where lie the mysterious dead.
“There is no reason,” said he, “that _all_ should die.”
The human spectres answered not. Perhaps they had not heard. Perhaps
their thoughts were away by cool mountain springs, by spread banquets.
Jean Petit, with strange feverish insistence, repeated his assertion,
which was also a question:
“There is no reason that _all_ should die.”
The spectres turned their hollow eyes to him.
Petit read the faces of his three comrades slowly.
The waves, intensely blue and sparkling, rose and fell with awful
monotony.
Again, and for the third time, the carnivorous face was thrust forward
and the swollen lips framed its sentence:
“For what reason should all die?”
In the ears of the others the words sounded like the tolling of that bell
which heralds criminals to execution. They looked not at the waters, not
at the sky, not upon each other, but at Jean Petit.
And on the faces of the three was the same questioning, anxious stare.
The red eye grew redder and more devilish.
The man at the tiller tongued his lips and went on in a harsh croak, like
the croaking of some foul bird of prey which had scented a carcase:
“Unless we eat soon there is an end!”
The spectres nodded.
“We cannot live another day!”
The spectres passively assented.
The mouth of one of them was marked with a dark stain, where he had been
endeavouring to masticate the leather of his shoe.
Jean Petit, not looking from one to the other, but holding all three with
his eyes, continued:
“Others have been as we.”
There was a long pause. The whale boat rose slowly upon a wave crest and
slid silently into the hollow.
The sun poured out his fires upon the ocean in intense silence.
“Others,” murmured Jean Petit, finishing his sentence, “have done it.”
A shudder of repulsion passed from one wretched frame to the other.
Petit alone did not shudder. He appeared calm—eager, but calm.
“To-morrow,” he said, “it will be too late!”
“To-morrow,” muttered the three, “we will be dead; what matters.”
“To-morrow,” said Jean Petit, forming his meaning more precisely, “one
will be dead. The others will live.”
There was a long, long silence.
The boat rose and fell, rose and fell, rose and fell.
It was fully a quarter of an hour before the convict spoke again.
Scanning closely the faces of his companions, he asked:
“Is it agreed?”
They answered not, “yes,” nor “no.”
“It—is—agreed!” said Jean Petit, slowly.
His voice was the voice of command, of authority, of organisation.
The slave had become a master. The subject was at last a king. The man
loomed up in the cold bulk of Power!
It was a case of survival, if not of the fittest, at least of the
strongest.
With a deep-drawn sigh of satisfaction the leader drew his knife—which
his hand had never left—from its sheath, and stooping forward split out
four splinters of uneven length from the timbers of the boat.
He closed his left hand upon them, clutching the hilt of the naked knife
in his right.
The ends of the splinters alone were visible.
“Come forward!” he ordered.
The three men—their gaze riveted on Petit’s left hand as if
fascinated—crawled towards him. It was a terrible picture, all the more
terrible for the glory and beauty of its setting, for the sparkle and
colour and sunshine which were the picture’s frame.
More terrible, too, in its tragic, portentous silence.
“Draw!” he commanded.
The man under whose face the clutched fist was thrust sucked in a deep
breath which was almost a moan.
He extended a trembling hand and drew forth a single splinter.
“Draw!” repeated Jean Petit, offering to each in turn.
The lots were drawn. The spectres waited, sitting silently, their eyes
upon the face of their commander.
“The shortest!” snarled the man with the knife.
Their sallow features were full of anguish. Four men knew that it was the
mission of one to die. To die—at once.
For man born of woman death is at all times terrible. But with these
death had also a sequel!
Already one was doomed.
Who?
The voice of Jean Petit rang grim and unearthly. At the word each man
unclosed his hand. The open palms lay side by side.
“Thou!” said the helmsman.
The head of the victim fell forward. A shudder, followed by a sob,
convulsed him.
Against a background of blue sky and water rose the hand of Jean Petit,
clasping a knife!
Two men turned away their heads!