Chapter 8

The matters that occupied his mind belonged only to his work. In the early morning at Bordeaux, when he had to change, he bought a budget of morning papers, and read them in the refreshment-room over his roll and coffee. The news was alarming enough: people were fleeing from Narbonne and the neighbouring towns. Seven had been shot in a riot on the previous night; the soldiery was in charge of the town, and martial law had been proclaimed.

The French journalists excelled themselves in superlatives ... their stories were vain accounts of personal emotions and experiences, for it is the fashion with them to thrust their personality in front of the news.

Thereafter, on the journey to Narbonne, Humphrey wondered how he was going to get his telegrams out of the town, if it were besieged. He bought a map of the district and studied it: it might be necessary to send a courier to Perpignan, or back to Bordeaux, or, if things were very bad indeed, there were carrier pigeons; the Spanish frontier at Port Bou was not very far away also ... perhaps, he could find some one to whom to telephone. It was his business to get any news out of Narbonne, and there would be no excuse for failure.

The people in his carriage were talking of the shooting.

"I shouldn't like to be going there," one said.

"It will be worse to-night," another remarked. "Those Southerners lose their heads so quickly."

It seemed odd to Humphrey that while they were[342] talking of it in this detached way, he alone, probably, out of the whole train-load, was about to plunge into the actualities of revolution of his own free will. For the next few days he would be living with the grievances of the wine-growers, learning things that were unknown to him now. He would have to record and describe all that happened. His was the power to create sympathy in English households for the wrongs of these people starving in the midst of their fertile vineyards.

The brakes jarred the carriages of the train. Heads were put out of the window. On the up-line a goods train carrying flour had met with an accident. The engine lay grotesquely on one side, powdered with white flour, and the vans looked as if they had been out in a snow-storm. The melancholy sight of the shattered train slid past, as their own train jolted slowly on its journey.

"What is it—have they wrecked the train?" some one asked.

"No," another said, pointing to a paragraph in the paper, "it was an accident. The engine ran off the metals last night. It's in the Depêche de Toulouse."

They all chattered among themselves. It was a trivial affair, then—one had thought for a moment that those sacred Narbonnais...!

But there was something sinister in that wrecked train with its broken vans and its engine covered in a cloud of white. It seemed to presage disaster, as it lay there outside the door of the town.

The train stopped. "Narbonne" cried the porters. Humphrey descended as though it was the commonest thing in his life to enter garrisoned cities. The platform was full of soldiers, some standing with fixed bayonets, others sleeping on straw beside their stacked arms. Officers strolled up and down to the clank of their swords; outside, through the door of the station, itself[343] guarded by an infantryman in a blue coat, with its skirts tucked back, he caught a glimpse of horses tethered to the railings.

Nobody stopped him but the ticket-collector: in the midst of all this outward display of militarism, the business of the station went on as usual. Trains steamed in and departed; expresses pounded through on their way to Paris; porters were busy with parcels. The hotel buses were drawn up outside, just as if nothing in the world had happened to disturb the life of the town. He chose the Hotel Dorade omnibus, and away they went.

The streets were lined with soldiers bivouacking on the pavements. The avenue from the station was a long line of stacked rifles, and soldiers in blue and red lounging against the walls, smoking cigarettes, or lying on the pavement, where beds of hay had been made. Many of the shops were shuttered. He looked up, and the flat roofs of the houses were like barracks, with the képis of soldiers visible between the chimney-pots. The bus passed an open square—cavalry held it, and another street, broad and long, leading from it, was a camp of white tents.

Sentries guarded the bridges across the river, and though the main Boulevard was free of soldiers, he saw a hint of power in the courtyards of large houses. The walls were placarded with green and yellow posters, addressed to "Citoyens," urging them to resist the Government. The soldiers read them idly.

And, in the midst of all this, the people of Narbonne sat outside the cafés in the sunshine, under the red and white striped awnings, drinking their vermouth or absinthe!

Later, after he had taken his room at the Hotel Dorade, he walked about the town through the ranks of the soldiers. Groups of people stood here and there,[344] with grim faces and stern-set lips; they looked revengefully at officers and mounted police, and whenever a regiment marched into the town to the music of its drums and bugles, it was greeted with hoarse shouts of derision, and mocking cries of "Assassins!"

At the corner of a street of shops he came upon a little mound of stones set round a dark stain on the cobbled road; a wreath was laid there, and a night-light still burned under a glass cover. A piece of white cardboard, cut in the shape of a miniature tombstone, rested against a brick. He read the ill-written inscription on the card:—
Cross
René Duclos
agé de 29 ans
assasiné par le gouvernement.

There were seven other little memorial mounds in the neighbourhood. Each one of them marked where a victim had fallen to the soldiers' ball cartridge. One of the cardboard tombstones bore a woman's name. Her death was one of the inexplicable accidents of life: she was to have been married on the morrow. On her way she had been carried along in the crowd which was marching towards the Town Hall ... and in a minute she was dead.

These signs of tragedy made a deep impression on Humphrey's journalistic sense. He saw that the soldiers had not dared to move the mounds that reminded the people of the dreadful happenings in their midst. And they were surrounded by little silent crowds, who spelt out the inscriptions, sighed, and departed with mutterings.

[345]

A man with bloodshot eyes, and unkempt hair, his chin thick with bristles, lurched across the road, and stood by Humphrey, regarding him with a curious, persistent gaze. Humphrey moved away, and the man edged after him. He made for the main Boulevards where the crowded cafés gave him a sense of safety. He turned round, and saw that he was still being shadowed.

A voice hailed him from a café: he turned and saw O'Malley, the Irishman of The Sentinel.

"Hallo," said O'Malley, "been here long?"

"Just arrived," Humphrey said. He was glad to see a friend. That unkempt man who had followed him made him feel uncomfortably insecure.

"Where are you stopping?" O'Malley asked.

"At the Dorade."

"I'm there too: there's a whole gang of French and English fellows here. Been having no end of adventures. My carriage was held up outside Argelliers yesterday, and they wanted to see my papers. As bad as the flight to Varennes, isn't it?" He laughed, and they sat down to drink.

The unkempt man took up his position against the parapet of the bridge opposite.

Humphrey noticed that O'Malley wore a white band round his arm with a blue number on it, and his name, coupled with The Sentinel, written in ink that had frayed itself into the fabric.

"You'll have to get one of these," O'Malley explained. "It isn't safe to be a stranger here. They're issued by the People's Committee to journalists who show their credentials. A lot of detectives have been down here, you see, posing as journalists, and asking questions in the villages, getting all sorts of information; that's how they managed to arrest the ringleaders in the villages."

[346]

"It was a pretty mean trick," Humphrey said.

"Mean—I should think it was. They nearly lynched Harridge, the photographer, yesterday, and they chased another so-called journalist to the river, and he had to swim for his life, while the mob fired pot-shots at him from the bridges. So now they've placarded the town to explain that every real journalist has a white armband with a number on it."

Humphrey looked at the shaggy man opposite. "Good Lord!" he said, "that's why that fellow's been shadowing me...."

"Yes. He's one of the Committee's spies."

"I'd better get that armband quick."

"No hurry. You're all serene in my company. We'll finish our drink and stroll up together."

On the way O'Malley told him some of the latest developments. The chief ringleader, the man whom the wine-growers hailed as the Redeemer, was still at large, and nobody knew where he was. Picture-postcards of the bearded man with a halo round his head and a bunch of grapes dangling from a cross that he held in his right hand, were selling in thousands at two sous each.

"To-morrow there are the funerals," remarked O'Malley. "Seven funerals at once. It ought to make a good story."

They came to a dingy house, where there were no soldiers. Humphrey followed O'Malley up a narrow, twisting staircase to a little room. The walls were plastered with the posters he had seen on the street hoardings. Five men sat in the room, smoking cigarettes. The air was full of the stale reek of cheap tobacco. They sat in their shirt-sleeves with piles of papers before them.

One of them, a gross man with a black moustache straggling over his heavy under lip, spread out his fat[347] hands in inquiry. Another, thin, undersized and dirty, with a rat-like face, peered at them with blinking red-rimmed eyes.

"What do you want?" he asked, gruffly.

O'Malley, in his best Irish-French, explained his business and presented Humphrey. The hollow farce of polite phrases, which mean nothing in France, was played out. They wanted to see his carte d'identité and all the credentials he had. Humphrey unloaded his pocket-book on them. Finally, they made him sign a book, and they gave him a white armlet; he pinned it round his arm, and walked forth a free man. The unkempt man stood on the opposite side of the street still watching him.

And now, as he walked along the streets of Narbonne, with the white armlet of the revolutionaries giving him protection, he smiled to see the soldiers guarding the streets.

"Look here," he said to O'Malley, "who's going to give me anything to prevent the soldiers bayoneting me?"

"Yes—I've thought of that too," O'Malley answered. "Funny, isn't it, that we've got to fly for a safeguard to the People's Committee? By the way, don't you get talking to strangers more than you can help. They're down on spies. I'm going to get my copy off now. See you at the post-office."

Humphrey went back to the Dorade, and wrote his message, a descriptive account of all that he had seen, in abbreviated telegraphese. Other correspondents were there, war correspondents used to open campaigns, prepared for all emergencies; others had come from the Fleet Streets of Spain and Belgium and Germany. There was an American, too, who had travelled from Paris: as he had not yet obtained his armband, he remained in the hotel, writing very alarming telegrams.

[348]

The Englishmen dined together—a jolly party—at a large round table, and, afterwards, they all went out to look at the town at night under arms. Once, during their walk, the sound of firing came to them, and they ran helter-skelter up the Boulevard right into the arms of a young lieutenant, who laughed and told them that nothing serious had happened. He invited them all to a drink in a café, and just to satisfy them, Humphrey went reconnoitring and found that all was peaceful.

He had no time to think of anything but his work. At midnight he went to bed and slept deeply.

On the second day the "Redeemer," whom every one had imagined to be captured, suddenly appeared in Narbonne, and was whisked away in a motor-car to Argelliers, his native town. Bouvier, of the Petit Journal, saw him, dashed into a motor-garage, and hired a car in an instant.

"Viens," he shouted, as Humphrey strolled down the Street. "The 'Redeemer' has come back. You can share my car." Humphrey, knowing nothing except that Bouvier was very excited, and that, by a chance, some big news had come under his notice, jumped into the car, and away they whirled into the open country.

The Southern landscape was vivid in the hot sunshine of the late autumn; they left clouds of dust behind them as the car raced along to overtake the car of the "Redeemer." They passed the spacious vineyards, where the grapes grew like stunted hop-fields, twining round their little sticks; they sped through avenues of poplars, and almond trees and ilex; through villages where old women cheered and pointed down the long road.

"We're catching him up," Bouvier grunted. "They must have heard the news of his coming somehow."

[349]

A bend in the road, and a bridge with the blue river running beneath its arches; farmhouses and boys driving cattle home; children swinging on a gate, and old men plodding towards the sunset, on sticks that could never straighten their bent backs: the country came at them and receded from them in a succession of pictures framed in the hood of their car. Vineyards, and again vineyards, with the ungathered grapes withering in the sun, and people crying to them, "He's come back: the brave fellow."

As the road led nearer to Argelliers they overtook yellow coaches, full of people, and country carts swinging along. The drivers pointed their whips ahead, and shouted something, but the words were lost in the rush of the wind as the car rushed by them.

"The whole countryside seems to know that he's escaped. There'll be thousands in the Market Place," Bouvier said.

"It'll be a fine story," Humphrey agreed. "Those other fellows must have missed it." He was drunk with the excitement and the happiness of hunting a quarry.

They came to the Market Place of Argelliers, and the sight amazed him.

Left and right the people crushed together—a rectangular pattern of humanity. People of all ages had been drawn there by the magnetism of this man who had stirred up the South to revolt. The caps and dresses of the women and girls gave touches of colour to the sombre crowd of men, and, as he stood up in the motor-car for a better view, he saw row upon row of pink, upturned faces, parted, eager lips, and eyes that strained against the sunshine to see the black-clad figure of a man standing on the low roof of the People's Committee. Boys had climbed the trees round the Market Place—their gaping faces shone from the dark branches; and on the outskirts[350] of the vast crowd men and women stood up in carts and waggonettes—horses had been harnessed to anything that ran on wheels.

There was not a soldier in sight. The sun shone fiercely on the Market Place of Argelliers, where two thousand people were thinking of their wrongs. And the man on the roof talked to them. His voice, strong and sonorous, came to them urging them to be of good cheer. They flung back at him cries of encouragement, and called him by name.

"I'm going into the crowd," Humphrey said.

"Better stop here," urged Bouvier. "They're an excitable lot."

"I must hear what he's saying."

Humphrey climbed out of the car, and pushed his way into the middle of the crowd. There was a loud shouting over some remark that the speaker had made. He found himself wedged in tightly between heavy, broad-shouldered men, with black eyes and swarthy faces. He heard the man on the roof speak about those who had been attacking him, and a voice close to Humphrey yelled, "La Depêche de Toulouse," and immediately another voice cried out, "Conspuez la Depêche de Toulouse." He turned at the voice and saw, with a sudden shock, the shaggy-haired man with the bloodshot eyes who had dogged his footsteps that first day in Narbonne. Their glances met. Humphrey thrust back into his pocket the pencil with which he had been making furtive notes.

"Conspuez les autres!" cried the man with the bloodshot eyes, "conspuez les mouchards."

He was conscious of a new note in the crowd: he saw anger and hatred passing swiftly over all the faces around him. They turned on him with relentless eyes. He saw the shaggy-haired man shouldering his way, and scrambling towards him with crooked fingers that[351] clawed at the air. In one quick second he realized that he was in danger.

"Conspuez les autres." The cry rose all about him swelling to a roar of confusion.

"En voilà un!" shouted the shaggy man, pointing to Humphrey's white armband. They surged against him, and he was swept from his feet. He heard the shriek of women, and the babble and a murmur that ran like an undercurrent through the storm of noisy voices. The black figure on the roof was wringing his hands, and trying to calm the mob.

Humphrey turned to escape. "What a fool I was to come into the thick of it," he thought. Once, in the struggle, he saw Bouvier standing with a white face in the motor-car, probably wondering what the row was about.

And then, they came at him suddenly and determinedly. Remorseless and menacing faces were thrust close to him. He struck out and a thrill went up his arm as his fist met a hard cheek-bone.

Something fell on his arm with a heavy, aching blow that left it numb and limp, and at the same moment an excruciating spasm of self-pity swept upward from his soul, as he saw, as in a red mist, uplifted, clenched hands struggling to meet him. This was real life at last. He had ceased to be an onlooker; the game was terrible and earnest, and he was, for the first time, the principal figure in the play. His agony did not last long.

The hot breath of the men was on him, and the evil, bloodshot eyes of the shaggy-haired man who had denounced him, loomed terribly large, like great red-veined moons.

And, in that last moment, before all consciousness went from him for ever, as he swayed and fell before the trampling mob, in that supreme moment when deliverance[352] came from all the tribulations that life held for him, an odd, whimsical idea twisted his lips into a smile as he thought:

"What a ripping story this will make for The Day."

The End