Chapter 12

"Others stick twigs of aubepine in their pastures; the apothecary is a man of science, yet every year he makes a bonfire of dried gorse and drives his cattle through the smoke. It may keep off witches and lightning--or it may not. I myself do not do such things."

"Still you believe the cruiser out at sea yonder is going to bring you evil?"

"She has brought it. But it's all the same to me. I am mayor, and exempt, and I have cider and tobacco and boudin for a few months yet."

He caressed his little, selfish chin, which hung between his mottled jowls, peered cunningly at me, and opened his mouth to say something, but at that moment we both caught sight of a peasant running and waving a packet of blue papers in the air. "Monsieur the mayor! Monsieur the mayor!" he called, while still far away.

"Cre cochon de malheur!" muttered the mayor, turning pale. "He's got a telegram!"

The man came clattering across the square in his wooden shoes.

"A telegram," repeated the mayor, wiping the sudden sweat from his forehead. "I never get telegrams. I don't want telegrams!"

He turned to me, almost bursting with suppressed prophecy.

"It has come--the evil that the black cruiser brings us! You laughed! Tenez, monsieur; there's your bad luck in these blue morsels of paper!"

And he snatched the telegram from the breathless messenger, reading it with dilating eyes.

For a long while he sat there studying the telegram, his fat forefinger following the scrawl, a crease deepening above his eyebrows, and all the while his lips moved in noiseless repetition of the words he spelled with difficulty and his labored breathing grew louder.

When at length the magistrate had mastered the contents of his telegram, he looked up with a stupid stare.

"I want my drummer. Where's the town-crier?" he demanded, as though dazed.

"He has gone to Lorient, m'sieu the mayor," ventured the messenger.

"To get drunk. I remember. Imbecile! Why did he go to-day? Are there not six other days in this cursed week? Who is there to drum? Nobody. Nobody knows how in Paradise. Seigneur, Dieu! the ignorance of this town!"

"M'sieu the mayor," ventured the messenger, "there's Jacqueline."

"Ho! Vrai. The Lizard's young one! She can drum, they say. She stole my drum once. Why did she steal it but to drum upon it?"

"The little witch can drum them awake in Ker-Is," muttered the messenger.

The mayor rose, looked around the square, frowned. Then he raised his voice in a bellow: "Jacqueline! Jacqueline! _Thou_ Jacqueline!"

A far voice answered, faintly breaking across the square from the bridge: "She is on the rocks with her sea-rake!"

The mayor thrust the blue telegram into his pocket and waddled out of his garden, across the square, and up the path to the cliffs.

Uninvited, I went with him.

X

THE TOWN-CRIER

The bell in the unseen chapel ceased ringing as we came out on the cliffs of Paradise, where, on the horizon, the sun hung low, belted with a single ribbon of violet cloud.

Over acres of foaming shoals the crimson light flickered and spread, painting the eastern cliffs with sombre fire. The ebb-tide, red as blood, tumbled seaward across the bar, leaving every ledge a glowing cinder under the widening conflagration in the west.

The mayor carried his silver-buttoned jacket over his arm; the air had grown sultry. As we walked our gigantic shadows strode away before us across the kindling stubble, seeming to lengthen at every stride.

Below the cliffs, on a crescent of flat sand, from which sluggish, rosy rivulets crawled seaward, a man stood looking out across the water. And the mayor stopped and called down to him: "Ohe, the Lizard! What do you see on the ocean--you below?"

"I see six war-ships speeding fast in column," replied the man, without looking up.

The mayor hastily shaded his eyes with one fat hand, muttering: "All poachers have eyes like sea-hawks. There is a smudge of smoke to the north. Holy Virgin, what eyes the rascal has!"

As for me, strain my eyes as I would, I saw nothing save the faintest stain of smoke on the horizon.

"He, Lizard! Are they German, your six war-ships?" bawled the mayor. His voice had suddenly become tremulous.

"They are French," replied the poacher, tranquilly.

"Then Sainte-Eline keep them from the rocks!" sang out the mayor. "Ohe, Lizard, I want somebody to drum and read a proclamation. Where's Jacqueline?"

At that instant a young girl, a mere child, appeared on the beach, dragging a sea-rake over the ground behind her. She was a lithe creature, bare-limbed and ragged, with the sea-tan on throat and knee. The blue tatters of her skirt hung heavy with brine; the creamy skin on her arms glittered with wet spray, and her hair was wet, too, clustering across her cheeks in damp elf-locks.

The mayor glanced at her with that stolid contempt which Finistere Bretons cherish toward those women who show their hair--an immodesty unpardonable in the eyes of most Bretons.

The girl caught sight of the mayor and gave him a laughing greeting which he returned with a shrug.

"If you want a town-crier," she called up, in a deliciously fresh voice, scarcely tinged with the accent, "I'll cry your edicts and I'll drum for you, too!"

"Can your daughter beat the drum?" asked the mayor of the poacher, ignoring the girl's eager face upturned.

"Yes," said the poacher, indifferently, "and she can also beat the devil with two sticks."

The girl threw her rake into a boat and leaped upon the rocks at the base of the cliff.

"Jacqueline! Don't come up that way!" bawled the mayor, horrified. "Hey! Robert! Ohe! Lizard! Stop her or she'll break her neck!"

The poacher looked up at his daughter then shrugged his shoulders and squatted down on his ragged haunches, restless eyes searching the level ocean, as sea-birds search.

Breathless, hot, and laughing, the girl pulled herself up over the edge of the cliff. I held out my hand to aid her, but she pushed it away, crying, "Thank you all the same, but here I am!"

"Spawn of the Lizard," I heard the mayor mutter to himself, "like a snake you wriggle where honest folk fall to destruction!" But he spoke condescendingly to the bright-eyed, breathless child. "I'll pay six sous if you'll drum for me."

"I'll do it for love," she said, saucily--"for the love of drumming, not for your beaux yeux, m'sieu le maire."

The mayor looked at her angrily, but, probably remembering he was at her mercy, suppressed his wrath and held out the telegram. "Can you read that, my child?"

The girl, still breathing rapidly from her scramble, rested her hands on her hips and, head on one side, studied the blue sheets of the telegram over the mayor's outstretched arm.

"Yes, I can read it. Why not? Can't you?"

"Read? I the mayor of Paradise!" repeated the outraged magistrate. "What do you mean, lizard of lizards! gorse cat!"

"Now if you are going to say such things I won't drum for you," said the child, glancing at me out of her sea-blue eyes and giving a shake to her elf-locks.

"Yes, you will!" bawled the angry mayor. "Shame on your manners, Jacqueline Garenne! Shame on your hair hanging where all the world can see it! Shame on your bare legs--"

"Not at all," said the child, unabashed. "God made my legs, m'sieu the mayor, and my hair, too. If my coiffe does not cover my hair, neither does the small Paris hat of the Countess de Vassart cover her hair. Complain of the Countess to m'sieu the cure, then I will listen to you."

The mayor glared at her, but she tossed her head and laughed.

"Ho fois! Everybody knows what you are," sniffed the mayor--"and nobody cares, either," he muttered, waddling past me, telegram in hand.

The child, quite unconcerned, fell into step beside me, saying, confidentially: "When I was little I used to cry when they talked to me like that. But I don't now; I've made up my mind that they are no better than I."

"I don't know why anybody should abuse you," I said, loudly enough for the mayor to hear. But that functionary waddled on, puffing, muttering, stopping every now and then in the narrow cliff-path to strike flint to tinder or to refill the tiny bowl of his pipe, which a dozen puffs always exhausted.

"Oh, they all abuse us," said the child, serenely. "You see, you are a stranger and don't understand; but you will if you live here."

"Why is everybody unkind to you?" I asked, after a moment.

"Why? Oh, because I am what I am and my father is the Lizard."

"A poacher?"

"Ah," she said, looking up at me with delicious malice, "what is a poacher, monsieur?"

"Sometimes he's a fine fellow gone wrong," I said, laughing. "So I don't believe any ill of your father, or of you, either. Will you drum for me, Jacqueline?"

"For you, monsieur? Why, yes. What am I to read for you?"

I gave her a hand-bill; at the first glance her eyes sparkled, the color deepened under her coat of amber tan; she caught her breath and read rapidly to the end.

"Oh, how beautiful," she said, softly. "Am I to read this in the square?"

"I will give you a franc to read it, Jacqueline."

"No, no--only--oh, do let me come in and see the heavenly wonders! Would you, monsieur? I--I cannot pay--but would--_could_ you let me come in? I will read your notice, anyway," she added, with a quaver in her voice.

The flushed face, the eager, upturned eyes, deep blue as the sea, the little hands clutching the show-bill, which fairly quivered between the tanned fingers--all these touched and amused me. The child was mad with excitement.

What she anticipated, Heaven only knows. Shabby and tarnished as we were, the language of our hand-bills made up in gaudiness for the dingy reality.

"Come whenever you like, Jacqueline," I said. "Ask for me at the gate."

"And who are you, monsieur?"

"My name is Scarlett."

"Scarlett," she whispered, as though naming a sacred thing.

The mayor, who had toddled some distance ahead of us, now halted in the square, looking back at us through the red evening light.

"Jacqueline, the drum is in my house. I'll lend you a pair of sabots, too. Come, hasten little idler!"

We entered the mayor's garden, where the flowers were glowing in the lustre of the setting sun. I sat down in a chair; Jacqueline waited, hands resting on her hips, small, shapely toes restlessly brushing the grass.

"Truly this coming wonder-show will be a peep into paradise," she murmured. "Can all be true--really true as it is printed here in this bill--I wonder--"

Before she had time to speculate further, the mayor reappeared with drum and drum-sticks in one hand and a pair of sabots in the other. He flung the sabots on the grass, and Jacqueline, quite docile now, slipped both bare feet into them.

"You may keep them," said the mayor, puffing out his mottled cheeks benevolently; "decency must be maintained in Paradise, even if it beggars me."

"Thank you," said Jacqueline, sweetly, slinging the drum across her hip and tightening the cords. She clicked the ebony sticks, touched the tightly drawn parchment, sounding it with delicate fingers, then looked up at the mayor for further orders.

"Go, my child," said the mayor, amiably, and Jacqueline marched through the garden out into the square by the fountain, drum-sticks clutched in one tanned fist, the scrolls of paper in the other.

In the centre of the square she stood a moment, looking around, then raised the drum-sticks; there came a click, a flash of metal, and the quiet square echoed with the startling outcrash. Back from roof and wall bounded the echoes; the stony pavement rang with the racket. Already a knot of people had gathered around her; others came swiftly to windows and doorsteps; the loungers left their stone benches by the river, the maids of Paradise flocked from the bridge. Even Robert the Lizard drew in his dripping line to listen. The drum-roll ceased.

"_Attention! Men of Finistere!_ By order of the governor of Lorient, all men between the ages of twenty and forty, otherwise not exempt, are ordered to report at the navy-yard barracks, war-port of Lorient, on the 5th of November of the present year, to join the army of the Loire.

"Whosoever is absent at roll-call will be liable to the punishment provided for such delinquents under the laws governing the state of siege now declared in Morbihan and Finistere. _Citizens, to arms!_

"The enemy is on the march! Though Metz has fallen through treachery, Paris holds firm! Let the provinces rise and hurl the invader from the soil of the mother-land!

"_Bretons!_ France calls! Answer with your ancient battle-cry, 'Sainte-Anne! Sainte-Anne!' The eyes of the world are on Armorica! _To arms!_"

The girl's voice ceased; a dead silence reigned in the square. The men looked at one another stupidly; a woman began to whimper.

"The curse is on Paradise!" cried a hoarse voice.

The drummer was already drawing another paper from her ragged pocket, and again in the same clear, emotionless voice, but slightly drawling her words, she read:

"To the good people of Paradise! The manager of the famous American travelling circus, lately returned from a tour of the northern provinces, with camels, elephants, lions, and a magnificent company of artists, announces a stupendous exhibition to be held in Lorient at greatly reduced prices, thus enabling the intelligent and appreciative people of Paradise to honor the Republican Circus, recently known as the Imperial Circus, with their benevolent and discerning patronage! Long live France! Long live the Republic! Long live the Circus!"

A resounding roll of the drum ended the announcements; the girl slung the drum over her shoulder, turned to the right, and passed over the stone bridge, sabots clicking. Presently from the hamlet of Alincourt over the stream came the dull roll of the drum again and the faint, clear voice:

"Attention! Men of Finistere! By order of the governor of Lorient, all men--" The wind changed and her voice died away among the trees.

The maids of Paradise were weeping now by the fountain; the men gathered near, and their slow, hushed voices scarcely rose above the ripple of the stream where Robert the Lizard fished in silence.

It was after sunset before Jacqueline finished her rounds. She had read her proclamation in Alincourt hamlet, she had read it in Sainte-Ysole, her drum had aroused the inert loungers on the breakwater at Trinite-on-Sea. Now, with her drum on her shoulder and her sabots swinging in her left hand, she came down the cliffs beside the Chapel of Our Lady of Paradise, excited and expectant.

Of the first proclamation which she had read she apparently understood little. When she announced the great disaster at Metz in the north, and when her passionless young voice proclaimed the levee en masse--the call to arms for the men of the coast from Sainte-Ysole to Trinite Beacon--she scarcely seemed to realize what it meant, although all around her women turned away sobbing, or clung, deathly white, to sons and husbands.

But there was certainly something in the other proclamation which thrilled her and set her heart galloping as she loitered on the cliff.

I walked across to the Quimperle road and met her, dancing along with her drum; and she promptly confided her longings and desires to me as we stood together for an instant on the high-road. The circus! Once, it appeared, she had seen--very far off--a glittering creature turning on a trapeze. It was at the fair near Bannalec, and it was so long ago that she scarcely remembered anything except that somebody had pulled her away while she stood enchanted, and the flashing light of fairyland had been forever shut from her eyes.

At times, when the maids of Paradise were sociable at the well in the square, she had listened to stories of the splendid circus which came once to Lorient. And now it was coming again!

We stood in the middle of the high-road looking through the dust haze, she doubtless dreaming of the splendors to come, I very, very tired. The curtain of golden dust reddened in the west; the afterglow lit up the sky once more with brilliant little clouds suspended from mid-zenith. The moorland wind rose and tossed her elf-locks in her eyes and whipped her skirt till the rags fluttered above her smooth, bare knees.

Suddenly, straight out of the flaming gates of the sunset, the miracle was wrought. Celestial shapes in gold and purple rose up in the gilded dust, chariots of silver, milk-white horses plumed with fire.

Breathless, she shrank back among the weeds, one hand pressed to her throbbing throat. But the vision grew as she stared; there was heavenly music, too, and the clank of metal chains, and the smothered pounding of hoofs. Then she caught sight of something through the dust that filled her with a delicious terror, and she cried out. For there, uptowering in the haze, came trudging a great, gray creature, a fearsome, swaying thing in crimson trappings, flapping huge ears. It shuffled past, swinging a dusty trunk; the sparkling horsemen cantered by, tin armor blazing in the fading glory; the chariots dragged after, and the closed dens of beasts rolled behind in single file, followed by the band-wagon, where Heaven-inspired musicians played frantically and a white-faced clown balanced his hat on a stick and shrieked.

So the circus passed into Paradise; and I turned and followed in the wake of dust, stale odors, and clamorous discord, sick at heart of wandering over a world I had not found too kind.

And at my heels stole Jacqueline.

XI

IN CAMP

We went into camp under the landward glacis of the cliffs, in a field of clover which was to be ploughed under in a few days. We all were there except Kelly Eyre, who had gone to telegraph the governor of Lorient for permission to enter the port with the circus. Another messenger also left camp on private business for me.

It was part of my duty to ration the hay for the elephant and the thrice-accursed camel. The latter had just bitten Mr. Grigg, our clown--not severely--and Speed and Horan the "Strong Man" were hobbling the brute as I finished feeding my lions and came up to assist the others.

"Watch that darn elephant, too, Mr. Grigg," said Byram, looking up from a plate of fried ham that Miss Crystal, our "Trapeze Lady," had just cooked for him over our gypsy fires of driftwood.

"Look at that elephant! Look at him!" continued Byram, with a trace of animation lighting up his careworn face--"look at him now chuckin' hay over his back. Scrape it up, Mr. Scarlett; hay's thirty a ton in this war-starved country."

As I started to clean up the precious hay, the elephant gave a curious grunt and swung his trunk toward me.

"There's somethin' paltry about that elephant," said Byram, in a complaining voice, rising, with plate of ham in one hand, fork in the other. "He's gittin' as mean as that crafty camuel. Make him move, Mr. Speed, or he'll put his foot on the trombone."

"Ho Djebe! Mail!" said Speed, sharply.

The elephant obediently shuffled forward; Byram sat down again, and wearily cut himself a bit of fried ham; and presently we were all sitting around the long camp-table in the glare of two smoky petroleum torches, eating our bread and ham and potatoes and drinking Breton cider, a jug of which Mr. Horan had purchased for a few coppers.

Some among us were too tired to eat, many too tired for conversation, yet, from habit we fell into small talk concerning the circus, the animals, the prospects of better days.

The ladies of the company, whatever quarrels they indulged in among themselves, stood loyally by Byram in his anxiety and need. Miss Crystal and Miss Delany displayed edifying optimism; Mrs. Horan refrained from nagging; Mrs. Grigg, a pretty little creature, who was one of the best equestriennes I ever saw, declared that we were living too well and that a little dieting wouldn't hurt anybody.

McCadger, our band-master, came over from the other fire to say that the men had finished grooming the horses, and would I inspect the picket-line, as Kelly Eyre was still absent.

When I returned, the ladies had retired to their blankets under their shelter-tent; poor little Grigg lay asleep at the table, his tired, ugly head resting among the unwashed tin plates; Speed sprawled in his chair, smoking a short pipe; Byram sat all hunched up, his head sunk, eyes vacantly following the movements of two men who were washing dishes in the flickering torch-light.

He looked up at me, saying: "I guess Mr. Speed is right. Them lions o' yourn is fed too much horse-meat. Overeatin' is overheatin'; we've got to give 'em beef or they'll be clawin' you. Yes, sir, they're all het up. Hear 'em growl!"

"That's a fable, governor," I said, smiling and dropping into a chair. "I've heard that theory before, but it isn't true."

"The trouble with your lions is that you play with them too much and they're losing respect for you," said Speed, drowsily.

"The trouble with my lions," said I, "is that they were born in captivity. Give me a wild lion, caught on his native heath, and I'll know what to expect from him when I tame him. But no man on earth can tell what a lion born in captivity will do."

The hard cider had cheered Byram a little; he drew a cherished cigar from his vest-pocket, offered it to me, and when I considerately refused, he carefully set it alight with a splinter from the fire. Its odor was indescribable.

"Luck's a curious phenomena, ain't it, Mr. Scarlett?" he said.

I agreed with him.

"Luck," continued Byram, waving his cigar toward the four quarters of the globe, "is the rich man's slave an' the poor man's tyrant. It's also a see-saw. When the devil plays in luck the cherubim git spanked--or words to that effec'--not meanin' no profanity."

"It's about like that, governor," admitted Speed, lazily.

Byram leaned back and sucked meditatively at his cigar. The new moon was just rising over the elephant's hindquarters, and the poetry of the incident appeared to move the manager profoundly. He turned and surveyed the dim bivouac, the two silent tents, the monstrous, shadowy bulk of the elephant, rocking monotonously against the sky. "Kind of Silurian an' solemn, ain't it," he murmured, "the moon shinin' onto the rump of that primeval pachyderm. It's like the dark ages of the behemoth an' the cony. I tell you, gentlemen, when them fearsome an' gigantic mamuels was aboundin' in the dawn of creation, the public missed the greatest show on earth--by a few million years!"

We nodded sleepily but gravely.

Byram appeared to have recovered something of his buoyancy and native optimism.

"Gentlemen," he said, "let's kinder saunter over to the inn and have a night-cap with Kelly Eyre."

This unusual and expensive suggestion startled us wide awake, but we were only too glad to acquiesce in anything which tended to raise his spirits or ours. Dog tired but smiling we rose; Byram, in his shirt-sleeves and suspenders, wearing his silk hat on the back of his head, led the way, fanning his perspiring face with a red-and-yellow bandanna.

"Luck," said Byram, waving his cigar toward the new moon, "is bound to turn one way or t'other--like my camuel. Sometimes, resemblin' the camuel, luck will turn on you. Look out it don't bite you. I once made up a piece about luck:

"'Don't buck Bad luck Or you'll get stuck--'

I disremember the rest, but it went on to say a few other words to that effec'."

The lighted door of the inn hung ajar as we crossed the star-lit square; Byram entered and stood a moment in the doorway, stroking his chin. "Bong joor the company!" he said, lifting his battered hat.

The few Bretons in the wine-room returned his civility; he glanced about and his eye fell on Kelly Eyre, Speed's assistant balloonist, seated by the window with Horan.

"Well, gents," said Byram, hopefully, "an' what aire the prospects of smilin' fortune when rosy-fingered dawn has came again to kiss us back to life?"