The Lively Lady

by Kenneth Lewis Roberts

  He was a tall, thin man, and under his eyes were dark pouches that seemed to match in shape the enormous drooping mustaches that curved down like sickles on each side of his mouth. He had strange ideas, telling in one breath how he had broken his parole, and in the next speaking of his honor, eagle eyed and fierce; then caressing his mustache and boasting how he had got three girls with child during his stay in the parole town of Wincanton. Yet I liked him. He seemed not only kind, but even honorable, as that term is understood by most. I am sure I could have left money with him and had no penny of it touched, unless he was starving; and I know he would have seen France in hell before he lifted his sword in behalf of any Bourbon king, though he would have marched alone with Bonaparte against all the cannon in the world.

  He made us welcome when we told him why we had come, and stood proudly before us, a huge cocked hat on his head, and holding under his arm, pressed against his coat of fine black broadcloth, a cane made of bone rings fastened together and polished.

  “Yes,” he said, speaking English well enough, “this king of yours, this king of Number Four, he is not appreciate’. There is nothing like him. He is a leader; and like all leaders, he finds out the affairs, both great and small, and places them together, do you understand, to discover the cause—the drift—the pattern. Perhaps he has told you something new, this king?”

  We watched him silently, because we knew nothing, except that King Dick must have had a reason for sending us to Le Febvre.

  He shrugged his shoulders. “Nobody knows nothing,” he said, “but I feel here—” he struck his breast with his clenched hand—“that things in France are bad—bad! Yet if things are bad in France there may be a wind to blow good to us, eh?” He pulled at his sickleshaped mustaches and peered at us sharply. He rolled an eye toward the next bay, where two Frenchmen were playing chess with a set of bone chessmen; then glanced up at the barred window overhead, through which the Dartmoor fog drifted in wisps that vanished at once in the gloom of the prison.

  “You desire to speak French, eh?” he said finally. “Whence does it spring, this desire?”

  “King Dick put it in my head,” I told him. “He told me to learn French so to keep myself busy.”

  His eyes seemed to search the air above and beside me; and as they moved from point to point, they swept repeatedly across my face, never lingering but always returning. At length he smiled. “Yes,” he said, “I teach you all the French you need. You find my French very useful; useful, but expensive. Maybe you find it cost too expensive.”

  “How much does it cost?”

  “Five pounds each man.”

  There was something here I could not understand; but I sensed that this general, like King Dick, knew something we didn’t. He had something to sell, and we couldn’t afford to go without it.

  “Five pounds!” Jeddy exclaimed. “I got some French already! I couldn’t use more than a shilling’s worth.”

  “Five pounds is all right,” I told the general. “Five pounds apiece. When do we start?”

  The general smiled grimly at Jeddy. “Truly!” he said. “Say me some French, so I see about your accent.”

  “Well,” Jeddy said, “I speak the pure Nantes French. Maybe you don’t know that brand, but it takes me in and takes me out.” He cleared his throat, stared round-eyed at the general, and spoke up boldly: “Mon Dieu, mon général, commez vous portez vous? Il est très méchant aujourdui, n'est pas; il fait plouit tout le temps.”

  The general seized his head in both hands and rocked it. The face of one of the chess players appeared suddenly around the canvas screen that separated the bay where we stood from the next, stared blankly at Jeddy, and withdrew as suddenly as it had appeared.

  “Dear sweet mother of God!” the general said. “Il fait plouit! Il est très méchant aujourdui! What horror! If this is the true Nantes French, then I know at last why the citizens of Nantes were treated so badly in the Revolution. Il fait plouit! Ah, my Godl My God!”

  “What’s wrong with it?” Jeddy asked.

  “As well ask what is wrong with England!” the general groaned. “It is all wrong! The gouvernment, the people, the prisons, the houses, the women, the dress, the speech—all, all is wrong. So it is with your French.”

  He turned to me. “You speak the pure Nantes French also? Speak something to me, so I know the worst.”

  “Mine’s canal French,” I told him; and with that, speaking stiffly, since I have never felt free in foreign languages, I said: “Je vois depart de cette prison ici.”

  The general glared at me, breathing heavily through his nose. He drew a folded silk handkerchief from his breast pocket, flung it open, enveloping us in a wave of violent perfume, and dabbed at his brow.

  “Look now,” he said, when he had folded most of the odor back into the handkerchief and placed it in his bosom again, “you are strange people, you Americans, laughing and mocking at all things, but doing it stiffly, without unbending. Being mockers, you fear others will mock you. Therefore you do not speak easily.”

  “General,” Jeddy said, touching him lightly on the chest with the backs of his fingers, “with a quart of brandy in me I can say anything in French.”

  “But certainly!” the general cried, flicking Jeddy’s chest with his finger tips in turn; “the stiffness is relaxed by the brandy. For a moment you forget yourself! That is the truth. Therefore we find a way to make you forget yourself so that you speak easily, even without the use of brandy, eh?”

  There were chairs in the general’s bay: chairs and a chest; and attached to stanchions were two paintings, one of a naked woman and one of a woman not quite naked, but almost, so that the place had quite an air. The general drew our chairs close together.

  "You know how we do this?” he went on. “We make you become other persons. No longer are you Americans when you come here to study with me. You become French persons—new persons. Thus you forget yourselves and your fear of being mocked, and talk like Frenchmen, waving the hands, raising the eyebrow, lifting the shoulder, curling the lip. You see? Ha, ha!” He bunched his fingers, kissed their tips, and tossed the kiss toward the picture of the almost naked woman.

  The thing seemed reasonable. At least there could be no harm in trying it; so I nodded.

  “Good!” the general said. “We start this minute.” He tapped me on the chest. “You are Jean Marie Claude Decourbes.” He repeated the name slowly, raising his shoulders and opening his eyes wide, so that he had a look of almost childish innocence. “Jean Marie Claude Decourbes. Mais oui!” He leaned forward and stared searchingly at me. “Who are you?”

  “Jean Marie Claude Decourbes!”

  He shook his head. “Shoulder!” he criticized. “Lift the shoulder! You are surprised I ask you! Everybody know you are Jean Marie Claude Decourbes—” his voice rolled sonorously—“enseigne de vais-seau de la Marine Imperiale de France! Raise the shoulder! Use the face! That is what a face is for—to show what passes behind it. You droop the eyelid and raise the chin one sixteenth inch: you are insult because the name is not known. You raise one eyebrow: you are patient with an ignorant man. You raise two eyebrows: you are surprised an intelligent man should not know. You see? Use the face! Why did God give you the face? Not to be blank toward all the world, like the sheep or the goat, hein? But to speak silently to women of things that cannot at the moment be said in words! To mislead the enemy! Very good! Who are you?”

  I drew down my mouth and raised my eyebrows. “Jean Marie Claude Decourbes,” I protested.

  “Damned if it ain’t!” Jeddy said.

  From his breast pocket the general drew out a small mirror. He breathed on it, wiped it on his sleeve, examined his face in it first on one side and then on the other; then handed it to me. “Look in this and say to yourself one hundred times who you are. Jean Marie Claude Decourbes, a seaman of Provence. Never forget. You are Jean Marie Claude Decourbes!”

  He turned to Jeddy. “Give attention, small one! You are Fel
ix Berthot, Capitaine du navire Ma Mie de Nantes. Who are you?”

  Jeddy lifted his shoulders until his head seemed almost to sink beneath their level, drew up his eyebrows and splayed out his hands. “Felix Berthot!” he plaintively declared, and anybody with half an eye could see from his gesture that he considered the general both rude and ignorant for asking.

  The general rubbed his hands together. “Good!” he said. “It marches!”

  Before we left the shelter of the dripping stone walls of Number Seven I had learned not only that my name was Jean Marie Claude Decourbes, but that I was born in St. Remy de Provence, that my parents were Agathe and Antoine Decourbes, that I had one brother and five sisters, that I had been captured by the British frigate Garonne in the year 1809. Jeddy, being more flexible with his face and hands and shoulders, had delved deeper into his private life, and was taking pride in having wed a woman of Morlaix during the year 1804 and in being the father of two daughters.

  Having arranged to return on the following day, we crossed the stone-flagged yards, slimy from dirt and the unending moisture of the Dartmoor mists. Swarms of yellow-clad prisoners were walking, gabbling, yelling, playing childish games and working at various pursuits while waiting for their noontime soup to come from the copper boilers of each prison’s cookhouse. Something about the tumult dulled my sense of individuality, and suddenly it seemed to me that I was no longer Richard Nason, but was indeed Jean Marie Claude Decourbes, and that I had truly been shut up in this dank and soursmelling prison since the year 1809. Yet this day was the fourth of April, and we had been where we were for less than a week. I was moved to wonder how we would feel about it if we had been there for years, instead of for a day or two. There came a time when dates meant little; but this date of April 4th was one that will never slip me, any more than will some of the dates that closely followed.

  * * *

  We had no sooner reached our bay and set out our plates and cups in preparation for the coming of Tommy Bickford with the bucket of soup than King Dick passed, attended by the Bishop and the Duke.

  He grinned at me languidly, but went on without speaking. Yet he had no sooner vanished into his own bay, with the Bishop and the Duke popping in after him like two dogs popping into a cave after a bear, than he reappeared again alone and came lightly down the alley to me.

  “Heah,” he said faintly, wrinkling his forehead until the lines on it looked like the depth lines on a chart, “you an’ Feevolus been ovah to Number Sem to see ’at old Gin’ral Le Feeber?”

  I said we had.

  He made a slight movement of his melon-like head: a movement that seemed to indicate he wished to see me alone.

  Even as I got to my feet my heart began to pound against my ribs like the strokes of a gunner’s sponge. I knew as well as though he had written it out that somehow he was bringing me the news I had known I must have ever since I sat in the longboat in Plymouth harbor, peering vainly through the slanting curtain of rain at the dripping stem windows of the Granicus, 74.

  I walked with him away from our bay. “ ’At old Gin’ral Le Feeber,” he said, turning a lackadaisical eye on me, “he’ll leam you moh French ’an anyone.”

  I could hardly speak until I had gasped a lungful of sour prison air. “You’ve got something for me,” I said, when I could talk without choking.

  “Yarse!” His black paw half opened before my face, and I saw a square of soiled paper resting against his pink palm. I took it from him. “White man come into ’at market ’is mohnin’, sellin’ aigs. He ast Agnes foh somebody ’at knowed ’em Americans; an Agnes, she sent Clerphus Lapp foh me.” Agnes, I knew, was the pretty vegetable seller from the near-by village of Tavistock, who came each day to the market. “Ah wouldn’ tell nothin’ to nobody, ’f Ah was you,” he added darkly. “Don’t do nobody no good, seppen to give ’em somep’n to talk about.”

  The note was printed roughly in pencil:

  “Please be selling something in the market one week from to-day that will be 11 April.”

  It was unsigned, but I needed no signature to tell me who had sent it.

  “Wipe ’at look off yo’ pan,” King Dick said severely. “Doan’ go lookin’ ’at way lessen you want somebody follerin’ you roun’ to see effen he kain’t git to know about somep’n wuff sellin’.”

  I showed him the message.

  “Whah ’is lady cornin’ fum?” he wanted to know.

  “What makes you think it’s a lady?”

  He chuckled a fluty, hysterical chuckle. “’At ain’ no way answer King Dick! Whuffoh you got ’at li’l’ sizzicky look in yo’ eye effen ’tain’t a lady? Mebbe you git ’at look foh an ole man wif whiskers, huh? Nossuh! Naw SUH!”

  “Well,” I said, “I don’t know for sure, but I think you’re right, and I want to sell something in the market a week from to-day.”

  “ ’At ain’t no trouble,” he assured me in his weakest, weariest voice. “What you want to sell?”

  “Anything,” I told him. “I want you to buy something for me; something that’ll let me into the market: something a lady’d like to buy.”

  He nodded. “’Ey’s some nice li’l’ ships finishin’ up ovah in Number One,” he said. “Hund’ed gun ship, foh feet long: make a nice li’l’ present foh a lady.”

  “No,” I told him, “that’s too large for a lady.”

  “Nice li’l’ frigate ovah in Number Five,” he said. “No bigger’n mah han’.” He opened his gigantic fist and stared admiringly at the vast spread of bone and sinew. “Got a lady foh a figgah-haid.”

  “That’s what I want,” I said. “Get it for me, and tell the man to paint the figurehead with a green dress.”

  * * *

  I think I might have sickened from impatience if my waiting had not been leavened by the news that came into the prison on the ninth day of April and sent the eight thousand Frenchmen into a shrieking frenzy.

  Because most of these Frenchmen had been in Dartmoor since 1806, which was the year the prison was built, they had found means to circumvent their jailers in the matter of newspapers. The British tried to deprive the prisoners of all news, but French newspapers and English too were delivered to the Frenchmen neatly baked in loaves of bread.

  When these loaves came into Prison Number Seven on the morning of April 9th there arose such an uproar from the prisoners that the soldiery came out of the barracks on the run.

  Frenchmen poured from Number Seven like a swarm of hornets, and the din brought other swarms from Number Six and Number Five. The uproar swelled and swelled until gamblers, Negroes and half-naked French came tumbling down from the second floor and the cock loft of Number Four. It spread to the yard beyond us, where the gray bulks of Number Three, Number Two and Number One crouched with noses pointed at a common center, like three enormous mangy cats glaring at their prey.

  We ran to the covered walk along the wall between the prison yards and the market place; for it was only along the walk that we could pass from the yard of Number Four into the others. When we entered the yard of Numbers Seven, Six and Five, there were four thousand yellow-clad figures in it, weeping, embracing and kissing, as Frenchmen so often do. Somewhere among them started the song that goes, “Allons, enfants de la Patrie, Le jour de gloire est arrive” —a song that sends quivers along my spine. Others ran about in a frenzy, shouting “Vive VEmpereur!” “Vive la Francel” in strange, cracking, trembling voices, or stood helplessly in their grotesque, pinched-looking yellow suits marked with the broad arrow of the criminal and the staring letters T. O.—stood with tears trickling and trickling from their eyes as if there would never be an end to their weeping.

  We watched them in silence, wondering what ailed them, while the soldiers on the walls lowered their muskets to stare round eyed. At length General Le Febvre and another man came pacing toward us, watching their excited countrymen out of eyes that seemed too hard and old for tears.

  General Le Febvre nodded curtly. “You know about this?�
� he asked, gesturing toward the yellow-clad thousands.

  We shook our heads.

  His features were rigid, in spite of what he had said to me about expressing the feelings through the face. “It is done,” he said. “The wolves have pulled down the lion. Bonaparte is finished, and the Allies have taken Paris. Now the wolves have nothing more to fear, and we shall go back to our own country.”

  He stalked off with his friend, his eyes as tragic as those of a man who has lost all he loves; and it was plain to be seen that the butcher Bonaparte, who cared no more for him than for a fly crawling on the wall, had held as much of his heart as had France itself.

  “To our own countryl” Jeddy repeated, echoing the general.

  It dawned on me, then, why the general had insisted and insisted until we had almost come to believe it ourselves, that Jeddy was Felix Berthot and I Jean Marie Claude Decourbes, enseigne de vais-seau de la Marine Imperiale de France.

  XXIV

  THE market square of Dartmoor Prison was a busy place, even under the worst of conditions, for all the petty shopkeepers among the prisoners were in constant need of replenishing their stores of tobacco, pipes, needles, thread, awls, boots; pots, pans, and pails; butter, eggs, cloth, coffee, tea, beer, rum, meat, fish, soap, and God knows what-all. But on this eleventh day of April it was busier than I had seen it in my short stay—busier, I think, than it had ever been. Not only were patches of blue sky showing now and again through the low-lying fog bank that hung perpetually over the prison when rain was not falling, so that the market folk were out in full force; but the news of Bonaparte’s defeat had brought French émigrés by the score to congratulate their countrymen on the end of their imprisonment, and to seek supporters among the old soldiers—supporters for the king who was now to be hoisted back on the throne of France by the English.

  Against the side walls of the square were rails to which were tied the donkeys of the market folk who had ridden in from Tavistock and Widecombe-in-the-Moor and Moreton-Hampstead—donkeys that added to the turmoil by bursting into brays so mournful that they might have been an embodiment of the hopelessness of all the nine thousand prisoners.