Leaving the house she left the voice behind. “Yet another promenade?” remarked Égisippe Coton. The taunt, and the voice wizened with rancour, gave her the fillip she needed, and blandly she condoled with him that he could not also allow himself a little stroll to see how things were going. One is very possibly safer out of doors, she observed.
For a while that seemed true enough, unless it were for the risk of breaking one’s ankle. Paving-stones and blocks of cobbles had been hacked up at random, and in the half-light it was easy enough to stumble into the gaps that remained.
Out of an alley darted the wood-seller’s little girl. Her pallor of town-life, her skinniness of under-nourishment, gave her a resemblance to Augusta, whom neither good air nor good food had forwarded; and she had, too, something of Augusta’s elfish decisiveness of diction. Poverty, though, had freed her from any nursery airs. And like a grown woman she greeted Sophia, and stretching upwards, linked arms.
“You are late, Madame Vilobie. You have missed a magnificent spectacle! Such barricades I have never seen before.”
Looking more closely at this experienced veteran, Sophia saw that she had a patch of plaster on her nose.
“Were you wounded, Armandine?”
“Nothing, nothing,” said the child. “A scratch, a graze from a piece of stone sent flying. However, I can say that I have been wounded in the people’s defence.”
“And the others?”
In her voice of a businesslike bird, Armandine detailed the dead and wounded: the butcher’s boy, the pastrycook, the sweep, the wine-merchant’s two nephews, and Monsieur Allin, saddler and National Guard.
“They also are with us,” she said with a sweep of her hand.
It seemed as though this child knew the defenders of the local barricades as well as she knew her father’s clients. These were not disembodied revolutionaries, these men behind the barricades, but the workers of the neighbourhood, figures seen every day. The actual barricades were almost as intimately known to Armandine. In this one was Aunt Zélie’s great wardrobe, in that the cornchandler’s bins, in a third cords of wood from Armandine’s papa and a great mass of books carried out by an old gentleman whom no one had ever set eyes on previously.
“Look,” she exclaimed. “There they are!”
Dark and regular, the barricades traversed the vista of the rue St. Jacques like waves rolling in upon a lee-shore.
“That is Monsieur Allin’s barricade,” said the child. “He came to attack it, but the sweep harangued him, and in a twinkling he was among the defenders. And there, do you see it, is the umbrella of the old gentleman who brought the books. He seems to be a little delicate.”
Like a guide finishing his course, Armandine walked away.
Augusta, gloved and wrapped in wool and cherished, might have been like this, Augusta walking staidly intrepid into the waves on Weymouth beach. But convention and riches had made of Augusta a rather dull and didactic child. Frederick had understood her best, calling her The Twopenny Piece. These men behind the barricades had children they loved, wives with whom they were in amity. Unglorified, undisciplined, under the windows of their own homes they walked out to die.
“I have no place here,” she said to herself, ashamed to the soul. And her hand fell back from the knocker on the door of the cooked-meats shop. The Maison du Four aux Brindilles stood in a quiet by-street near the river, a street of ancient and overhanging houses. The burst of cannonading echoed through it as though from another world.
Cannon! The stature of that sound reared up above the height of the barricades, the minnikin height of man. She banged on the door.
“Is Madame Lemuel ... ?”
The old man had a serious face, large and pale and wrinkled. He trod with the cautious dignity of some one suffering from corns, and on his hand was a wide wedding-ring.
“This way, if you please.”
Beyond the kitchen, spotless and orderly, abundant with looped black puddings, casks of brined pork, bunches of herbs and jars of spices, was a woodhouse opening into a small courtyard. Across the courtyard was another backdoor, another shed, a room where, in semi-darkness, people were sitting round a table eating and a child whimpered. The shop beyond, shuttered and obscure, smelled of blood; putting out her hand Sophia touched something cold and sticky.
“It is only horse-flesh,” said her guide. “Never fear.”
She heard a door being unbarred, stepped through it, stood in a street. It was almost as though she had entered another courtyard, so tall was the barricade. She looked for Minna, and in an instant recognised her. And her first impulse was an irresistible impulse to laugh, for Minna was holding a gun.
The impulse to laugh was succeeded by a feeling of acute anxiety when she observed more closely how the weapon was handled. She hurried forward.
“Sophia! You are safe!” exclaimed Minna, and levelled the gun at Sophia’s bosom.
“How many people have you killed with that?”
“None! But I have wounded several.”
“I can well believe it.”
There was a crowd of people, a great noise of conversation. An old man, red-nosed and serious, with military medals pinned on his coat, was tying up a boy’s wounded hand. The boy was sitting on the ground, his back against the barricade, tears running down his furious rigid face. An old soldier, three National Guards, several students, artisans, small shopkeepers, many ragged and workless, many women ... for a moment it seemed to Sophia that a young officer was also among the defenders of the barricade.
“Our prisoner,” said Minna.
He was seated on a doorstep, his long thin legs sprawling, on his long thin face a look of bewilderment and dejection. Beside him, and seemingly in charge of him, was a very stout old lady with a hairy chin and a magnificent cap. She was haranguing him, emphatically wagging her head, creasing her double chins. Sophia edged a little nearer and heard her say,
“And that is how one gets piles.”
The young officer shut his eyes and swallowed.
The attack which he had led so much too spectacularly (“He came clambering over the barricades, waving a sword, so there was nothing for it but to let him in,”) had been repulsed. The old man with the medals snorted at this. It was a wretched piece of work, he said, he would have been ashamed to be seen dead in it. It was obvious that he spoke with intent, careful to discourage too much elation among the defenders. At every thud of the cannon he cocked his head, made a wry grimace as though he were trying some bitter flavour on his palate. The cannon, Minna said, was firing from the hospital, the Hôtel Dieu. And she made a joke about pills which had obviously not originated with her.
She had completely assimilated the colour of her surroundings, identifying herself with the barricade, knowing all the news, all the rumours, all the nicknames. It was quite genuine, but slightly overdone, and the effect was as though she were a little tipsy. To Sophia, arriving cold and raw in the midst of this scene already warmed with blood and powder, Minna’s demeanour was embarrassing and painful, she could not help feeling that Minna knew every one behind the barricade much better than she knew her.
“How long have you been here?”
“Three hours.”
If I were here as many days, thought Sophia, I should still be out of it. If only there were something for me to do!
As time went on this feeling was augmented by a searching wish that there might be something to eat. And she had her first moment of identification with those around her when the door of the horse-flesh shop opened, and the old man who had let her in to the Maison du Four aux Brindilles came out, treading with his cautious suffering dignity, and carrying wine and bread and slices of pickled pork.
Then, thinking that these refreshments were for those who had fought, whereas she had done nothing but arrive late, hang about, and look on, she stood back, proud and miserable.
“You look so tired.”
Minna was at her elbow with a glass and a hunch of bread a
nd meat.
“Do you know, those are the first words you ever spoke to me.”
“When you came that evening to the rue de la Carabine?”
“Yes.”
In the shabby remains of daylight they stared at each other, startled into recognition.
“To arms! To the barricades!”
A barricade to the southward was being attacked. A moment later the noise of firing broke out in the next street.
“They are doing it in style,” said the old soldier. “Keep down, damn you!” he shouted to those who had mounted the barricade and were watching the fighting, and shouting encouragement; and he grabbed the leg of a red-haired boy and hauled him down.
“Oh, but I say! We’ve got to see how it goes, down there.”
“We shall know soon enough. Now listen! If they carry it, it’ll be our turn. Wait till they come close. Long shots are no good in this cat-light, nothing but waste of powder. Let them come close, and then give them a real peppering. And don’t try any fancy shooting. This is fighting, not target-practice. Aim fair and square at their middles.”
His bellowing harangue over, he climbed heavily up the barricade, and peered down the street. They listened for his report. He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth and climbed down again. Stumping grandly to and fro, he trod on Sophia’s foot.
“Hey! Can you shoot?”
His voice was so contemptuous that the prisoner vented a sound of protest. Turning her back on this champion, Sophia answered,
“I can load.”
“Load, then! Here, Clément, Dujau, Laimable! This lady will load for you.
“As for you, Captain — you’ll see some fighting presently, maybe.”
The prisoner flinched as though the old man’s wrath had caught him a buffet. Then, biting his lip and bridling, he tried to reassert his superior dignity, tossed his head, put on a sneering and haughty expression. The old woman on the camp-stool continued her inflexible narrative. She was trudging through a death in childbed now. If she could keep him an hour or two longer, thought Sophia, she would make mincemeat of him.
It seemed as though they would stand for ever in this smoky dusk, under this confused hubbub of firing and shouting. The echoes rang and rattled through the gully of the narrow street, and a cage of canaries in a window overhead trilled frantically. Suddenly, as though answering the canaries, there was an outburst of shrill cheering.
“Those damned brats!” exclaimed the old soldier. And another voice, snarling and agitated, began to speak of the Gardes Mobiles, trained by the government to savagery like a pack of trained hunting-dogs, until a third voice, solid and peremptory, silenced the recital.
The man called Laimable, not turning his head, remarked,
“The worst of it is, they ought to be fighting with us.”
His tone was philosophical, the flat voice of an intellect, the voice of one accustomed to receive no answers to his statements. There was no answer to this one, either.
The cooked-meat-shop man, having carried in his tray and his bottles, now came out again with a long carving-knife.
“The best I can do,” he apologised. “My two boys have taken all the firearms, and everything else they can lay hands on. However, they are making good use of them, no doubt.”
Without a pause in her monologue the stout old woman fumbled under her petticoats, produced a chopper, and laid it across her knees.
It seemed that the noise around them constrained them to keep silence. With one accord they moved cautiously, spoke in undertones, coughed under their breaths as though in church. A deepening seriousness pressed on them one and all, and there was scarcely a stir in the common mood when the noise from the barricade down the street changed its tune, was traversed by shrieks and crashes, when the clatter of running feet approached.
Panting and bloodied, a man scrambled up the barricade, was helped over.
“Give me a gun! Mine’s jammed.”
In a moment Minna had given him hers. There was an unmistakable renunciation in the gesture, and an equally unmistakable triumph in the movement with which she pulled the duelling pistol by J. Watson of Piccadilly, London, from her bosom. Sophia could imagine that melancholy voice remarking with suavity,
“One must be prepared for emergencies.”
It was likely to be her last clear impression of Minna, for more runners were being helped over the barricade, and already she was busy loading, comparing with rage the smoothness of Frederick’s well-oiled pieces which she had handled in the Blandamer preserves, and the cranky unkempt weapons which must serve now. For we shall all be killed, she said to herself — a purely formal movement of the mind. For hours now, under this imminence of death, the idea of death had been unmeaning, unrealisable. And even when the red-headed boy fell back with a cry and lay struggling beside her she went on loading, knowing that the wetness on her hand was blood exactly as she knew that her legs were cramped with kneeling on cobbles, that her ears were humming like stretched wires, that a cold sweat of excitement had broken out all over her.
But this isolation was no longer an isolation setting her apart from those around her, she was not cased up now in that feeling of being out of it, an anomaly, an intruder. This furious detachment, she had it in common with every other fighter on the barricade. It was the mood of battle.
Bread or Lead. Before long, the ammunition would be running short. This was how one felt when one’s children were starving, when there was no more bread in the cupboard, no more milk in the breast. The fighters were lessening too. She had noticed that one particular musket was no longer thrust down to her, and now it fell clattering; and slowly, like an ebb, the body of Laimable drooped from its meditative attitude, the head pillowed on one arm, and fell also.
This barricade was not holding out so well as the other, or maybe the time of fighting went more swiftly than the time of waiting. Yet, when the assailants rushed it, the hand-to-hand fighting revived a fierceness that the failing ammunition had belied, and for a minute or two it seemed as though they might be driven back. Then, in the street running parallel, the sound of cannonading burst out, and as though this jarred the rhythm of fighting here, there was a wavering, a pause; and like a swarm of bees the Gardes Mobiles came over, yelling and jeering.
Caspar is one of these, she thought. She was able to think now, there was nothing more she could do. With the certainty of a bad dream, there, when she looked up, was Caspar’s profile outlined against the smoky dusk, tilted, just as it had been on those summer evenings at Blandamer House, when he played his guitar, leaning against the balustrade. Lightly he leaped down within a hand’s-breadth of her, crying Surrender.
On the farther side of the barricade a house had been broken into. Trampling steps were heard, shouts and cries. Suddenly the shutters of an upper room were thrown open, and a woman leant out, shrieking with terror, crying that she was going to throw herself down. The gaslight shone out into the street, a livid square of light falling like a trap. She saw Caspar recognise her, and for an instant his face wore a look of sheepish devotion.
“Why, it’s Caspar!”
It was Minna’s voice, warm, inveterately hospitable. He glanced round. With a howl of rage he sprang forward, thrust with his bayonet, drove it into Minna’s breast.
“Drab!” he cried out. “Jewess! This is the end of you.”
A hand was clapped on Sophia’s shoulder, a voice told her she was a prisoner.
“One moment,” she replied, inattentively. With her free arm she pulled out the pistol and cocked it, and fired at Caspar’s mouth as though she would have struck that mouth with her hand. Having looked to aim, she looked no further. But she saw the bayonet jerk in Minna’s breast, and the blood rush out.
Even when her hands were caught behind her and tied there, she did not realise that she was a prisoner. Thumped with a musket-butt, kicked and hauled and shouted at, she remained motionless and uncomprehending. And dragged away by force, marching with the
other prisoners, she thought she was yet standing by the barricade with Minna lying at her feet.
It was the clatter of the pistol, falling from her numbed grasp, that roused her. She awoke, looked round to see where she was, and who was with her. They were going by the Hôtel de Cluny. Its windows were lit up, a stretcher was being carried in through the doorway.
“We could have some fun in there.”
It was one of the escort who spoke; and they began to quarrel amongst themselves, the blither spirits canvassing the project of hunting through the wounded to see if they could lay hands on any notorious revolutionaries, the duller saying that they had better get rid of this lot first.
“That’s easy enough. Shoot them now.”
“Excuse me,” said a voice, precise and anxious. “Such were not our instructions.”
And they were halted, while the dispute continued. In some near-by belfry church-bells were ringing the tocsin, the peal running its scale backwards, the topmost bell smiting back the ascending jangle.
“Orders are orders,” persisted the doctrinaire.
“Quite right!” the old soldier interposed. “Orders are orders, prisoners are shot at dawn. I’ve been in the army, I know.”
While the wrangling continued he added softly,
“Maybe things will have changed again by then.”
The boy with the wounded hand looked up.
“Do you think so? Yes, why shouldn’t they? Listen! The fighting goes on.”
With his bright feverish eyes he stared into the old soldier’s face, interrogating it for a look of hope. There was no trace of hope on that bleak countenance, only a great deal of obdurate cunning.
Meanwhile the Gardes Mobiles had taken themselves off into the Hôtel de Cluny. The remaining escort were getting under way, the conscientious National Guard scratching his head, and glancing at the old soldier as though for guidance, when another batch of prisoners came past. This was a very different turnout. The escorting men were regulars, an officer was in charge. With a sigh of relief the doctrinaire shepherded his flock into their wake.
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