The Maids of Paradise

“You mean that – that I need not go to Lorient – to this war?”

“I hope so, my friend.”

He looked at me, astonished. “If you can do that, m’sieu, you can do anything.”

“In the meanwhile,” I said, dryly, “I want another look at Tric-Trac.”

“I could show you Tric-Trac in an hour – but to go to him direct would excite his suspicion. Besides, there are two gendarmes in Paradise to conduct the conscripts to Lorient; there are also several gardes-champêtre. But I can get you there, in the open moorland, too, under everybody’s noses! Shall I?” he said, with an eager ferocity that startled me.

“You are not to injure him, no matter what he does or says,” I said, sharply. “I want to watch him, not to frighten him away. I want to see what he and Buckhurst are doing. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Then strike palms!”

We struck vigorously.

“Now I am ready to start,” I said, pleasantly.

“And now I am ready to tell you something,” he said, with the fierce light burning behind his blue eyes. “If you were already in the police I would not help you – no, not even to trap this filou who has mocked me! If you again enter the police I will desert you!”

He licked his dry lips.

“Do you know what a blood-feud is?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Then understand that a man in a high place has wronged me – and that he is of the police – the Imperial Military police!”

“Who?”

“You will know when I pass my fagot-knife into his throat,” he snarled – “not before.”

The Lizard picked up his fishing-rod, slung a canvas bag over his stained velveteen jacket, gathered together a few coils of hair-wire, a pot of twig-lime, and other odds and ends, which he tucked into his broad-flapped coat-pocket. “Allons,” he said, briefly, and we started.

The canvas bag on his back bulged, perhaps with provisions, although the steel point of a murderous salmon-gaff protruded from the mouth of the sack and curved over his shoulder.

The village square in Paradise was nearly deserted. The children had raced away to follow the newly arrived gendarmes as closely as they dared, and the women were in-doors hanging about their men, whom the government summoned to Lorient.

There were, however, a few people in the square, and these the Lizard was very careful to greet. Thus we passed the mayor, waddling across the bridge, puffing with official importance over the arrival of the gendarmes. He bowed to me; the Lizard saluted him with, “Times are hard on the fat!” to which the mayor replied morosely, and bade him go to the devil.

“Au revoir, donc,” retorted the Lizard, unabashed. The mayor bawled after him a threat of arrest unless he reported next day in the square.

At that the poacher halted. “Don’t you wish you might get me!” he said, tauntingly, probably presuming on my conditional promise.

“Do you refuse to report?” demanded the mayor, also halting.

“Et ta sœur!” replied the poacher; “is she reporting at the caserne?”

The mayor replied angrily, and a typical Breton quarrel began, which ended in the mayor biting his thumb-nail at the Lizard and wishing him “St. Hubert’s luck” – an insult tantamount to a curse.

Now St. Hubert was a mighty hunter, and his luck was proverbially marvellous. But as everything goes by contrary in Brittany, to wish a Breton hunter good luck was the very worst thing you could do him. Bad luck was certain to follow – if not that very day, certainly, inexorably, some day.

With wrath in his eyes the Lizard exhausted his profanity, stretching out his arm after the retreating mayor, who waddled away, gesticulating, without turning his head.

“Come back! Toad! Sourd! V-Snake! Bat of the gorse!” shouted the Lizard. “Do you think I’m afraid of your spells, fat owl of Faöuet? Evil-eyed eel! The luck of Ker-Ys to you and yours! Ho fois! Do you think I am frightened – I, Robert the Lizard? Your wife is a camel and your daughter a cow!” The mayor was unmarried, but it didn’t matter. And, moreover, as that official was now out of ear-shot, the Lizard turned anxiously to me.

“Don’t tell me you are superstitious enough to care what the mayor said,” I laughed.

“Dame, m’sieu, we shall have no luck to-day. To-morrow it doesn’t matter – but if we go to-day, bad luck must come to us.”

“To-day? Nonsense!”

“If not, then another day.”

“Rubbish! Come on.”

“Do you think we could take precautions?” he asked, furtively.

“Take all you like,” I said; “rack your brains for an antidote to neutralize the bad luck, only come on, you great gaby!”

I knew many of the Finistère legends; out of the corner of my eye I watched this stalwart rascal, cowed by gross superstition, peeping about for some favorable sign to counteract the luck of St. Hubert.

First he looked up at the crows, and counted them as they passed overhead cawing ominously – one – two – three – four – five! Five is danger! But wait, more were coming: one – two – three – four – five – six – seven – ! A loss! Well, that was not as bad as some things. But hark! More crows coming: one – two – three! Death!

“Jesû!” he faltered, ducking his head instinctively. “I’ll look elsewhere for signs.”

The signs were all wrong that morning; first we met an ancient crone with a great pack of fagots on her bent back, and I was sure he could have strangled her cheerfully, because there are few worse omens for a hunter of game or of men. Then he examined the first mushroom he found, but under the pink-and-pearl cap we saw no insects crawling. The veil, too, was rent, showing the poisonous, fluted gills; and the toadstool blackened when he cut it with the blade of his fagot-knife.

He tried once more, however, and searched through the gorse until he found a heavy lizard, green as an emerald. He teased it till it snapped at the silver franc in my hand; its teeth should have vanished, but when he held out his finger the creature bit into it till the blood spurted.

Still I refused to turn back. What should he do? Then into his mind crept a Pouldu superstition. It was a charm against evil, including lightning, black-rot, rheumatism, and “douleurs” of other varieties.

The charm was simple. We needed only to build a little fire of gorse, and walk through the smoke once or twice. So we built the fire and walked through the smoke, the Lizard coughing and cursing until I feared he might overdo it by smothering us both. Then stamping out the last spark – for he was a woodsman always – we tramped on in better humor with destiny.

“You think that turned the curse backward, m’sieu?” he asked.

“There is not the faintest doubt of that,” I said.

Far away towards Sainte-Ysole we saw the blue woods which were our goal. However, we had no intention of going there as the bee flies, partly because Tric-Trac might see us, partly because the Lizard wished any prowling passer-by to observe that he was occupied with his illegitimate profession. For my part, I very much preferred a brush with a garde-champêtre or a summons to explain why no shots were found in the Lizard’s pheasants, rather than have anybody ask us why we were walking so fast towards Sainte-Ysole woods.

Therefore we promptly selected a hedge for operations, choosing a high, thick one, which separated two fields of wheat stubble.

Kneeling under the hedge, he broke a hole in it just large enough for a partridge to worry through. Then he bent his twig, fastened the hair-wire into a running noose, adjusted it, and stood up. This manœuvre he repeated at various hedges or in thickets where he “lined” his trail with peeled twigs on every bush.

Once he paused to reset a hare-trap with a turnip, picked up in a neighboring field; once he limed a young sapling and fixed a bit of a mirror in the branches, but not a bird alighted, although the blackthorns were full of fluttering wings. And all the while we had been twisting and doubling and edging nearer and nearer to the Sainte-Ysole woods, until we were already within their cool shadow, and I heard the tinkle of a stream among leafy depths.

Now we had no fear; we were hidden from the eyes of the dry, staring plain, and the Lizard laughed to himself as he fastened a grasshopper to his hook and flung it into the broad, dark water of the pool at his feet.

Slowly he fished up stream, but, although he seemed to be intent on his sport, there was something in the bend of his head that suggested he might be listening for other sounds than the complex melodies of mossy waterfalls.

His poacher’s eyes began to glisten and shimmer in the forest dusk like the eyes of wild things that hunt at night. As he noiselessly turned, his nostrils spread with a tremor, as a good dog’s nose quivers at the point.

Presently he beckoned me, stepped into the moss, and crawled without a sound straight through the holly thicket.

“Watch here,” he whispered. “Count a hundred when I disappear, then creep on your stomach to the edge of that bank. In the bed of the stream, close under you, you will see and hear your friend Tric-Trac.”

Before I had counted fifty I heard the Lizard cry out, “Bonjour, Tric-Trac!” but I counted on, obeying the Lizard’s orders as I should wish mine to be obeyed. I heard a startled exclamation in reply to the Lizard’s greeting, then a purely Parisian string of profanity, which terminated as I counted one hundred and crept forward to the mossy edge of the bank, under the yellow beech leaves.

Below me stood the Lizard, intently watching a figure crouched on hands and knees before a small, iron-bound box.

The person addressed as Tric-Trac promptly tried to hide the box by sitting down on it. He was a young man, with wide ears and unhealthy spots on his face. His hair, which was oily and thick, he wore neatly plastered into two pointed love-locks. This not only adorned and distinguished him, but it lent a casual and detached air to his ears, which stood at right angles to the plane of his face. I knew that engaging countenance. It was the same old Tric-Trac.

“Zut, alors!” repeated Tric-Trac, venomously, as the poacher smiled again; “can’t you give the company notice when you come in?”

“Did you expect me to ring the tocsin?” asked the Lizard.

“Flute!” snarled Tric-Trac. “Like a mud-rat, you creep with no sound – c’est pas polite, nom d’un nom!”

He began nervously brushing the pine-needles from his skin-tight trousers, with dirty hands.

“What’s that box?” asked the Lizard, abruptly.

“Box? Where?” A vacant expression came into Tric-Trac’s face, and he looked all around him except at the box upon which he was sitting.

“Box?” he repeated, with that hopeless effrontery which never deserts criminals of his class, even under the guillotine. “I don’t see any box.”

“You’re sitting on it,” observed the Lizard.

“That box? Oh! You mean that box? Oh!” He peeped at it between his meagre legs, then turned a nimble eye on the poacher.

“What’s in it?” demanded the poacher, sullenly.

“Don’t know,” replied Tric-Trac, with brisk interest. “I found it.”

“Found it!” repeated the Lizard, scornfully.

“Certainly, my friend; how do you suppose I came by it?”

“You stole it!”

They faced each other for a moment.

“Supposition that you are correct; what of it?” said the young ruffian, calmly.

The Lizard was silent.

“Did you bring me anything to chew on?” inquired Tric-Trac, sniffing at the poacher’s sack.

“Bread, cheese, three pheasants, cider – more than I eat in a week,” said the Lizard, quietly. “It will cost forty sous.”

He opened his sack and slowly displayed the provisions.

I looked hard at the iron-bound box.

On one end was painted the Geneva cross. Dr. Delmont and Professor Tavernier had disappeared carrying red-cross funds. Was that their box?

“I said it costs forty sous – two silver francs,” repeated the Lizard, doggedly.

“Forty sous? That’s robbery!” sniffed the young ruffian, now using that half-whining, half-sneering form of discourse peculiar alike to the vicious chevalier of Paris and his confrère of the provincial centres. Accent and slang alone distinguish between them; the argot, however, is practically the same.

Tric-Trac fished a few coins from his pocket, counted carefully, and handed them, one by one, to the poacher.

The poacher coolly tossed the food on the ground, and, as Tric-Trac rose to pick it up, seized the box.

“Drop that!” said Tric-Trac, quickly.

“What’s in it?”

“Nothing! Drop it, I tell you.”

“Where’s the key?”

“There’s no key – it’s a machine.”

“What’s in it?”

“Now I’ve been trying to find out for two weeks,” sneered Tric-Trac, “and I don’t know yet. Drop it!”

“I’m going to open it all the same,” said the Lizard, coolly, lifting the lid.

A sudden silence followed; then the Lizard swore vigorously. There was another box within the light, iron-edged casket, a keyless cube of shining steel, with a knob on the top, and a needle which revolved around a dial on which were engraved the hours and minutes. And emblazoned above the dial was the coat of arms of the Countess de Vassart.

When Tric-Trac had satisfied himself concerning the situation, he returned to devour his food.

“Flute! Zut! Mince!” he observed; “you and your bad manners, they sicken me – tiens!”

The Lizard, flat on his stomach, lay with the massive steel box under his chin, patiently turning the needle from figure to figure.

“Wonderful! wonderful!” sneered Tric-Trac. “Continue, my friend, to put out your eyes with your fingers!”

The Lizard continued to turn the needle backward and forward around the face of the dial. Once, when he twirled it impatiently, a tiny chime rang out from within the box, but the steel lid did not open.

“It’s the Angelus,” said Tric-Trac, with a grimace. “Let us pray, my friend, for a cold-chisel – when my friend Buckhurst returns.”

Still the Lizard lay, unmoved, turning the needle round and round.

Tric-Trac having devoured the cheese, bread, and an entire pheasant, made a bundle of the remaining food, emptied the cider-jug, wiped his beardless face with his cap, and announced that he would be pleased to “broil” a cigarette.

“Do you want the gendarmes to scent tobacco?” said the Lizard.

“Are the ’Flics’ out already?” asked Tric-Trac, astonished.

“They’re in Paradise, setting the whole Department by the ears. But they can’t look sideways at me; I’m going to be exempt.”

“It strikes me,” observed Tric-Trac, “that you take great precautions for your own skin.”

“I do,” said the Lizard.

“What about me?”

The poacher looked around at the young ruffian. Those muscles in the human face which draw back the upper lip are not the muscles used for laughter. Animals employ them when they snarl. And now the Lizard laughed that way; his upper lip shrank from the edge of his yellow teeth, and he regarded Tric-Trac with oblique and burning eyes.

“What about me?” repeated Tric-Trac, in an offended tone. “Am I to live in fear of the Flics?”

The Lizard laughed again, and Tric-Trac, disgusted, stood up, settled his cap over his wide ears, humming a song as he loosened his trousers-belt:

“Si vous t’nez à vot’ squeletteNe fait’ pas comme Bibi!Claquer plutôt dans vot’ litQue de claquer à la Roquette!” —

“Who are you gaping at?” he added, abruptly. “Bon; c’est ma geule. Et après? Drop that box!”

“Come,” replied the Lizard, coldly, placing the box on the moss, “you’d better not quarrel with me.”

“Oh, that’s a threat, is it?” sneered Tric-Trac. He walked over to the steel box, lifted it, placed it in the iron-edged case, and sat down on the case.

“I want you to comprehend,” he added, “that you have pushed your nose into an affair that does not concern you. The next time you come here to sell your snared pheasants, come like a man, nom de Dieu! and not like a cat of the Glacière! – or I’ll find a way to stop your curiosity.”

The dull-red color surged into the poacher’s face and heavy neck; for a moment he stood as though stunned. Then he dragged out his knife.

Tric-Trac sat looking at him insolently, one hand thrust into the bosom of his greasy coat.

“I’ve got a toy under my cravate that says ‘Papa!’ six times – pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! Papa!” he continued, calmly; “so there’s no use in your turning red and swelling the veins in your neck. Go to the devil! Do you think I can’t live without you? Go to the devil with your traps and partridges and fish-hooks – and that fagot-knife in your fist – and if you try to throw it at me you’ll make a sad mistake!”

The Lizard’s half-raised hand dropped as Tric-Trac, with a movement like lightning, turned a revolver full on him, talking all the while in his drawling whine.

“C’est çà! Now you are reasonable. Get out of this forest, my friend – or stay and join us. Eh! That astonishes you? Why? Idiot, we want men like you. We want men who have nothing to lose and – millions to gain! Ah, you are amazed! Yes, millions – I say it. I, Tric-Trac of the Glacière, who have done my time in Noumea, too! Yes, millions.”

The young ruffian laughed and slowly passed his tongue over his thin lips. The Lizard slowly returned his knife to its sheath, looked all around, then deliberately sat down on the moss cross-legged. I could have hugged him.

“A million? Where?” he asked, vacantly.

“Parbleu! Naturally you ask where,” chuckled Tric-Trac. “Tiens! A supposition that it’s in this box!”

“The box is too small,” said the Lizard, patiently.

Tric-Trac roared. “Listen to him! Listen to the child!” he cried, delighted. “Too small to hold gold enough for you? Very well – but is a ship big enough?”

“A big ship is.”

Tric-Trac wriggled in convulsions of laughter.

“Oh, listen! He wants a big ship! Well – say a ship as big as that ugly, black iron-clad sticking up out of the sea yonder, like a Usine-de-gaz!”

“I think that ship would be big enough,” said the poacher, seriously.

Tric-Trac did not laugh; his little eyes narrowed, and he looked steadily at the poacher.

“Do you mean what I mean?” he asked, deliberately.

“Well,” said the Lizard, “what do you mean?”

“I mean that France is busy stitching on a new flag.”

“Black?”

“Red —first.”

“Oh-h!” mused the poacher. “When does France hoist that new red flag?”

“When Paris falls.”

The poacher rested his chin on his doubled fist and leaned forward across his gathered knees. “I see,” he drawled.

“Under the commune there can be no more poverty,” said Tric-Trac; “you comprehend that.”

“Exactly.”

“And no more aristocrats.”

“Exactly.”

“Well,” said Tric-Trac, his head on one side, “how does that programme strike you?”

“It is impossible, your programme,” said the poacher, rising to his feet impatiently.

“You think so? Wait a few days! Wait, my friend,” cried Tric-Trac, eagerly; “and say! – come back here next Monday! There will be a few of us here – a few friends. And keep your mouth shut tight. Here! Wait. Look here, friend, don’t let a little pleasantry stand between comrades. Your fagot-knife against my little flute that sings pa-pa! – that leaves matters balanced, eh?”

The young ruffian had followed the Lizard and caught him by his stained velvet coat.

“Voyons,” he persisted, “do you think the commune is going to let a comrade starve for lack of Badinguet’s lozenges? Here, take a few of these!” and the rascal thrust out a dirty palm full of twenty-franc gold pieces.

“What are these for?” muttered the Lizard, sullenly.

“For your beaux yeux, imbecile!” cried Tric-Trac, gayly. “Come back when you want more. My comrade, Citizen Buckhurst, will be glad to see you next Monday. Adieu, my friend. Don’t chatter to the Flics!”

He picked up his box and the packet of provisions, dropped his revolver into the side-pocket of his jacket, cocked his greasy cap, blew a kiss to the Lizard, and started off straight into the forest. After a dozen steps he hesitated, turned, and looked back at the poacher for a moment in silence. Then he made a friendly grimace.

“You are not a fool,” he said, “so you won’t follow me. Come again Monday. It will really be worth while, dear friend.” Then, as on an impulse, he came all the way back, caught the Lizard by the sleeve, raised his meagre body on tip-toe, and whispered.

The Lizard turned perfectly white; Tric-Trac trotted away into the woods, hugging his box and smirking.

The Lizard and I walked back together. By the time we reached Paradise bridge I understood him better, and he understood me. And when we arrived at the circus tent, and when Speed came up, handing me a telegram from Chanzy refusing my services, the Lizard turned to me like an obedient hound to take my orders – now that I was not to re-enter the Military Police.

I ordered him to disobey the orders from Lorient and from the mayor of Paradise; to take to the woods as though to avoid the conscription; to join Buckhurst’s franc-company of ruffians, and to keep me fully informed.

“And, Lizard,” I said, “you may be caught and hanged for it by the police, or stabbed by Tric-Trac.”

“Bien,” he said, coolly.

“But it is a brave thing you do; a soldierly thing!”

He was silent.

“It is for France,” I said.

He shrugged his shoulders.

“And we’ll catch this Tric-Trac red-handed,” I suggested.

“Ah – yes!” His eyes glowed as though lighted up from behind. “And another who is high in the police, and a friend of this Tric-Trac!”

“Was it that man’s name he whispered to you when you turned so white?” I said, suddenly.

The Lizard turned his glowing eyes on me.

“Was the man’s name – Mornac?” I asked, at a hopeless venture.

The Lizard shivered; I needed no reply, not even his hoarse, “Are you the devil, that you know all things?”

I looked at him wonderingly. What wrong could Mornac have done a ragged outcast here on the Breton coast? And where was Mornac? Had he left Paris in time to avoid the Prussian trap? Was he here in this country, rubbing elbows with Buckhurst?

“Did Tric-Trac tell you that Mornac was at the head of that band?” I demanded.

“Why do you ask me?” stammered the Lizard; “you know everything – even when it is scarcely whispered!”

The superstitious astonishment of the man, his utter collapse and his evident fear of me, did not suit me. Treachery comes through that kind of fear; I meant to rule him in another and safer manner. I meant to be absolutely honest with him.

It was difficult to persuade him that I had only guessed the name whispered; that, naturally, I should think of Mornac as a high officer of police, and particularly so since I knew him to be a villain, and had also divined his relations with Buckhurst.

I drew from the poacher that Tric-Trac had named Mornac as head of the communistic plot in Brittany; that Mornac was coming to Paradise very soon, and that then something gay might be looked for.

And that night I took Speed into my confidence and finally Kelly Eyre, our balloonist.

And we talked the matter over until long after midnight.

XV

FOREWARNED

The lions had now begun to give me a great deal of trouble. Timour Melek, the old villain, sat on his chair, snarling and striking at me, but still going through his paces; Empress Khatoun was a perfect devil of viciousness, and refused to jump her hoops; even poor little Aïcha, my pet, fed by me soon after her foster-mother, a big Newfoundland, had weaned her, turned sullen in the pyramid scene. I roped her and trimmed her claws; it was high time.

Oh, they knew, and I knew, that matters had gone wrong with me; that I had, for a time, at least, lost the intangible something which I once possessed – that occult right to dominate.

It worried me; it angered me. Anger in authority, which is a weakness, is quickly discovered by beasts.

Speed’s absurd superstition continued to recur to me at inopportune moments; in my brain his voice was ceaselessly sounding – “A man in love, a man in love, a man in love” – until a flash of temper sent my lions scurrying and snarling into a pack, where they huddled and growled, staring at me with yellow, mutinous eyes.

Yet, strangely, the greater the risk, and the plainer to me that my lions were slipping out of my control, the more my apathy increased, until even Byram began to warn me.

Still I never felt the slightest physical fear; on the contrary, as my irritation increased my disdain grew. It seemed a monstrous bit of insolence on the part of these overgrown cats to meditate an attack on me. Even though I began to feel that it was only a question of time when the moment must arrive, even though I gradually became certain that the first false move on my part would precipitate an attack, the knowledge left me almost indifferent.