Ten o’clock, eleven o’clock, midnight.... Nothing as yet had occurred. The men, growing a little impatient, turned over in their hammocks, straining their ears for the least sound, counting the bells as they were struck, during the watch, by the signalman on the upper deck. They had endured too many hours of sleeplessness in the past not to know exactly the meaning of the bells as they were struck. At one o’clock, five o’clock and nine o’clock the signalman struck twice; at half-past one, half-past five, and halfpast nine he struck twice, followed by one slightly softer note; at two o’clock, six o’clock, and ten o’clock he struck two double bells; at half-past two, half-past six, and half-past ten he struck double bells twice and a half hell, or four sharp notes and a softer one; at three o’clock, seven o’clock, and twelve o’clock he struck three double notes; and at the half-hours a small note extra. Finally, at four o’clock, eight o’clock, and twelve o’clock he struck four double notes with a half note extra to denote the half-hours.
The eight and a half bells of half-past twelve had struck when a shrill whistle rang through the lower decks. It came from the hold, and the guards wondered what the meaning of it was. They put the question from deck to deck, and some of them in order to find out leant over the companion-ways. Then at the back of the alley-way in which the cells were situated, some one shouted that the Toper or the African must have whistled, for both of them were locked in the same cell, the other cells being occupied or not sufficiently secure. Nothing further was heard, and quietness was soon restored among the guards, who resumed once more their accustomed beat.
Suddenly there was a crash in Chéri-Bibi’s old cell. It was Little Buddha, who had been “given the hold” and was rolling on the deck near the bars, cursing and moaning in a most pitiful manner.
The guard who was nearest the cage went up to the bars and ordered the convict to hold his noise unless he wanted to be sent to the cells in the morning.... Little Buddha groaned still louder.
“I’ve broken my leg, I’m certain.... I’ve broken my leg.”
“Well, it will be set to rights to-morrow,” growled the guard. “Stop your row, or I’ll blow your brains out.... Shut your jaw, damn it!”
And as though the threat had frightened him, Little Buddha, crouching in the dusk of the cage, became silent. The men in their hammocks and in the ad joining cages wondered what he was waiting for. Soon they were reassured, for Little Buddha again set up his moaning. He was suffering more than he could bear, and wanted to go to the sick-bay at once. His leg was broken. He would kill the man who had played him such a dirty trick, he declared. Finally nothing could be heard but his clamor. There was a general protest. It was impossible to sleep in such a din. And the convicts advised the warders, in surly tones, to take the “flabby legged” person to the sickbay. It was the hour for having a snooze, what!
The warders once more ordered him in threatening language to be quiet.
“I can’t bear it... I can’t bear it. My poor leg.... Let me go to the sick-bay.... Besides, my head’s broken. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I’m covered with blood. I’m done for, I know I am.”
The guards went up to the bars to which he had dragged himself, and threw the light of a lantern over his face. It was bleeding. To hasten the climax Little Buddha had cut his forehead with a knife.
It was then that Pascaud, who was going his rounds, stopped and decided what was to be done.
“He is bleeding. He says he’s broken a leg. Look sharp, and take him to the sick-bay.”
“Yes... yes... take him away,” snarled the other men, who seemed to have exhausted their patience.
The sound of Pascaud fumbling with his keys could be heard. He was looking for the one which opened the cage. A great silence fell; the decisive struggle was at hand. The success of the revolt depended upon the next moment.
Little Buddha, with one hand in his trousers pocket, clutched his revolver.
The men above in their hammocks held themselves in readiness to jump out; but their seeming sleepiness deceived Pascaud, who little suspected what was about to happen to him.
He opened the door, followed by a guard who stood at the entrance and unconsciously helped the plotters by preventing the door from closing with a slam. As a further precaution one of the convicts stretched out his leg, above his hammock, to keep the grille open.
Pascaud bent over Little Buddha.
“Come, what’s the matter with you? Let’s have a look.”
At that moment Little Buddha, rising to his feet, fired his revolver point blank at him. At once pandemonium reigned, more shots were fired, the convicts leapt on to the deck, and made a rush at the guards.
Pascaud sank to the floor, killed, it seemed, on the spot. His fellow-guard on the doorstep had not time to move a limb, for a bullet struck him down almost at the same time, and he fell head foremost into the alley-way.
In the other cages the convicts armed with revolvers fired on the guards through the bars, and a general fusillade blazed out from the three cages.
Terror stricken, unable to understand what was happening to them, nor, in particular, how the convicts had secured revolvers, the guards fired into the cages as they fled like madmen, throwing themselves flat on the deck and shouting for help.
On the upper gun deck the plot which Little Buddha had revealed to the convicts was carried out in every particular. His cage, near the ship’s prow, was quickly cleared, and its hundred and fifty convicts, after breaking down the companion-way at the main hatchway, threw themselves upon the guards and overwhelmed them by weight of numbers.
Some fifteen of these hapless men lay on the deck mortally wounded, while the other half at length darted from the upper gun deck to the lower gun deck, and thence to the lower deck, where the cells stood, and here they defended themselves with the courage of despair; but at that moment they were caught between two fires. And a frightful cry of victory signalized their destruction: “Chéri-Bibi! The Countess!” No one knew whence they came, but they both plunged into the fray like fiends. The awful woman was as dreadful a sight as Chéri-Bibi himself under the rays of the lanterns which cast a sinister light upon the appalling carnage.
Now the few survivors begged for mercy.
Chéri-Bibi stopped the slaughter.
“We must have hostages. Stop fighting,” he commanded his men on the lower gun deck. And in a voice which drowned all other cries:
“Let these men be dragged into one of the cages and locked in!”
The cages were opened with the keys which were taken from Pascaud and the guards, and the convicts swarmed into the alley-way in a regular crush. They were seeking their prey. Half of them whom Chéri-Bibi drove from behind had to mount to the upper gun deck, where the struggle with the men under de Kerrosgouët’s command had become more desperate than ever.
The Toper himself, standing behind Chéri-Bibi, saw that the dead and dying, both overseers and convicts, and the few guards whose lives had been spared, were dragged to the “financiers’ cage.” And in a trice they were crammed into it helter-skelter and the door locked on them.
Suddenly a voice cried:— “Shooters!” And, in deed, rifles were being distributed to the men who were on their way to the upper gun deck; next supplies of cartridges were passed from hand to hand. And the men who had no arms hurried to the place where they were being given out. The distribution was taking place in the Countess’s late cell.
Unseen hands were passing up arms and munitions through the gap by which the Kanaka’s wife had escaped, and men were eagerly laying hold of them.
The guards whose duty it was to watch this darksome corner of the ship, this part of the hold in which the first battle against the shadowy figure of Chéri-Bibi had been fought at random, had made for the ladder when they heard the report of firing in the cages, and were massacred with most of their comrades in sight of the cells.
The distribution was effected at this spot because there was no fighting and no danger. Wh
en it was completed, two hands were outstretched from the cavity, and a voice begged some one to pull him through to the deck. Then an odd pale little figure appeared with the ingenuous look and the smiling face of a boy who had succeeded in playing a smart; trick. On his head was the white cap of a cook’s mate, and the body which followed showed the poor, trembling, timid body of the Dodger. The convicts grasped the meaning of many things when they saw this little scamp among them. They shouted “Hurrah!” while the journeyman baker ran up to the deck yelling:
“Chéri-Bibi... Chéri-Bibi for ever!”
The fight round the hatchway now simmered down. The men on deck ceased their fire, and in the thick smoke of battle could no longer sight the besiegers at the infernal opening.
The convicts wondered what new plan was in preparation on deck. Obviously it was one that boded them no good.
Chéri-Bibi satisfied himself that the convicts were ready to follow him now that they were well armed. He explained in a few peremptory words that the moment had come to conquer or die. They must dash like a whirlwind on deck, and make short work of the warders.... No quarter in this fight.... Nothing could resist them, and if they had any stomach for the fight the Bayard would be theirs.
While he was speaking in this strain, the ladder was put up in its old place. Then he led them forward. The Countess, intoxicated with the fight, rushed headlong behind him, and then came the Toper, the African, Little Buddha and the rest. The Dodger joined them at the moment when Chéri-Bibi shouted “Up, rebels!”
The great mass of men holding their rifles above their heads bundled themselves into the hatchway. To clamber up the ladder was the work of a moment, but at that very moment a terrible whizzing noise, an amazing quick succession of shots re-echoed, and howls of fury and pain went up from the convicts, who for the most part fell and rolled to the feet of their comrades.
It was the Hotchkiss gun which had entered the struggle. Its small shrapnel, its gleaming glittering bullets, its “little pills” penetrated the flesh, tore the convicts’ ranks, struck the steel plates of the bulkheads and the lower decks, and disseminated death on every hand.
The few men who were uninjured among the first group of convicts fell back, leaving a pile of corpses at the entrance to the cages. Chéri-Bibi was obliged to retreat with the rest. He was not wounded, though, to all appearance, he sought death in this sanguinary encounter in which he seemed to be playing the return match with fate. The Countess pressed one hand against the bulkhead for support, while with the other she wiped with an unconscious gesture the blood from her face. A splinter from a shot had ripped open her forehead. The madness of defeat and death dwelt in her infuriated eyes and screaming mouth.
“We are done for!” growled Chéri-Bibi, while his forces behind him, crowded within the narrow channel of the cages and the ladders, yelled their determination not to die “down there” but “on deck... on deck.”
The men behind pushed forward the men in front into the radius covered by the Hotchkiss gun, which, fortunately for the convicts, was rather narrow. Nevertheless, more men were killed.
Chéri-Bibi had reckoned without the gun.
Nothing remained but to die in their retreat unless they could succeed in getting out... and to get out; of it....
Suddenly an idea occurred to Chéri-Bibi.
“Bring the kit bags,” he shouted, “all the blooming lot, and the deputy-warders’ mattresses. We’ll set ’em on fire; a fire as hot as a furnace! They won’t stand it, and we’ll get through. It’s a poor look-out for those who funk scorching their paws. Who’s got a light?”
“I have,” said the Dodger, handing him his automatic match-box.
They heaped up the straw mattresses and canvas bags in front of the hatchway, and soon a great and acrid cloud of smoke ascended, and was succeeded by long tongues of flame, and then by a denser mass of smoke, forcing the men on deck to draw back. The Captain and his men had to move away with their Hotchkiss gun to prevent themselves from being suffocated.
Oaths and shouts abounded: “Get at the warders!... Fire! Fire!... To the pumps! Fire! They’ve tricked us by firing the ship... Ship on fire!... To the pumps, damn and blast it!”
And from this miniature volcano, for such the hatchway became, from this smoking chasm whence issued a clamor of pitiable or savage cries, from amid the smoke as it swept upwards, fiends in human form leapt into view. Some possessed, as it were, wings of flame and flung themselves at the overseers to set them on fire in their turn; others who had divested themselves of all clothing the better to plunge through this furnace, brandished their rifles on high as though they were clubs.... That was how Chéri-Bibi labored with the butt end of his terrible rifle, swooping down on many a head and creating round him a wide reddening circle.
“Forward!... Forward!... rebels,...” he shouted, foaming at the mouth. “Forward!... They can’t kill the dead!”
Standing at his side was a veritable fury. It was the Countess, who waved her blood-stained hands while her abundant tresses played round her livid temples like serpents. She fought with a cutlass. Then came the Dodger, whose head had been injured by his own rifle, and who had abandoned fighting in order to act as “scout” to Chéri-Bibi and to defend him from an unlucky blow. Like King John’s son at Poitiers, he cried out, to Chéri-Bibi during the combat:
“Look to your left!... Look to your right!” The smoke died down when the mattresses and kit bags blazed up, and from the hatchway, which was now clear, an innumerable and hideous band of men with a thousand heads crept in an unceasing stream.... The inferno was vomiting forth its devils.... The fight was no longer anything but a hand-to-hand struggle in which it was impossible to distinguish one man from another. The Hotchkiss gun was of no service in this indescribable mêlée. The Captain and de Vilène, covered with wounds, continued to fight, yielding their ground by inches and heartening their men by the force of their heroic example.
With his own hand the Captain struck down half a dozen convicts, and he strove to come face to face with Chéri-Bibi, but that elusive individual seemed invulnerable.
Overwhelmed by weight of numbers, half of his men unarmed, Barrachon was forced to give way, and he ordered the retreat when young Sub-Lieutenant de Kerrosgouët fell gloriously beside the Hotchkiss gun which was under his charge. It was necessary to save the gun, to retire to the protection of the second Hotchkiss, and to run out both guns against the rabble who had mastered the entire forecastle deck. That was their only chance of safety.
Suddenly a terrible hail of shot took the sailors and military overseers in the rear. Barrachon and de Vilène turned round, and a simultaneous exclamation of despair escaped from their lips. Above them, on the roof of the chart-room, they sighted three fiends all black and a little man all white. Three coal-trimmers and the journeyman baker, the Dodger, had seized the 47 mm. Hotchkiss, and were turning it on the men on deck, not hesitating, in their frenzy for destruction, to mow down their own men.
Nothing was left to the Captain but to get away with the last of his men to the quarter-deck and there to entrench himself with the other gun.
The Captain ordered the retreat. He could depend on some hundred and fifty unwounded men who would sell their lives dearly.
Drunk with victory, some of them black with powder, others red with blood, Chéri-Bibi’s men were getting ready to rush forward and finish off the remainder of the crew and warders, when a dense smoke issued from the hatchways, and the sinister cry “Ship on fire” caused them to waver.
The conflagration made a barrier between the two forces. And the necessity to arrest the scourge before it could destroy the ship which had cost them so much to conquer, seized the entire mass of insurgents. Under the direction of the Dodger, who knew how to man the pumps, the convicts set to work to extinguish the fire.
At the same time this strange figure who understood more about the ship than any one else, ordered all the entrances which led to the heart of the conflagration to be clos
ed, and the hatches covered with wet tarpaulins. The convicts fell foul of each other, like men possessed, in this great and frightful confusion of dead and dying. Cries and oaths went up in the fast closing night. From the depths below, where the women and children were incarcerated, came heartrending shrieks as though they were being burnt alive. In the after part of the Bayard, on the quarter-deck, spasmodic firing still continued. And then it died into silence, for Barrachon and his men had fired their last shot. Every man thought that the end was in sight.
To the unparalleled evils of fire and sword was added yet another: tempest. The roaring of the fire, and the hissing of the water as it evaporated amid-ships, were succeeded by the howling of the wind which once again had veered to the north-west and was blowing a gale. In the sky, above those figures covered with blood, clouds were gathering from the pale distant horizon, with the coming of an ominous dawn. Tremendous waves already swept the seas and played with the wretched vessel which could not maneuver now that she was without a chief to control Ker.
With no sort of guidance she could neither keep her head nor sail before the wind nor avoid the violent buffeting of the waves on her quarter.
The demons who came out of the inferno returned to the inferno. Standing on the Captain’s bridge, at the post to which pride and rebellion had raised him, and where he could do nothing for himself or others, nothing but rejoice at the disaster which had befallen them and take the lead in it, Chéri-Bibi was like an evil spirit, with head once more upraised — in defiance — to the God who afflicted him, his own particular God, whom he called Fatalitas.
On the deck in the midst of this confused medley of men and sea and skies, a young girl was on her knees praying to the God whom she called “Our Father which art in Heaven,” and beseeching His mercy for all the souls on the ship without exception — convicts, convict guards and Chéri-Bibi.
Collected Works of Gaston Leroux Page 149
