“Oh man, oh fantôme, do not look at me with those eyes,” Asad begged.
Asad was the faster. He had already made a bloody mess of Charley Oceaan. Asad was the stronger. Charley's wrists were weak with the fire-weariness of merely parrying the strong knife blows. Asad was the more enduring. Charley was already stumbling tired, and with an ashy-gray clouded look on him from the blood loss. But it was Asad who was unaccountably nervous.
“Man, don't look at me, don't look at me like that,” he whimpered.
Asad had Charley Oceaan down and it was only a question whether Charley's wrists or his throat would be hacked to pieces first. Everything had gone against Charley, except that twisted quirk in Asad.
“Man, don't look at me with those eyes, don't look at me at all, ever,” this Asad de Mogador moaned, and he rolled his own eyes in an extraordinary manner.
Failing immediately to close Charley's eyes in death, crazily fearing that even in death Charley's eyes would remain open and staring at him, Asad suddenly gave it all up. He wrenched himself away, he stumbled and fell down the steps, he rolled in the street, he rose and ran. He went and threw himself in the Seine, so a boy who had followed him reported. He was a fetishistic man.
Asad did not drown, however. He was pulled out of the river by workmen. And he was around Paris all that winter and spring and summer, working for the other revolution. But in all that time he would avoid Charley Oceaan with horror. He would stay as far out of Charley's way as he could.
Those of the select company would now refer to Charley Oceaan as The Man with the Spooky Eyes, and there had always been something odd about his eyes. The new thing in them now was merely dull agony, though. Charley was badly cut up, almost mortally so.
Paris of the One Hundred Persons, it was the pivot and future of the world. But an examination of the one hundred persons is a little disappointing. They are rather straining and confused little men. Not really a great one in the lot.
Frederic Ozanam who instituted the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, Abel Davaud a young bronze worker, Paul de Flotte a revolutionary theorist, Karl Marx who was another, Monsignor Affre who was Archbishop of Paris, Louis Blanc with his dream of networks of cooperatives, Philippe Buchez whose history of the French Revolution had now reached forty-six volumes (many poor workmen had read all forty-six volumes of it), Odilon Barrot, Napoleon Chancel, Ledru-Rollin who has been called the boneheaded demagog, Lamartine the scrivener, Flocon the turncoat (he became a moderate), Agricol Perdiguier with his attempts to reform the Compagnonnages, the artisan-guilds, Etienne Cabet who invented Cabetian Communism and the Icarian Commonwealth, Ifreann Chortovitch the young revolutionary from Krakow, Victor Schoelcher who slipped through the decree ending slavery in the French colonies.
Not a great man in the lot — hardly a one, except Ozanam, of whom one could say unhesitatingly ‘He was a good man’ — none of them men of real intelligence. There were ten thousand Frenchmen of real intelligence (it was a century of genius) but none of them won places in the Paris of the One Hundred Persons.
What were these then who happened to be fashioning the future and with no license for it? They were whistles, whistles with various winds blowing through them.
The hundred persons of earth-fulcrum Paris were not all discrete individual human persons. Some of them were hasty journals or newspapers, some of them were clubs or leagues, some of them were secret societies. But they were whistles, every one of them, and they gave their own sound to the prevailing winds. Perhaps three score and ten further men and institutions (other than those whose names we mumble) made up the circle and century of influence, but they were none of them prodigies, they were none of them of full talent; one half of them were hardly competent. They were rhythms, they were drum-beats, they were pulses.
Dana Coscuin's own opponent and counterpart approached about a week after that of Charley Oceaan.
“But he is no counterpart at all of me,” Dana said. “This mystic thing breaks down into a mish-mash. I am not so squarish a man as that — ” (but Dana was just about as squarish a man) “ — I am not nearly so old a man — ” (but Dana was quite nearly as old; it was the black beard that made the antagonist seem older) “ — I am sure that I have much more fire in me — ” (but the Carbonarist who was the opponent was full of his own enclosed fire, as were all who belonged to the society of the Charcoal-Burners) “ — I, at least, am faithful, and he is as treacherous as his namesake.” (But Dana had been unfaithful to his own basis several times, and the antagonist kept forever a burning faith in his own creed.)
The antagonist came and stood in the street before the house, rather surly, rather bashful. He kicked his toe in the dust and waited for Dana Coscuin to come out.
He was Jude Revanche, the squarish bearded man who had cursed Dana in the roadway at Hendaye, who had said that he would burn down the Carlist Hills, who had gone off with Kemper Gruenland on the long east road towards the Mediterranean and towards Cagliari in Sardinia. (Wait, wait, that part has not been sufficiently explained.)
Jude was the greatest cut-throat in the world, and now there was a new and sinister change in him (of the left, of the left eye particularly).
“He is now a caochan, a one-eyed creature of the Devil,” Dana said, “and an honest man cannot escape, without craftiness and tall trickery, the knife of a caochan. It was always so in Ireland.”
Dana took strips of leather from which Mariella made bridles and reins: bridle-making was a mountain trade that she still followed. Dana also took finished and near-finished bridles that already had their iron bit-pieces. He wrapped these strips with their iron around his throat tightly, and over them he wrapped a fine green scarf that Catherine Dembinska had given him. An iarann-scornach, an iron-throat can sometimes escape the blade of a Devil's one-eye.
Dana went out into the street to meet the caochan.
“Straw-hair, I will have all the blood out of you and sell it for pigs’ blood,” Jude Revanche the caochan said.
“You make the wrong move, square man, and I will have the beard off your face and the eyes out of your head,” Dana said in the pleasant fashion he had used for the words once before. And he scored Revanche deeply in the cheek with his hand knife.
“One of my eyes is already gone,” Revanche said conversationally, “to your fair giant friend in the house there. He took it from me in Sardinia. It marked the end of our friendship. I will go in and kill him as soon as I have killed you.” And Revanche struck his knife to Dana's throat in a blow too rapid to be measured in time. Jude was faster of hand than Dana. “What say you now, straw-hair, what say you now?” Revanche taunted.
And Dana was completely unable to answer. Whether his throat had been severed through the leather and iron he did not know, but the very force of the blow had numbed his voice. Then he sliced Revanche severely on the square jowls.
Revanche struck again. This blow certainly went through wound leather and even through wrought iron and brought Dana's blood in a growing smear on the green scarf.
Dana struck back, and the battle was over with. He had Revanche's right eye out of his head and dangling on his cheek, and the cut-throat was blind.
“End it, straw-hair, end it,” Revanche said stolidly.
“I leave you,” Dana said with a mere whisper of his returning voice.
Revanche's face contorted at the news that he would not die. He went off crying, weeping blood and tears. “What I was born to do, I cannot do now.”
All the antagonists, all the supplanted and unhoused ones, had returned to the house and to battle except the counterpart of Catherine Dembinska.
“How could Catherine have a counterpart?” Dana asked.
“My counterpart is not at all what you would imagine,” Catherine said.
Some time after this, it was late afternoon of February 20, Sunday, of the year 1848, there was a hearty booming that echoed up and down Montreuil Street, there was a striding mountain
of royal purple hue, there were remembered words that were outrageously sounding in the real world:
“It is I and thou, Dana, and the wonderful blood in the gutters!” The afternoon sun went under a cloud, but hearts leapt up contrarily. Ifreann Chortovitch the Son of the Devil had finally appeared on their scene.
X
DEVIL UNDER THE TABLE
“Dana, Dana, that we may become close friends in the short years before I devour you,” Ifreann gloated his pleasure at the meeting. He was the most fearsome and at the same time the most pleasantly hearty man any of them had ever encountered. He had poured himself up those front steps like a fruity flood.
“You cannot come into this house, Ifreann — if you are Ifreann,” Dana said sharply. But Dana was a pygmy beside this much solider giant than Kemper. Besides, he was taken with an unaccountable liking for the big man. A monstrous liking really.
“Of course I will come into this house. I own this house,” Ifreann said. “As well tell a river that it cannot come into its own banks. There has been some supplanting here, I know, but I am sure it has been of a good-humored sort. My large and sensational mistress was rolled down the stairway and out into the street. I forgive that, though she hasn't forgiven it yet. Are you sure that you can take her in dishonest combat, Mariella? Any person may have the rug pulled from under his feet.
“Tancredi caused a tall Savoyard of my employ to fall from a slick roof to his death. I forgive that. A Savoyard who can fall under any conditions is not such a one as I want to keep. Kemper has chased a German hulk back to the Germanies, and I forgive that. German hulks are easy to come by.
“Oceaan has spooked the Lion of Mogador, and I also forgive that. I myself must frequently spook this Asad to keep him in line. Which of us has the spookiest eyes, Oceaan? Is it possible that I have found an equal or master in you?
“Dana has blinded Jude Revanche, and this I do not entirely forgive, Dana. It is counted against your blood and against your life. But that I should be unwelcomed in my own house, this I could not forgive at all. Let it not happen!”
“You are in the house. You are not in our love,” Mariella said.
“I don't deal in that commodity,” Ifreann told her. “But I do deal in bodies. I wonder if you will be as enjoyable as the sensational Donzelle, Mariella. Ah, the swollen red-black anger look of Tancredi, the only high scenery of Sardinia that can be exported. I collect such looks as I collect other glories. If looks could kill, I would long ago be dead of such a look. And when I am finally dead, it will be at the hands of a man with just such a look on his face. Today or another day, it will not matter when I go to my father.”
Ifreann was as tall as Tancredi, as bulky as Kemper, and he had much more meaning and weight to him. Perhaps this Ifreann was a young man, as it was said of him, but there was nothing to correlate his appearance to. Perhaps he was handsome, if a man with a great purple pumpkin of a head can be called handsome. Well, yes, Ifreann was handsome; he was probably the most imposing man that any of them had ever encountered: but he did have a high complexion.
Dana Coscuin had gone quickly up the stairways to the suite at the top. The code must be broken down here. The code had never been anything but a prideful little bit of vaunting: that each person must handle his own antagonist himself. An antagonist too strong had come now, a counterpart too far-fetched. There are some things that cannot be allowed to happen. The two philosophies were pretty evenly balanced, but the two persons were not. Well, Dana would intervene between them with his life then. It was Ifreann or Dana sooner or later anyhow. Let it be sooner.
But Catherine Dembinska had gone. Somewhere over the roofs she had gone. It was only a hasty note she had left there. Dana read it and pocketed it:
“Dana, for my life I flee from him. For my life, never let him know where I have gone.”
Ifreann came in. How could so large and heavy a man move absolutely silently?
“My fellow townswoman has not waited my coming?” Ifreann asked. “How can a citizen of Krakow be so lacking in the social graces?”
“You knew her in Krakow?” Dana asked tightly.
“From childhood, yes, or from monsterhood in my case. That is one of the reasons she must be dealt with. She knows or suspects secrets about me that no one else alive even suspects. Certain dead persons who know them are silenced even beyond the usual death silencing — I have considerable influence on the lower side.”
“You are all false braggard. You are nothing but a big fat man,” Dana said.
“You know that I am more, Dana. But the curious Catherine has gone. I remember now that she was always a roof sparrow, that she once nearly did me to death on roofs as Tancredi did the Savoyard Louis Saussure. I had intended to kill her this evening, before my supper, as aperitif. Now I will have to wait till after.”
“You will not kill that girl, Ifreann.”
“Yes, Dana, I will kill that girl. You know it.”
“Then I will kill you.”
“Then one of us will kill the other, true. But I am not all sorry it is delayed. How else would we become close friends for the while? How else have the pleasant interval before I devour you? Now I will go through her trunks and other things.”
“You will not touch one of her things, Ifreann, or I will hack off your hands, here, now,” Dana swore. “Back down, big man, out, outside!”
“Dana boy, your eyes are as spooky as those of Charley Oceaan,” but Ifreann backed out of the room.
“Tancredi, Kemper, carry out Catherine's things. We will soon know where to take them,” Dana called.
“It will be very easy for me to trace her by them,” Ifreann smiled.
“It will not be,” Mariella interposed. “You have lost the neighborhood, purple-head. The ears and the eyes of it belong to us now, not to you.”
“It will be handy to have the unrecognized but effectual heads of the two revolutions here under one roof,” Ifreann said.
“You brag about our role, then you brag about your own,” Kemper told him.
“Not so much as you would think in either case,” said Ifreann. “Even braggards sometimes underestimate their own effect. Paris is a microcosm of the world, we are a microcosm of Paris. What pleasures, what contrasts, what tensions we can set up. What fruitful interchange.”
“Ah, we have boxed the bear up in his own cage,” Charley Oceaan muttered. “We will pull one claw a day, one fang a day. And you have to sleep sometime, bear.”
“Do I now? Nobody has ever seen me sleep, ever, anywhere. It is part of my legend that I never sleep.”
“You are nervous already, bear?” Charley Oceaan asked Ifreann.
“Nervous? Yes, Charley, the Son of the Devil is always nervous. It is his nature. I drag broken nerve ends like lopped lengths of fire-hose, but you cannot see them. I understand, Oceaan, how you spooked the brown lion Asad. I also am tempted to cry out ‘Man, do not look at me with those eyes!’ ” But Ifreann was grinning a big and blood-thirsty grin and he didn't seem nervous. And yes, there was a strong wrong liking for this Ifreann in all of them. Be he monster or be he man, there was a sharp vitality in him that called them like a whole new unbroken world.
Ifreann had previously arranged it: now servitors brought huge pots and kettles and platters, an outsized and excellent supper for them all.
The revolution began scarce thirty hours after that.
February 22-23-24 of the year 1848 were three eventful days. They were crammed full of the unexpected for all the hours of them. They were really comic days, farce-filled days. Farce in February, Tragedy in June.
It would not, of course, be like the primordial French Revolution of 1789. Neither would it be like the secundial Revolution of 1830. But it could well be more bloody than both of them put together. There were human barrelsful of blood waiting to be spilled, eager for it really. There were more people now, and they had more blood in them.
Things were confused but they were not extreme. France,
although technically bankrupt in the paper accounting of it, was the most prosperous country in Europe, and Europe was more prosperous, better fed, better clad than she had been at any time since the thirteenth century. There were steep inequities, there was poor division of wealth, but there was wealth to be divided or used. Revolutions do not come from completely empty stomachs or larders.
It would seem that there was very little repression in France and almost nothing over which to hold a revolution. There was incompetence, there was complete misunderstanding of all the newly developed problems, but nobody had sought redress on these; the proper protests had not even been phrased yet. But there were those with a vested interest in a blood revolution in Paris and throughout France, and if France went down in blood, nearly every country in Europe would do likewise.
It began with plans for a banquet, which was a code word for the revolution. A banquet site had been leased for ten days — quite a lengthy banquet.
The newspaper La Réforme had been laying out reformist programs for four and a half years. A large percentage of the reforms had already been achieved. An extension of the newspaper was the great reformist banquets that had been held for several years, and a giant one was scheduled for February 22, 1848. Perhaps the first blood of the 1848 revolution was shed in the anger at the price of the banquet tickets being raised from three francs each to six francs, to keep out the rabble.
The permissive government had sometimes seemed to sponsor and sometimes to withdraw support for the banquet. The banquet would include huge processions. The banquet, in fact, would be the revolutions.
It was all “down with the government and up with reform” in the popular press. The government was inclined to agree. The government was looking for a substitute for itself; it would turn its functions over to almost anyone who wanted them.
The government was Louis Philippe the citizen-king and Marie Amelie the queen; Guizot, a very good man who had been recommending himself for scapegoat for some time, was chief minister. Duchâtel was Minister of the Interior, Marshal Sebastiani was Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hébert was Keeper of the Seals. They were all good men; none of them had been able to adjust to new problems, and still less had the opposition.
The Flame Is Green: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 1 Page 20
