Then I patiently pointed out to him his folly, and he listened with ill-grace, obstinate, mute, dull cunning gleaming from his half-closed eyes.
Then I asked him what he would do if the cruiser began dropping shells into Paradise; he deliberately winked at me and thrust his tongue into his cheek.
“So you know that the cruiser has gone?” I asked.
“Do you suppose Buckhurst’s men hold the semaphore? If they do, they sent that cruiser on a fool’s errand,” whispered Speed.
Here was a nice plot! I stepped to the window. Outside in the square Buckhurst was still speaking to a spellbound, gaping throng. A few men cheered him. They were strangers in Paradise.
“What’s he doing it for?” I asked, utterly at a loss to account for proceedings which seemed to me the acme of folly. “He must know that the commune cannot be started here in Brittany! Speed, what is that man up to?”
Behind us the mayor was angrily demanding that we leave his house; and after a while we did so, skirting the crowd once more to where, in a cleared space near the fountain, Buckhurst stood, red flag in hand, ranging a dozen peasants in line. The peasants were not Paradise men; they wore the costumes of the interior, and somebody had already armed them with scythes, rusty boarding-pikes, stable-forks, and one or two flintlock muskets. An evil-looking crew, if ever I saw one; wild-eyed, long-haired, bare of knee and ankle, loutish faces turned toward the slim, gray, pale-faced orator who confronted them, flag in hand. They were the scum of Morbihan.
He told them that they were his guard of honor, the glory of their race—a sacred battalion whose names should shine high on the imperishable battlements of freedom.
Around them the calm-eyed peasants stared at them stupidly; women gazed fascinated when Buckhurst, raising his flag, pointed in silence to the mayor’s house, where that official stood in his doorway, observing the scene: