Страница 41 из 100
We strolled up Broadway and the evening sky was cobalt blue, the lamps yellow, the fires flickering red and orange in their brasiers. When I had lightened my load and tucked Mathilde into bed, I stepped out for a jiffy. I had no other plan than that I would quietly examine this place where the Marquis de Tilbot had exiled us. Perhaps some oysters too. Why not?
I entered into the white-gas stream of Broadway, but could not see the silver North River and the dark East River flowing like mercury in the night, and how could I guess what was occurring, that very hour, in the unlit streets around the Bowery, where there was a murky smoking red-flecked flow of life-not ants but human beings, a living mass of men-roaring south toward me.
I later learned that the city fathers had locked about three hundred pigs inside the Canal Street pound. I had seen a notice in the street, but what were pigs to me? The city would no longer tolerate the swine whom their improvident owners let wander the streets where they relieved themselves in public and fornicated without shame.
The people's pigs had been stolen from them, and as a result there was extreme social agitation around the pound. All the angry owners of the pigs, some armed with hammers, others with crowbars, others with no more than a skinful of John Barleycorn, had been drawn toward this enclosure like filings to a magnet.
So as I i
I heard them coming, I suppose, but I had lived so many years in Paris I thought the roar of voices to be nothing but a boxing match nearby.
On the corner of Broadway along Chambers Street, I saw a strange sight-a French noble whose cloak did not obscure the gold embroidery shining bright as Jesus in the gas. He carried a silver-capped stick in his inky right hand and an untidy pile of papers beneath his left arm.
I had forgotten that Lord Migraine was shortsighted, so when he did not see me I assumed he meant to cut me. Why not? It must be clear by now that I had no intention of being his second signatory. But then I saw he was not cutting me at all. He offered me his hand.
"Which way do you walk?" he asked.
As he was once again attempting English, I was slow to understand him.
"I trust Mrs. Larrit is recovered."
In the course of this very short conversation we had walked a block and so were on the corner of Murray Street when the swine and their fellows arrived on top of us. Murray was dark, but Broadway was lit from the Battery up to the Delphi Theatre, so although I pulled him into a doorway, the bright light caught his fancy coat, and that was jewel enough to halt the whole stampede, or that part of it composed of a hulking Irishman and his Carib friend who immediately demanded that the aristocrat tell them who he was and where he came from.
"I am Mr. Olivier de Garmont," he said, in a haughty style not well matched to his situation. "I am a friend of General Lafayette."
To which the Carib wished to know how it was his head had not been taken off his shoulders many years before.
The little fellow stepped full into the light and, with that largeness of gesture that marks French theatrical speech, declared himself a student of democracy.
Alas, his listeners knew nothing of the French or the theater. They were drunk and probably affronted that he did not have the grace to act afraid.
"Ye little curd o' moon spit," cried the Irishman, and wrapped his arm around the slender neck and dragged him into Murray Street, wrenching him so violently that papers and stick went flying in the dark.
I searched for his stick and found it by its silver knob. By this time the two large men were sending him between them back and forth like a shuttlecock and singing in loud rousing voices:
"Aux armes, citoyens!
Formez vos bataillons!
Marchons, marchons!
Qu'un sang impur
Abreuve nos saillons!"
You have just read those words, written in a good hand. Migraine seemed not to understand the deadly intention of the song.
Silver knob or no, his lordship's stick was too light to be a useful weapon. Chance brought me a decent length of lumber, four inches by two inches, I would say. This instrument I brought down upon the Carib's arm.
Lord, what a crack.
Urgently the fellow held his limb against his chest, bestowing upon me, in complete silence, a look of inexorable outrage.
"Kindly bash the bugger, Jim," said he, or words to that effect.
I was a fair height, and I was strong enough, but the Irishman was taller and heavier. I later read that he was a ferry driver famous for his foul mouth and violent possession of disputed wharfs. Soon he would be a millionaire. Now he was about to murder me.
The Irishman had raised his ringed fist.
"Lord Jesus," interrupted the Carib, and sat down suddenly.
"Allez!" cried Lord Migraine. I did not have to turn my head to see the Frenchman's arm. It was extended parallel to the earth and at one end there was a pistol with an eight-inch barrel.
"No," I said, for I did not see how he had time to prime it.
"Allez-vousen," he said.
The Irishman began to laugh, and that was his miscalculation for it produced a flash of flame and he was violently pushed backward on his heels.
"You!" he said, clutching at himself. It was clear he had taken a ball in the shoulder.
"Now," said my surprising ally to our two assailants. "Maintenant rentrez chez vous."
It was clear I had much to learn about Olivier de Garmont.
Olivier
DESPITE THE HOSTILE NATURE of my financial instruments, I lived very well in my first fortnight in New York, firstly due to the allowance provided by Mr. Peek, secondly by lunching at my boardinghouse, and thirdly by accepting the invitations to di
There was a long treatise on American prisons I was duty bound to write, and I certainly heard many original opinions during those nightly di
I called frequently on Master Larrit and was irritated to find him not at home to me. However, I was a French commissioner and therefore, without having done a thing to deserve it, I had American gentlemen making servants of themselves at every turn. If news of this did not reach Mr. Parrot, then so be it. I had sent a doctor to his dying wife, but perhaps he had wished her dead and he was a