Penguin Island — 45 Bk6 Ch7 - Bidault-Coquille and Maniflore, The Socialists

VII. BIDAULT-COQUILLE AND MANIFLORE, THE SOCIALISTS

Whilst the wind of anger and hatred blew in Alca, Eugine Bidault-Coquille, poorest and happiest of astronomers, installed in an old steam-engine of the time of the Draconides, was observing the heavens through a bad telescope, and photographing the paths of the meteors upon some damaged photographic plates.

His genius corrected the errors of his instruments and his love of science triumphed over the worthlessness of his apparatus.

With an inextinguishable ardour he observed aerolites, meteors, and fire-balls, and all the glowing ruins and blazing sparks which pass through the terrestrial atmosphere with prodigious speed, and as a reward for is studious vigils he received the indifference of the public, the ingratitude of the State and the blame of the learned societies.

Engulfed in the celestial spaces he knew not what occurred upon the surface of the earth.

He never read the newspapers, and when he walked through the town his mind was occupied with the November asteroids, and more than once he found himself at the bottom of a pond in one of the public parks or beneath the wheels of a motor omnibus.

Elevated in stature as in thought he respected himself and others.

This was shown by his cold politeness as well as by a very thin black frock coat and a tall hat which gave to his person an appearance at once emaciated and sublime.

He took his meals in a little restaurant from which all customers less intellectual than himself had fled, and thenceforth his napkin bound by its wooden ring rested alone in the abandoned rack.

In this cook-shop his eyes fell one evening upon Colomban’s memorandum in favour of Pyrot.

He read it as he was cracking some bad nuts and suddenly, exalted with astonishment, admiration, horror, and pity, he forgot all about falling meteors and shooting stars and saw nothing but the innocent man hanging in his cage exposed to the winds of heaven and the ravens perching upon it.

That image did not leave him.

For a week he had been obsessed by the innocent convict, when, as he was leaving his cook-shop, he saw a crowd of citizens entering a public-house in which a public meeting was going on.

He went in.

The meeting was disorderly; they were yelling, abusing one another and knocking one another down in the smoke-laden hall.

The Pyrotists and the Anti-Pyrotists spoke in turn and were alternately cheered and hissed at.

An obscure and confused enthusiasm moved the audience.

With the audacity of a timid and retired man Bidault-Coquille leaped upon the platform and spoke for three-quarters of an hour.

He spoke very quickly, without order, but with vehemence, and with all the conviction of a mathematical mystic.

He was cheered.

When he got down from the platform a big woman of uncertain age, dressed in red, and wearing an immense hat trimmed with heroic feathers, throwing herself into his arms, embraced him, and said to him: “You are splendid!”

He thought in his simplicity that there was some truth in the statement.

She declared to him that henceforth she would live but for Pyrot’s defence and Colomban’s glory.

He thought her sublime and beautiful.

She was Maniflore, a poor old courtesan, now forgotten and discarded, who had suddenly become a vehement politician.

She never left him.

They spent glorious hours together in doss-houses and in lodgings beautified by their love, in newspaper offices, in meeting-halls and in lecture-halls.

As he was an idealist, he persisted in thinking her beautiful, although she gave him abundant opportunity of seeing that she had preserved no charm of any kind.

From her past beauty she only retained a confidence in her capacity for pleasing and a lofty assurance in demanding homage.

Still, it must be admitted that this Pyrot affair, so fruitful in prodigies, invested Maniflore with a sort of civic majesty, and transformed her, at public meetings, into an august symbol of justice and truth.

Bidault-Coquille and Maniflore did not kindle the least spark of irony or amusement in a single Anti-Pyrotist, a single defender of Greatauk, or a single supporter of the army.

The gods, in their anger, had refused to those men the precious gift of humour.

They gravely accused the courtesan and the astronomer of being spies, of treachery, and of plotting against their country.

Bidault-Coquille and Maniflore grew visibly greater beneath insult, abuse, and calumny.

For long months Penguinia had been divided into two camps and, though at first sight it may appear strange, hitherto the socialists had taken no part in the contest.

Their groups comprised almost all the manual workers in the country, necessarily scattered, confused, broken up, and divided, but formidable.

The Pyrot affair threw the group leaders into a singular embarrassment.

They did not wish to place themselves either on the side of the financiers or on the side of the army.

They regarded the Jews, both great and small, as their uncompromising opponents.

Their principles were not at stake, nor were their interests concerned in the affair.

Still the greater number felt how difficult it was growing for them to remain aloof from struggles in which all Penguinia was engaged.

Their leaders called a sitting of their federation at the Rue de la Queue-du-diable-St. Maël, to take into consideration the conduct they ought to adopt in the present circumstances and in future eventualities.

Comrade Phœnix was the first to speak.

“A crime,” said he, “the most odious and cowardly of crimes, a judicial crime, has been committed.

Military judges, coerced or misled by their superior officers, have condemned an innocent man to an infamous and cruel punishment.

Let us not say that the victim is not one of our own party, that he belongs to a caste which was, and always will be, our enemy.

Our party is the party of social justice; it can look upon no iniquity with indifference.

“It would be a shame for us if we left it to Kerdanic, a radical, to Colomban, a member of the middle classes, and to a few moderate Republicans, alone to proceed against the crimes of the army.

If the victim is not one of us, his executioners are our brothers’ executioners, and before Greatauk struck down this soldier he shot our comrades who were on strike.

“Comrades, by an intellectual, moral and material effort you must rescue Pyrot from his torment, and in performing this generous act you are not turning aside from the liberating and revolutionary task you have undertaken, for Pyrot his become the symbol of the oppressed and of all the social iniquities that now exist; by destroying one you make all the others tremble.”

When Phœnix ended, comrade Sapor spoke in these terms: “You are advised to abandon your task in order to do something with which you have no concern.

Why throw yourselves into a conflict where, on whatever side you turn, you will find none but your natural, uncompromising, even necessary opponents?

Are the financiers to be less hated by us than the army?

What inept and criminal generosity is it that hurries you to save those seven hundred Pyrotists whom you will always find confronting you in the social war?

“It is proposed that you act the part of the police for your enemies, and that you are to re-establish for them the order which their own crimes have disturbed.

Magnanimity pushed to this degree changes its name.

“Comrades, there is a point at which infamy becomes fatal to a society.

Penguin society is being strangled by its infamy, and you are requested to save it, to give it air that it can breathe.

This is simply turning you into ridicule.

“Leave it to smother itself and let us gaze at its last convulsions with joyful contempt, only regretting that it has so entirely corrupted the soil on which it has been built that we shall find nothing but poisoned mud on which to lay the foundations of a new society.”

When Sapor had ended his speech comrade Lapersonne pronounced these few words: “Phœnix calls us to Pyrot’s help for the reason that Pyrot is innocent.

It seems to me that that is a very bad reason.

If Pyrot is innocent he has behaved like a good soldier and has always conscientiously worked at his trade, which principally consists in shooting the people.

That is not a motive to make the people brave all dangers in his defence.

When it is demonstrated to me that Pyrot is guilty and that he stole the army hay, I shall be on his side.”

Comrade Larrivée afterwards spoke.

“I am not of my friend, Phœnix’s opinion but I am not with my friend Sapor either.

I do not believe that the party is bound to embrace a cause as soon as we are told that that cause is just.

That, I am afraid, is a grievous abuse of words and a dangerous equivocation.

For social justice is not revolutionary justice.

They are both in perpetual antagonism: to serve the one is to oppose the other.

As for me, my choice is made.

I am for revolutionary justice as against social justice.

Still, in the present case I am against abstention.

I say that when a lucky chance brings us an affair like this we should be fools not to profit by it.

“How?

We are given an opportunity of striking terrible, perhaps fatal, blows against militarism.

And am I to fold my arms?

I tell you, comrades, I am not a fakir, I have never been a fakir, and if there are fakirs here let them not count on me.

To sit in meditation is a policy without results and one which I shall never adopt.

“A party like ours ought to be continually asserting itself.

It ought to prove its existence by continual action.

We will intervene in the Pyrot affair but we will intervene in it in a revolutionary manner; we will adopt violent action.

Perhaps you think that violence is old-fashioned and superannuated, to be scrapped along with diligences, hand-presses and aerial telegraphy.

You are mistaken.

To-day as yesterday nothing is obtained except by violence; it is the one efficient instrument.

The only thing necessary is to know how to use it.

You ask what will our action be?

I will tell you: it will be to stir up the governing classes against one another, to put the army in conflict with the capitalists, the government with the magistracy, the nobility and clergy with the Jews, and if possible to drive them all to destroy one another.

To do this would be to carry on an agitation which would weaken government in the same way that fever wears out the sick.

“The Pyrot affair, little as we know how to turn it to advantage, will put forward by ten years the growth of the Social party and the emancipation of the proletariat, by disarmament, the general strike, and revolution.”

The leaders of the party having each expressed a different opinion, the discussion was continued, not without vivacity.

The orators, as always happens in such a case, reproduced the arguments they had already brought forward, though with less order and moderation than before.

The dispute was prolonged and none changed his opinion.

These opinions, in the final analysis, were reduced to two: that of Sapor and Lapersonne who advised abstention, and that of Phœnix and Larrivée, who wanted intervention.

Even these two contrary opinions were united in a common hatred of the heads of the army and of their justice, and in a common belief in Pyrot’s innocence.

So that public opinion was hardly mistaken in regarding all the Socialist leaders as pernicious Anti-Pyrotists.

As for the vast masses in whose name they spoke and whom they represented as far as speech can express the impossible—as for the proletarians whose thought is difficult to know and who do not know it themselves, it seemed that the Pyrot affair did not interest them.

It was too literary for them, it was in too classical a style, and had an upper-middle-class and high-finance tone about it that did not please them much.