The matters that occupied his mind belonged only to his work. In the early morning at Bordeaux, when he had to change, he bought a budget of morning papers, and read them in the refreshment-room over his roll and coffee. The news was alarming enough: people were fleeing from Narbonne and the neighbouring towns. Seven had been shot in a riot on the previous night; the soldiery was in charge of the town, and martial law had been proclaimed.

The French journalists excelled themselves in superlatives ... their stories were vain accounts of personal emotions and experiences, for it is the fashion with them to thrust their personality in front of the news.

Thereafter, on the journey to Narbonne, Humphrey wondered how he was going to get his telegrams out of the town, if it were besieged. He bought a map of the district and studied it: it might be necessary to send a courier to Perpignan, or back to Bordeaux, or, if things were very bad indeed, there were carrier pigeons; the Spanish frontier at Port Bou was not very far away also ... perhaps, he could find some one to whom to telephone. It was his business to get any news out of Narbonne, and there would be no excuse for failure.

The people in his carriage were talking of the shooting.

"I shouldn't like to be going there," one said.

"It will be worse to-night," another remarked. "Those Southerners lose their heads so quickly."

It seemed odd to Humphrey that while they were[342] talking of it in this detached way, he alone, probably, out of the whole train-load, was about to plunge into the actualities of revolution of his own free will. For the next few days he would be living with the grievances of the wine-growers, learning things that were unknown to him now. He would have to record and describe all that happened. His was the power to create sympathy in English households for the wrongs of these people starving in the midst of their fertile vineyards.

The brakes jarred the carriages of the train. Heads were put out of the window. On the up-line a goods train carrying flour had met with an accident. The engine lay grotesquely on one side, powdered with white flour, and the vans looked as if they had been out in a snow-storm. The melancholy sight of the shattered train slid past, as their own train jolted slowly on its journey.

"What is it—have they wrecked the train?" some one asked.

"No," another said, pointing to a paragraph in the paper, "it was an accident. The engine ran off the metals last night. It's in the Depêche de Toulouse."

They all chattered among themselves. It was a trivial affair, then—one had thought for a moment that those sacred Narbonnais...!

But there was something sinister in that wrecked train with its broken vans and its engine covered in a cloud of white. It seemed to presage disaster, as it lay there outside the door of the town.

The train stopped. "Narbonne" cried the porters. Humphrey descended as though it was the commonest thing in his life to enter garrisoned cities. The platform was full of soldiers, some standing with fixed bayonets, others sleeping on straw beside their stacked arms. Officers strolled up and down to the clank of their swords; outside, through the door of the station, itself[343] guarded by an infantryman in a blue coat, with its skirts tucked back, he caught a glimpse of horses tethered to the railings.

Nobody stopped him but the ticket-collector: in the midst of all this outward display of militarism, the business of the station went on as usual. Trains steamed in and departed; expresses pounded through on their way to Paris; porters were busy with parcels. The hotel buses were drawn up outside, just as if nothing in the world had happened to disturb the life of the town. He chose the Hotel Dorade omnibus, and away they went.

The streets were lined with soldiers bivouacking on the pavements. The avenue from the station was a long line of stacked rifles, and soldiers in blue and red lounging against the walls, smoking cigarettes, or lying on the pavement, where beds of hay had been made. Many of the shops were shuttered. He looked up, and the flat roofs of the houses were like barracks, with the képis of soldiers visible between the chimney-pots. The bus passed an open square—cavalry held it, and another street, broad and long, leading from it, was a camp of white tents.

Sentries guarded the bridges across the river, and though the main Boulevard was free of soldiers, he saw a hint of power in the courtyards of large houses. The walls were placarded with green and yellow posters, addressed to "Citoyens," urging them to resist the Government. The soldiers read them idly.

And, in the midst of all this, the people of Narbonne sat outside the cafés in the sunshine, under the red and white striped awnings, drinking their vermouth or absinthe!

Later, after he had taken his room at the Hotel Dorade, he walked about the town through the ranks of the soldiers. Groups of people stood here and there,[344] with grim faces and stern-set lips; they looked revengefully at officers and mounted police, and whenever a regiment marched into the town to the music of its drums and bugles, it was greeted with hoarse shouts of derision, and mocking cries of "Assassins!"

At the corner of a street of shops he came upon a little mound of stones set round a dark stain on the cobbled road; a wreath was laid there, and a night-light still burned under a glass cover. A piece of white cardboard, cut in the shape of a miniature tombstone, rested against a brick. He read the ill-written inscription on the card:—
Cross
René Duclos
agé de 29 ans
assasiné par le gouvernement.

There were seven other little memorial mounds in the neighbourhood. Each one of them marked where a victim had fallen to the soldiers' ball cartridge. One of the cardboard tombstones bore a woman's name. Her death was one of the inexplicable accidents of life: she was to have been married on the morrow. On her way she had been carried along in the crowd which was marching towards the Town Hall ... and in a minute she was dead.

These signs of tragedy made a deep impression on Humphrey's journalistic sense. He saw that the soldiers had not dared to move the mounds that reminded the people of the dreadful happenings in their midst. And they were surrounded by little silent crowds, who spelt out the inscriptions, sighed, and departed with mutterings.

[345]

A man with bloodshot eyes, and unkempt hair, his chin thick with bristles, lurched across the road, and stood by Humphrey, regarding him with a curious, persistent gaze. Humphrey moved away, and the man edged after him. He made for the main Boulevards where the crowded cafés gave him a sense of safety. He turned round, and saw that he was still being shadowed.

A voice hailed him from a café: he turned and saw O'Malley, the Irishman of The Sentinel.

"Hallo," said O'Malley, "been here long?"

"Just arrived," Humphrey said. He was glad to see a friend. That unkempt man who had followed him made him feel uncomfortably insecure.

"Where are you stopping?" O'Malley asked.

"At the Dorade."

"I'm there too: there's a whole gang of French and English fellows here. Been having no end of adventures. My carriage was held up outside Argelliers yesterday, and they wanted to see my papers. As bad as the flight to Varennes, isn't it?" He laughed, and they sat down to drink.

The unkempt man took up his position against the parapet of the bridge opposite.

Humphrey noticed that O'Malley wore a white band round his arm with a blue number on it, and his name, coupled with The Sentinel, written in ink that had frayed itself into the fabric.

"You'll have to get one of these," O'Malley explained. "It isn't safe to be a stranger here. They're issued by the People's Committee to journalists who show their credentials. A lot of detectives have been down here, you see, posing as journalists, and asking questions in the villages, getting all sorts of information; that's how they managed to arrest the ringleaders in the villages."

[346]

"It was a pretty mean trick," Humphrey said.

"Mean—I should think it was. They nearly lynched Harridge, the photographer, yesterday, and they chased another so-called journalist to the river, and he had to swim for his life, while the mob fired pot-shots at him from the bridges. So now they've placarded the town to explain that every real journalist has a white armband with a number on it."

Humphrey looked at the shaggy man opposite. "Good Lord!" he said, "that's why that fellow's been shadowing me...."

"Yes. He's one of the Committee's spies."

"I'd better get that armband quick."

"No hurry. You're all serene in my company. We'll finish our drink and stroll up together."

On the way O'Malley told him some of the latest developments. The chief ringleader, the man whom the wine-growers hailed as the Redeemer, was still at large, and nobody knew where he was. Picture-postcards of the bearded man with a halo round his head and a bunch of grapes dangling from a cross that he held in his right hand, were selling in thousands at two sous each.

"To-morrow there are the funerals," remarked O'Malley. "Seven funerals at once. It ought............