Puslapio vaizdai
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princess. They started for the thick of the hurrying throngs. But Ventrillon's shoulder was caught suddenly in a grip of iron.

"But my fare!" screamed the taxidriver. "Where is my fare? And I lack also my pourboire."

"Have you taken us to our destination?" demanded Ventrillon.

"It is impossible. There is no more essence."

"Then I do not pay."
"But you will pay."

"I cannot. I have not a sou." "And you take a taxi without a sou! Voleur! Thief! thief!" shouted the taxi-driver. "Help! Police!"

Something had to be done. Ventrillon seized the occasion by the hairs.

He wrenched himself free from the taxi-driver, and with two bounds was upon the roof of the taxi. He pulled the girl up after him, and, standing with one arm about her, turned loose the full volume of his tremendous baritone.

"Proletariat of Montmartre," he bellowed, "I appeal to the soviets of Montmartre!"

The taxi-driver made a flying leap for the roof and caught on with his hands. Ventrillon kicked his knuckles. The driver fell sprawling, and then gathered himself again. Murder and lust for violent death gleamed in

his eyes.

The taxi was at a strategic point, the intersection of two streets, and it commanded the mob in four directions. The soviet of the Celestialists had already dashed up in a body. Unorganized proletariats now came sweeping in from all directions. The taxi was surrounded almost instantaneously by a dense mass of humanity, all straining to see the new sensation.

The driver leaped for his victims upon the roof, and was torn down by a hundred hands.

"I denounce this conductor of taxis," cried Ventrillon. "I am of the artist-proletariat, and I denounce him as a capitalist.'

"Capitalist!" yelled the mob. "Down with the capitalists!"

"I denounce him, moreover, as a bourgeois."

"Down with the bourgeois!" "I denounce him as a camel, as a cow, as a species of dirtiness-"

"Down with the conductor of taxis!" "I sentence him to be drowned in a camomile tea. A la tisane, Camarades!"

"A la tisane!" they yelled, and from hand to hand the poor conductor of taxis was forced farther and farther from his vehicle, even to the very outskirts of the rapidly growing crowd about it.

"You are amusing yourself?" Ventrillon whispered to the companion in his embrace.

"Oui, monsieur, je m'amuse bien." A spot of color glowed on each of her pale cheeks, and her eyes shone with excitement.

"That is good," said Ventrillon. Then he looked down at her. "Name of a dog!" he swore, "she is pretty!"

"What did you say, monsieur?”
"I said, 'Is n't Paris a large city?'”

$6

Ventrillon at once became aware that he now dominated the crowd below. His coup with regard to the chauffeur had virtually put him in command. They were ready to follow this, the only leader who had arisen. He was a remarkable figure, this youth with the pure, unclouded countenance of a

young girl, tall, slim, and beautiful, and bellowing forth with a voice which shook the windows of four streets. "Little one," said he, "we are about to lead the revolution, you and I. It is the occasion. We shall seize it by the hairs. Carmen and her daughter are already on their way to the country."

A tremendous uproar had broken out during his silence. Rival factions were vainly trying to drown out one another's war-cries, "Vivent les Vorticists! Vivent les Noctambules!"

An adherent of the Celestialists had climbed upon a projection of the façade of a corner building, and was screaming out his creed.

"I believe in the abolition of ideas," he screeched. "To have ideas is human, to have none is divine. God does not think; He creates. I am a Celestialist. I believe in creation without ideas. Down with those who paint objects! Down with those Futurists who would paint ideas! Long live the Celestialists, who paint neither!"

"Comrades," suddenly boomed out the voice of Ventrillon and drowned them all, "I am the revolution who speaks."

Silence fell.

"I now proclaim the commune of the soviets of Montmartre," he cried. "In union there is strength. Let us all work together. Vive l'Union Sacrée! We shall defy the French Government. We shall pay no taxes. We support the commune by voluntary offerings. I proclaim for all a policy of free beer and the socialization of the cabaret of the Leaping Mole." "Vive-vive-vive la commune de Montmartre!" screamed the mob. "Oh, how I amuse myself!" cried the young acrobat, ecstatically.

"For free beer the Government must have a treasury," Ventrillon continued; "that is obvious. Even what is free must be bought. We shall now proceed to the first collection of the voluntary taxes. I appoint myself treasurer of the soviet government of Montmartre. Pass the hat! Subscribe! Pour out your gold! America aids us."

Pandemonium reigned. It appeared that the new-found leader was a genius.

Now, for the collection of a public subscription there is nothing more vitally necessary than a pasting-up of posters. Everybody knows that. As it happened, there were no posters upon Montmartre, but Montmartre is the country where only the impossible happens. Within less than ten minutes after this announcement, men were pasting up, in all the streets of the quarter, the old government warloan posters, with the old inscriptions replaced by new and far more piquant

ones.

A hatful of money was handed up to Ventrillon, and he gave it to the girl to guard. Then came a cardboard box filled with small bank-notes, then another hat. The treasury grew.

"Now," said Ventrillon, "we have the money; but to keep it is another affair." They were surrounded in all directions by a mob which would be ready, upon any attempt at embezzling the treasury by escape, to unjoint their members.

Now, a certain person in the mob had recognized the girl upon the taxi and had made her way to it in the midst of the uproar.

"Chichetta! Chichetta!" called a feminine voice from immediately below the roof of the taxi.

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"But this one," said the girl, "is good, and he can do everything. I have already seen him do it."

"Carmen," cried Ventrillon, astounded, "it is you! And you do not know me, Ventrillon? Veritably, this is fate. In fact, I myself am fate. And you are my children. To the taxi, Carmen!"

He reached down and gave a hand to Carmen, who now climbed up beside them.

"O Ventri," she cried and embraced him, "I did not dreama it was you! It is really you. Dio! how good you are! In your case I have no fear. I giva you my Chichette. I shall be happier to know she is yours

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"She is already mine," said Ventrillon. "Woman, behold the father of your daughter! I have adopted her. And now, pardieu, I adopt her mother."

The mob became delirious. They had heard nothing of all this.

"Oh," said they, "what a genius is found!" A queen of beauty was on the taxi, and she was an ugly old woman. That is the sort of jest that Paris adores.

"Behold the Goddess of Reason!" cried the mob. "Vive the Queen of Love and Beauty!"

Now it was that Ventrillon would have wept. Applauded in ridicule as she was, Carmen was smiling with

the vanity of triumph. The mob screamed, and Carmen bowed right and left like a queen receiving homage. The mob yelled again. The heavens rang with laughter and the hysterical screams of women.

But Ventrillon had no time for weeping.

"Carmen," he whispered suddenly, "here are at least a thousand francs. When I give the sign, vamose with them. You are going to the country at last."

"None of this is true," said Carmen; "it cannota be.”

Then suddenly a new cry arose. The hilarity stopped short, crushed into silence beneath the awful earnestness of that first distant yell. The excitement persisted, but it had become sinister. Tragedy was afoot.

"The gens d'armes! The police! They have guns! They are going to shoot!"

Terror struck the mob. "It is necessary to resist," yelled a voice, and a new leader had arisen. They turned away from the taxi and cried:

"Resist! We must resist! Barricades! Arm yourselves! We must have arms! Down with the gendarmes!"

Ventrillon turned pale. Was the greatest joke the city of Paris had ever known to end like this? Somebody had made a fatal mistake. It was evident that the police believed a genuine insurrection had taken place.

"Down with the gendarmes!" shrieked the mob. "Assassinate the gendarmes!" The temper of the mob did not help matters.

Ventrillon's inspiration came like a bolt from the blue.

"Comrades of the soviets of Montmartre!" he bellowed, and silence fell.

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"Silence!" roared Ventrillon, and shall inform you. The chief requisite there was silence.

"The comrade has spoken well," he said. "We must annihilate the gendarmes; but how shall we strike them? We have not the guns to shoot them down. The gendarmes are gendarmes,

of humanity is beer. Beer, comrades. We shall attack them with beer! Have Iwe not socialized the cabaret of the Leaping Mole? The beer of the Leaping Mole is ours. Let us take possession. Now, listen! Here is the plan

them all. One hundred francs! It was an insult. He would make Freddy "cough up."

"One hundred francs is not enough," said Ventrillon.

"Then what would you have me do?" said Freddy. "I am not a millionaire."

"One hundred francs is not enough," repeated Ventrillon, implacably.

"Then name your terms," said Freddy. "I will do what I can and no more."

"One hundred francs," said Ventrillon-"and"

Freddy leaned on the back of a broken chair to steady his nerves to meet the shock. "Free beer!"

"Agreed!" shouted Freddy. "Free beer!"

"The first to be delivered immediately," said Ventrillon. "I have been pretending that I am God; now I shall pretend that I am human. I satisfy my humanity."

Freddy handed him a beer, and Ventrillon drank.

"As a matter of fact," said he, "I am neither. I am a political genius."

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