‘Certainly,’ replied the Count. ‘I have taken French classes before, and my Spanish is quite good enough for me to do so here. I would, too, be grateful for the chance to earn a little more money.’
Accordingly it was settled that on the following day he should take over from Monsieur Degas; and when he arrived at the school he found the unfortunate Frenchman only too willing to give up his duties. Ferrer explained that, as less than forty of the pupils took French, Degas held only two classes, a junior and a senior, each for an hour a day, and that the rest of his time had been spent giving instruction in cooking, as he had once been a professional chef. About the cooking lessons Ferrer said he had already made other arrangements and had relieved Degas of them nearly a month ago. He added that although Señor Chirikov would be only a part-time teacher, he wished him to enjoy the same amenities as the other masters. Then he left him with the Frenchman.
Degas showed de Quesnoy the work his two classes were doing, and later took one of them in his presence, after which he took him to the masters’ common-room at the back of the house. Soon after midday the other masters began to troop in, among them Sanchez and Benigno. The former, as the Count had already learned, ran the foundry for the students who were learning metal-work, and the latter acted as Editor for the publishing business.
There were eleven masters in all and three women teachers; and as de Quesnoy shook hands with them in turn, he decided that he had rarely met a group of such strong individualists. Their clothes and manners showed them all to be eccentrics, but he soon found that, apart from Sanchez, their level of intelligence was unusually high, and he had little doubt that they were all fanatical atheists hand-picked by Ferrer to aid him in his work. Next door to the common-room there was a small dining-room, and having crowded into it they ate for lunch the dishes produced by the cooking class held that morning.
During the days that followed de Quesnoy spent most of the hours, when he was neither taking his French classes nor coaching his two private students in Russian, browsing in the Escuela Moderna library.
One thing that amazed him was the enormous number of weekly and monthly journals either openly published by anarchist groups or carrying articles in defence of anarchists who had been caught after committing outrages and brought to trial. They ran into hundreds and were produced not only in every European country but also the United States and South America. The greatest number were published in France, and that he had never before seen any of them he attributed to their probably being put on sale only in the poorer quarters of Paris, Lyons, Marseilles and other cities. Many of them had been suppressed after publishing only a few issues, but a similarity of set-up and contributors showed that in the majority of such cases the periodical had, after a short interval, been revived under another name. That this spate of agitator literature continued unabated could be taken as fair proof that Doña Gulia’s contention, that hundreds of thousands of Spaniards were convinced anarchists, was correct. From that, he judged by the number of anarchist publications throughout the world, if there were a million Spanish anarchists their total number must run to anything between five and ten million.
In the course of his reading he was interested to find that, as the legislative bodies of States were produced by elections, and anarchists were pledged to abolish all legal procedure, the majority of them considered it to be inconsistent with their principles to use the vote. There were, however, exceptions and one of their most prominent leaders, Count Carlo Cafiero, had laid it down in an article published by ‘Le Droit Social’ in Lyons that: ‘Our action must be permanent rebellion by speech, by writing, by the dagger, by the gun, by dynamite, and even by the voting paper; for everything unlawful is of service to us.’
He was, too, greatly intrigued to learn the real reason that lay behind Kaiser Wilhelm II having, soon after he ascended the throne, ‘dropped the pilot’, as had been termed his dismissal from office of his Chancellor, the mighty Bismarck, who had been the most outstanding figure in European politics for a quarter of a century.
After the two abortive attempts in 1878 by the anarchists Emil Hoedel and Karl Nobiling to assassinate Kaiser Wilhelm I, the Chancellor had initiated a ruthless drive against all revolutionary organisations in Germany. In Berlin alone no less than 563 persons were brought to trial for expressing in either writing or speech approval of those attempts; only 42 were acquitted and the remainder received sentences between them amounting to 812 years’ imprisonment.
It was not without reason that Bismarck was known as the Iron Chancellor, and in the years that followed he used an iron hand in putting down all manifestations of Socialism in Germany; so that ten years later when Kaiser Wilhelm II succeeded to the throne he had virtually beaten it down into impotence. The new ruler, however, was an exceptionally vain man and, working to make himself popular with the masses, in 1890 he refused to renew the anti-Socialist laws.
This was the root of the quarrel between the Monarch and the great statesman. Bismarck ceased to be Chancellor and was reported to have said: ‘One must either fight Socialism or yield to it. I prefer the former course, the Emperor prefers the latter. That is why I have retired.’
De Quesnoy also learned much about the various types of anarchists. A few, such as Prince Kropotkin, Count Cafiero and Count Tolstoi, who came from the upper classes, were men with excellent brains but a kink that had led them to strive for the realisation of their ideas entirely regardless of consequences, although Tolstoi had propagated his ideas solely by word and been opposed to any form of violence. A much larger number came from the middle classes and were again idealists, but mostly men like Morral, whose morbid natures had led them, after long brooding upon the sufferings of the poor, to commit their crimes as a protest against a system which gave only a limited number of people power and wealth. But the vast majority were drawn from the dregs of society and these could be divided into two categories: men who had been dogged by persistent ill-luck, and habitual criminals.
Typical of the first category had been Auguste Vaillant, who had thrown a bomb in the French Chamber of Deputies in 1893. After only a rudimentary education he had been thrown penniless on the world at the age of fourteen. That he was not without spirit had been shown by his having emigrated in turn to both Algeria and the Argentine in endeavours to make a career for himself, but fortune had refused to smile on him in either; and on his return to Paris, he had been unable to secure a better post than that of a junior clerk at the miserable salary of eighty francs a month—then worth about 16s a week. Having become infected with anarchist doctrines while in the Argentine he had decided to give his life as a means of demonstrating social injustice. By saving a few sous a week the poor wretch had gradually built up a store of chemicals to make his bomb, and loaded it with little scraps of iron that he had picked up. It had proved such a poor affair that the old nails in it had fallen on the heads of the Deputies without injuring any of them. Nevertheless, he had been condemned to death and, in spite of a nation-wide agitation for his reprieve, sent to the guillotine.
Later there appeared little doubt that it was President Carnot’s refusal to commute Vaillant’s sentence that led to his assassination in Lyons the following year. The young Italian, Santo-Geronimo Caserio, who avenged Vaillant by stabbing the President to death, had also been almost totally uneducated; he had been put to slave in a bakery at the age of thirteen, and had never known anything but the direst poverty.
It was, however, clear that the anarchist doctrine of the rejection of all authority had a great appeal to the criminal mind, and during the past twenty years hundreds of criminals, when brought to trial, had defiantly proclaimed themselves from the dock to be anarchists.
Of this type a man of half-French, half-German, blood named François Ravachol, had been an outstanding example. His first exploit had been to break into the house of an old gentleman who was said to keep there a considerable sum of money. Finding the old man in bed, he split his head open with a chopper, t
hen chased the elderly housekeeper out into the road and murdered her also. A few years later, hearing that the Countess de Rochetaillé had been buried wearing her valuable jewels, he went by night to the cemetery. Being possessed of enormous strength he succeeded in raising two slabs of stone that covered the grave, weighing respectively 260 and 330 1b., broke open the coffin and, from rage at finding nothing of value, desecrated the corpse. Another of his crimes was the brutal murder of an old hermit who had accumulated a hoard of gold. He then became interested in the anarchist movement, owing to the wide publicity given to it by serious disturbances in Paris on May Day, 1891. The police had broken up a procession and two of the principal anarchist agitators who led it, Descamp and Dardare, had been arrested and sentenced to five and three years’ hard labour by a judge named Benoit. They had become known in Socialist circles as ‘the Clichy martyrs’ and Ravachol decided to revenge them. For that purpose he and his associates had stolen one hundred and twenty dynamite cartridges. With these they had twice blown up M. Benoit’s apartment and committed many other outrages, which had initiated the ’92–’94 anarchist reign of terror in Paris.
Although de Quesnoy continued occasionally to look in at the branch of the Somaten to which he belonged, he now spent most of his evenings in the masters’ common-room. As the majority of its members lived in cheerless bed-sitting-rooms, they used it at night for games of chess, or whiling away the time denoucing to one another the iniquities of the régime. Such discussions were followed by him closely, but he could never find more than a hint in them that the speakers might be involved in active measures towards bringing about an anarchist Utopia.
Nevertheless, these hints were sufficient to convince him that some, if not all, of them were in touch with the militants, and his belief was strengthened by his having soon learned that all of them were Freemasons. After a while he formed the conclusion that they would have spoken more openly in front of him had he not been there only as a temporary, and it was on that account they were deliberately exercising a certain degree of caution.
However, one of the women teachers was both more virulent and inclined to be somewhat less discreet than the others; so he decided to play up to her and give her the impression that he wanted to start an affaire with her, on the chance that she would talk more freely if he could get her on her own. Her name was Dolores Mendoza and she was obviously of Jewish extraction but, as he learned later, her mother was an Argonese, and from her she had inherited a pair of pale blue eyes which, in her sallow face, made her rather striking.
In his second week there he asked her out to dinner and she readily accepted. On the Tuesday evening they had a modest meal at a fish restaurant down by the harbour, but he plied her liberally with wine and under its stimulus she talked animatedly on a variety of subjects. She was very intense and, like her fellow teachers, had no sense of humour; so in spite of her intelligence he found her rather a bore. Now and then he turned the conversation to politics, but she shied off the subject and he refrained from pressing it, as he felt that on the first occasion they were out together it would be bad tactics.
At the end of dinner he got two surprises. In keeping with her anarchist principles, when the bill was brought she insisted on paying half. The second was more in the nature of a nasty shock. As the waiter went off to get their change, she said, ‘Well, shall we go back to your place or would you like to come to mine?’
He had no doubts about what she meant, and silently cursed himself for not having taken into account that the anarchists believed in free love, and that it was considered a point of honour by the most orthodox of their women to give themselves to anyone who wanted them; and he had certainly led her to suppose that he found her very attractive.
After racking his wits for a moment for a way to escape without offending her from the tricky situation in which he had landed himself, he said, ‘I’ve rather peculiar views about that sort of thing. I think that to get the best out of it, the first time should be something one can look back on with special pleasure. I mean not just a roll on a bed and a goodnight kiss, but a real long session. Afterwards, of course, one takes any opportunity that offers; but what I would really like is for us to go down to some little place on the Costa Brava for a weekend together. I’m prepared to wait for that, if you are.’
Her pale blue eyes regarded him with faint surprise, then she smiled and said, ‘Perhaps you’re right. Anyhow it shows that you must like me a lot, and I’m rather flattered. Let’s do that, then. But I can’t next weekend, I’m already engaged to spend Saturday night with another friend of mine.’
Inwardly he sighed with relief. He had anyhow gained an eleven-day respite; time enough to pump her if that was possible, and later he could think up some excuse to drop her.
Two nights later Sanchez took him out to dinner, and by chance he learned how it was that Ferrer’s swarthy younger son always had a pocketful of money. He was wearing a gaudy new jacket and a handsome red satin cummerbund, and late in the evening, after they had been drinking fairly heavily, de Quesnoy congratulated him on his finery, remarking that he was lucky to be able to afford it.
Sanchez closed one of his sloe-like eyes in a leery wink, and replied, ‘I paid for them with some of the money from my little Marquésa, and there’s plenty more where it came from.’
‘You are lucky in having a rich mistress, then,’ the Count commented with a smile.
‘She’s not my mistress, though I don’t doubt I could make her let me have her if I wanted to. But she’s too skinny for my liking.’ Suddenly he lowered his voice and became confidential. ‘Her husband is an old dotard and she’s having an affaire with her groom. He’s a friend of mine and he told me about it. I put up a little scheme to him and we fixed things up between us. They have their fun in the woods when they are out riding together. He took me out and showed me their favourite love-nest among the bushes. I borrowed a camera and after a bit of practice with it went out and lay in wait for them. I got two lovely snaps while he was keeping her good and busy. They were some pictures, I can tell you. Her face was turned sideways and her eyes were closed, but there was no mistaking what they were up to. I sent her a couple of copies and told her where to leave the cash. She’s paid up handsomely for the past three months and I split with my friend; although, of course, she doesn’t know that and is still potty about him.’
De Quesnoy laughed and, as he was expected to, praised Sanchez’ cunning but mentally he promised himself that, when in due course he had collected enough evidence to get the Ferrer brothers arrested, he would see to it that Sanchez received a special beating-up for this despicable blackmail.
On the Saturday Ferrer told ‘Señor Chirikov’ that he had received a letter from Monsieur Gérault, the new French master, who was also to teach physics, that he would be arriving on Monday; but as his train did not get in until the evening the French classes were to be taken as usual on that day.
By then, owing mainly to the numerous evenings he had spent in the masters’ common-room, the Count had acquired a considerably wider knowledge of anarchist affairs and of the divergence of the views expounded by the principal exponents of its philosophy.
He learned that while the pacific Jean Jacques Rousseau and the two most blood-lusting fiends of the French Revolution, René Hébert and Anacharsis Clootz, were all looked on as ‘Saints’ in the movement. Robespierre, who had sent ten times as many people to their death as the last two put together, was anathema to them because he had made himself virtually a dictator.
He had heard discussed the attempt of the Utopian Robert Owen to found a Socialist community at New Harmony, Indianna, and of that made later at Cincinnati by his disciple, Josiah Warren, to run a ‘time store’ on the principle of exchanging services instead of paying for them in money.
He also became aware of the subtle difference between anarchism and nihilism. The former wished to destroy the existing order, but had plans for building a new one consisting of free Labour gr
oups and free Communes; whereas, with true Russian pessimism, the latter’s aim was simply to annihilate every form of authority, then sit back and let matters take whatever course they would.
From his reading and these conversations he formed one definite conclusion. It was that the belief generally held, that all active anarchists were members of a world-wide organisation and received their orders from some secret headquarters—probably in London—where their outrages were planned, was a complete myth.
Their first principle—the rejection of all authority—made that belief, even theoretically, untenable; and a careful analysis of their crimes showed beyond all doubt that they did not even have regional headquarters in individual countries or cities.
This explained why such a high proportion of their attempts, particularly against well-guarded Heads of State, had proved failures. Had they been carefully planned and properly financed many more of them must have met with success. But examination showed that nearly all these attempts had been made by individuals who had imbibed anarchist doctrines and were either solitaries or at most had only a very small group of associates.
The travesty of a bomb that Vaillant had thrown in the Chamber of Deputies had been made by himself out of the poorest possible materials. Caserio, on hearing that President Carnot was to open the Colonial Exhibition at Lyons, had set out to assassinate him from the Mediterranean port of Cette, but he had not enough money to buy even a third-class railway ticket for the whole journey; so he had had to walk the last eighteen miles on the afternoon preceding his attack. Luccheni, who stabbed to death the Empress Elizabeth of Austria, purchased a knife for the purpose for twelve francs; but fearing that his money might not last out until he could find an opportunity to strike the Empress down, he induced the shopkeeper to take it back. Instead, he bought for less than one franc a long file set in a wooden handle and, after sharpening it to a needle point, used it as a stiletto to do the deed.
Vendetta in Spain Page 10
