Vendetta in Spain ddr-2 Page 10

  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 organizations 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 anarchist. A few, such a 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 realization of their ideals 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 Yaillant'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 Frangois 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, then chased the elderly housekeeper out into the road and murdered her also. A few years later, hearing that the Countess de Rochetaille 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 lb., 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 denouncing to one another the iniquities of the regime. 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 r
oll on a bed and a good-night 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 week-end 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 week-end. 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 Marquesa, 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's 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 'Senor Chirikov' that he had received a letter from Monsieur Gerault, 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, Rene Hebert 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, Indiana, 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 groups 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 organization 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.

  It was obvious that had any of these assassins been directed by some central committee, they would have been furnished with proper weapons and ample money to aid them in carrying out their murderous intent.

  However, it did seem to de Quesnoy that there were grounds for believing that the Barcelona anarchists differed from others in this respect. This he believed to be because they were strongly influenced by the Syndicalists who, while accepting anarchist principles, held somewhat more practical views about the establishment of a new social order after the present one had been destroyed. There was also the fact that the bombs used by the Spanish anarchists were no home-made toys, as witness the terrible devastation caused by the one that Morral had hurled at the Royal coach, and this implied that either they were supplied by some central headquarters or that there was such a centre where potential assassins received instruction in making them.

  That no international world-headquarters of anarchism existed was a sad blow to the Count, since he had hoped that through the Barcelona anarchists he might eventually learn its whereabouts, in due course penetrate it and, sooner or later, find means to blow sky-high the brains directing the movement. But it had proved to be a nebulous creature that could not be brought to grief by any single act. He could only console himself with the thought that he might still deal a crippling blow against the Spanish anarchists if he could secure evidence that it was Ferrer to whom they looked for support and direction.

  On the Sunday he wrote a long letter to de Cordoba, giving an account of his doings since his arrival in Barcelona, reporting on the situation as he saw it, and stating his hopes of securing evidence which would show that Ferrer and some of his associates had known in advance of Morral's intentions; all of which he asked should be passed on to Don Alfonso.

  When Monday came de Quesnoy decided that as it would be his last chance to share the common-room with the other masters, he would spend the evening there. After he had had dinner he went in to find Dolores Mendoza playing chess with Jovellenos, who took the higher maths class, and three other men sitting talking politics as usual. They were Zapatro, who taught architecture, Herr Schmidt, the German master, and Benigno. De Quesnoy s
ettled down with those three and the interminable discussion went on according to custom. Spaniards by habit sit up late so these sessions often went on until past midnight, and it was about eleven o'clock when Benigno remarked:

  'Sanchez should be here soon now. My father gave him the job of meeting this new man, Gerault, at the station and bringing him here. His train was due in at a little after ten.'

  He had hardly finished speaking when the door opened and Sanchez came in with a small, weedy little middle-aged man. Dolores and Jovellenos glanced up but did not break off their game; the other four came to their feet to greet the newcomer. Sanchez introduced them in turn and coming last to the Count said:

  'This is Senor Chirikov. He is a Russian but speaks French like a native, and owing to the retirement through illness of your predecessor he has been deputizing for you as French master until your arrival.'

  De Quesnoy murmured a conventional greeting and put out his hand, but the other did not take it. He was staring at the Count with murder in his eyes. Suddenly he cried:

  'He is no Russian! He is a Frenchman! I know this man. He can have come among you only as a spy. Two years ago in Paris he penetrated the secrets of the Freemasons and brought about the fall of the Combes government. He is that notorious monarchist, Colonel the Count de Quesnoy.'

  Unmasked

  For a moment utter silence descended on the small room. Every one of the eight people in it remained perfectly still, as though temporarily paralysed by the waving of a magician's wand. Even their breathing was not perceptible, and the smoke from their cigarettes and pipes hung unmoving in faint blue strata. Although they made no movement the pulses of all of them had quickened. Their thoughts were racing and the atmosphere was tense with the invisible radiations those thoughts made upon it.