Vendetta in Spain

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 roll 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