Vendetta in Spain

DENNIS WHEATLEY

VENDETTA IN SPAIN

THE BOOK CLUB

121 CHARING CROSS ROAD LONDON, WC2

© Dennis Wheatley 1961 First published 1961

For SHELAGH

Still 'the dazzling young Duchess of Westminster'* who knew and loved Spain at the period of this story.

♦Robert Sencourt in "King Alfonso" (Faber and Faber, 1942)

Death at High Noon

The principal streets of Madrid presented a riot of colour. From a cloudless sky the sun poured down on the flags of all nations, long strings of pennants and thousands of yards of red and yellow bunting draping the innumerable stands that had been erected on every available space beyond the pavement line. In addition, following the eastern custom brought over by the Moors, carpets, woven rugs and colourful tapestries hung from every window and balcony. On both sides, behind lines of soldiers in bright uniforms, the pavements were a solid mass of people in gala attire. Others filled the stands, every window and even the roof-tops. At intervals along the route there rose tall flagpoles surmounted by gold crowns and bearing shields with the arms of Spain and those of Princess Ena of Battenberg, for King Alfonso XIII had that day, the 31st of May, 1906, married the granddaughter of Queen Victoria.

The side streets, although nearly deserted, were little less gay; for the marriage of the young King, aged twenty, to the beautiful, golden-haired English Princess, aged nineteen, was a most popular one, and even the poorest Madrilehos had shown their joy by hanging flags and strips of carpet from their windows.

Down one such street behind the Calle Mayor several small groups of smartly-dressed ladies and gentlemen were hurrying. They had just left the church of San Jeronimo in which the wedding mass had been celebrated with great pomp and splendour, and were making their way to a special stand reserved for certain court officials and distinguished guests to witness the procession on its way back to the Palace.

In one of these groups the most striking figure was Armand, Count de Quesnoy, the thirty-one year old son of the ninth Due de Richleau. He was only a little above medium height but carried himself with the easy grace of a man who had spent most of his life hunting, dancing, fencing and soldiering. His hair was dark and slightly wavy, his forehead broad, his face oval with a rather thin but well moulded mouth, and a pointed chin that showed great determination. His nose was aquiline, his eyes grey, flecked with tiny spots of yellow; at times they could flash with piercing brilliance, and above them a pair of 'devil's eyebrows' tapered up towards his temples. At the moment his slim figure was hidden by the robes of a Knight of the Golden Fleece, and it was his membership of this illustrious Order that had secured for him a place in the church to witness the wedding ceremony.

Beside him, a hand on his arm, was his wife, Angela: a typical English beauty with big pansy-brown eyes and a milk-and-roses complexion. Her forehead was broad, her eyebrows well arched, and her fine jaw-line, square almost to the point of truculence, showed her to have a personality as determined as her husband's. On her high-piled hair she wore an enormous hat decorated with tulle and yellow roses. In spite of the heat she was wearing a dress made of satin. It was also yellow, had leg-of-mutton sleeves, almost touched the ground and was excruciatingly nipped in at the waist above an armour of whalebone corset.

She had been his first great love and he hers; but she had already been married when they met and many vicissitudes had prevented the consummation of their love until at last tragedy had broken the barrier that kept them apart, and fourteen months earlier she had become his Countess.

With them in the group that had slipped away from the church as soon as the Te Deum had been sung were Colonel Guy Wyndham and several other officers of the 16th Lancers who had formed Princess Ena's military escort on her journey to Spain. At the end of the side street, on showing their passes, the police made a way for them through the crowd into the Calle Mayor about two-thirds of the way down, where this narrow street in the heart of old Madrid widens out in a small square called the Plaza de la Villa.

There the group separated, the de Quesnoys and several others crossing the square to the stand which had been erected in front of the church of Santa Maria, while Colonel Wyndham and his officers went to a nearby house occupied by a Mr. Young, one of the secretaries at the British Embassy, who had invited them and the British Ambassador, Sir Maurice de Bunsen, to see the procession from its windows.

The stand was already three parts full with Spanish hidalgos and their ladies, and foreign notabilities, whose rank had not been high enough to secure them places in the church, and now the front rows, too, were rapidly filling up with the more exalted representatives of the aristocracy of many nations. De Quesnoy's Order of the Golden Fleece made him a Grandee of Spain; so on that account he ranked among them, but that he and his wife should have been allotted seats in the very front row he knew must be due to the influence of the King's cousin, the young Due de Vendome, who was devoted to him.

Francois de Vendome had been the instrument chosen by fate to alter the whole course of de Quesnoy's life. The Due de Richleau was by birth a Frenchman, but he had married a Russian Princess, and since he loathed the French Republican regime he had lived for many years as a voluntary exile on a large property of hers a little to the north of the Carpathians; so de Quesnoy had been born and brought up in Russia.

At the age of eighteen, in order that he might establish his right to French citizenship, he had, against the strong opposition of his father, decided to do his military service in France, and had chosen the Army as his career.

That career had opened with promise, but political differences with his superiors had resulted in his being packed off to insufferably dreary garrison duty in Madagascar. There, for the following two-and-a-half years, he had succeeded in overcoming discomfort and boredom by devoting his abundant spare time to an intensive study of the occult. Then, changes at the War Office had resulted in his being posted to Algeria. At that time France was opening up the interior of North Africa, so while there he was almost constantly on active service against the tribesmen and, as he soon showed himself to be a born cavalry leader, his promotion was rapid. Another three years and he was a Brevet Lt.-Colonel decorated with the Legion d'Honneur.

When at last recalled to France early in 1903 he had hoped to be given employment with a regiment, as the greatest ambition of his life was, in time, to command a Cavalry Division, but fate had decreed otherwise. The Republican government was riddled with corruption, and so fanatically atheist that it was purging the Army of many of its ablest officers solely because they adhered to their religion. A group of patriots had decided that the only remedy was to restore the Monarchy. Among them was an Assistant Chief of Staff named General Laveriac, and he had drawn de Quesnoy into the conspiracy.¹

The Monarchists' choice for King was the Due de Vendome, in whose veins ran the blood of Henry IV, the founder of the Bourbon dynasty. His father had married the Spanish Infanta Maria Alfon-sine, so he had been brought up in Spain but, like de Quesnoy, he insisted on going to France to do his military service. Soon after de Quesnoy's return, de Vendome was due to become an officer-cadet at St. Cyr, and Laveriac had asked the Count to take a post as

¹ See The Prisoner in the Mask.

Chief Instructor there so that he might watch over the young Prince and gradually initiate him into the plan to stage a coup d'etat for the purpose of proclaiming him as Francois III of France.

De Quesnoy had accepted this most delicate task and in due course de Vendome—an unambitious but deeply religious young man—had, from a sense of duty, consented to being placed on the Throne. But the conspiracy had been betrayed and de Vendome arrested. By sacrificing his own liberty de Quesnoy had saved the Prince from acute suffering and probably death. It was for this signal service to a member of the Spanish Royal Family that King Alfonso had made de Quesnoy a Knight of the Golden Fleece. But his career in the French Army was irretrievably ruined. He had been deprived of his commission and could no longer even set foot in France without risking imprisonment for his part in the conspiracy. It was this knowledge, that there was little hope of his ever being able to return to the land of his ancestors, and because he knew how greatly it would please Angela, that had led him at the time of their marriage to become a naturalized British citizen.

The ledge of the stand in the front row of which they sat was only just above the level of the heads of the crowd; but it was no more than three deep there because the stand projected over the pavement in front of the church and there was room for only a thin ribbon of people between the stand and the backs of the soldiers lining that part of the route. In consequence the procession itself would pass within fifteen feet of them. Midday had just chimed so it was now due to start and the street had'been cleared, but it would be the best part of an hour before, near its end, the Crown Coach entered the Calle Mayor; for the timing had been arranged to allow for the Royal couple to receive the homage of the great nobles, officials and royalties of Spain before setting out from the church. Suddenly the eager, murmuring crowd began to cheer, a solitary mounted orderly came into view, and a few yards behind him the Captain-General of Madrid.

In his magnificent uniform he made a resplendent figure, but as he passed the stand, followed by a jingling troop of cavalry that headed the procession, it was upon his horse that de Quesnoy's eyes were fixed. It was a pure white Arab, mettlesome, high-stepping and perfectly proportioned. As a fine judge of horseflesh he thought he had never seen a better mount, and he gave an inaudible sigh.

His sigh was not one of envy for the splendid animal, but of regret that he would now never lead another cavalry charge, much less command a Cavalry Division. Had the conspiracy succeeded de Vendome would, he knew, have rewarded him with one, and after leaving France he had had thoughts of joining the Army of one of the South American Republics in which, for an officer of his experience, there would have been fine prospects; but Angela's having become free to marry him had put an end to such ideas.

As the wife of a French politician she had lived for so long in Paris that the past eighteen months, during which she had been back in England among her own family and old friends, had meant positive bliss for her. He could not possibly ask her to give that up and go with him to an utterly strange life in Latin America; yet there was no other avenue by which he could satisfy his longing to resume his career as a soldier.

Fortunately, however, his father was rich and made him a very handsome allowance. That enabled him and Angela to live in considerable comfort, to enjoy the amenities of London society and to visit friends, or stay at fashionable hotels abroad. For the past fourteen months they had divided their time between such jaunts to the Continent and longish stays with her relatives, mostly at English country houses, in what really had amounted to a prolonged honeymoon. But now he was in negotiation for the lease of a pleasant house just off Berkeley Square, and had resigned himself to settling down to the sort of round that men of his class lived—the London Season, Scotland or a visit to a German spa in August, shooting in the autumn, a month or more somewhere in the Mediterranean after Christmas, hunting in the shires during early spring, then another trip abroad until Ascot, Lord's, Henley and Goodwood came round again.

At first only the thought that he would be sharing it with Angela had made bearable to him the contemplation of such an aimless existence, but early in the year another factor had arisen which now made him regard it much more cheerfully. Angela was expecting a baby in October.

For some reason, perhaps because so great a part of his bachelorhood had been spent in outposts of the French empire, or because he had not met any women other than Angela whom he had wished to marry, he had never thought of himself as a father. But now he was thrilled by the idea. He hoped that she would give him a boy to carry on the ancient title of de Richleau, but the prospect of a girl who might take after her was almost as exciting. Her pregnancy bad run a normal course and so far caused her little inconvenience; but from the moment she had told him of it he had shown the greatest concern for her, and he was a little worried at the moment that the walk from the church and the heat might have tired her unduly. To his tender, whispered inquiry she replied with a smile that she felt perfectly well, then she began to fan herself while he opened the big gilt-edged programme they had been given on reaching the stand, and read out to her the names of the regiments and personalities that were now passing within fifteen feet of them.

For over half an hour detachments of cavalry, infantry and artillery went by. Every regiment from the Home Army was represented; black and brown troops had been brought from the Spanish colonies and Berbers in the service of Spain, who loped along on their ungainly camels, from Morocco. Then came the open State landaus and the gilded coaches. In the first carriages were the English Lords and Ladies sent to attend the new Queen. Next came the Great Officers of the Spanish Royal Household, Cardinals in their scarlet and other dignitaries of the Church, then the coaches of the principal Grandees of Spain, the Dukes of Alba, Baildn, Fernan-Nufiez, Medina-Sidonia and many more. They were followed by coaches containing members of the Royal Family and many visiting royalties; in the last rode the Prince and Princess of Wales, sent to represent King Edward VII, who was happy to regard himself as the principal sponsor of this royal romance.

Among the dozen or more coaches containing Don Alfonso's relatives there was one that the de Quesnoys gave a special cheer, for in it were the Due de Vendome and his family. A few years after his father's death, his mother, the Infanta Maria Alfonsine, had married again, taking as her second husband the Conde Ruiz de Cordoba y Coralles, a member of the great banking family whose head was his elder brother, Jos6. In the coach on its front seat de Vendome was sitting between the two Condes, his stepfather and Stepuncle. Opposite, facing the horses, sat their two wives. Like all the other Spanish ladies in the procession they were wearing the national head-dress, huge combs of tortoiseshell from which were draped mantillas of the finest lace. The Infanta was in her early forties, plump, somewhat heavy-jowled and high-nosed; her sister-in-law, the Condesa Gulia, was much slimmer and it was at her that nine-tenths of the male spectators were now looking.

Although the wife of the older brother, the Condesa was much the younger of the two women, being still only in her early twenties. She was not so dark as the average Spaniard, having Titian hair and a matt-white magnolia complexion; but her eyes were black and held the slumbrous fire which is one of the greatest attractions of the typical Spanish beauty. As the coach passed the stand, those eyes sought de Quesnoy, then remained riveted upon him, but he was quite unconscious of her special interest in himself and his smiles and waves were directed at the family as a whole.

Cannon continued to thunder in the distance, and joy-bells to peal from a score of churches. The crowd had been cheering for close on an hour, yet its Olds showed no signs of hoarseness. In fact, as the coach carrying Prince George and Princess Mary of Wales passed the Court stand, a louder than ever burst of cheering thundered along from further up the street, indicating that the Crown coach must have entered the Puerta del Sol—the Piccadilly Circus of Madrid—in which thousands of people were congregated.

A moment later a huge mahogany coach emerged from under the arch of greenery and flowers that spanned the street where it entered the little square. In it were the King's mother, Queen Maria Christina, who had acted as Regent during his long minority, Queen Ena's mother, Princess Beatrice, the Infante Don Carlos and his four-year-old son, Don Alfonso Maria.

Next, in accordance with ancient custom, there came a gold-panelled coach which was empty, and known as 'The Carriage of Respect'. The coaches of the nobility had been drawn by four horses, those of the royalties by six, and now there came into view the eight beautiful Andalusian cream-coloured steeds drawing the Crown coach. It was moving very slowly and as the lead horses came level with the de Quesnoys, owing to some check to the procession in front, it was forced to come to a stop.

The shouts of ⁶ Viva el Rey! Viva la ReinaF were now deafening. On both sides of the street there was a sea of waving hats and a cascade of blossoms being thrown into the roadway where the coach would pass. The King was leaning out of its left-hand window acknowledging the roar of acclamation that was going up from the stand, and at the same time pointing out to the Queen the old church of Santa Maria that towered up behind it. To see the church better his lovely golden-haired wife, her face radiant with excitement, was leaning right across him. At that moment, from a high window in a house opposite, a big bouquet of flowers was thrown and came swishing down towards the coach.

As the bouquet landed there came a blinding flash, an explosion like a crash of thunder, and a blast that sent nearby troops and people reeling in all directions. A great cloud of black smoke billowed up, so dense that for several moments the coach was hidden in it. Angela was only one of scores of women in the stand who gave a piercing scream, but for once de Quesnoy ignored her.

The cream Andalusians, terrified by the explosion, were rearing, plunging, whinnying. They had already dragged the coach several yards forward and threatened to bolt with it. In an instant de Quesnoy had leapt over the low front of the stand, thrust his way through the panic-stricken people, and was out in the roadway. Flinging himself at the near leader he seized its nose-band, dragged down its head and brought it to a halt.

As the smoke cleared he saw that the English officers in Mr. Young's house nearby had not been less prompt to act than himself. Followed by the British Ambassador they had rushed from the house and Colonel Wyndham was the first to reach the now white-faced Queen who, with the King's arm about her, was standing in the roadway.

He saw, too, that the bomb had exploded under the off-wheel horse, shattering its legs and ripping open its belly. Had the coach not been brought to a halt at the very moment the bomb was thrown it must have been hit and blown to pieces; and, even so, had the Queen not leant right over to look out of its left-hand window she would almost certainly have been struck by several of the splinters.

The royal couple had escaped by a miracle, but the bomb had disintegrated into a hundred deadly fragments, one of them actually cutting in two the gold chain of Carlos III that the King was wearing round his neck, and the others had caused appalling havoc. The coachman had tumbled from his box and lay groaning in the road. Two soldiers lay dead near him and a dozen spectators had been killed or wounded. The Major of the Escort had been thrown from his horse and was smothered with blood, the gilded front of the coach was now dripping red with gore, smears of it showed crimson on the white satin shoes and train of the Queen. There was blood everywhere.

After the first shock she showed great bravery; putting her hand to her heart she even managed to give the horrified crowd a reassuring smile. Don Alfonso, too, displayed the personal courage for which he was already renowned. With perfect calmness he immediately took command of the situation. As his brother-in-law, Don Carlos, came running up he told him to go back to his coach at once and assure the two mothers in it that the Queen and himself were unharmed. Then, as the Crown coach could no longer be used, he kissed his wife and led her forward, shielding her as far as he could from the sight of the dead and wounded, to the empty Coach of Respect, so that they could resume their drive to the Palace in it. At the sight of his calmness the crowd temporarily stunned and murmuring angrily, suddenly broke into renewed cheers, mingled with cries of blessing and thanksgiving.

Having handed the Queen into the coach, the King ordered that it should continue its journey at a slow pace, and got in beside her. De Quesnoy waited until it moved off, then returned to the stand.

As he mounted the steps at its end he saw that a little knot of people were standing bunched together at the place where he and Angela had been sitting. A moment later he joined them. They were facing inward looking down at something and talking in hushed voices. He heard a man among them say, 'And such a beautiful woman, too.' Then, peering between their heads he saw what it was at which they were looking. It was Angela.

She was lying back limply in her own seat against the tier of seats above. Her mouth hung open and the brim of her big hat with the yellow roses now stobd up at a grotesque angle owing to the back of it being crushed beneath her head; but someone had reverently crossed her hands upon her breast. A little lower down there was a small jagged hole in her satin dress, a broken strip of corset whalebone protruded from it and its edges were stained with blood.

Transfixed by horror de Quesnoy stared down at her. He had seen death too often not to recognize it on sight. In vain he strove to persuade himself that he was the victim of some ghastly nightmare out of which he would soon struggle with a gasp of relief. The death and bloodshed in the street from which he had just come made the truth only too plain. Barely a second before he jumped from the stand a fragment of the accursed bomb had hit Angela. The thing he stared down on with the gaping mouth in which the tongue lolled back was not his beautiful Angela. She was gone, and with her had gone the child that was to bring them so much joy.

A voice near him said in English, 'Count, I cannot find words to express . . . I, er . . . was seated just behind her. At least she can have felt little pain. As you leapt into the street she gave one cry and fell back. It was all over almost instantly.'

Turning his head slowly de Quesnoy recognized Sir Derek Keppel, who had come over in the suite of the Prince of Wales. Another voice said in Spanish, 'It was so, Senor Conde. I, too, witnessed this tragedy from close by. Look, there are ambulances now arriving in the street. Let us summon one of them to take the poor lady to the hospital.'

'No.' De Quesnoy found his voice suddenly, although it came only as a hoarse croak. 'I'll not have my wife's body exposed in a public morgue.' Stepping forward he picked Angela up in his arms, but then gazed round with haggard eyes, apparently uncertain what to do next.

Another Spaniard spoke. 'Permit me to recall myself to you, Senor Conde. I am the Marques de la Vera. My carriage is waiting behind the church. Allow me to place it at your disposal.'

Glancing up, de Quesnoy recognized a short, fair-haired man to whom he had been introduced at a reception a few nights earlier. With an effort he blurted out, Thank you, Marques. Please . . . show me the way to it.'

With murmurs of sympathy the little crowd parted. The Marques led the way, first up the stand then down a staircase behind it, through a narrow alley that ran along one side of the church and so into Madrid's oldest and most picturesque square, the Plaza Mayor. Parallel with the shady colonnades on all its four sides private carriages were lined up waiting for their owners. The Marques gestured towards one and cast an anxious glance at de Quesnoy, fearing that he must succumb under the weight of his burden. But the Count's slim figure was deceptive; his muscles were iron hard and he was immensely strong. At the moment he was not even conscious of the weight of the body he was carrying but, still half dazed, was saying bitterly to himself over and over again, 'Never again. Never again.'

When they reached the carriage and he had laid Angela on the front seat the Marquds ordered the hood to be put up and said, 'You are staying with the Cordobas, are you not?'

On de Quesnoy's nodding, he ordered his coachman to drive to the Palacio de Cordoba. The Count, Sir Derek and the Marques settled themselves on the back seat. The little group that had accompanied them, several of whom were openly crying, bowed reverently and crossed themselves; then the carriage pulled out of the line and drove off.

Slowly, for now that the crowds had broken up even the back streets were filled with strolling people, they circumvented the Puerta del Sol and the Calle Alcala, crossed the wide Paseo del Prado and reached a narrow street running parallel to the Calle Serrano. In it was situated the early eighteenth-century Palacio with its long rows of windows from each of which bellied out an ornamental iron grille. Behind the Palace was a spacious garden and beyond that a more modern block facing on the Recoletos, just below the Plaza de Colon, in which the Coralles banking business was conducted.

The Palace was almost deserted, as the two Condes with their wives and de Vendome had been bidden to the State luncheon at the Royal Palace and the servants had been given leave to go out to see the procession. The elderly janitor, who was still in his box, roused from his siesta as de Quesnoy passed him carrying Angela's body; but as he was not called on he assumed that she had only fainted from the heat, and promptly returned to his basket chair.

De Quesnoy, still with his mind repeating, 'Never again. Never again,' had automatically murmured his thanks to the Marques and Sir Derek, and now he carried Angela across the hall of the Palace, up one side of the great horseshoe staircase, through the lofty picture gallery and up further flights of stairs to the suite they had been given. In its bedroom he laid her gently on the big four-poster bed, then sank down in a chair beside it, burying his head in his hands.

Meanwhile at the Royal Palace the earlier arrivals knew nothing of the attempted assassination until later ones, who had been within hearing of the bomb's explosion, told them about it.

When the Sovereigns made their appearance everyone crowded round to express sympathy for them in their ordeal, and relief at their escape. The King waved the episode aside as the act of a madman and declared that the extraordinary enthusiasm shown by the crowds all along the route was ample proof of the loyalty of the Spanish people, and that they had taken his beautiful Queen to their hearts. He then decreed that the celebrations should continue as if nothing unusual had happened and, soon after one o'clock, he and his guests went in to lunch.

The Cordobas did not get back to their Palacio until well on in the afternoon, then, after a belated siesta, they had to dress and go again to the Royal Palace to attend the State banquet. The Infanta, her husband and de Vendome went by right of her position as the King's aunt; Conde Jose and his wife because - apart from the Coralles' millions, which had been brought into the family two generations earlier, making him one of the most powerful men in Spain - he was the head of one of its most ancient families and, as the de Cordoba, entitled to address the King as cousin.

Besides the de Quesnoys they had a number of other guests, mostly relatives who lived in the country, staying for the celebrations. These dined in the Palacio then went out to see the fireworks and illuminations. By midnight, tired but cheerful, they returned and congregated in the great drawing-room, from the walls of which tall paintings of past Cordobas by Velasquez, Zurbaran and Goya looked down. They were joined soon afterwards by their host and hostess, the Infanta, Conde Ruiz and Frangois de Vendome, and settled down with nightcaps to talk over the events of the day.

De Vendome was helping himself to a brandy and soda from the table of drinks near the door, when his eye was caught by the Major-domo who was standing just outside it. Setting down his glass he stepped over to the man and asked,

⁴ What is it, Eduardo?'

The elderly white-haired servant nervously fingered the silver chain of office that he wore round his neck, and replied, 'Your Highness, I am worried about the Count and Countess de Quesnoy. They did not appear at dinner and none of the staff I have questioned has seen them since they went out this morning. Yet they are upstairs in their suite. Agusto, the footman who is valeting the Count, and the maid who is attending on the Countess, went up to lay out Their Excellencies' evening things. The dressing-room was empty and the bedroom door locked. On their knocking the Count called to them in an angry voice to go away and not come back. Fearing they must be unwell, or perhaps overtired, I went up myself after dinner and offered to bring them something up on a tray, but with the same result. What can possibly have caused them to refuse food and lock themselves in? I am afraid there must be something wrong.'

The Prince's young face showed swift concern, and he said, 'I fear you are right, Eduardo. I'll go up and find out.'

Ten minutes later he re-entered the drawing-room, now white to the lips and with his hands trembling slightly. His mother was the first to catch sight of him, and she exclaimed in a loud voice:

'Whatever is the matter, Francois? You look as if you had seen a ghost.'

He stared back into her plump face with its fleshy Bourbon nose, then gazed helplessly round at the others. The two Condes, resplendent in satin knee-breeches and full court dress, were standing together: Ruiz was slim and elegant with a pale face and dark side whiskers; Jose was more strongly built and had a ruddier complexion partially hidden by a flowing moustache and black spade-shaped beard. It was the latter who broke the sudden hush that had fallen, by saying with, for him, unaccustomed sharpness:

'Come, boy! Don't stand there gaping. Tell us what has upset you.'

'It's Angela!' de Vendome gasped. 'She was struck by a fragment of the bomb and ... and killed. De Quesnoy brought her back here and carried her up to their room. He's been sitting beside her body all these hours. He . .. he's utterly distraught. I fear for his reason.'

'Dios! but this is terrible,' cried the Infanta. 'We must. .

The rest of her sentence was drowned in a chorus of exclamations of horror. De Vendome had burst into tears. Every face in the room showed shock and distress, with one exception. The beautiful Condesa Gulia was seated in a low chair a little behind the others; her magnificent eyes had narrowed slightly and she was smiling.

One of her guests - an aunt of her husband - happened to turn and catch sight of her expression. Giving her a puzzled look, the old the aftermath

lady said tartly, There is nothing to smile at in this, Gulia. To weep for the poor Count would be more fitting.'

Instantly the smile on Gulia's full red lips disappeared, and with a surprised lift of her fine eyebrows she replied, 'Did I appear to be smiling, Dona Ines? I certainly was not. It must have been the shadow thrown on my face by those flowers between us and the lamp standard that deceived you. No one could be more upset by this tragedy than myself.'

But she was lying. She had neither particularly liked nor disliked Angela as a person, and, as she was not an evil woman, she would not have wished her dead. But she was an intensely passionate one and, quite unconsciously, de Quesnoy had aroused in her an emotion that went to the roots of her being.

She had been thinking, Tt was because of his devotion to his wife that he would not even look at me. And now she is dead . . . dead. It will take him time to get over it, but when he has I'll make him look at me with seeing eyes. He'll become my lover then. What bliss that would be. For that I'll risk anything - even Jose's learning about us and throwing me out into the street.'

2

The Aftermath

The state of mute despair in which Frangois de Vendome had found de Quesnoy had certainly given the young man grounds to fear for his friend's reason, but, in fact, the Count was much too well-balanced for even so terrible a shock to affect him permanently. Nevertheless it was not until several days after Angela's funeral that his manner again became anything approaching normal.

During them he spent most of his time in a small sitting-room that de Cordoba had offered him as a sanctum; and, in order not to depress the other guests, had asked to have his meals served there. De Vendome had brought Father Tomaso, the Cordobas' chaplain, to see him and urge upon him the consolations of religion, but he had politely declined them on the grounds that, although nominally a Catholic, he had long since ceased to be a practising one. However, Angela had become a convert to the Roman faith before her first Carriage, so he willingly accepted the good Father's offer to make arrangements for her burial.

21

The bomb had killed thirty people and wounded over a hundred. On the afternoon of his wedding the King had visited the injured in hospital and he had then ordered that a State funeral should be given to the dead. The majority were conveyed to the cemetery on nine enormous hearses through weeping crowds, but a few of the bereaved families preferred to arrange private interments, among them that of the Marquesa de Tolosa. She had been seated on the second floor balcony of the house from which the bomb had been thrown and, as her family were friends of the Cordobas, Father Tomaso arranged that a Requiem Mass should be celebrated for the Marquesa and Angela together.

While de Quesnoy remained mainly in seclusion he found his greatest solace in his host, who devoted much time to sitting with him. The backgrounds of the two men could hardly have been less similar. De Quesnoy's had been an open-air life of travel, soldiering, war and sport, whereas the Conde had never been outside Europe, neither hunted, fished nor shot, and spent most of his time immersed in his banking activities, his only outdoor interest being as a naturalist with the finest collection of butterflies in the country. Yet they had certain things in common. Both of them came from ancient families and were passionately convinced Monarchists; both were well read and particularly interested in history and ancient religions; and both had a wide knowledge of international relations. So, after a day or two, by coaxing de Quesnoy to discuss these subjects, the Conde found that for a while he could take his guest's mind off his bereavement.

At the end of the week's wedding celebrations the Cordobas' other guests left for their homes and de Quesnoy raised the matter of his own departure; but, as he had not been able to bring himself to make any plans, the Conde insisted that he should stay on, at least for another week or two, and he gladly accepted.

It was no small part of his affliction that with the loss of Angela he had become completely rootless. When writing to break the news of her death to her parents he had also written to his agents instructing them to break off negotiations for the house near Berkeley Square as, now that he had become a widower, it would have been much too large for him. Moreover, although his relations with her family were pleasant enough and he knew they would willingly continue to accept him as a member of it, he found most of them distinctly dull, and without her to make it tolerable he felt most averse to condemning himself to the pointless social life they led.

Thirteen years had elapsed since he had left his boyhood home in Russia, and during them he had been back there only once. It lay in the heart of Central Europe, on the River Pruth near the little town of Jvanets and the best part of 400 miles from the nearest cities: Kiev, Budapest, Bucharest and Odessa; so the only diversion it could offer was hunting. He knew that his father would be pleased to see him, so he might go there for a visit of a month or two, but to settle down there with only the affairs of the estate to occupy him would soon bore him to distraction.

Vienna was the city that he loved best, and he could be sure of a welcome there from many old friends with whom in the past he had painted the town red. But at* this juncture the thought of nights spent with Wine, Women and Song appealed to him even less than the more staid social life of London. There remained the possibility of reviving his plan for offering his services as a soldier to one of the South American Republics; but as yet he still felt quite incapable of making any definite decision about his future.

Apart from an intolerable ache caused by the finality of his loss of Angela, only one emotion stirred him repeatedly; it was a fierce craving to see justice done on those responsible for her death. Daily he spoke of this to the Conde, who kept him informed about the progress the police were making in their investigations.

The name of the assassin was Mateo Morral and he was on the police files as an agitator, but had done nothing before throwing the bomb which might have justified his arrest. He had come from Barcelona and was a Catalan of superior type; his bearded face had a mild expression, his hands were well cared-for and he had a general air of middle-class respectability.

The old house from which the bomb had been thrown had been divided up into apartments, and it was Morral's unsuspicious appearance which had enabled him to rent a room on its third floor without anyone suspecting that he might be an anarchist. But when the room had been broken into, it had been found that, in addition to chemicals left over from compounding the explosives for the bomb, there were others that indicated he had been treating himself for syphilis.

Immediately he had thrown the bomb he had rushed downstairs, mingled with the crowd in the street, and succeeded in reaching the office of a Don Jos6 Nakens, who was the editor-proprietor of a Republican weekly journal called The Mutiny. Nakens had provided him with a change of clothes and found him shelter for the night. Ke had then managed to escape unrecognized from the city and gone into temporary hiding with another associate at a village on the road to the Escorial. Next day he attempted to board a train at Torrejon de Ardoz, but by then his description had been circulated throughout the length and breadth of Spain, and at the station he was identified. A rural guard who was present had tried to arrest him but Morral had shot him dead with a Browning pistol, and had then used the pistol to kill himself.

Further investigations disclosed that had the anarchists' original plot matured it would have had infinitely more hideous results. A gallery in the church in which the wedding Mass was to be celebrated had been allotted to the Press. With forged credentials Morral had succeeded in obtaining a pass to it and had intended to throw his bomb down into the body of the church at the moment when the King and Queen received the Sacrament. Had he done so the two hundred fragments into which it splintered must have killed not only them but half-a-hundred other royalties, priests and officials grouped about the high altar.

By a dispensation attributable only to God this ghastly slaughter had been prevented by an eleventh-hour alteration of arrangements. It had been suggested that little four-year-old Don Alfonso Maria -who as the son of the King's deceased sister was Heir Apparent to the Throne - was too young to be expected to sit quietly through the long ceremony in the body of the church; so it was decided that he and his attendants should sit in the gallery with his cousin, the fourteen-year-old Princess Pilar, next to him to keep him from becoming restless. The Press then having been relegated to a position that would have made the aiming of the bomb more chancy, Morral had elected to hurl it from his room in the Calle Mayor.

It was on learning this that de Quesnoy burst out:

'What infamy! The imagination reels at the thought of such a massacre. It seems incredible that any human being, let alone an educated man like this Morral, could become so obsessed with vindictiveness against the ruling caste as to plan the murder of men, women and even innocent children indiscriminately. Yet one cannot doubt that he would have turned the church into a shambles had he had the chance. Hell is too good for such Devil's spawn.'

The disease from which he was suffering had probably affected his brain,' suggested the Conde.

'Perhaps; but what of the others who aided and abetted him - the editor who got him out of Madrid, and the man who hid him in the country? Besides, these anarchists are becoming an ever-increasing menace to established order. In Russia during the past twenty years nihilists have murdered scores of Provincial Governors and other high officials. In France, Italy or Belgium every few months they commit some appalling outrage. Look, too, at the toll they are taking of Europe's rulers. In '94 one of them assassinated President Carnot in Lyons, in '98 another stabbed to death the Empress

Elizabeth of Austria, and in 1900 yet another killed King Humbert of Italy. A dozen other rulers have been wounded or had narrow escapes. Not one of them today can wake up in the morning without the thought that he may be murdered before evening.'

The Conde nodded. 'It is not the first attempt on Don Alfonso, either. Just a year ago a bomb was thrown during his State visit to Paris, while he was driving through the streets with President Loubet. He gave fine proof of his courage on that occasion by leaning out of the carriage window and crying, " Vive la France/" Then he turned with a smile to the President and asked, "Was that intended for you or for me?" The President rose to the occasion and replied, "This is the land of equality, Sir." But you are right. These anarchists are a hideous menace. Among their victims that you omitted to name was President McKinley of the United States. His assassination a few years ago shows that their organization must be world-wide.'

'Exactly; and they cannot all be mad, at least not in the accepted sense which would make them medically certifiable.'

'No, they are fanatics; mostly, I think, embittered men who have brooded upon imagined wrongs so long that they have lost all moral sense and are prepared to go to any lengths to avenge themselves upon society.'

'They are responsible for their actions!' de Quesnoy exclaimed harshly. 'And nothing - nothing - can excuse this deliberate treacherous warfare they are waging on unsuspecting people. They should be stamped out like poisonous reptiles. I only wish to God that I knew a way to set about it.'

T understand how you must feel, and you are right,' the Conde agreed. 'But you may be sure that the police are doing everything possible to that end. Regarding yourself, though, Count; permit me to remark that now eight days have elapsed since your personal tragedy I do feel that you should make an effort to cease brooding upon it. Will you not try to put these villainous anarchists out of your mind and engage it with new interests?'

De Quesnoy sighed. 'I suppose that I ought to, and since you wish it I will make the endeavour; but I fear it will prove a hard task. You see at the moment there is nothing in which I feel I could interest myself.'

'You are interested in art and history.'

*I am, but I have visited the Prado many times and have already seen most of the sights of Madrid.'

'Of course; but I gather you have never been in Southern Spain. Andalusia is the loveliest part of my country and in its cities are some of the most beautiful buildings in the world. The Moors left us finer examples of their great civilization than any that are to be found in North Africa.'

'Were I in a normal state I am sure I should find them fascinating, but at the moment I really could not face a sightseeing tour on my own.'

The Conde smiled. 'My dear friend, we should not dream of allowing you to do so. I have already discussed this proposal with Francois and he was delighted at the idea of acting as your companion and guide.'

'How good of you both;' de Quesnoy raised a faint smile in reply. 'In that case it would be churlish of me to refuse.'

That evening de Vendome came up to discuss the trip with him and the places he proposed they should visit. His plan was to go south to Cordoba, across to Seville, then through Jerez de la Fron-tera to Cadiz; from there down to Algeciras, inland to Ronda, across to the Mediterranean coast at Malaga, inland again to Granada, return to the sea at Alicante, up the coast to Valencia, and so back to Madrid, stopping a few nights or longer, if they felt so inclined, in each of these places.

'But such a tour could take up to two months,' de Quesnoy protested.

'What matter,' the young Prince shrugged. 'Neither of us has any duties to claim him; and among these places there are several that I have never been to myself. Like you, after becoming an exile from France I decided to change my nationality, and I am now a Spaniard. So the more I can see of what is now always to be my country, the better.'

De Quesnoy shook his head. 'That is a plausible excuse, dear boy, and it is charming of you to make it; but you will have many opportunities to visit these places in more cheerful company than mine. I really cannot allow you to saddle yourself with me for more than a couple of weeks. However hard I try not to show my grief it is certain that I shall be moody and preoccupied for a good part of the time.'

'I don't mean to give you the chance to be. We are going by road in my new automobile and whenever you show signs of depression I intend to make you drive it.'

'What!' exclaimed the Count, sitting up with a jerk. 'But I've never driven an automobile in my life. I hate the damn' smelly unreliable things.'

The Prince laughed. 'Being, like yourself, a lover of horses, until quite recently I shared your prejudice. But soon everyone will be driving one; so you'll have to learn sooner or later, and this is an excellent opportunity. The new models don't break down like the early types, either; at least not every few miles, and having to keep your mind on the machine will keep it off everything else.'

Next day, the 9th of June, they set out. De Vendome's car was a six-cylinder Hispano Suiza and capable of doing sixty miles an hour on the flat; but horses were still apt to shy at cars, so their progress was slow through the city and suburbs of Madrid, and it was not until tea-time that they reached the little town of Aranjuez, which is in miniature to Ma'drid what Versailles is to Paris. The Prince's mother had a villa there so it was one of his homes, in which he had his own suite. They garaged the car there and he ordered beds to be made up, but only caretaker servants were in residence so they dined at a restaurant on the south bank of the Tagus. The river there ran through woods that formed a charming setting, and for dessert they had a great bowl of freshly-picked strawberries.

On the 10th the road, curving south-eastward across the plain of New Castile, proved a dreary stretch and was almost deserted, but it could hardly have been bettered as a place for the Prince to give de Quesnoy his first lessons in driving. By nightfall they reached Manzanares, and on the 11th covered another long, flat stretch until late afternoon when they entered more picturesque hilly country. So far the surface of the roads had been far from good, but now to the ruts and potholes were added sudden twists and unexpected gullies that could be negotiated well enough by muleteers and ox carts, but presented most unpleasant traps for motorists. The high-sprung chassis with its narrow tyres bucked alarmingly from side to side and it took all de Vendomes's newly acquired skill to get them that night to Linares. Their last lap to Cordoba ran through the Sierra Morena and for most of the way followed the course of the Guadalquivir. The mountain scenery was magnificent, but it proved a gruelling drive and they were both heartily glad to reach the white city from which at one time a Caliph had ruled all Spain.

In its oldest part lay the ancestral home of the Condes de Cordoba, a rambling two-storey house with airy, sparsely-furnished rooms built round three carefully tended gardens. Jasmin, bougainvillaea and climbing geraniums covered their walls, the fronds of tall palms rustled high above, orange, lemon and loquat trees were enclosed by low-clipped hedges, there were roses in great profusion with many other flowers and fountains that tinkled faintly into lily pools. It was typical of several such Casas that de Quesnoy was to see in the next ten days.

They spent three days there while de Vendome took his guest to see the Cathedral, once a magnificent Mosque - with its nineteen aisles of Moorish arches and amazing labyrinth of nearly a thousand columns made from different coloured marbles - several fine Casas and Renaissance churches, the statue of the Grand Captain, Gonzalo Gonzalez - upon the bronze charger and body of which a white marble head sits so incongruously - and the thousand-year-old Synagogue in the narrow maze-like streets of the old Jewish quarter.

On the 16th they did the eighty-seven miles to Seville, the most fascinating of all the Spanish cities, and there they remained five days. De Quesnoy was impressed with the Cathedral, which he thought even finer than that at Toledo, and intrigued by the amazing collection of bejewelled chalices and reliquaries in its treasury. The Alcazar Palace, with its perfectly proportioned halls and courts of Moorish stonework carved to appear as delicate as lace, walls of tiles patterned by time to the most roseate hues and lovely gardens in which grew a profusion of jacarandas, oleanders and rare flowering shrubs, all delighted him so much that he paid it three visits. But by the end of five days he was surfeited with the sight of Baroque altars, charming patios glimpsed through iron grilles, Spanish old masters, Moorish fountains and the endless fine tapestries that graced the walls of the big private Casas.

Sensing his boredom de Vendome suggested that they should push on to Jerez, so on the 22nd they took the road south through a smiling countryside of rolling downs across which well-husbanded plantations of olive trees alternated with fields of corn. While in Seville they had occupied a private suite in the palatial Alfonso XII Hotel, and de Vendome had tactfully declined invitations from the Albas and other of his acquaintances who lived in the city, because he knew that de Quesnoy was still averse to going into society. But he had never before been to Jerez, and if they were to see anything of the wine industry, of which that charming little town is the centre, there was no escape from accepting the hospitality of the Sherry Barons.

For two days Williams, Domeques and Gonzalez in turn initiated them into the mysteries: took them to see vineyards and presses and over vast Bodegas in which were stacked tens of thousands of casks of sherry. As a lover of fine wine de Quesnoy enjoyed sampling the rare Manzanillas, Amontillados, and very old rich Olorosos, and he seemed at last a little more like his normal self. But when de Ven-ddme suggested going on to Cadiz he shook his head.

'No, Francois. You must forgive me. I enjoyed Cordoba and

Seville, but for the present I could not face another church or picture gallery. I really think that we should return to Madrid and that I should take a definite decision on how to employ myself in the future.'

The younger man's face fell, then after a moment he said, 'All right; let's cut out Cadiz and go straight down to Algeciras. We can bathe there and could hire a boat to do some sailing, if you like. That would make a change for you, and you could think out what you mean to do more pleasantly while lounging on a beach than in the stifling heat that by now must be making Madrid almost unbearable.'

It was a sensible suggestion, so de Quesnoy agreed. Next morning they drove southward, meeting again on the road many little groups consisting of heavily-laden donkeys and, jogging along on mules, bronze-faced men in flat-crowned hats and sloe-eyed women wearing colourful skirts and scarves typical of Andalusia.

At Algeciras they stayed at the Reina Cristina, which stands on high ground surrounded by a pleasant garden, and looks out across the blue bay to the Rock of Gibraltar. De Quesnoy had never cared much for sailing so they did not hire a boat, but each morning they took a picnic lunch and drove some five miles to a deserted bay where they spent most of the day, either in the water or baking themselves brown on the golden sands.

Nearly all the other guests at the hotel were English, and after dinner the string band played all the hits from the more recent Gaiety shows, but, after a few evenings of sitting in the Palm Court, de Quesnoy again dropped into long periods of moody silence. On their fourth night there, in a new effort to distract him from his thoughts, de Vendome suggested a visit to the Casino, and they went out to have what they intended to be a mild gamble.

In de Quesnoy's case it proved far from that. He was generous by nature and rich enough to lose a considerable sum without worry, but he was careful about money, so would not normally have risked more than about twenty pounds. But his mind was not on the game, so he made his bets with indifference and several times Banco'd' indiscriminately. To everyone's surprise he won again and again, and after an hour's play he suddenly realized that he had a big pile of high denomination chips in front of him. Seeing that his luck was in he began to plunge, and his luck did not desert him. When they left at three o'clock in the morning he had won nearly ^Seven hundred pounds.

Next morning when they met in their private sitting-room for breakfast de Vendome congratulated him again on his big win. ^Wl*h a twisted smile he said,

'Lucky at cards, unlucky in love. I'd give every penny of it for one half-hour with Angela. But you and your uncle were right. I've got to forget her and make a new life for myself. I shall always remember your kindness to me, Francois, in taking me on this trip. It has helped a lot, but more sightseeing in Malaga, Granada and the other places won't get me anywhere. From today I mean to put the past behind me and concentrate on re-making my career. If you have no objection we will pack this morning and start back for Madrid. Then, as soon as possible, I mean to sail for South America.'

The young Prince nodded. 'I understand; just as you wish. You are right, of course, to take up soldiering again. It's in your blood, and with the wars and revolutions that are always going on out there you will have no difficulty in obtaining a senior rank in the army of one of the Republics.'

But Fate had other plans for de Quesnoy. When the post arrived there was a letter for him from de Cordoba. A passage in it ran:

Frangois wrote to me from Seville that although you were well, and as cheerful as could be expected in the circumstances, he felt sure that our plan to distract your mind by a tour of Southern Spain was doomed to failure, and that you would not fully recover until you had something definite to occupy it.

Yesterday I spoke of the matter to Don Alfonso. He is greatly concerned for you and he has in mind a mission which he believes may appeal to you. In consequence, S. M. el Rey has commanded me to request you to wait upon him with as little delay as possible at his Palace at Aranjuez, where he is now residing.

3

A Dangerous Mission

De quesnoy had refused to interest himself in the oily mysteries of the Hispano Suiza's engine, but had soon mastered the art of driving the machine. His long-acquired feel for the mouths of horses stood him in good stead when taking the wheel, and every day for the past three weeks he had spent an hour or more at it; so, now that he could take turns with de Vendome in driving, they hoped to do the journey back to Aranjuez in four days.

In that, luck was against them. Between Linares and Valdepenas they had their first breakdown. Fortunately it occurred within a few miles of the latter place and they were able to hire a team of mules that towed the car into it in something under two hours. But as yet this old market town had no garage and it was only after a prolonged struggle with a telephone system still in its teething stage that the Prince succeeded in getting through to Madrid and arranging for a spare part to be sent off by passenger train that evening. In consequence it was not until July the 3rd that they arrived in Aranjuez.

For the best part of two hundred years the Spanish Royal Family had made a practice of spending some of the hottest months there instead of remaining to swelter in Madrid, and the Infanta Maria Alfonsine had been given a life tenancy of the villa in the Royal Domain, in which they had slept on their outward journey. She and her husband, the Conde Ruiz, were now installed there, and at this time of the year it was also home to de Vendome; so they drove straight to it.

The villa was, in fact, a miniature palace, playing the rdle that Le Petit Trianon played to Versailles. In the past, Spanish Kings had often kept their mistresses there, but under the Regency of Queen Maria Cristina it had been given a new respectability. It faced on to a pretty little courtyard, was surrounded by woods and contained much beautiful furniture, including a remarkable collection of clocks.

Soon after their arrival a message was sent to the Palace asking when it would be convenient for de Quesnoy to wait upon the King. A reply in Don Alfonso's own hand was delivered that evening. In it he said he thought it preferable that the Count should not come to the Palace; so he would ride over to the villa the following morning.

At eleven o'clock, a fine boyish figure unattended except for a groom, he clattered into the courtyard. Having kissed his aunt and given vigorous handshakes to Conde Ruiz, the Prince and the Count, who had assembled to receive him, with a light, quick step he led the way up to the drawing-room. Refreshments had been set out there and while they drank a glass of champagne he asked de Vendome and de Quesnoy about their journey; then, after ten minutes, he said to the Infanta:

'Aunt, I have a private matter to discuss with M. le Comte de Quesnoy. You will, I am sure, allow us to make use of your drawing-room.'

E>e Quesnoy had already met the King a score of times - in England with the Londonderrys and at Eaton Hall, where he had stayed as a guest of the Duke and Duchess of Westminster while courting Queen Ena; in Madrid, when installed as a Knight of the Golden Fleece, at numerous functions there and he had played polo with him - but when the King stood up to acknowledge his aunt's curtsey, as the others smilingly withdrew, the Count could not help being again impressed that one so young should already have acquired such a regal presence.

He was only twenty and looked still younger, but he held himself splendidly upright and this, coupled with his very slender figure, made him appear taller than his medium height. His hair and eyes were dark, his thin face, still cleanshaven, was bronzed, his every movement had springiness and verve, and his mobile mouth broke into frequent smiles. He was wearing a white stock, a long waistcoat, a loose coat and beautifully-cut riding breeches, and his long legs were encased in top-boots polished to the brightness of a mirror.

With amusement and respect the Count recalled hearing about the shock he had given to his ministers when, at the age of sixteen, he had assumed power as a Sovereign. To the surprise and dismay of those elderly gentlemen, after the long and tiring ceremony of taking the oath to observe the Constitution he had declared that he would immediately hold his first Cabinet meeting. At it he had vigorously opposed certain changes that it was planned to make in the army, then laid it down in no uncertain terms that now he was of age the Cabinet's power to bestow rewards was revoked, and that henceforth he alone would decide who was to receive honours and decorations.

When the others had left the room he said at once to de Quesnoy, 'Count, after the tragedy that occurred on the day of my wedding I wrote to you expressing my sympathy in your great loss. I wish to assure you now that my letter was no mere formal condolence. Both the Queen and I felt most deeply for you.'

'Your Majesty is very gracious to concern yourself . . .' murmured the Count.

'But,' the King brushed aside the acknowledgement and hurried on, 'it would be another tragedy if a man of your abilities allowed his grief to turn him into a misanthrope; and that, I was distressed to learn from de Cordoba, there seems some danger of your doing.'

De Quesnoy nodded. 'It is true, Sir. During the past five weeks I've been no fit companion for anyone. But when your summons reached me in Algeciras I had just decided to go to South America and take up soldiering again. A break with the past and new activities will, I hope, in time restore my zest for life.'

'It would be some months at least before you could get there and take up responsibilities weighty enough to distract your mind, whereas I could offer you immediate employment; although I must add that it would be of a very unorthodox nature for a gentleman.'

'Even so, I'd be interested to hear your idea, Sir.'

'De Cordoba also told me that on several occasions you had lamented the fact that there was no way in which you could help to stamp out these accursed anarchists.'

'Nothing, Sir, would give me greater satisfaction.'

'Well, I can give you the chafice. But it would entail your assuming a new identity and living for a while in considerable discomfort.'

'From that, I assume your Majesty is suggesting that I should undertake to spy upon these people in collaboration with your police?'

'Spy upon them, yes; but without official assistance of any kind -other than that which I can give you. The very essence of my proposal lies in your having no connection with the police.'

The Count raised his 'devil's eyebrows'. 'I must confess, Sir, I fail to understand. I have no experience in such matters and . . .'

'Oh yes you have. Frangois told me how, after your secret return to Paris, you passed yourself off as a Russian revolutionary, ferreted out the secrets of the Masons, and provided the material that brought about the fall of the Government of that atheist Emile Combes.'

'True;' de Quesnoy gave a faint smile. 'I meant only that I know nothing whatever about Spanish anarchists, and unless your secret police collaborate with me . . .'

'Have I not made myself clear?' the King cut in, a shade impatiently. 'If you agree to undertake this venture I wish you to work entirely independently. I will, of course, furnish you with a certain amount of data with which to begin your investigation, but I intend that the police should be kept in ignorance of your activities.'

T accept what you say, Sir, but permit me to remark that I fail to see what you can possibly hope to gain by keeping me in a watertight compartment. It stands to reason that my chances of success would be far greater if I were to have the help of the department of your police that specializes in following up the activities of anarchists.'

'Ha!' exclaimed the King. 'That is just where you are wrong. But since you are a foreigner it is not surprising that you should be puzzled by my attitude. The great majority of my people would be, too, for very few of them have sufficient knowledge of what goes °n behind the scenes to realize the difficulties of my situation.'

After a moment's pause, he continued, 'To accept this mission will be to court considerable danger, Count; so it is only right that I should disclose to you in confidence my reasons for distrusting my own police. That means going back a long way. I assume that, as an educated man, you know the main outlines of Spanish history; but even at the risk of boring you I must recall some of the events of the past in order to make clear to you the effect they have had on the present.'

Standing up, the King began to pace up and down while reeling off facts and dates that had been familiar to him from his earliest boyhood. 'In the past hundred years the only period in which the Spanish people have enjoyed peace and contentment under a King was the ten years' reign of my father, Don Alfonso XII of blessed memory. I said "under a King", mark you; that is important.

'Let us go back to the era of Napoleon. Charles IV was then King of Spain. He was a weak and foolish man. It is common knowledge that from the time of the French Revolution Queen Maria Louisa's lover, the upstart Godoy, was the real ruler of the country. So weak was the King that his elder son, Ferdinand, conspired to force his abdication, and more or less succeeded. That was in 1808 and Napoleon took advantage of their quarrel to intervene. Like the wily blackguard he was, he pretended to give both his support, tricked them both into coming to France to confer with him, then compelled both to abdicate and put his brother, Joseph Bonaparte, on the throne.

'Joseph proved a much better King than might have been expected. He did his best for the Spanish people and eventually quarrelled with his brother through placing their interests before those of France. But his reign was a terrible period for Spain, because the country became for years the battleground between the French and the Duke of Wellington aided by the Spanish patriots who had risen against their conquerors. You know the end. One after the other Napoleon's Marshals were defeated and by 1814 the French had been driven from the country.

'By then King Charles was dead; so it was Ferdinand who returned from exile to mount the throne. But meanwhile in 1812 the Cortes had met in Cadiz and given Spain a new Constitution. Abroad there seems to be a myth that Spanish sovereigns are absolute; but that is far from being the case. From mediaeval times there have always been Parliaments here that have to some extent restricted the powers of the monarchy. But the Constitution of 1812 went much further than any preceding one, because it was made by men who had been influenced by the democratic principles that emerged from the

French Revolution. That Constitution, with only slight modifications, is still in force and binding upon Spanish sovereigns today. Under it no decree that I may issue is valid unless it is countersigned by one of my Ministers.

'However, Ferdinand VII accepted and swore to observe it. He did nothing of the kind, and proved the worst type of autocrat. You must have seen his portrait by Goya many times. It would be hard to find a more cunning, shifty face, and that was the nature of the man. He had no sooner assumed power than he arrested all the leading Liberals, threw them into prison and confiscated their property. That was the root from which our worst trouble springs. It divided the Spanish people into two camps: those who supported the monarchy - they were in the majority, because, even under bad rulers, Spain has always been monarchist at heart - and a hard core of democrats made bitter by the persecution and determined sooner or later to get control of the Government.

⁴In 1823, driven to desperation by Ferdinand's arbitrary measures and oppressive taxation, the people revolted and made him a prisoner. But Louis XVIII of France sent an army that crushed the revolution and set him at liberty. One way and another, through trickery, treachery and the support of the Church and foreign troops, he succeeded in ruling as a despot for a quarter of a century. Then, on his very deathbed, this evil genius of my country left Spain another terrible legacy.'

Pausing in his stride for a moment, the King took a drink from his glass, then went on, 'You will, of course, know that in France the Salic law operated, by which no female could ascend the throne; and that with the ending of the Hapsburg dynasty in 1700 Louis XIV's grandson, the Due d'Anjou, became the first Bourbon King of Spain as Philip V. It was this French Prince who introduced the Salic law, which previously had not applied here. Ninety years later King Charles IV approved a resolution of the Cortes to revoke this law and revert to the old order of succession but, most unfortunately, the decree was never promulgated. Thus, the question whether a female could legally ascend the throne remained debatable.

'Ferdinand VII had no son; so two persons were Heirs Apparent: under the Salic law, his brother, Don Carlos, and under the old law, his daughter by his fourth wife, Queen Maria Cristina. In spite of the most vigorous protests from Don Carlos and many of the highest nobility, on his deathbed he designated as his successor his daughter, the Infanta Isabella, who was then only a child of two.

'Ferdinand had often said with cynical humour that Spain was a bottle of beer of which he was the cork, and that on his death it would blow up. By his malicious decision he ensured that it should. Don Carlos was in many ways a good man, and that he should become King was obviously preferable to saddling the country with the uncertainties of a long minority. Don Carlos decided to fight for what he considered to be his rights, and Spain was plunged into a hideous civil war. Behind him he had the Church, most of the aristocracy and all those best elements in Spain who treasured the old traditions of the country handed down from the time when Spain was a mighty Empire. Yet the forces of the Queen Regent emerged victorious. How, you may well ask? To keep her infant daughter on the throne she took the only course open to her and threw herself into the hands of the Liberals.

'At the date of Ferdinand's death she was still only twenty-six, and an exceptionally lovely woman. She had not long been a widow when she secretly married a Captain in her Guards named Munoz. Incredible as it may sound, still in secret she had nine children by him. The strain of keeping up appearances while leading this double life hardly bears thinking about, and naturally the affairs of the country suffered in consequence; she became a puppet in the hands of factions and military adventurers.

'In 1846 the young Queen, Isabella II, although only thirteen, was declared of age and married to her cousin, the Duke of Cadiz. He was a spineless creature, so the power emanating from the throne continued to be the plaything of unscrupulous intriguers. To worsen matters it soon became evident that she had inherited even more than the normal share of the Bourbon appetites.'

The King paused to smile, took another drink from his glass, which de Quesnoy had refilled, then added, 'Perhaps I should say "appetite" for in this case I have not so much in mind the gastronomic feats of Louis XIV or of Louis XVI, who frequently ate a whole chicken as a single course in a meal, but the amorous endurance which caused Henry of Navarre to be nicknamed Le Vert Galant, and led to Louis XV keeping a harem busy in his "Pare au Cerfs". Every handsome guardsman Queen Isabella set eyes on became grist to her mill, and her immoralities were so flagrant that after years of misrule by her favourites the people rebelled and threw her out.

'With her to exile in France she took her young son, my father, and in 1870 she abdicated in his favour, but he became King Alfonso XII only in name. Meanwhile, under the Provisional Government of Serrano and General Prim, there ensued two years of semi-anarchy here while the Spanish people demanded a King, and half the Royal Houses in Europe wrangled over who should supply one. Feeling was so intense that it started the Franco-Prussian war, but Prim eventually decided upon Amadeo of Savoy, the second son of King Victor Emanuel II.

'Poor fellow, he was no match for such an imbroglio. Generals, Carlists, Liberals and Cardinals all combined to make his life hell. In a little under three years he threw in his hand and returned to Italy.

'The distracted Cortes then proclaimed a Republic, but the great bulk of the people was bitterly opposed to it and the Government lost all control of them. On any. excuse armed mobs surged through the cities looting and murdering, bands of peasants turned themselves into bandits robbing travellers and holding them to ransom. To save Spain, Don Carlos, son of the first Don Carlos, raised his standard in the north and launched the second Carlist war. That only made matters worse, as thousands more Spaniards set about cutting one another's throats.

'In desperation a General named Martinez Campos made a pronunciamiento calling on my father to return and ascend the throne. He had just completed his first term as an officer-cadet at Sandhurst. Immediately, he set out for Spain. He was received with tremendous acclamation, but the first task thrust upon him was to defeat the Carlist army. He did so, but at a price. History repeated itself. Once again the Church and the traditionalists - those elements which in any country are the natural supporters of monarchy - had rallied round Don Carlos. To bring peace and keep his throne my father was compelled to become dependent on the Liberals.

'He was a good man and would have made a fine King; but he was unlucky. When he was about my present age he married for love the beautiful Mercedes, daughter of the Duke de Montpensier. They adored one another, but after being Queen for only six months she died. With her death the spirit went out of him. He succeeded in keeping the peace, but only by persuading the Conservatives to make great concessions, and an era of two-party government set in. The Conservative leader, Canovas, made a dubious pact with the Liberal leader, Sagasta. They rigged the elections and played box and cox, so that when the people became dissatisfied with one party the other went in. That system, which makes a mockery of the People's rights, has now continued here for many years.

Shortly after Queen Mercedes' death, from a sense of duty my lather married again - my beloved mother, who was born the Archduchess Maria Cristina of Hapsburg. She bore him two daughters. He died still grieving for Mercedes, at the early age of twenty-eight, ^and I, as you know, was born a King posthumously.

^My mother is the most wise and saintly woman I have ever known; but once again Spain faced the uncertainties of a long Regency under a Queen. During my minority no course was open to her but to allow her Ministers to make use of the monarchy as a front to cover their own policies and ambitions. It was owing largely to her tact that the throne survived our war with the United States in '98. It is true that for long Cuba had been shockingly misgoverned and the Americans had some justification in taking it from us to protect their commercial interests there, but there was no justification whatever for those rapacious dollar grubbers to rob us afterwards of the Philippines, and the surrender of this last really valuable fragment of the old Spanish Empire caused our people intense indignation. That, and the loss of our entire fleet, was enough to overturn any throne, but my mother succeeded in riding out the storm, and seeing me crowned.

'Yet in the four years since I attained my majority there have been no less than fourteen political crises and I have had eight Prime Ministers. Such is my inheritance - an ever-increasing pressure from the people to give them a real say in the government of the country, but a Constitution which compels me to accept the policies recommended by politicians who have made a compromise solely to keep themselves in power, and whose views hardly differ whether they label themselves Conservative or Liberal.'

Having swallowed the rest of his wine, the King resumed briskly. 'Now, let us sum up, and assess the results of this hundred years of civil war and dissension through which Spain has passed. Again and again, to preserve the monarchy in its legitimate line Queen Regents and youthful Sovereigns have been compelled to turn for support to the Liberals. And in more recent times so-called Conservative ministers have risen to power only by making big concessions to the Left. In consequence, as nepotism is still rife here, more than half the high posts in my Civil Service are held by Liberals.

'Mark you, I do not suggest for one moment that these men are lacking in patriotism, and I am confident that ninety-nine per cent of the Spanish people are entirely loyal to my person. But the great majority of Liberals of all nationalities have their heads among the clouds. Many of them are fine people with high ideals, their only desire being to better the lot of the masses. Unfortunately they fail to realize that in many countries, of which Spain is one, the bulk of the people is not sufficiently advanced to govern themselves. The result of their measures, as has been proved only too often, is to open the way for revolution. Evil men with extremist views make use of them, then climb to power over their dead bodies. That is the danger here.

'I believe my police to be reasonably efficient. I have no doubt at all that they would not hesitate to arrest anyone whom they had proof was an anarchist, or involved in treasonable activities. But many of the senior officers in the police are Liberals. Those who are hold that every man has a right to express his opinions. They deliberately delude themselves about the degree of danger arising from orators who, under the guise of agitating for reforms, stimulate revolution, and this is particularly so in Barcelona where the police, being Catalans, naturally have a certain sympathy with revolutionaries who cloak their &ims under a demand for Catalonian independence. It is these people who spread the doctrines of Karl Marx and Bakunin, and they are the real root of the trouble. It is they who inspire fanatics and men with a grievance to become active anarchists; yet their activities are condoned by the police on the grounds of permitting free speech. If you could secure evidence that the most prominent of these mob orators, and writers of inflammatory articles, were secretly connected with the bomb plots we would be able to send them to prison, and so make some headway in stamping out the breeding-ground of anarchy. You see now what I have in mind. Do you agree?'

'I do, Sir,' de Quesnoy replied at once.

The King came to a sudden halt in front of the Count, looked at him fixedly, and said, 'Good! And after this long dissertation of mine, may I take it that you understand my reasons for not trusting my police to co-operate fully with you?'

'Indeed yes. Your Majesty could not have explained matters more lucidly.'

'Tell me, then; are you game to carry out an independent investigation?'

'I am. It is just something of this kind that I need at the moment. But you spoke, Sir, of giving me some aid yourself. Since your police are ruled out, what form will it take?'

'I have to go into Madrid this afternoon. I will order the police dossier on Morral and his associates to be sent to the Palace. One of my gentlemen whom I can trust will deliver it to de Cordoba, and Francois can go into Madrid to collect it from him tomorrow. No official will then know that you have seen it or that it has been °ut of my possession.'

|That would be excellent. For how long may I keep it?'

'A few days should be sufficient for you to make such notes as you require from it. Should the police ask to have it back I can always put them off by saying that I have not yet had time to study

it fully.'

For some ten minutes more they discussed the matter; then Don Alfonso rang the bell, the others came back into the room, and shortly afterwards they all escorted him down to the courtyard.

The arrangement about the dossier worked without a hitch and de Vendome brought it to the Count on the following afternoon; but it proved far larger than he had expected, and consisted of so many papers that they filled two large suitcases. Delighted to have so much material to examine, de Quesnoy set to work on it that evening.

It was a quiet household. De Vendome was a deeply religious young man and, with Father Tomaso's help, was endeavouring to catch up in his work as President of numerous Church charities; he was also an exceptionally fine horseman and he had won prizes for jumping at International Horse Shows; so he spent much of his time out riding or playing polo with the King. The Infanta, aided by her lady-in-waiting Dona Isabella, also busied herself with many charities and at other times pottered in her garden. Conde Ruiz was much in Madrid on business and spent most nights there at the family Palacio, as the two brothers were devoted to one another, and, although the Palacio was owned by the elder, it was so spacious that the younger also had a private suite there and he, his wife and his stepson made it their home when living in the capital.

In consequence, de Quesnoy had few interruptions and he spent many hours up in a room at the top of the house, of which he had been given the key, reading and making extracts from the great pile of police reports on Mateo Morral and subversive pamphlets, etc., that had been seized during raids on Nakens' publishing office and the premises of other anarchists suspected of being associated therewith.

Morral, it transpired, was the son of a wealthy cotton spinner who had given him an excellent education, which included sending him for some years to study in Germany. But he was of a morose and brooding disposition and had soon adopted revolutionary views. For a long time past Barcelona had been the centre of an increasingly strong demand for Home Rule for Catalonia, and on MorraFs return to his native province he had fervently embraced this movement to break away from the central government. The movement contained many anarchists and Morral became one of them.

At that time the most prominent anarchist in Barcelona was a man named Francisco Ferrer. He had been born at Alella, a little place some twelve miles outside the city, and was now in his middle forties. As a young man Ferrer had attached himself to Ruiz Zorrilla, the Republican leader of the days of Isabella II and the

Revolutionary period that followed her downfall. After Zorrilla had been sent into exile he settled at Geneva and Ferrer joined him there, later acting as his intermediary with revolutionaries in Spain who had gone into hiding.

In 1885 Ferrer's treasonable activities were discovered, but he had been warned in time and escaped to Paris, where his wife and children joined him. There for a number of years he earned a precarious living as a teacher of languages. Being a very highly-sexed man and an enthusiastic advocate of the anarchist doctrine of Free Love, his home life was not a'happy one, and on one occasion his wife had tried to shoot him. However, there was evidently something about him that made a special appeal to women, as he never lacked for mistresses, and a lady named Mile Meunier, who possessed considerable wealth, had become a disciple of his.

Mile Meunier was particularly enthusiastic about a scheme he had evolved to bring about revolution by educating promising young students to become atheists and anarchists, and to enable him to proceed with it she left him a valuable block of house property in Paris. A Liberal government in Spain having quashed prosecutions pending against Ferrer and a number of other agitators in exile he had, in 1901, returned to Barcelona and, with Mile Meunier's money, opened an establishment which he named the Escuela Moderna.

Ferrer staffed his school with fellow anarchists, both male and female, then added to it a considerable library and an 'educational' publishing business. The library consisted of Rationalist, Positivist, Revolutionary and Communist books and pamphlets of all kinds, and most of the many accounts of anarchist activities which, for the past twenty years, had met with a ready sale in most European countries. The publishing side produced translations of works by French, German and British sociologists of advanced or revolutionary views, and distributed them to booksellers throughout Spain.

The Church, and numerous other respectable bodies in Barcelona, had protested in the strongest possible terms at young people in their midst being openly led to deny God and become enemies of the State. But such was the strength of the Liberal insistence on maintaining freedom of speech that their protests had been rejected by the authorities, and for the past five years Ferrer had continued vvithout interference to canalize youthful enthusiasm into revolutionary channels and to disseminate literature calculated to inflame the discontented.

Morral had naturally become an intimate of Ferrer and after a time Ferrer had made him the librarian at the Escuela Moderna where one of the women teachers was a Senorita Soledad Villafranca, who was said to be very attractive. She had become one of Ferrer's mistresses and at the same time the mistress of Morral. One theory was that the two men had quarrelled over her and that this had led Morral to plan his attack on the King and Queen to show his mistress what a fine fellow he was. Another theory was that Ferrer had used the Senorita Villafranca to influence Morral into making his attempt, although there was no evidence of this.

In addition to these particulars about Morral and Ferrer the dossier contained brief biographies of Ferrer's teaching staff which showed that, although no criminal act could be imputed to any of them, they all openly proclaimed their allegiance to anarchist principles, and that, at one time or another, most of them had been mixed up with Communists, Collectivists, and other types of advanced Socialists whose object was to bring about a dictatorship of the proletariat.

From the seized pamphlets de Quesnoy gathered that the object of the anarchists was not only to overthrow the existing governments in every country, but also to abolish rule by law. That explained to him a point about their activities which had at times puzzled him. Although since the early 'eighties there had been many attempts to assassinate Monarchs and Presidents, there had been many more against Public Prosecutors and Judges; and it now emerged that whenever an anarchist was caught after an outrage and condemned to death or a long prison sentence, his confederates invariably did their utmost to avenge themselves upon the lawyers who had helped to convict or sentence him.

Ever since de Quesnoy had been a boy, there had also been an increasing number of outrages in connection with labour disturbances, particularly in the mining districts of France and Belgium. Pits had been flooded and hoisting gear and the houses of pit-owners blown up; on many occasions troops had had to be called in and ordered to fire on the mobs before such riots could be quelled. The anarchists took the credit for these dynamitings, but the strikes were clearly Communist-inspired; so the Count naturally assumed, as did most other people of his class, that Marxists, Anarchists, Communists, Syndicalists and Nihilists were more or less interchangeable terms for the same type of people, and that although they might differ slightly in their doctrines their common object was to bring about a Socialist world.

Of one thing there seemed no doubt whatever. As far as Spain was concerned Francisco Ferrer was the root of the trouble. He might never have thrown a bomb himself, or even have assisted in planning any act of violence; but it was inescapable that by corrupting the minds of others he was morally responsible for the deaths of scores of innocent people and, most probably, among them Angela's.

De Quesnoy therefore decided that his only real hope of succeeding in his mission lay in putting Ferrer out of the way; and he made up his mind that he would leave nothing untried which might get him the evidence to send the anarchist to the hangman's rope.

By the end of the week he had finished with the dossier and arranged with de Vendome to.return it to the King.

On the Saturday, de Cordoba and the Condesa Gulia arrived to spend the week-end, and both were delighted to find him much more like his old self. That evening there was a dinner-party - the first he had attended since his wife's death - at which he talked with an animation and cheerfulness which showed that he was at last free from his gloomy preoccupation with her loss. On the Sunday, after attending Mass, they all went for a ride through the woods and in the afternoon had a jolly picnic beside the river. It was soon after their return, and before going up to change for dinner, that, while strolling in the garden, he came upon Gulia sitting on a stone seat alone.

In the warm light of the summer evening she made a lovely picture. Her burnished Titian hair, worn Madonna fashion, caught the light in its side curls, her darker, arched eyebrows and slumbrous black eyes made a striking contrast to her magnolia petal skin. Her full, rich red lips parted, showing small, even, flashing white teeth as she smiled a welcome to him. Yet after one swift glance at his eyes her feminine instinct told her that he was regarding her only with the detached interest that he would have bestowed on a fine marble statue.

When he sat down beside her they talked for a while of his trip with de Vendome, then she said, 'Now that high summer is here the Court will be moving as usual to San Sebastian, and everyone who matters goes with it; the Embassies and even many big financiers like Jos6, who conducts most of his business from a branch of the bank there. We have a charming villa with a little private bay not far from the city. Both he and I would be so delighted if, when we go north next week, you would accompany us and stay with us for a while.'

Smiling, he shook his head. 'It is most kind of you to ask me, Condesa, but I fear I must refuse. On Monday I am off to Barcelona.'

'Barcelona!' she repeated, opening wide her splendid eyes. 'Whatever for ? At this time of year you will find the heat there intolerable.'

Her husband knew of the mission he had been given by the

King, as also did de Vendome, who had spoken of it in front of his mother and Conde Ruiz; so he saw no reason for concealing it from her. After drawing for a moment on the Hoyo de Monterry cigar he was smoking, he replied, 'Please regard it as a secret except from your family, who already know about it, but I am going to Barcelona to hunt anarchists.'

She gave him a long, steady look then said without a suggestion of a smile, 'In that case you need not go so far as Barcelona. You had better begin by hunting me. I am an anarchist.'

4

Anarchists and Anarchists

De quesnoy's 'devil's eyebrows' shot up as he exclaimed, 'You can't be serious!'

'I am,' she assured him, and her full, cupid's-bow mouth broke into a smile. That smile, although he did not realize it, was one of secret triumph. She had played her cards well. Her shock tactics had succeeded. He was staring at her, and for the first time consciously, in an attempt to assess her personality as a woman.

He gave a quick shake of his head. 'I refuse to believe it. What you say does not make sense.'

'It would if you knew more about me. I am a niece of Miguel de Unamuno.'

The Count's broad forehead wrinkled again, and he said, 'Unamuno? I seem to have heard the name as that of an educationalist; is he not a Professor?'

'He is that and much more. He is also a philosopher and now acknowledged as one of the greatest brains that Spain has produced in the past century. His book, The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Peoples, is already a classic. You should read it.'

'I fear that my Spanish has not yet reached a standard high enough for me to appreciate the nuances of a philosophical treatise. And even if it had, since you imply that your uncle favours violence as a means of bringing about a change in the social order, it is quite certain that I should find myself strongly opposed to his views.'

'He does not advocate violence; he is simply a clear-thinking man with the highest ideals. His wish is to see Spain legally transformed into a true democracy in which all men are equal.'

De Quesnoy took another pull on his cigar, and said, 'I see. On the face of it, then, your uncle is a Socialist. That does not tally with your implication that you imbibed anarchist doctrines from him.'

'No; since I have been old enough to think for myself I have moved much further to the Left. I find a great deal of sound sense in the philosophy of the anarchists.'

Again the Count regarded his lovely companion with a puzzled frown. 'Do you really mean that? Had you been given Morral's opportunity on Don Alfonso's wedding day would you have thrown the bomb?'

Gulia tossed back her head and laughed. 'Of course not. How could you even suggest that I might?'

'To be an anarchist is synonymous with holding a belief in the justification of using violence to achieve one's ends.'

'No, my dear Count; in that you are entirely wrong. In Spain today there are at least a million anarchists, but I doubt if a thousand of them would kill to further the general acceptance of their principles.'

'Oh come, Dona Gulia; when you speak of a million surely you are confusing anarchism with socialism, and lumping the two together.'

'Indeed I am not. There are many more Socialists than that. By far the greater part of the workers in Madrid, Valencia, Bilboa, Seville and Cadiz is Socialist, whereas the anarchists are concentrated in other areas of the country. The million I spoke of consists of a great part of the workers of Catalonia and the peasantry of Andalusia.'

'The peasantry of Andalusia! You amaze me. I had thought that in Spain, like most other countries, the agricultural population was the main support of the Conservatives.'

'It is not so here. The great part of the land consists of huge estates owned by absentee landlords who draw their wealth from their properties but never go near them. For generations the wretched tillers of the soil have been forced to work for a miserable pittance under slave-driving bailiffs, or starve. Can you wonder that they would like to throw off the yoke and keep for themselves the results of their labours?'

'No, that is natural enough. And had I given the matter serious thought I might have guessed that such feelings existed from the appalling poverty I saw in many of the villages during my trip to the south. However, I still feel that we are using terms that have different meanings for us. By anarchists I mean the sort of revolutionaries known as dynamiters, who created a reign of terror in

Paris in '94, when I was a young Cadet at St. Cyr, and fanatics like Morral. It is true that ever since the 'eighties hardly a month has passed without one of them exploding a bomb or knifing some unfortunate person in one country or another. But, even so, their number must be comparatively limited. On the other hand, these hundreds of thousands of Catalonian workers and Andalusian peasants of whom you speak can be striving to gain their ends only by constitutional methods. Obviously those ends are the abolition of privilege, the confiscation of wealth through the penal taxation of the rich and equality for everyone in a Workers' State. What is that but Socialism?'

She shook her head. 'You have defined Socialism but not anarchism. They have certain aims in common, of course, but differ fundamentally in the type of society they wish to bring about.'

After a moment's thought de Quesnoy said, 'What you say interests me tremendously. During the past week I have had the opportunity to acquire a considerable amount of information about the militant anarchists; but I had no idea that their doctrines, exclusive of violence, were accepted by great numbers of law-abiding citizens. In common with most people of our class, I think, I had, too, taken it for granted that, as it is the anarchists who claim kudos for most of the acts of violence committed during strikes, they were Socialists with extreme views. Please tell me now about this fundamental difference between the two creeds.'

'Give me a cigarette, and I will,' Gulia replied.

'So you smoke,' he smiled, producing his case.

She laughed. 'Yes, sometimes in private; although the Infanta still considers even that somewhat reprehensible in a woman.'

'Indeed?' de Quesnoy raised his eyebrows. 'Having all her life had to conform to the stiff etiquette of the Spanish Court has naturally given her a rather forbidding manner, yet I had formed the impression that beneath it she is a very human person. But no matter; please go on.'

He lit the cigarette for her and Gulia continued. 'When you said a while back that the Socialists aim for a Workers' State you were right. Their aim is to better the lot of the masses by nationalizing all the social services and canalizing the whole wealth of the country into the Treasury, so that it should be redistributed by free education, pensions for people who are too old to work, a fund to support those who are temporarily unemployed through no fault of their own, demolishing slums and building great blocks of modern workers' flats in their place, increasing the number of hospitals and giving free medical treatment to everyone, and so on.

'To do that would entail the creation of a vast non-productive bureaucracy which would eat up most of the money coming in before any surplus got back through these projects to the people who had earned it. Still worse, the central government would control everything and everybody: where people lived, the hours they worked, what they did with their leisure, and how they brought up their children. Carried to its logical conclusion Socialism becomes Communism, the only difference between the two being that, while the Socialists are prepared to wait until they can gain their ends by legal means, Karl Marx advocated attempts to achieve them more rapidly by insurrection. If either triumphed, in the long run the State would own everything; no one would be permitted to own land or any form of property, or to accumulate money to leave to his relatives. It would be the utter negation of freedom; we would all be slaves of the State.'

De Quesnoy nodded. 'I agree. The whole basis of Socialism is that the government should control the entire wealth of a country and the labouring capacity of its people. To do that would be impossible unless it had absolute power, and used compulsion to force on people the way they should lead their lives. Now, what about anarchism?'

'That is utterly different. The anarchist claims to be a law unto himself. That is no new thing. Zeno, the Greek philosopher who founded the Stoic school, was of that opinion; so were the powerful sect of Gnostics in early Christian times. The doctrine of Atheism was preached by many profound thinkers during the Middle Ages: Joachim, Abbot of Fiore, in Calabria, Amaury of Chartres, and Father John Ball, who played a big part in Wat Tyler's rebellion. It was because the men who took part in that rebellion believed that law enforced by the State was an evil and crippling thing that, on reaching London, their first act was to burn down the great law offices in the Temple.'

'Of course, there have always been individualists all through history. But militant anarchism as we know it began only in the 1870s. What gave rise to this modern creed that has become such a menace to the social order at the present day?'

'Michael Bakunin did more than anyone to formulate its principles. He argued that the State was a product of religion and an historically necessary evil representing a lower form of civilization °ut of which mankind is now sufficiently advanced to pass; and he demanded its complete abolition. He wished to do away with all legislation and claimed full autonomy for each nation, region and commune. He also held that all individuals should be given full independence, because one becomes really free only when all others are free. Working upwards from the individual, free federations of communes would become free nations. In such nations everything necessary for production would be owned in common by each Labour group or Commune, and each group would administer its own affairs independently of the others.'

Stubbing out her cigarette, Gulia concluded, 'So you see anarchism is the complete antithesis of Socialism. Not a single peseta would be wasted on a non-productive bureaucracy. The millions that even now are squandered in that way would be sufficient for every family to live in comfort. The profits of labour would go to those who earned them, and everyone would have the opportunity to develop their own individualities as they wished. That would be real freedom, and it is that which anarchism offers.'

Tn theory the case sounds a good one,' de Quesnoy admitted, 'but in practice I cannot believe that it could be made to work. All the same, I'd like to know more about it.'

'Then to start with you should read Paul Eltzbacher's book called Anarchism, in which he gives a very full account of the men he terms the Seven Sages and of the principles they laid down. They were Bakunin, Proudhon, Max Stirner, Prince Kropotkin, William Godwin, Count Tolstoi, and, I think, yes, the American, Benjamin Tucker. Unfortunately he does not include chapters on Count Carlo Cafiero or Fanelli, the two greatest of Bakunin's disciples who carried his doctrines to Italy and Spain; but you can learn about them elsewhere.'

'I thought Max Stirner was a close associate of Marx, and so a Communist,' the Count remarked.

'He was at one time. To begin with all these champions of the oppressed masses united to form a common front. It was Bakunin who organized it by founding the International Working Men's Association. They held a number of Congresses, but it soon became apparent that the views of the principal speakers at them were hopelessly irreconcilable. Marx had the greatest number of followers so he took over the International, while Bakunin and his followers seceded from it and formed a new Association called the Federation Jurassienne. It was that body that initiated Propaganda by Deed.'

'What exactly is meant by that?'

'It is the anarchist term for acts of violence. The militant anarchists argue that if one accepts the proposition that all laws and authority are wrong, it becomes right to endeavour to destroy the whole social fabric that law and authority have built up. Since they are in such a small minority they know that they have no hope of attaining their ends by open revolt: but, they reason to themselves like this—"It is for us to set an example and by so doing draw attention to ourselves and our principles. When the masses see that by our deeds we are striking terror into the oppressors they will take heart, acclaim us, rise and overthrow the whole social structure." '

De Quesnoy gave a grim little smile. 'They certainly must have caused plenty of people in high places a lot of sleepless nights. But I think the chances of their ever succeeding in bringing about a revolution are extremely small. *And even if they did they would gain nothing by it. They would only have smoothed the path for the Socialists, and ultimately the Communists.'

'You cannot be certain about that,' she objected quickly. 'It would not be so if in the meantime far greater numbers of people had been educated to understand the benefits that anarchism would bring them: that with the abolition of all law they would at last enjoy true freedom.'

'But no society can possibly exist without law.'

'It could, once everybody realized that their own interests are those of mankind in general. It would then be possible to replace the present legal systems, with their frequent injustices and penal codes, by common brotherly customs which would be universally accepted and willingly observed by all.'

He shook his head. 'You paint a Utopia; and I am still amazed to hear that hundreds of thousands of people believe that such a state of things might actually be brought about. Human nature being what it is, this idea that everybody would be content with an equal share of this world's goods and, out of brotherly love, not seek to increase it at the expense of others would never work. It surprises me, too, that a woman so exceptionally intelligent as yourself, Dona Gulia, can possibly suppose that it could. What of all those who are bora lazy, the unscrupulous with a lust for power, and thieves and criminals with no laws or police to keep their depra-dations in check?'

Before she could answer de Vendome came hurrying through the gardens towards the house. Throwing them a quick smile, he called out, 'Aren't you two coming in to change? If you don't, you'll be late for dinner.'

As they stood up, she said, 'There would be difficulties, of course. Every revolution has to go through its birth pangs; but we'll talk of that another time.' Giving him a quick glance, she added, 'Jose is aware that I hold Liberal views, but not that they are so far to the Left. To know that I believe in anarchism might distress him.

I have spoken to you so frankly only because you have now become deeply interested in these problems; but I rely on you to regard all I have said as in confidence.'

He bowed. 'I am greatly honoured that you should have given me your confidence, and you may count on me to respect it. But much as I shall look forward to discussing such matters with you again, as I am leaving for Madrid first thing tomorrow morning, I fear it will not be until my return from Barcelona.'

'Get your business there over quickly, then.' She gave him the full benefit of her ravishing smile. 'And please don't think that because I am an anarchist I would ever dream of shielding an assassin, whatever his politics. If you are after one of those people who aided Morral I hope you get him. Have you any idea how long you are likely to be away?'

'None at all, I'm afraid.'

'Well, we shall be at San Sebastian until the end of September. Do please come to stay with us if you can. Jose would be delighted. You know he is very fond of you, and so am I.'

They had reached the house, and as he held the door open for her he quickly concealed his surprise. Such a declaration by a young woman to a friend of her husband's with whom she had never before held a private conversation was so unconventional as to be startling. But after a moment he decided that he must have misunderstood her. He had a flair for languages and his Spanish was now fluent, but by no means perfect; so he could easily have interpreted wrongly the sense of her remark. She could not have meant that she, too, was very fond of him, but that she, too, would be delighted to see him at San Sebastian.

Nevertheless, as he watched her graceful figure mounting the curved staircase, he found himself thinking that Jos6 was a lucky man to have such a lovely and interesting woman for his wife.

Early the following morning, de Vendome drove the Count into Madrid. Having left the bags he had taken on his trip with his heavier luggage, which was still at the Palacio Cordoba, he went out to make a number of arrangements. He had decided that the best means of penetrating anarchist circles in Barcelona would be to adopt similar measures to those he had used two years before in Paris, when ferreting out the secrets of the Masons, and pose as a Russian refugee; so his first visit was to the Russian Embassy.

The Ambassador, Count Soltikoff, was an old friend of his father's, and had known him from his youth; so he had no hesitation in making certain requests to him and, when asked, giving the true reason for making them.

Having listened to de Quesnoy's plans, the Ambassador thoughtfully stroked his grey mutton-chop side whiskers for a moment, then said, 'I can well understand how eagerly His Majesty must have seized on the chance to engage a really trustworthy man of your adventurous disposition in such an undertaking, but I am by no means sure that you would not be wise to tell him that, having thought matters over, you wish to be released from it.'

'Why should I do that?' de Quesnoy asked in surprise. 'This mission is the very thing I needed to take my mind off the great loss I have suffered.'

'Perhaps; but there are better ways of employing yourself which would do so equally well, and possibly more swiftly.'

'I can think of no better way of using my mind and abilities than in an attempt to bring some of these devilish assassins to justice.'

The Ambassador nodded. 'No one would deny the menace that militant anarchism has become to society, and that the men who plan these callous outrages are deserving of death. But to wage war upon and destroy them is a matter for the State, not a private individual.'

'Surely, Your Excellency, it is the duty of every citizen to help protect his fellows by shooting a mad dog, should he be given the opportunity?'

'Of course, but it is not part of our duty to go in search of mad dogs. Or, if you feel that it is, why did you not long since return to Russia, where the nihilists perpetrate more of these bloody outrages than in any other country, and devote your energies to bringing a number of them to the scaffold?'

De Quesnoy shrugged. 'There is the difference that the Ocrana are to be trusted, whereas the Spanish Secret Police are not; so it is only here that my help might prove of value. Besides, I am personally concerned in this. These inhuman monsters murdered my poor Angela.'

The shrewd eyes of the older man narrowed a little. 'That is precisely the point that I wished you to admit. You are, in fact, proposing to set out on a vendetta, and deliberately ignoring the divine prohibition expressed by the words "Vengeance is Mine, saith The Lord".'

T had not thought of it in that light, but I must confess that there is much in what Your Excellency says. I would certainly not have accepted this mission had it not been for the personal motive.'

'Then I beg you, Armand, to reconsider the matter. In my long experience I have never known good come to a man from allowing bis bitterness, however well justified, to drive him into taking the law into his own hands. In this case it is true that you will have the law behind you but, even so, should your activities lead to the death of some of these people, it is you who will ultimately be called to account for that by the highest of all tribunals.'

For some twenty minutes, they argued the pros and cons of the matter, but de Quesnoy could not be persuaded to forgo the opportunity he had been given to avenge Angela's death and, at length, the Ambassador reluctantly agreed to aid him by supplying him with certain items which, if at any time his belongings were searched, would substantiate his story that he was a Russian.

Next, after trying several shops that sold second-hand luggage, he succeeded in finding a rather battered trunk that had on it a number of old labels including those of hotels in Constantinople and Athens. Taking it away with him in a hired carriage, he then had himself driven to a number of second-hand clothes shops in which he bought two suits, an overcoat, shoes, and a variety of other items that were in good repair but of the inexpensive kind that might have been worn by a minor official. Lastly he obtained from a bookshop in the Puerta del Sol five, mostly well-thumbed, books in Russian, two of which were histories, two novels by Dostoievsky, and one a collection of Communist tracts by Engels.

After lunch he paid another call at the Embassy and collected three partly-used pencils made in Russia, a block of seven Russian stamps in current use, a small wooden frame with wires across it strung with beads - called an abacus, on which all Russians do their calculating - and a bottle of the Eau de Cologne with which many Russians are in the habit of scenting themselves. In addition, the Ambassador had had some of his Spanish pesetas changed into Russian roubles for him, and handed over a list that he had obtained at the Count's request of all the ships that had called at Valencia during the past fortnight. Among them there was not one that had come from Constantinople, but a Greek ship had arrived on the 6th from the Piraeus; she might have brought him from Athens, which suited him just as well, and having memorized her name he destroyed the list.

Returning to the Palacio Cordoba, de Quesnoy made a thorough examination of his purchases and removed from the clothes all marks which might give away their Spanish origin. He then soaked off from the trunk all the labels except those showing that it had been in Constantinople and Athens, and another which showed that it had been in Salonika. Having dressed in one set of his new garments he packed the rest and the other items into the trunk, had it corded and taken downstairs, then said good-bye to his host and hostess, who had returned from Aranjuez at midday. A hired carriage took him to the Atocha station where he bought a second-class ticket and at a few minutes before seven boarded the night train for Valencia.

Corridor coaches and restaurant cars had so far been introduced only on luxury trains, and there were no second-class sleepers; but the gauge of the Spanish railways being broader than those in other parts of Europe, except Russia, the coaches were somewhat more comfortable. Nevertheless, until night cooled the air a little it was stiflingly hot and, lolling in hts corner, with only a bottle of tepid wine to wash down the sandwiches with which he had supplied himself, he found the long journey exceedingly trying.

Arriving in Valencia on the morning of the 13th, he asked a cab driver to take him to a modest hotel in the neighbourhood of the University, and was set down at one in the Calle Don Juan de Austria. There he checked in as Senor Nicolai Chirikov and said that he wanted a room for only a few nights while he carried out some research in the University Library. After a meal in a nearby restaurant he went up to his room and to bed, to make up during the hot hours of the day for some of the sleep he had lost during his night journey.

In the late afternoon he went to the University and, on stating that he was a Russian schoolmaster engaged in writing a book on social conditions in Spain, secured a reader's ticket. He had no intention of writing anything, but put the ticket carefully away as a useful piece of evidence of his new identity. He then drove out to the port and made inquiries about ships sailing for Barcelona. Having learned that a two-thousand-five-hundred-ton cargo vessel, the Velez-Rubio, that plied between the Mediterranean ports and took a few passengers was leaving in three days' time, he ran her Captain to earth in one of the better waterside cafes and, to his satisfaction, arranged for a passage in her.

On the 14th, having nothing to do, he instinctively went to see the Cathedral; but, as was usual in the Spanish churches, the many fine paintings in it by old masters were ill-lit and, having never been cleaned, had become so darkened by time that they were hardly worth looking at. In the Treasury, among the assorted collection of crystal caskets, ornamented with lack-lustre jewels, that contained the bones of Saints, the piece de resistance was a vessel said to be the Holy Grail and sent to Spain for safe-keeping during the persecution of the Christians by the Roman Emperor Valerian; but he found it difficult to believe that a poor carpenter had been given a green agate chalice from which to drink.

His walk round the Botanical Gardens that evening was much more rewarding, as between its groups of tall palms it had a wonderful variety of sub-tropical trees, shrubs and plants. Having found it so pleasant he spent most of the following day there re-reading one of the Dostoievsky novels.

Next morning he left Valencia in the Velez-Rubio. There were only two other passengers on board; a doctor named Luque and his wife. They were a middle-aged couple who had chosen this means of returning from a holiday with relatives in Cartagena. De Quesnoy's reason for travelling by sea was that he wanted to arrive in Barcelona with a few people who knew him as Senor Chirikov, and had he gone by train the opportunity for making acquaintances would have been briefer and much less good. In pursuance of his design, while the ship chugged her way at a modest six knots through the blue waters of the Mediterranean, he sat with the Luques on the after-deck under an awning and soon became on friendly terms with them.

During the course of the afternoon they told him of the life they led and the ramifications of their family, while he told them the story he had invented about himself as Nicolai Chirikov. He said that he was a bachelor, had been a teacher in a private school in Odessa, and that it had been part of his duties to take the senior classes in history. He had taught his pupils what, as a Liberal, he regarded as the truth about the exploitation of the masses both in peace and war by autocrats for their own selfish ends. Some of his pupils had retailed his views to their wealthy parents, and he had been tipped off that the Tsarist police were going into the matter. To avoid arrest, and probable exile to Siberia, he had realized his few assets as swiftly as possible and fled abroad. A Turkish steamer had taken him down to Constantinople. Then, as he had always longed to see Greece, he had gone on via Salonika to Athens. But there was no possibility of earning a living there; so he had accepted an offer by a sea-captain he had met to take him on for a nominal fee to Spain. After a week in Valencia he had decided that he was more likely to find suitable employment in the much larger city of Barcelona; so was going on there.

The Luques proved most understanding and sympathetic, but it was among the ship's officers that de Quesnoy had hoped to find a likely type to sponsor him on his arrival in the Catalonian capital, and, later in the day, he found just such a man in Modesto Pelayo, the Velez-Rubio's Second Officer. Pelayo, a bearded, bronzed, broad-shouldered man, had started as a seaman before the mast and was now in his early forties; but his lack of general education made it unlikely that he would ever become master of a vessel, and, as he considered himself a thoroughly competent officer, he naturally felt very bitterly about this limitation to his career. That evening, over a bottle of Anis del Mono paid for by the Count, Modesto and 'Nicolai' discussed at length the iniquities of the present social system and parted firm friends, the one to go on watch and the other to go to his cabin.

The following evening the Velez-Rubio docked at Barcelona. After promising the Luques to let them know how he got on, de Quesnoy accompanied Pelayo ashore and was taken by him to a clean but inexpensive pension in the Calle de Cabanas, which was not far from the harbour. They then had supper together and afterwards visited a number of bars in each of which they spent an hour or so drinking. In the early hours it was the Count who found a cab and took the befuddled sailor back to his ship in it.

But Pelayo had not been so drunk that he did not remember his promise to call for his new friend next morning and show him Barcelona. By that the Count had not supposed that the convivial rough-diamond intended to take him round yet one more Cathedral or to look at another gallery of Old Masters; but he had thought it probable that the tour would include those symbols of tyranny, the palaces in the old city, and, almost certainly, as Modesto was a seafaring man, the one-time Arsenal of the Kings of Aragon which de Cordoba had told him on no account to miss, as it was now a Nautical Museum and contained many interesting relics of the great Conquistadores. He was therefore considerably surprised when, a quarter of an hour after they had boarded a tram, he saw that it had left the main streets behind and was grinding its way uphill towards the northern outskirts of the city.

On his asking where they were going, Pelayo replied, 'Why, I promised to show you the city, didn't I, and you'll get no better view of it than from Mount Tibidabo.' And he proved unquestionably right. After changing trams in the suburbs, they took a Funicular Railway, but even that did not take them to the top, and for the final lap they had to trudge, with a little crowd of other people who had been in the Funicular, up steep paths through a wood of pines. When at last, breathless and perspiring, they did reach the summit the panorama from it was one never to be forgotten. From a height of sixteen hundred feet they gazed down on the broad coastal plain with the sprawling city spread out with its centre far below them. The air was so clear that they could pick out all the Principal buildings and, looking south over many miles of the shimmering Mediterranean, even discern some faint smudges on the horizon that Pelayo said were the Balearic Isles.

The mountain had a broad, flat top on which a number of cafes and restaurants had been built and, as it was a Sunday, they were crowded with people; but Pelayo managed to secure a table at which they sat drinking iced beer while admiring the view. Up there, too, was a permanent fun fair and, after lunching off spider crabs, they patronized some of its sideshows.

Late in the afternoon they returned to the city and, much to de Quesnoy's secret satisfaction, the evening, if less relaxing, proved unexpectedly profitable from the point of view of his mission; for Modesto took him to a club to which he belonged that was a branch of the Somaten.

Among the subversive pamphlets which had formed part of the papers that Don Alfonso had secured for him there had been some issued by the Somaten, and also a short account of its history; so he was already aware of its activities. It was a disciplined organization that had been formed by private citizens of Barcelona in the Middle Ages with the object of maintaining order, and its motto was 'Peace, peace and again peace'. But in more recent times it had become the spearhead of the movement for Catalan nationalism.

De Quesnoy had both read the arguments for that in the pamphlets and discussed it with de Vendome; so he knew both sides of the question. The Catalans' case was that their stock inhabited the Mediterranean coast on both sides of the Pyrenees, occupying both the whole of Catalonia and a considerable area of southern France including Marseilles, and that at one time they had been one nation. They therefore claimed that as an individual race, neither French nor Spanish, they were entitled to independence. That their language was still a live one was true, although much more so in the Spanish area than the French, and in Barcelona several papers printed in Catalan were among those with the largest circulation. They had also clung most tenaciously to their racial customs and to certain regional rights extracted through the centuries from their Spanish rulers, and on these they based their case for being given self-government.

The opposite view was that since very ancient times the Catalans never had been independent. Those to the north of the Pyrenees had in Roman times been absorbed into the provinces of Nar-bonensis and Provence and later became subjects of the Kings of France; while those to the south had been absorbed into the province of Hither Baetia and later become subjects of the Kings of Aragon. Therefore, from the time of the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon to Isabella of Castile in 1469, Catalonia had become an integral part of Spain, and should so remain.

The same arguments applied to the Basques, who were also agitating for independence. On the Atlantic coast their stock had from time immemorial occupied large areas both to the north and south of the Pyrenees, and they even had a language of their own which resembled no other in Europe; but they too had never been a nation and, for many centuries, while those to the north had owed allegiance to the Kings of Navarre, those to the south had owed allegiance to the Kings of Castile.

One might almost as well endeavour, reasoned the anti-separatists, to make a case for the peoples of Brittany and Cornwall becoming one nation with self-government, for they too come of the same stock and had a root language in common, and Brittany at least was - for a long period - a Sovereign State; yet the English Channel has separated them hardly less effectively than the Pyrenees has both the Catalans and the Basques.

For the Spanish Catalans and Basques, union with the French elements of their race could obviously be only a long-term aim, but the agitation by both for Home Rule had in recent years greatly increased. This was especially so among the Catalans as they were the most vigorous and industrious of the Spanish peoples, and much fuel was added to the fire of their unrest by the knowledge that the hard work they put into their commercial ventures led to their having to contribute far more per head in taxation to the central government than did the lazier populations in other parts of Spain.

Since the aim of the Somaten was to throw off the yoke of the monarchy and that of the anarchists to abolish government of any kind - and Dona Gulia had told the Count that Barcelona was the stronghold of Spanish anarchy - he had good grounds for assuming that, both being subversive organizations, many members of the Somaten were also anarchists. In consequence he spared no pains to make himself pleasant to those members of the Club to whom Pelayo introduced him.

In their grave Spanish way they responded readily, and when they learned that he was a refugee from Tsarist persecution they eagerly crowded round pressing him to tell them about conditions in Russia. He willingly obliged, purposely exaggerating the situation by implying that the whole nation, except for a handful of aristocrats, went about in constant terror of having something pinned ^uPon them by the Secret Police, and that every political exile was condemned to the horror of the Siberian salt mines.

Naturally, when the question arose, he declared himself heartily in favour of Catalonian independence, and 'Nicolai Chirikov' was obviously so much a man with the right ideas that by midnight he had been proposed and accepted as a member of the Puerto branch of the Somaten.

His original plan had been to join one of the Barcelona Lodges of Freemasons; since once a Mason always a Mason, and having been initiated in Paris two years earlier he would have had only to find, through the secret hand-grip, a Brother Mason to introduce him. Unlike British Masonry, Continental Masonry had for long been the principal breeding-ground of atheism and revolt. It had originated in Germany and in the mid-eighteenth century been brought by the mystic Illuminatii to France. There it had spread rapidly, so that there were soon Lodges of the Grand Orient in every town of any size; and its inner council had undoubtedly organized the French Revolution. Its ramifications spread all over Europe and it had later been responsible for all those bloody upheavals that overturned half a dozen governments in the years 1848 and '49. Fifty years later it was still a great secret power capable of bringing about revolts in most countries at any time.

In 1904, in collaboration with the atheist War Minister of France, it had launched a great campaign to undermine the strength of the French Army, and de Quesnoy had become a Freemason with the object of exposing this evil combination. Under the name of Vasili Petrovitch, and posing as a Russian political refugee, he had succeeded in doing so; and now, feeling certain that the Spanish Masonic Lodges would be the natural meeting places for anarchists, he had been contemplating on his way to Barcelona an attempt to repeat the process. Unfortunately, however, having exposed the War Minister he had, at the eleventh hour, been exposed himself; and the Freemasons had learned that their betrayer, Vasili Petrovitch, was in fact Colonel the Count de Quesnoy.

Thus, though remote, there was a slight element of risk in his plan; for although he was using a different Russian name and background, if in a Barcelona Lodge it chanced that he came face to face with a visiting French Mason who had known him in Paris, he would be identified, with results that he did not care to contemplate. In consequence, having had the luck to be made a member of the Somaten, which he felt would serve his purpose equally well, he decided there and then to abandon his idea of again becoming a member of a Masonic Lodge.

To stimulate and direct the political activities of its members was only a part of the Club's function. It was also a social meeting-ground for the officers of merchant ships, Customs officers and other minor officials of the great port. Drinks could be had there at a bar and cold snacks at a buffet. Cards and dice could be played. It also had a library and a small gymnasium; so, quite apart from his special reason for cultivating the company who frequented it, de Quesnoy found it a useful place in which to kill time. And after Modesto Pelayo's return to duty in his ship on the Monday the Count found time hang heavily on his hands.

He dared not appear too curious and could only leave it to time to develop his acquaintance with several regular frequenters of the Club, whom he suspected might be anarchists, until one of them either took him into his confidence or, inadvertently, made some incriminating admission. As the Club did not open until after the siesta hour, he was reduced in the mornings to taking long solitary walks or strolling aimlessly along the Ramblas among the colourful crowd that always thronged this principal shopping street of the old town.

The old town appealed to him, but it formed only a small part of the great modern city. Of Barcelona the Spaniards, even in other cities, were intensely proud, as it had made almost their only contribution to twentieth-century architecture and town-planning. There were many fine blocks of offices and apartments in it, with electric light, lifts, telephones and other up-to-date innovations, and it was laid out like an American city, in blocks intersected by scores of parallel streets. But de Quesnoy found their sameness both confusing and dreary, and he would have much preferred it had his quest taken him back to the picturesque alleyways of Cordoba or the tranquil, irregular side-streets of Seville.

For him to have spent a pleasant hour or two in any of the better hotels or restaurants would have been to risk being seen going in or out by some members of the Somaten and so, probably, ruining his build-up of himself as a Russian schoolmaster of very limited means. In consequence, as the only alternative to walks in the woods and gardens on the slopes of Montjuich, which lay at the end of the street in which his pensidn was situated, he again took to sightseeing, but he was always relieved when the hour came for him to resume his role as an unsuspected inquiry agent at the Club.

Yet, strange as he afterwards thought it to be, it was not there that he picked up his first real lead to the militant anarchists of Barcelona, but through Doctor Luque.

The Infernal Machine

De quesnoy had taken the Luques' having asked him to let them know how he was getting on as no more than a casual politeness, but being by habit good-mannered himself, instead of ignoring it he had, on Tuesday, sent the Doctor a line saying that he had found quite comfortable quarters suitable to his modest means, and hoped they had found all well on their arrival home; but he did not really expect that they had taken sufficient interest in a poor refugee to wish to pursue his acquaintance.

However, on the Thursday he received a reply asking him to dine with them on the Saturday. It came from the Senora Luque, whom he had judged to be a good-natured motherly woman and, as he rightly guessed, had been inspired by a kind thought for a lonely foreigner in a strange city.

Their apartment was in one of the new blocks of flats some way to the north of the Plaza de Las Glorias, and on arriving there he found that they had staying with them a Lieutenant Aguilera of the Spanish Navy, who was a nephew of the Doctor.

The Lieutenant had returned a few days before from a long tour of duty in the Canaries, and only that morning the light cruiser in which he had served had been paid off. After the introductions had been made and the Doctor had provided them with aperitifs, the question of the Lieutenant's prospects came up, and it transpired that these were very far from rosy.

The Spanish Navy had never fully recovered from the crushing defeat inflicted on it by Nelson at Trafalgar, and from that time, too, the once mighty Spanish Empire had begun to fall to pieces. Chunk after chunk of South America had revolted, thrown off the Spanish yoke and declared itself a Republic, so that by the 'nineties the only considerable colonies left to Spain, apart from the Canaries, were Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. This reduction of her Empire militated against any necessity for Spain to attempt again to build up a first class fleet, but with the introduction of ironclads she had continued to build and maintain a navy of the second rank. By 1898 many of its ships were in poor condition and their guns obsolete, although the navy was still a calling in which many thousands of sailors found a career. But then its death blow fell.

6o

Cuba, owing to the exactions and tyranny of a succession of Spanish Governor-Generals, had, for the previous twenty years, been in a state of semi-revolt, and during a good part of that time the great island had been rent by a series of bloody civil wars. In an attempt to suppress the rebels one General, known as 'Butcher' Weyler, had even gone to the length of destroying the insurgents' crops and houses and herding their non-combatant relatives into concentration camps. The United States, becoming alarmed for the big investments her citizens had made in Cuba, sent the battleship Maine to protect their interests. From a cause that still remains a mystery, soon after arriving in Havana harbour she blew up.

War followed, and the American Pacific Squadron promptly destroyed the Spanish warships based on the Philippines. Although Spain's main fleet was ill-equipped and ill-munitioned, she at once dispatched it to the Caribbean. It reached Santiago safely but was there blockaded by a much more powerful American fleet. Meanwhile, the Americans had landed troops and were about to attack the city from its landward side. The Spanish Admiral, Cervera, decided that his honour demanded he should leave harbour and fight, although he knew his choice to be suicidal. His fleet was totally destroyed.

This annihilation of the Spanish Navy had occurred only eight years ago. Since then no new ships of any size had been built; so Lieutenant Aguilera had been extremely lucky to get his last posting in one of the few remaining cruisers. And as there were still hundreds of naval officers of experience intriguing to be given further sea service he had good grounds for fearing that he might never get another.

Over a hearty meal of escudella soup, chicken cooked a la cilindron and a chocolate cake layered with thick cream, which they washed down with the local Alella wine, the Lieutenant continued futilely to resurrect and inveigh against the brutal greed of past Generals, the criminal stupidity of the statesmen and the unbending pride of the Admiral, which had combined to threaten him at the age of twenty-eight with an abrupt termination to his career.

De Quesnoy, having had his own career as a soldier cut short, although for very different reasons, sympathized with him; but he became distinctly bored by the conversation as, despite several attempts by Senora Luque and himself, they seemed unable to get away from the subject.

In Spanish homes it is customary for guests not to linger for long after dinner; so having partaken of a small glass of Anis in the sitting-room, the Count made a move to leave. But the Senora waved him back to his chair and said:

'Don't go for a little while. You have not yet told us how you like Barcelona.'

⁴It is a beautiful city,' he replied politely, 'and I find the people most courteous and friendly. The old town appeals to me particularly, owing to my interest in history.'

'Have you visited the Cathedral?' asked the Lieutenant.

As de Quesnoy shook his head, the young man went on, 'You should, then. Not for its religious associations, as I gather from a remark you made at dinner you are not that way inclined. But in it is the huge crucifix that Don John of Austria had nailed to the mainmast of his flagship when he defeated the Turkish fleet at the battle of Lepanto.'

'Indeed!' the Count raised his eyebrows. ⁴Yes, I must certainly see that, for Lepanto was one of the decisive battles of the world.'

'I imagine,' the Doctor put in with a smile, 'that our friend has been too busy looking for a job to do much sightseeing.'

'Yes, indeed,' de Quesnoy agreed, 'but so far I have had no luck. As you may recall, I am hoping to find a post as a schoolmaster and that is not easy without the right kind of introductions.'

The Senora glanced at her husband and remarked, 'I wonder if Francisco Ferrer could help?'

De Quesnoy's face remained impassive, but his heart gave a jump. Ferrer's name stood at the very top of the mental list he had made of people whose activities he intended to investigate whilst in Barcelona. But he was too experienced a hunter to rush his fences. To have invented some excuse for introducing himself to Ferrer might easily have aroused the anarchist's suspicions, and he had not intended even to fish for an opening until he had been long enough in the city to have made many other acquaintances who would vouch for him as an enemy of established authority. Only then, perhaps towards the end of the following week, had he meant to go to the library that Ferrer ran and, by becoming a subscriber, open the way to a possible meeting. But it had been because Ferrer was a schoolmaster that he had elected to pose as a schoolmaster himself, hoping that their apparent community of interests might help him to establish relations with his quarry. Now it looked as if his idea was about to bear fruit. Praying that the Doctor's reply might be favourable, he held his breath while awaiting it. After a moment the mild-mannered little man said:

'Yes, my love. Ferrer might know of a post that would suit Senor Chirikov. We must arrange for them to meet.'

While refraining from showing any special enthusiasm, the Count bowed a courteous acknowledgement. 'For such an introduction I should be most grateful.'

'Most evenings Senor Ferrer takes an aperitif at the Cafe Ronda,' the Doctor went on. 'It lies in the Calle de Ronda about halfway between the Plaza de la Universidad and the Plaza de Cataluna. Would it be agreeable to you to meet me there at about six o'clock on .. . let us say Tuesday?'

'My time is still my own, so entirely yours.'

'Then I will get in touch with Ferrer and unless I let you know to the contrary we'll meet on Tuesday evening.'

With that understanding the Count thanked his hosts and took his departure. On his way home he marvelled that so lucky a break should have come from such an unexpected quarter; but, great as his hopes were of it producing concrete results, during the days that followed he did not neglect the cultivation of his acquaintances at the Somaten club.

On the Tuesday he arrived at the Cafe Ronda promptly on time and sat down at one of the tables on the pavement. Some twenty minutes later Doctor Luque arrived and they had hardly exchanged greetings when they were joined by a small dark man in his middle forties, who was wearing a panama hat and gold pince-nez. As he lifted his hat on being introduced to de Quesnoy the Count saw that he had an exceptionally high, narrow forehead. He spoke with the abrupt aggressiveness of a man suffering from an inferiority complex, and his glance from behind the thick-lensed eyeglasses struck de Quesnoy as slightly shifty. But he greeted the Doctor as an old friend, and on being told that the Count was a Russian political refugee shook hands with him warmly.

When drinks had been ordered 'Nicolai Chirikov' was called on to give an account of himself. As he had known Odessa well in his youth it was easy for him to talk of the city and the imaginary school there in which, according to his story, he had become a master. He had, too, meticulously worked out the details of his fictitious journey into exile, and from Valencia onwards Luque could vouch for it. His appearance, accent and the attitude of mind he displayed all contributed to the impression that he was a Russian, and from the outset it was clear that Ferrer never for a moment suspected him to be anything but what he made himself out to be.

After they had been talking for some while Ferrer asked de Quesnoy in what subjects he specialized, to which he replied 'History and literature and, of course, I could teach Russian.'

Ferrer pursed his thin-lipped mouth. 'I take it you mean Russian history.'

'Yes; although I am fairly well up in the history of other countries, particularly in so far as it has affected my own.'

'I thought as much.' The suggestion of a sneer appeared on Ferrer's face. Tt is the same story everywhere. Each country teaches its young little except about its own triumphs, and consistently perverts the truth as the means of justifying the wars started by Kings for their own aggrandizement. My system is very different. In my school we devote a first course to ancient civilizations and the rise of the priestly caste which by spreading superstition became an aristocracy that battened on the people. In the second course we deal with the principal religions of modern times, showing how each has hindered rather than helped the development of mankind, and caused untold misery through its adherents launching wars in an endeavour to force their faith on others. Then the final course deals with the rise of democracy, and the strivings now in progress by the masses in every country to throw off the yoke of tyranny and achieve the individual freedom which is their right.'

Then it is a fine work you are doing,' commented de Quesnoy with feigned enthusiasm.

Tt is,' agreed Ferrer, 'but I think it hardly likely that you have sufficient knowledge of international movements to aid me in it; even if I had a vacancy for a history master, which I have not.'

'How about a master to teach Russian, though?' Luque suggested.

Ferrer shook his high, narrow head. 'I have French and German masters, of course, but Russian is of little use outside Russia; and I could afford neither to employ a Russian teacher nor the time in my schedule for my students to attend lessons in Russian. However, I might be able to send Senor Chirikov a few pupils for private tuition.'

'That would be a great kindness,' smiled the Count, 'because I was able to bring only a limited sum out of Russia with me and, although it is sufficient for my present needs, unless I can find some means of supplementing it I shall soon be in difficulties. As a matter of fact I already have cards in two newspaper shops advertising myself as a teacher of Russian, but so far I have had no applicants for lessons.'

In the latter statement de Quesnoy was telling the truth, since he had decided that to take such a step was necessary to support his cover: although he was hoping that nobody would take advantage of his offer, since to have to waste his time teaching Russian was the last thing he wanted.

For another half hour they sat over a second round of drinks comparing the progress of workers' movements in Spain and Russia;

then the party broke up. But before they parted Ferrer asked de Quesnoy if he would like to see over his school and, on the Count's accepting, he said:

'Unlike ordinary schools we have sessions all the year round; so although next week we shall be in August I shall still be as busy as ever. We have evening classes, too, for those who have to earn their living in the daytime; but none on Sundays because the law still kept in force through the influence of the Church does not permit it. So the best time for you to come would be on Sunday morning. Shall we say at about eleven?'

'That would suit me admirably,' the Count replied; and as he strolled back down the colourful ever-crowded Ramblas to his dreary little pension he felt well satisfied with the course events were taking.

On the Sunday he found the Escuela Moderna to be housed in an old mansion in a street just off the Ronda de Antonio, which was not far from the University; and he guessed that Ferrer had chosen its location so that it should be handy for University students with Leftish leanings who elected to take some of his courses in addition to their official curriculum.

He was admitted by an elderly janitor who took him up to the top floor of the house which, when it had been converted, Ferrer had turned into his own living quarters. Ferrer took him to his study, a room lined with bookshelves on which, as de Quesnoy saw at a glance, in addition to books in several languages, there were many hundreds of pamphlets. They had only just sat down when the door opened again and a buxom young woman carrying a tray with glasses and sherry came in. She had fine eyes and a full, moist mouth, but over wide nostrils in a retrousse nose and a very fleshy jowl robbed her of any claim to be a real beauty.

Ferrer introduced her as his wife, and as de Quesnoy bowed he studied her with interest. He knew that she had no legal claim to that status and wondered if she was Soledad Villafranca, who had also been Morral's mistress, or if she was a new acquisition in Ferrer's long line of conquests. That such an unprepossessing man should possess the power to attract a succession of women appeared strange; but the Count knew that a man's features played only a minor part in stimulating female inclinations, and that whatever the major quality was to have for his bedfellow this passionate-looking young creature, who must be at least twenty years younger than himself, Ferrer must have it.

He treated her, too, more like a servant than a wife; for as soon ^as she had filled their sherry glasses, although she showed an inclination to linger and join in their conversation, he as good as ordered her out of the room.

Having offered his guest a cheroot he sat back in his chair and launched out into an enthusiastic description of his school. Latin and Greek he declared to be a waste of time, and acquiring an extensive knowledge of literature and art a luxury which could be afforded only if one intended to take them up as a means of livelihood or make them one's chosen recreation. Grammar and syntax he also declared to be unnecessary, except for a would-be writer, as all that the average man needed was the ability to make himself understood with reasonable clarity. Naturally, everyone should have a basic knowledge of most subjects taken in a normal education, but the really important thing was that both men and women should concentrate from their 'teens onward on some course of study which would enable them to become useful members of society.

He had as pupils boys, girls and also grown-up men and women. When they came to him they had to select one, or at most two, fields suited to their abilities in which to specialize. All had to go through the three courses in history that he had outlined to de Quesnoy at their earlier meeting, in order that they might fully understand the development of mankind, their obligations to their fellow-men, and become workers in the international movement to free the masses from their centuries-old slavery. But apart from this sociological instruction all their other time was given to developing their natural talents. There was a section in which pupils could graduate through carpentry, plumbing and practical building to architecture, another in which they could graduate through typing and shorthand to secretarial duties or journalism, and sections teaching cooking and household management, engineering and technology, chemistry and science, and agriculture. In addition, extra courses could be taken in French and German and in literature and art.

Now that the matter was put to him de Quesnoy was inclined to agree that in normal schools much time was wasted drilling into pupils matter that could be of little value to them later in life, and that for men and women who would have to earn their own living this new system of education, in which they devoted their energies to acquiring practical knowledge in specialized fields while still young, had much to commend it. But one thing stood out a mile. The heart and soul of Senor Francisco Ferrer's Escuela Moderna lay in the course which all pupils were compelled to take, whereby he disseminated his doctrines for the abolition of the Church and State and the emergence of a classless society.

In the Count's mind there lay no shadow of doubt that Ferrer's school was the root from which the Spanish anarchist movement was fostered and supplied every year with scores of young enthusiastic recruits. It now remained to discover whether he was content only to spread his mental poison, or if he actually encouraged the more fanatical of his disciples to undertake Propaganda by Deed.

Far from disclosing even a suggestion of his thoughts, de Quesnoy expressed the greatest interest in Ferrer's work and gave it the highest praise. When they had finished their drinks the schoolmaster stood up and proposed to show his guest over the premises. Following him downstairs de Quesnoy duly inspected the rows of typewriters in one room, the long carpenter's bench in another, the drawing-boards of the technicians in a third, and so on, until they came to a laboratory. In it two youngish men stood side by side bending over one of the slabs, their backs turned to the door. At the noise of the door opening they both swung round and, after a moment's hesitation, Ferrer introduced them:

'My two sons, Benigno and Sanchez; Senor Chirikov, who has recently arrived from Russia.'

If appearances went for anything the brothers had had different mothers. Benigno was small, sandy-haired, intelligent-looking and had both his father's high forehead and sharp nose. He gave the impression of being about twenty-six. Sanchez was a big man, dark to the point of swarthiness, with the coarse features of a peasant and narrow eyes that suggested he had inherited a peasant's cunning. De Quesnoy put him down as about twenty-one.

As the Count walked forward to shake hands with them his glance took in the slab at which they had been working. On it there was a metal canister, the works from the inside of a small clock, some slabs of stuff that looked like toffee, and several strands of thin wire. Having been a soldier he immediately recognized the slabs as dynamite and realized that the brothers had been constructing an infernal machine.

Ferrer, too, had immediately grasped the situation. His face suddenly dark with anger, he snapped at his sons, 'I have told you before. I will not allow you to construct such things here. The . . . the workshop at the mine in which they are used is the place for that.'

De Quesnoy could not tell if Ferrer's anger was real. If it was it lent support to the police reports about him, which stated that, although he openly preached the doctrines of anarchy, he was opposed to violence and had no connection with the militant anarchists. On the other hand it might be simulated and the implication that the explosives were to be put to a legitimate use in a mine a clumsy attempt to cover up the use his sons were making of the laboratory.

For a few tense moments the Count seethed with real rage, but of the fierce and internal variety. Whether Ferrer's outburst was genuine or not, clockwork infernal machines were never used in mines. The two young men were making a bomb, and there could be little doubt how they meant to use it. There could be little doubt either that it was here, in this laboratory, that Morral had learnt how to make the sort of bomb that had killed Angela. And it was more than likely that it was the Ferrers who had taught him how to do so. At the thought de Quesnoy clenched his hands until the nails dug into his palms and his knuckles went white. He felt a terrible temptation to whip out the little revolver he always carried and shoot them where they stood.

With a great effort he mastered it. To execute two men who he felt convinced had played a part in bringing about Angela's death would give him a grim satisfaction; but if he held his hand for the moment he now had a lead which might enable him to destroy the whole brood of assassins root and branch, and that would be a far more fitting memorial to her.

His brain clicked over. He had the lead, but if he did not take it at once it might be lost. Still outwardly calm, and ignoring what Ferrer had said about a mine, he stepped over to the slab, picked up the works of the little clock and remarked:

T wonder that you still use these things. Their ticking often gives them away so that they are discovered before they are timed to go off. It is far better to use a small phial of acid which, in a given time, eats through its container, and then a thin wire, the snapping of which detonates the bomb.'

For a moment there was a stunned silence, while the brothers stared at him uncertainly, then he added with a smile, 'My cousin is a nihilist and at his home in Odessa I sometimes used to help him make his bombs; so I know quite a lot about such things.'

Both brothers gave a sudden sigh of relief, then the face of the elder lit up and he exclaimed, 'Then you are one of us! Welcome to Barcelona, Senor Chirikov; it is a pleasure to meet you.'

Ferrer had remained scowling in the background. Now he burst out: 'You young fools. I've warned you time and again to stop associating with the militants. You'll end by getting yourselves shot. I warn you, too, Senor Chirikov. Have nothing to do with these young hotheads. I make no secret of my views, but we'll not achieve our ends by violence.'

The sandy-haired Benigno turned to de Quesnoy. 'Sanchez and I are sorry to disagree with our father, but he is old-fashioned and out-of-date. We'll get nowhere by just talking. We've done little else for far too long. Our only hope lies in Propaganda by Deed and in terrorizing all those who attempt to suppress us.'

'Right or wrong,' Ferrer declared harshly, 'I'll not allow you to use this house to make engines of destruction. Take your things, or better still, render them safe, and throw them in the dustbin, then get out. Now, Senor Chirikov, come with me and I will show you the rest of our premises.'

'One moment, Father,' the black-browed Sanchez intervened. 'I'd like to hear something about the Russian nihilists at first hand, and I'm sure Benigno would too. What about having a drink with us this evening, Senor Chirikov?'

'I should be happy to,' de Quesnoy replied, with difficulty concealing his elation at this chance to win the confidence of two active anarchists. 'Where shall we meet?'

'It would be better still if the Senor would dine with us,' suggested Benigno. 'We'd have longer to talk then, and could go out to the Font de Lleo at Montjuich.'

On de Quesnoy's accepting, as the restaurant was some way outside the town, it was arranged that the brothers should pick him up at seven o'clock near the Columna de Colon, which was not far from his pension. Then, having said good-bye to them for the present, he accompanied the now sullen Ferrer on a tour of the library, the foundry, the kitchens and the publishing part of the establishment.

When, nearly an hour later, he left the Escuela Moderna he had plenty to think about, and the problem uppermost in his mind was the question whether Ferrer was genuinely opposed to violence or had been playing a part. He had certainly appeared to be in earnest, and Benigno's attitude to his father supported a belief that he had been. On the other hand, if Ferrer's sons had been using the laboratory against his express wishes it seemed strange that they had not at least taken the precaution of locking themselves in before getting to work. If, too, Ferrer's was, in fact, the brain that plotted and directed the anarchist outrages it would be a matter of the first importance that he should be protected from the least breath of suspicion; so it might well be that Benigno had played up to him on a well-established procedure of always making him appear before strangers as only a propagator of anarchist theory. Whichever might prove to be the case, the Count felt that his luck had been very much in that morning and that he could look forward to a promising evening.

By five to seven he was standing outside the Museo Marftimo opposite the towering column erected to the memory of the discoverer of America; but few Spaniards have much regard for punctuality, and it was nearly half past before the brothers, without apology for their lateness, but with cheerful greetings, picked him up in a one-horse coche.

Montjuich is a great hill rising to six hundred feet in height on the western outskirts of Barcelona. Towards the sea its side is almost sheer, so the approach to its summit has to be made from the landward side, and even there the slope upward round a succession of hairpin bends is so steep that de Quesnoy felt pity for the poor lean horse drawing them and, half-way up, insisted on getting out. The Ferrers thought his conduct strange, but attributed it to Russian eccentricity, and good-naturedly joined him.

At the top of the hill they got into the carriage again and drove through pines, palms and tamarisks towards its southern slope, on which stood the restaurant. From its terrace there was a fine view of the great rambling castle that for centuries had dominated Barcelona, and one could see for many miles out to sea.

Even before they sat down at one of the tables in the garden, the clothes of people at others and the waiters hurrying about in spotless white aprons told de Quesnoy that it was a much more expensive place than he had expected the Ferrers to take him to, and he wondered that they could afford it.

For a moment he put it down to Spanish pride in showing a foreigner round, coupled with a generous desire to do him well; but, in spite of the rather shoddy suits all three of them were wearing, the head waiter hurried up to take their order, and it then emerged that the brothers often came there on Sundays in the summer. That caused the Count to think again, and he recalled the fact that in Russia it was common knowledge that the nihilists not only committed assassinations, but also robbed banks and blackmailed wealthy people. They justified such crimes by saying that they were committed as their only means of raising funds to continue their political campaign and support their comrades who were in hiding. But de Quesnoy thought it probable that in some cases a part of the proceeds was kept back; and he had no reason to suppose that the activities and morals of the Spanish anarchists differed much from those of the Russian nihilists.

As the evening advanced he formed the opinion that Sanchez, anyhow, was in the movement mainly for what he could get out of it. The burly, coarse-featured young man gulped down the rich dishes he had ordered with a zest that implied that he could not have enough of them, and each time he filled his mouth with wine his eye roved round the prettier of the women at the nearby tables. In Spain no respectable woman then ever took a meal in public; so the majority of them were the better class of kept girls out for the evening with their mostly middle-aged lovers, and two of them, no doubt attracted by Sanchez's fine physique, covertly returned his glances. Although he did not actually say so his attitude clearly conveyed that this was the sort of life he visualized himself living when equality for all had been achieved, and that he would be entitled then to the best of food and wine all the time, with no nonsense about any monied "class having first call on the prettiest women.

Benigno was very different and, de Quesnoy soon decided, a true fanatic. He seemed little interested in what he ate and drank, and not the least in any of the good-looking girls at nearby tables; but he was intensely interested in all the Count had to say on the condition of the Russian workers. Sanchez was interested only in the accounts that their guest gave them of high officials being blown to pieces, shot, knifed or poisoned, whereas Benigno wanted to know what wages the workers received, the cost of rent and food, the percentage of them that contributed the little they could afford towards the freedom movements, and the answers to a score of similar questions.

De Quesnoy succeeded in satisfying both of them, although in the case of Benigno he was compelled to use guesswork in answering most of his inquiries. The evening therefore proved a great success, and as they drove back through the cool night air to the city the brothers pressed their new friend to keep in touch with them and to come out with them again. To maintain the role he was playing he had to say that, to his regret, his very limited resources did not permit him to return their hospitality on the scale they had entertained him; but, as he had felt sure they would, they brushed that objection aside, declaring that among friends the bill should be paid by whoever happened to have most money.

Thinking over the evening as he undressed in his bed-sitting-room, with its cheap furniture and faded wallpaper, two things were uppermost in the Count's mind: one was the pleasure he had derived, after making do for a fortnight on indifferent food, from a meal of lobsters, duck and wood strawberries with cream; the other was how strange it was that Benigno, who was far the more intelligent of the two, apparently failed to see his younger brother as he was - a gross, brutal egoist who camouflaged his selfish appetites under a veneer of back-slapping good fellowship - and quite clearly worshipped the ground he walked on.

On the Monday, and again on Tuesday, to de Quesnoy's considerable annoyance Ferrer sent him students who wished to take a course in Russian; so there was nothing for it but to agree to the times that suited them and during those hours assume the role of a pedagogue. Fortunately neither of them could afford more than two hours a week, so they did not greatly interfere with his pursuit of the lines through which he hoped to succeed with his mission.

He had no place in which to give these lessons other than in his bedroom, and it was on returning to it late on the Tuesday night, when he had again been out with the Ferrer brothers, that he found that his things had been searched. Nothing had been taken, and he had little doubt that on Ferrer's instructions one of the students had returned to his room during his absence to vet its contents; so he had good reason to be glad about the precautions he had taken.

Most evenings he continued to put in at his branch of the Somaten; but in addition to Tuesday evening he also spent that of Friday with the Ferrer brothers, taking them to the club for a snack meal. He was, however, a little surprised to find that they did not know any of its members.

When Sunday morning came round again he decided to pay Ferrer another visit. To thank him for having sent the two students was excuse enough, and Ferrer received him without any trace of the moody anger he had displayed when they had last parted. After they had talked for a few minutes in the hallway of Ferrer's apartment, in order to prolong the conversation de Quesnoy asked if he might borrow a few books. Ferrer then took him down to the library, which on Sundays was closed to the public.

Having found the shelves containing books in French, de Quesnoy looked through them and chose three. One was a work in support of the expulsion of the religious Orders from France by the government of the atheist Emile Combes, another was on the brutal exploitation of the negroes in the Congo by their Belgian overlords, and the third was a translation from the German of Paul Eltz-bacher's book, Anarchism, which Dona Gulia had recommended to him.

After glancing at their titles Ferrer remarked, 'An interesting choice; but as you intend to settle here I should have thought that it would have paid you better to improve your knowledge of Spanish, rather than to struggle through serious works in French.'

De Quesnoy smiled. 'French is my second language. I both read and speak it fluently.' By way of explanation he transposed the nationalities of his parents, and added, 'My mother was a Frenchwoman.'

Ferrer raised his thinly-marked eyebrows. 'Indeed!' Then after a short pause he went on, 'That being the case I think I could offer you employment—although it would be only of a temporary nature. My French master, Emile Degas, has been ill for some time. Poor fellow, he is suffering from a cancer and in great pain. I have arranged for a new man to take his place, but he will not be arriving from France until towards the end of the month. In the meantime I would have liked to relieve Degas of his duties, but the classes must go on. Do you think you would be competent to take them, so that I could release him at once to*receive full-time treatment?'

'Certainly,' replied the Count. T 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 Senor 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 Dona 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 millions.

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 hi 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 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 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 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 settled 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.

De Quesnoy needed no telling that, for him, the silence was pregnant with menace. The men about him were declared enemies of society. He had every reason to believe them either actively concerned in carrying out assassinations or, at least, helping to plan them. Since they felt no scruples during attempts to murder their chosen victims, about innocent people often being killed or maimed, it was certain that, should they be convinced he was a spy, they would show no mercy to him.

Taken completely off his guard, during those seconds of explosive quiet, he stared at the weedy little Frenchman who had denounced him. Then, rallying his wits in an attempt to save himself, his face suddenly took on an expression of angry amazement. His 'devil's eyebrows' shot up into his forehead and in a voice sharp with indignation, he cried:

'Monsieur! How dare you make such an accusation. You are entirely mistaken.'

'Nothing of the kind!' Gerault snapped back. 'You were the leader of the conspiracy to put the Due de Vendome on the throne, and later you passed yourself off under the name of Vasili Petrovitch. It was you who bribed that absinthe-besotted traitor, Bidegain, to steal the fiches from the files of the Grand Lodge, and letters from the War Minister to our Secretary-General, Vadecard. I would know you again anywhere.'

'I haven't an idea what you are talking about,' stormed the Count. 'I've never seen you before in my life.'

As he made the latter statement he would have been prepared to swear to it. The lined face, beady brown eyes and thin drooping moustache of the Frenchman were entirely strange to him; but during the months he had lived in a Montparnasse boarding-house

82

as Petrovitch he had been introduced to scores of Freemasons and attended a dozen or more Lodge meetings, so he could not have remembered the faces of a tenth of those he had met or rubbed shoulders with.

On the other hand, as the wrecker of their attempt to sabotage the French Army, they had ample cause to remember him; and not just vaguely as a man they had seen a few times, for his description had been circulated by the police and photographs of him had appeared in all the papers. Ten months earlier his participation in the abortive conspiracy to place de Vendome on the throne had brought him nation-wide publicity, so the Press had seized on his reappearance in Paris as front-page news, and his features had temporarily become as well known as those of the atheist War Minister whom he had succeeded in hounding out of office.

It was that which made his return to France, even temporarily and under another name, still almost certain to lead to his arrest; but as he was in Spain and it was getting on for two years since such notoriety had been thrust upon him, he had considered negligible the chances of his being recognized by one of the class of people with whom he intended to mix in Barcelona. He had even regarded the risk as so remote that he had contemplated joining a Masonic Lodge there; so he felt that fate had played him a really scurvy trick in confronting him with an enemy who could swear to his identity.

Hiding his apprehension that he might fail in his attempt to bluff matters out, he gave a swift glance round at the other occupants of the room. Dolores and Jovellenos had come to their feet. The tall, stoop-shouldered mathematics master was peering through his spectacles at Gerault; but Dolores's pale-blue eyes now seemed to be protruding slightly and were fixed on him with evident suspicion. Zapatro and Herr Schmidt he could not see, as both of them were standing a little behind him; but Sanchez's low brow was furrowed and his mouth grim, while Benigno was regarding him with a puzzled frown.

Meanwhile Gerault had returned to the attack. Wrinkling up his nose he retorted with a vicious sneer, 'So you have never seen me in your life, eh? No doubt the noble Count considered me too insignificant a person to register in his aristocratic memory. But I have seen him, with Lazare, with Forain and with others whom he deceived with his glib tongue so that he might lie his way into our Brotherhood. I tell you, comrades, he is a traitor; a spy. If we had caught him in Paris we'd have had him garrotted by apaches and paid them handsomely for their trouble.'