A PROFESSIONAL CONSPIRATOR.
Up till that time I knew nothing of Haigh's gifts in the musical line,
and a bit of a revelation was in store for me. It did not come all at
once. The conductor of the opera company ("_reputado maestro D.
Vincente Paoli_" the lean handbills styled him) opened the concert, and
it was not until he and Haigh had some difference over the accentuation
of a note in an air from Bizet's _I Pescatori di Perle_ that my
shipmate strode over the piano stool.
The old professional's face was amusing to watch. Good-natured contempt
for amateur theory was very plainly written on it at first. That gave
way to surprise and wonder; and then these merged into undiluted
admiration.
Haigh had given his version of the disputed passage, and then saying,
"This is rather a fine bit too," had played through the Moor's fierce
love song; after which, without any words being spoken, he verged off
into other melody which we could appreciate even though we failed to
recognize its origin. It was all new to us, and after a while we began
to see that the player was his own composer.
He peered round from time to time, glancing over his shoulder at our
faces, and once stopped to ask if we were bored.
"No, go on," said Paoli. "I never heard music like that before. It is
new. I do not say whether I like it. I cannot understand it all as yet,
I who can comprehend all that even Wagner wrote. But it is wonderful.
Continue.--No, nothing fresh, or my ears will be dazed with surfeit.
Play again that--that piece, that study, I know not what you call it,
which ran somehow thus"--the Italian hummed some broken snatches.--"It
seemed to show me a procession of damned spirits scrambling down the
mountains to hell, with troops of little devils blackmailing them on
the road. I know not how you call the thing, and like enough I have
totally missed its motive; but there is something about it that holds
me, fascinates me, and I would hear it again that I may understand."
Haigh grinned and complied, and then he played us more of his own
stuff, the most _outre_ that human ears had ever listened to, and
we marvelled still further. But having by this time fallen in with his
vein, we both of us could appreciate the luxuries he was pouring out.
"Signor," said Paoli enthusiastically, when it was over, "if you chose,
you could found a new school of music."
"And call it the Vagabond School, eh?"
"Your airs are wild and weird, I own, but, signor, there is melody in
every note of them."
Haigh shrugged his shoulders. "Such melody, _maestro mio,_ as only
the initiated can appreciate. You have been a wanderer, _maestro_,
and so has Cospatric; therefore you understand. But the steady,
industrious stay-at-homes, the people who think that they know what
music really is, and what its limits are, and all about it, what would
they say to these queer efforts of mine? They would not even dignify
them by the word 'distorted.' They would call them unmitigated bosh,
and set me down as a virulent maniac. No, signori, I am not ambitious,
and so I shall not lay myself open to that sort of snubbing. Come
across to the other room for cigarettes and vermouth."
And there we sat till the melancholy chaunt of the _sereno_
outside told us it was five o'clock, and, with the blessing of God, a
fine morning.
A certain black box, my one piece of salvage from the wreck at Genoa,
came up from the ugly cutter next afternoon, and I am proud to say that
my violin added another link between us.
For the next three days we had as good a time as one need wish to
enjoy. Every evening after his duties at the theatre were over the old
Italian called us round his piano, and we feasted on what we all three
loved. And then the opera company took steamer to fulfil an engagement
at Valencia. Haigh was for accompanying them. Amongst other reasons he
had a bit of a penchant for the soprano's understudy. But I said "No,"
reminding him of the other business we had in hand, and pointing out
how much time had been frittered away already.
"Oh, as to that," said he, "I think we may as well pat the pocket that
holds what we've got, and resign ourselves to Kismet with regard to the
rest."
"It's scarcely wise to throw the sponge up yet. I am not hopeful, but I
don't despair."
"I'm letting the thing drop from my mind. However, if you've an idea,
old chappie, let's hear it."
"What do you say to taking up another partner?"
"To what end? I fail to see what use a third would be. Still, give the
proposed partner a name."
"Taltavull."
"Phew! I say, I rather bar meddling with politics, especially the
white-hot explosive politics that he affects."
"So do I. I hate 'em. Still, if there's anybody able to ferret out
where that Recipe's got to, and make the present holder disgorge, that
long, lean, respectable-looking anarchist is the man. To begin with, he
has a far cleverer head on him than either of us can run to, and from
what I told you about his theories, he'll be as keen as knives when
once he's shown the scent."
"But the man's not more than human," objected Haigh. "I don't see that
he'll be able to squint farther through a brick wall than either of us
could."
"He has more chances, for this reason: he's mixed up with social
undercurrents whose flow we can neither trace nor follow. These will
take him to places where we could not get, and show him things that we
could not find."
"Which fine metaphor boiled down signifies that you want to bring the
man into partnership because he is a professional conspirator."
"Put it that way if you like. Also you must not forget that you and I
are at present dead-locked."
"So that we have all to gain and nothing to lose. Precisely; old man,
you've put it in a nutshell. The only other thing is, do you think
Taltavull would play fair?"
"We must risk that. It isn't a matter one could make out a paper
agreement over, and sign our names to across a charter-party stamp. But
I think, from what I saw of him, Taltavull is not the man to do an
unfair thing to any one who treats him well. But, as I say, we must be
prepared to risk it."
"All right then," said Haigh; "so far as I'm concerned, I'm quite
willing. You do the recruiting. We might call ourselves the Raymond
Lully Exploitation Company, Limited."
I went out there and then about the errand, and found Taltavull at his
own house, sitting in a huge stuffed armchair. He was reading
_L'Intransigeant_, and marking in blue pencil the points where he
considered its racy blackguardisms were not sufficiently pungent.
The furniture of a Spanish sitting-room is made up, as a rule, of
whitewash on the walls, and a good supply of eighteenpenny rush-seated
chairs scattered about the tiled floor. This is on account of the
climate, which at times makes all appearances of coolness to be highly
appreciated. But the anarchist was not a Spaniard, nor an Italian, nor
anything else so narrow. He was a man of no nationality, and
cosmopolitan, and sublimely proud of that expansiveness. Consequently,
he had taken his ideas of furniture from a more northern island, and
had his room well crammed with massive mahogany and dark oak, with the
upholstery in dull crimson velvet. To be sure, no style could be more
unsuited to the climate, but then, on the other hand, it was a standing
witness of his emancipation from all restraint. The thing might bring
him discomfort, but that was a secondary matter, and he was prepared to
suffer for his faith's sake. Certain hard and fast principles always
came first with him, and in the heavy mahogany and the hot plush velvet
none of them were violated.
He put down his paper when I was announced, and said he was glad to see
me; and I honestly believe that the phrase of welcome was no empty one,
even before he knew what I had come about. He seemed--I say it without
conceit--to have taken a fancy to me at our first meeting.
The gist of my tale came out pretty rapidly, although I skipped no
details, but waded through chapter and verse; but before it was half
told, Taltavull had sprung up from his seat, and was pacing backwards
and forwards over the thick carpet, fiercely waving his long arms, and
looking for all the world like a mechanical frock-coated skeleton. I
broke off, and asked half-laughingly if I had offended him.
"I deem you, senor," cried he, "the greatest benefactor that my cause
and I have ever known. I shall feel myself standing to the chin in your
debt, whatever your conditions may be."
And with that I went on to the end of the yarn.
"Senor Cospatric," said he, when the last had been told, "it is
directly contrary to the tenets of our creed to assist one
individual--much less two--in piling up wealth beyond the due
proportion. But it is also our fixed maxim to deal honourably with
those who do the like by us. You, Don Miguel, are one of our enemies, a
passive one, it is true, but none the less an enemy, because you are
not for us. Also I see with sorrow and certainty that you will never
become a convert. There is something in your blood, some hereditary
taint of conservatism, which forbids it. But for all that, you shall
find that we anarchists can keep faith with our opponents. You shall
have your rigid eighteen months' monopoly of the diamonds before we
begin to stir the market and set about revolutionizing the world."
"Always supposing you can manage to finger the Recipe, which, as we
stand at present, seems a by no means certain thing."
"Pah, _amigo_, you are half-hearted. I"--he struck his narrow
chest fiercely--"shall never think of defeat. From the outset I shall
go into the business with intention to succeed. Of my methods you may
not learn much, for to those beyond the pale we lock out secrets. But
could you know how far our brotherhood extends, and how deep is the
responsibility with which each member is saddled, you would have more
faith in the mighty weapon whose hilt I, Taltavull, grasp between my
fingers."
"Don't you go and involve Haigh and myself in a political row."
"No word of what is happening will pass outside the bounds of our own
clique."
"I just mentioned the matter, y'know, because you anarchists have got
the reputation of not sticking at much."
"My dear Don Miguel, a statesman in your own islands once evolved the
policy of Thorough. We have adopted the selfsame principle. Nobody and
nothing must stand in the way of our ends. We stand up for humanity in
the mass. _Bourgeois_ society is bound to go under. And to hasten
its downfall any one of our members is proud to offer himself as a
sufferer, or as even a martyr to death, for the Cause. We aim at
producing a state of society in which men may live together in harmony
without laws. You must see that we are merely extreme philanthropists,
and that our motives are pure in the extreme. And, _amigo_, you
must disabuse your mind from the vulgar illusion that we are nothing
but a band of brutal assassins who murder only through sheer lust for
blood."
I started some sort of apology, but he cut me short.
"My dear fellow, you haven't put my back up in the very least. A man is
bound to misunderstand us unless he is on our side; because if he does
understand and appreciate, and has any claim to the title of man, he
could not help being an anarchist. But now let us drop the question and
get to the work of the more immediate present. I am going to the
telegraph office first. Let me accompany you back as far as your
hotel."
"When shall I see you again?" I asked, as we parted at Bustamente's
doorway.
"When I find where the Recipe is."
"And that will occupy how long? A week?"
Taltavull laughed. "You will see me to-morrow afternoon at the latest,"
said he.
Confidence is said to be infectious, but I can't say that my hopes were
very highly excited by Taltavull's sanguineness of success. As to
Haigh, he had scoffed at the idea of tracing up the Recipe from the
first, and all I could tell him about the new power on the scent would
not change his cheerful pessimism. "The whole loaf we are not going to
get, dear boy," was his stated opinion; "and we may as well be
contented with the crumbs we've grabbed, and enjoy 'em accordingly.
There's the dinner bell. Let's go and make merry with the drummers."
However, true to his word, and not a little to our surprise, Taltavull
turned up about four the next afternoon and told us that he had been
successful. There was a little subcutaneous pride to be noted as he
made the announcement, for, after all, he was a human man as well as an
anarchist, and had done a thing which we deemed very nigh impossible.
But he kept this natural exultation under very modestly, saying that
all credit that might be due was owing not to him, but to the great
organization. We were merely offered a proof, he said, of what the
anarchist body could encompass when once their machinery was put in
motion. And then, having given us the broad fact, he proceeded to show
out details. Or rather, to be strictly accurate, he gave us a string of
results, without any hint as to how they had been arrived at, a certain
amount of mystery being the salt without which no secret society could
possibly exist.
Put briefly and in its order of happening, the story ran as follows:--
The raider, as we had already faintly surmised, was none other than the
man with the spectacles in the Genovese _caffe_. His name was
Pether--N. Congleton Pether; he was of Jewish extraction, and he was
stone-blind. He had been much in Africa, and it was in the southern
part of that continent that an accident deprived him of his sight. The
injured eyeballs had been surgically removed, and artificial ones
mounted in their stead. The man was clever in the extreme in hiding his
infirmity; for a week none of the hotel people where he was staying in
Genoa even guessed at it. Casual acquaintances scarcely ever detected
the missing sense.
English being his native tongue, Pether had naturally lost no word of
the discussion over Weems's manuscript, and directly the little
schoolmaster and myself had left the _caffe_ he had beckoned his
servant Sadi, who was within call, and had gone off on his arm towards
the harbour. There he threw money about right and left, and the
information he wanted was given glibly. A freight steamer consigned to
some senna merchants would be sailing for Tripoli at noon on the
morrow. To the skipper of this craft he betook himself, and bargained
to be set down unostentatiously in Minorca. It would mean a very slight
deviation from the fixed course, and what he paid would be money into
that skipper's own pocket. You see Pether knew how to set about
matters. Had he gone to the shipowners, he would as likely as not have
failed, or at any rate been charged an exorbitant fee; but by applying
to a badly paid Italian seaman who was not above cooking a log, he got
what he wanted for a thousand-franc note.
The senna steamer made for neither Ciudadella nor Port Mahon. Her
doings were a trifle dark, and she did not want to be reported. But her
skipper was a man of local knowledge, and remembered that there were
three small harbours on the northern coast of Minorca, used exclusively
by fishermen and _contrabandistas_. Further, being a man of guile,
he understood the ways of the outpost Carabinero. He knew that if an
open boat were seen to come into one of these village harbours from
somewhere out of vague seaward darkness, the local preserver of the
king's peace and the king's customs would not be rude enough to look in
that direction. That uniformed worthy would understand that some
gentleman in the neighbourhood wished to land a cargo, probably of
smokable tobacco, free of duty. He would know that if he interfered, he
would probably test the chill sensation of dull steel jabbed between
the shoulder blades before many days were over. He would expect that in
the ordinary course of events judicious short-sightedness would be
rewarded by notes for many pesetas, and American tobacco in generous
quantity. And he would reroll and smoke his Government cigarette,
placidly non-interferent, thanking his best saint for the happy time to
come.
And in fine it was managed in this very fashion. The senna steamer
hove-to in the twilight some three miles off-shore, and a boat put into
the tiny sheltered bay of Cavalleria just two hours after nightfall.
The boat scarcely touched the beach. She disgorged herself of two
passengers and a small lot of luggage, and departed whence she had come
in scared haste.
A Carabinero, with his back ostentatiously turned to the newcomers,
leaned on his rifle, whistling mournfully. Sadi wrapped a greasy note
round a pebble, and chucked it to the man's feet, whence it was
transferred to the pocket of his ragged red trousers without comment,
and then the pair took their way up past the carvel-built fishing-boats
into the straggling village street.
Cavalleria has no regular _fonda_, or even _casa_, but there is a shop
where they sell wine, and black tumour-covered sausages, and white
bread, and _algobra_ beans, and Scotch sewing cotton. The whole village
knew of their arrival, and were gathered in this shop to meet them when
they came in. Few questions were asked. The Spaniard of the lower
orders has a most Hibernian weakness for anything smacking of
conspiracy, or any enterprise which is "agin' the Government." Pether
saluted the audience with one mysterious grin, which they appeared to
consider as fully explanatory, and then inviting them all to drink with
him, put down a peseta,[2] and received much change in greasy bronze.
"_Dos reales_" was the price of that piece of lavish entertainment, the
old twopence-halfpenny still holding sway in out-districts against the
more modern decimal notation.
[2] A _peseta_ is worth rather less than a franc at the usual
rate of exchange.
And then a guide was wanted.
Every able-bodied man amongst the villagers offered his services for
nothing. His time and all that he possessed was entirely at the
disposition of the senores. The choice was embarrassing. But at last
one rope-sandalled hero was selected, and the trio set off into the
night between the great rubble walls. The most of their luggage had
been left to go to Mahon by mule pannier on the morrow. They only took
one small box with them, slung by a strap over Sadi's shoulders. But
the guide carried pick and shovel.
They struck the main road and held on along it till they reached the
cemetery, and there struck off through Alayor, and on down the narrow
lanes to Talaiti de Talt. Sadi and the Spaniard dug, and being used to
the exercise, and working in the cool of the night, deepened their pit
rapidly. Only the stars watched them at their labours. Pether was not
able to look on; he could only listen.
As day was beginning to gray the sky the entrance tunnel was unroofed,
and down the two foreigners dropped into it, Sadi leading. The man of
the soil feared ghosts and crouched at the lip of the hole. Also, being
ignorant of all other tongues save Minorquin, he understood no word of
what was being said beneath him.
But of a sudden a noiseless light of blinding whiteness flared out from
the inside of the Talayot; and after an interval of black-velvet gloom
it flashed out again. His fears still were strong, but curiosity
trampled them under foot, and the man in the rope sandals dropped
noiselessly on to the floor of the tunnel. Again the intense white
glare shone out, and the watcher saw words of writing on the farther
wall of the Talayot, and him of the spectacles holding his wooden box
so as to face them. Afterwards, by the light of a candle, he who had
made the flashes scraped this lettering from the plaster with his
knife, and his companion, laughing, scribbled something else on the
blank place. And then, as the cold earthy atmosphere was beginning to
make him sweat, the son of the soil climbed out again.
"Great Caesar!" exclaimed Haigh, when the narrative had reached this
point. "I'm beginning to have an inkling of how it was all worked out.
If that chap photographed the inscription by magnesium flashlight, I
verily believe I know where the plates----But don't let me interrupt
yet. Finish the tale first."
And so Taltavull went on.
The uncanny sights which he had witnessed impressed the Cavalleria
fisherman mightily, and when he received a valuable banknote, he helped
fill up the hole and departed, fully determined to hold his tongue. The
man with the spectacles said that evil would assuredly befall if he
spoke of the things he had seen, and that fisherman believed him
implicitly.
The two raiders walked rapidly down the narrow lanes till they came
upon the broad road at that point where it is interrupted by a hedge of
wheelbarrows and gang planks. Coming down the other branch road
opposite to them was the zinc-roofed diligence, which had left
Ciudadella in chill darkness at a quarter to five. At their sign the
driver brought the ramshackle conveyance to a stand, and they squeezed
into the stuffy interior. Then with an _arre-e-ee_, and an
impartial basting with the short whip, the four wretched horses got
into their shamble again, and forty minutes later were climbing in and
out of the clean dry holes in Calle Isabella 2^a at Mahon. They only
had one hitch in their enterprise. During one of these bumps in the
uneven street the door flew open, and the camera fell out on the cobble
stones with a thud and a sound of splintering glass.
"And I thought that man a Juggins," said Haigh, "and imagined I was
blarneying and greening him _ad libitum_, whilst all the time he
was bamboozling me--me--me, gentlemen. But, Senor Taltavull, are you
perfectly certain the fellow is blind? I think you must be mistaken
there."
"He is stone-blind; but, as I told you, he is marvellously clever at
concealing it. You are by no means alone in being deceived."
"But, _amigo_, he looked at me when we were talking, and pointed
out things about the room, and, in fact, used his eyes the whole time.
Brown eyes they were, and good to look upon."
"I tell you he is very, very clever, and as his great conceit is to
hide his infirmity, he uses all his wit to do it. Sadi, his servant,
had helped him to explore the room beforehand, so that he knew exactly
where everything lay. And the sound of your voice would tell him where
to direct his gaze during a conversation. But call to mind anything
where immediate vision was necessary. Did you never ask him to read a
letter or anything of that kind, and not notice (now that you are
reminded of it) that he somehow or other evaded doing so?"
"No, no---- By Jove, yes, I did though. I asked him to play cards, and
he wouldn't from conscientious motives or some rot of that kind."
"There you are, then."
"Right. Of course he couldn't see the pips. And this was the man I
thought I was having on for a Juggins. And this is the man who has got
the Recipe for Diamonds locked up in a photographic double dark-back.
That is, unless he's taken it out and got it developed."
"So far as I can make out," said the anarchist, "the negative is still
undeveloped. Pether took it to Palma, and he has it there now, not
daring to trust it in a photographer's hands, and not being able to
develop it himself. Senores, I believe it will be for us to unlock that
tremendous mine of potential energy. Mallorca, I regret to say, is too
strictly Catholic to be a profitable sowing ground for our propaganda,
but we have scattered adherents here, and these are working their best
for us. But our presence in that island is imperatively demanded.
Unfortunately, the next steamer does not sail for two days."
"Then we'll take the cutter," said Haigh. "Wind's in the sou'-sou'-east
and lightish, but if it holds as it is we should make Alcudia Bay by
early to-morrow morning, and from there could hit off the railway at La
Puebla and get to Palma."
And to this Taltavull and I agreed.