Mr. X came to me, preceded by a letter of introduction from a good
friend of mine in Paris, specifically to see my collection of Chinese
bronzes and porcelain.
"My friend in Paris is a collector, too. He collects neither porcelain,
nor bronzes, nor pictures, nor medals, nor stamps, nor anything that
could be profitably dispersed under an auctioneer's hammer. He would
reject, with genuine surprise, the name of a collector. Nevertheless,
that's what he is by temperament. He collects acquaintances. It
is delicate work. He brings to it the patience, the passion, the
determination of a true collector of curiosities. His collection does
not contain any royal personages. I don't think he considers them
sufficiently rare and interesting; but, with that exception, he has met
with and talked to everyone worth knowing on any conceivable ground. He
observes them, listens to them, penetrates them, measures them, and puts
the memory away in the galleries of his mind. He has schemed, plotted,
and travelled all over Europe in order to add to his collection of
distinguished personal acquaintances.
"As he is wealthy, well connected, and unprejudiced, his collection is
pretty complete, including objects (or should I say subjects?) whose
value is unappreciated by the vulgar, and often unknown to popular fame.
Of trevolte of modern times. The world knows him as a revolutionary
writer whose savage irony has laid bare the rottenness of the most
respectable institutions. He has scalped every venerated head, and
has mangled at the stake of his wit every received opinion and every
recognized principle of conduct and policy. Who does not remember his
flaming red revolutionary pamphlets? Their sudden swarmings used to
overwhelm the powers of every Continental police like a plague of
crimson gadflies. But this extreme writer has been also the active
inspirer of secret societies, the mysterious unknown Number One of
desperate conspiracies suspected and unsuspected, matured or baffled.
And the world at large has never had an inkling of that fact! This
accounts for him going about amongst us to this day, a veteran of many
subterranean campaigns, standing aside now, safe within his reputation
of merely the greatest destructive publicist that ever lived."
Thus wrote my friend, adding that Mr. X was an enlightened connoisseur
of bronzes and china, and asking me to show him my collection.
X turned up in due course. My treasures are disposed in three large
rooms without carpets and curtains. There is no other furniture than the
etagres and the glass cases whose contents shall be worth a fortune to
my heirs. I allow no fires to be lighted, for fear of accidents, and a
fire-proof door separates them from the rest of the house.
It was a bitter cold day. We kept on our overcoats and hats.
Middle-sized and spare, his eyes alert in a long, Roman-nosed
countenance, X walked on his neat little feet, with short steps,
and looked at my collection intelligently. I hope I looked at him
intelligently, too. A snow-white moustache and imperial made his
nutbrown complexion appear darker than it really was. In his fur coat
and shiny tall hat that terrible man looked fashionable. I believe he
belonged to a noble family, and could have called himself Vicomte X de
la Z if he chose. We talked nothing but bronzes and porcelain. He was
remarkably appreciative. We parted on cordial terms.
Where he was staying I don't know. I imagine he must have been a lonely
man. Anarchists, I suppose, have no families--not, at any rate, as we
understand that social relation. Organization into families may answer
to a need of human nature, but in the last instance it is based on law,
and therefore must be something odious and impossible to an anarchist.
But, indeed, I don't understand anarchists. Does a man of that--of
that--persuasion still remain an anarchist when alone, quite alone and
going to bed, for instance? Does he lay his head on the pillow, pull
his bedclothes over him, and go to sleep with the necessity of the
chambardement general, as the French slang has it, of the general
blow-up, always present to his mind? And if so how can he? I am sure
that if such a faith (or such a fanaticism) once mastered my thoughts
I would never be able to compose myself sufficiently to sleep or eat or
perform any of the routine acts of daily life. I would want no wife, no
children; I could have no friends, it seems to me; and as to collecting
bronzes or china, that, I should say, would be quite out of the
question. But I don't know. All I know is that Mr. X took his meals in a
very good restaurant which I frequented also.
With his head uncovered, the silver top-knot of his brushed-up hair
completed the character of his physiognomy, all bony ridges and sunken
hollows, clothed in a perfect impassiveness of expression. His meagre
brown hands emerging from large white cuffs came and went breaking
bread, pouring wine, and so on, with quiet mechanical precision.
His head and body above the tablecloth had a rigid immobility. This
firebrand, this great agitator, exhibited the least possible amount of
warmth and animation. His voice was rasping, cold, and monotonous in a
low key. He could not be called a talkative personality; but with his
detached calm manner he appeared as ready to keep the conversation going
as to drop it at any moment.
And his conversation was by no means commonplace. To me, I own, there
was some excitement in talking quietly across a dinner-table with a
man whose venomous pen-stabs had sapped the vitality of at least one
monarchy. That much was a matter of public knowledge. But I knew more. I
knew of him--from my friend--as a certainty what the guardians of social
order in Europe had at most only suspected, or dimly guessed at.
He had had what I may call his underground life. And as I sat, evening
after evening, facing him at dinner, a curiosity in that direction
would naturally arise in my mind. I am a quiet and peaceable product of
civilization, and know no passion other than the passion for collecting
things which are rare, and must remain exquisite even if approaching to
the monstrous. Some Chinese bronzes are monstrously precious. And here
(out of my friend's collection), here I had before me a kind of rare
monster. It is true that this monster was polished and in a sense even
exquisite. His beautiful unruffled manner was that. But then he was
not of bronze. He was not even Chinese, which would have enabled one
to contemplate him calmly across the gulf of racial difference. He was
alive and European; he had the manner of good society, wore a coat and
hat like mine, and had pretty near the same taste in cooking. It was too
frightful to think of.
One evening he remarked, casually, in the course of conversation,
"There's no amendment to be got out of mankind except by terror and
violence."
You can imagine the effect of such a phrase out of such a man's mouth
upon a person like myself, whose whole scheme of life had been based
upon a suave and delicate discrimination of social and artistic values.
Just imagine! Upon me, to whom all sorts and forms of violence appeared
as unreal as the giants, ogres, and seven-headed hydras whose activities
affect, fantastically, the course of legends and fairy-tales!
I seemed suddenly to hear above the festive bustle and clatter of the
brilliant restaurant the mutter of a hungry and seditious multitude.
I suppose I am impressionable and imaginative. I had a disturbing
vision of darkness, full of lean jaws and wild eyes, amongst the hundred
electric lights of the place. But somehow this vision made me angry,
too. The sight of that man, so calm, breaking bits of white bread,
exasperated me. And I had the audacity to ask him how it was that the
starving proletariat of Europe to whom he had been preaching revolt and
violence had not been made indignant by his openly luxurious life. "At
all this," I said, pointedly, with a glance round the room and at the
bottle of champagne we generally shared between us at dinner.
He remained unmoved.
"Do I feed on their toil and their heart's blood? Am I a speculator or a
capitalist? Did I steal my fortune from a starving people? No! They
know this very well. And they envy me nothing. The miserable mass of the
people is generous to its leaders. What I have acquired has come to
me through my writings; not from the millions of pamphlets distributed
gratis to the hungry and the oppressed, but from the hundreds of
thousands of copies sold to the well-fed bourgeoisie. You know that my
writings were at one time the rage, the fashion--the thing to read with
wonder and horror, to turn your eyes up at my pathos . . . or else, to
laugh in ecstasies at my wit."
"Yes," I admitted. "I remember, of course; and I confess frankly that I
could never understand that infatuation."
"Don't you know yet," he said, "that an idle and selfish class loves to
see mischief being made, even if it is made at its own expense? Its own
life being all a matter of pose and gesture, it is unable to realize the
power and the danger of a real movement and of words that have no sham
meaning. It is all fun and sentiment. It is sufficient, for instance,
to point out the attitude of the old French aristocracy towards the
philosophers whose words were preparing the Great Revolution. Even in
England, where you have some common-sense, a demagogue has only to shout
loud enough and long enough to find some backing in the very class he
is shouting at. You, too, like to see mischief being made. The demagogue
carries the amateurs of emotion with him. Amateurism in this, that, and
the other thing is a delightfully easy way of killing time, and feeding
one's own vanity--the silly vanity of being abreast with the ideas of
the day after to-morrow. Just as good and otherwise harmless people will
join you in ecstasies over your collection without having the slightest
notion in what its marvellousness really consists."
I hung my head. It was a crushing illustration of the sad truth he
advanced. The world is full of such people. And that instance of the
French aristocracy before the Revolution was extremely telling, too.
I could not traverse his statement, though its cynicism--always a
distasteful trait--took off much of its value to my mind. However, I
admit I was impressed. I felt the need to say something which would not
be in the nature of assent and yet would not invite discussion.
"You don't mean to say," I observed, airily, "that extreme
revolutionists have ever been actively assisted by the infatuation of
such people?"
"I did not mean exactly that by what I said just now. I generalized.
But since you ask me, I may tell you that such help has been given
to revolutionary activities, more or less consciously, in various
countries. And even in this country."
"Impossible!" I protested with firmness. "We don't play with fire to
that extent."
"And yet you can better afford it than others, perhaps. But let me
observe that most women, if not always ready to play with fire, are
generally eager to play with a loose spark or so."
"Is this a joke?" I asked, smiling.
"If it is, I am not aware of it," he said, woodenly. "I was thinking of
an instance. Oh! mild enough in a way . . ."
I became all expectation at this. I had tried many times to approach him
on his underground side, so to speak. The very word had been pronounced
between us. But he had always met me with his impenetrable calm.
"And at the same time," Mr. X continued, "it will give you a notion
of the difficulties that may arise in what you are pleased to call
underground work. It is sometimes difficult to deal with them. Of course
there is no hierarchy amongst the affiliated. No rigid system."
My surprise was great, but short-lived. Clearly, amongst extreme
anarchists there could be no hierarchy; nothing in the nature of a
law of precedence. The idea of anarchy ruling among anarchists was
comforting, too. It could not possibly make for efficiency.