Two police inspectors were waiting for me in my home in the little rue Oudry. One of them was short and looked rather elderly; the other was enormous and bald, about forty-five and as swarthy as pitch. The plain clothes they wore hung awkwardly on them, and when they spoke they raised their hands as if in salute. While I was saying good-by to my friends and the family, the police, with excessive politeness, hid behind the doors. The older man, when he left, kept taking off his hat and saying, “Excusez, Madame!”
One of the two detectives who had been pursuing me so tirelessly and vehemently during the past two months was waiting outside the door. In a friendly way, as if there were nothing at all between us, he arranged the rug and shut the door of the car. He reminded me of a hunter who was handing his game over to the buyer. We set off.
A fast train. A third-class compartment. The older inspector proved to be a geographer; Tomsk, Kasan, the Nijni-Novgorod fair he knew them all. He spoke Spanish and knew the country. The other, tall and dark, was silent for a long time, and sat sullenly a little distance away. But presently he unburdened himself. “The Latin race is marking time; the rest are leaving it behind,” he remarked suddenly, as he cut a piece of fat pork with a knife held in a hairy hand adorned with heavy rings. “What have you in literature? Decadence in everything. The same in philosophy. There has been no movement since Descartes and Pascal . . . The Latin race is marking time . . . ”
I waited, in astonishment, to see what would come next. But he lapsed into silence and began to chew the fat and a bun. “You had Tolstoy, not so long ago, but we understand Ibsen better than Tolstoy.” And he was silent again.
The old man, piqued by this sudden show of erudition, began to explain to me the importance of the Trans-Siberian railway. Then, at once supporting and softening the pessimistic conclusions of his colleague, he added: “Yes, we suffer from lack of initiative. Everybody wants to be a government official. It is sad, but one cannot deny it.” I listened to them both humbly and not without interest.
“Shadowing a person? To-day it is impossible. Shadowing is efficient when it isn’t noticed, isn’t it? I must say candidly the metro kills shadowing. People being watched should be ordered never to use the metro, only then would shadowing be possible.” And the dark one laughed grimly.
The older man added, to soften the effect, “We often watch, alas, without even knowing why.”
“We policemen are sceptics,” the dark one resumed abruptly, changing the subject. “You have your ideas. But we preserve the existing order. Take the Great Revolution. What a movement of ideas! Fourteen years after the revolution, the people were more miserable than ever before. Read Taine . . . We policemen are conservatives from the very nature of our duties. Scepticism is the only philosophy possible for our profession. After all, no one chooses his own path. There is no freedom of will. Everything is predetermined by the course of things.”
He began to drink wine with the air of a stoic, straight from the bottle. Then, corking the bottle: “Renan said that new ideas always come too early. And that is true.”
With this, he cast a suspicious glance at my hand, which I had placed casually on the door-knob. To reassure him, I hid my hand in my pocket. By that time the old man was again having his revenge: he was talking about the Basques, their language, women, head-dress, and so forth. We were approaching the station of Hendaye.
“This is where Déroulède, our national romantic, lived. He needed only to see the mountains of France. A Don Quixote in his Spanish abode.” The dark fellow smiled with a sort of solid condescension. “If you please, monsieur, follow me to the station commissariat.”
At Irun, a French gendarme addressed a question to me, but my guardian made a masonic sign to him and led me hurriedly through the station corridors.
“C’est fait avec discrétion, n’est-ce pas?” the dark one asked me. “You can take a trolley-car from Irun to San Sebastian. You must try and look like a tourist so as not to arouse the suspicions of the Spanish police, who are very distrustful. And from now on, I don’t know you, do I?”
We parted coldly.
From San Sebastian, where I was delighted by the sea and appalled by the prices, I went to Madrid, and found myself in a city in which I knew no one, not a single soul, and no one knew me. And since I did not speak Spanish, I could not have been lonelier even in the Sahara or in the Peter Paul fortress! There remained only the language of art. The two years of war had made one forget that such a thing as art still existed. With the eagerness of a starved man, I viewed the priceless treasures of the Museum of Madrid and felt again the “eternal” element in this art. The Rembrandts, the Riberas. The paintings of Bosch were works of genius in their na?ve joy of life. The old caretaker gave me a lens so that I might see the tiny figures of the peasants, little donkeys and dogs in the pictures of Miel. Here there was no feeling of war; everything was securely in its place. The colors had their own life, uncontrolled.
This is what I wrote in my notebook in the museum: “Between us and these old artists without in the least obscuring them or lessening their importance there grew up before the war a new art, more intimate, more individualistic, one with greater nuances, at once more subjective and more intense. The war, by its mass passions and suffering, will probably wash away this mood and this manner for a long time but that can never mean a simple return to the old form, however beautiful to the anatomic and botanic perfection, to the Rubens thighs (though thighs are apt to play a great role in the new post-war art, which will be so eager for life). It is difficult to prophesy, but out of the unprecedented experiences filling the lives of almost all civilized humans, surely a new art must be born.”
In my hotel, I read the Spanish papers with the aid of a dictionary, and waited for an answer to the letters I had sent to Switzerland and Italy. I was still hoping to get there. On the fourth day of my stay in Madrid, I received a letter from Paris giving me the address of a French Socialist, Gabier. He was the director of an insurance company, but in spite of his bourgeois social standing, I found him in firm opposition to the patriotic policy of his party. From Gabier I learned that the Spanish party was completely under the influence of the French patriotic socialism. There was serious opposition only in Barcelona, among the syndicalists. The secretary of the Socialist party, Anguillano, whom I intended to visit, was serving a prison sentence of fifteen days for a disrespectful reference to some Catholic saint. In bygone days Anguillano would simply have been burned in an auto da fé.
I was waiting for an answer from Switzerland, meanwhile memorizing Spanish words and visiting the Museum. On November 9, the maid at the small pension in which Gabier had placed me called me out into the corridor with a frightened air. There I found two young men of unmistakable appearance who invited me, in not very friendly fashion, to follow them. “Where to?” But of course, to the Madrid prefecture of police. Once there, they seated me in a corner.
“Am I under arrest, then?” I asked.
“Si, para una hora, dos horas (for an hour or two).”
Without changing my position, I sat there in the prefecture for seven hours. At nine o’clock in the evening, I was taken upstairs. I found myself before a fairly well thronged Olympus.
“What is it that you have arrested me for, precisely?”
This simple question nonplussed the Olympians. They offered various hypotheses in turn. One of them referred to the passport difficulties that the Russian government raised for foreigners going to Russia.
“If you could only know the amount of money we spend in prosecuting our anarchists,” said another, appealing to my sympathy.
“But surely I cannot be held answerable at the same time for both the Russian police and the Spanish anarchists?”
“Of course, of course, that is only to give you an example.”
“What are your ideas?” the chief asked me at last, after deliberating for a while.
I stated my views in as popular language as I could.
“There, you see!” they said.
In the end, the chief informed me through the interpreter that I was invited to leave Spain at once, and until I left my freedom would be subjected to “certain limitations.” “Your ideas are too advanced for Spain,” he told me candidly, still through the interpreter.
At midnight a police agent took me to the prison in a cab. There was the inevitable examination of my belongings in the centre of the prison “star,” at the intersection of five wings, each of them four stories high. The staircases were of iron, and were suspended. The peculiar prison night-silence, saturated with heavy vapors and nightmarishness. Pale electric lights in the corridors. Everything familiar, everything the same. The rumbling of the iron-bound door when it opened; a large room, semi-darkness, heavy prison odors, a miserable and repulsive bed. Then the rumbling of the door as it was locked. How many imprisonments did this make? I opened the small aperture in the window behind the grating. A draft of cool air blew in. Without undressing, with my clothes all buttoned up, I lay down on the bed and covered myself with my overcoat. Only then did I begin to realize the full incongruity of what had happened. In a prison in Madrid! I had never dreamed of such a thing. Izvolsky had done his job well. In Madrid! I lay on the bed in the Madrid “model” prison and laughed with all my might, laughed until I fell asleep.
When I was taking my walk, the convicts explained to me that there were two kinds of cells in the prison the free cells and those for which one paid. A cell of the first class cost one and a half pesetas a day; one of the second class, 75 centimes. Every prisoner was entitled to occupy a paid cell, but he had no right to refuse a free one. My cell was a paid one, of the first class. I again laughed heartily. But after all, it was only logical. Why should there be equality in prison, in a society built entirely on inequality? I also learned that the occupants of paid cells walk out twice a day for an hour at a time, whereas the others have only a half-hour. Again, this was perfectly right. The lungs of a government thief who pays a franc and a half a day are entitled to a larger portion of air than the lungs of a striker who gets his breathing free of charge.
On the third day I was called up for anthropometric measurements, and was told to paint my fingers with printer’s ink and impress their marks on cards. I refused. Then “force” was resorted to, but with a studied politeness. I looked out the window while the guard courteously painted my hand, finger after finger, and pressed it about ten times on various cards and sheets, first the right hand, then the left. Next I was invited to sit down and take off my boots. I refused. The feet proved more difficult to manage, and the administration presently was walking about me in confusion. In the end, I was unexpectedly allowed to go and talk to Gabier and Anguillano, who had come to see me. Anguiliano had been released from prison another one the day before. They told me that all the agencies to bring about my release had been set in motion. In the corridor I met the prison chaplain, who expressed his Catholic sympathies with my pacificism and added consolingly: “Paciencia, paciencia.” There was nothing else possible for me, anyway.
On the morning of the twelfth, the police agent informed me that I was to leave for Cadiz that same evening, and asked if I wanted to pay for my railway ticket. But I had no desire to go to Cadiz and I firmly refused to pay for the ticket. It was enough that one had to pay for accommodation in the “model” prison.
And so, in the evening, we left Madrid for Cadiz. The travelling costs were at the expense of the Spanish king. But why Cadiz? Again I looked at the map. Cadiz is the farthest extremity of the southwestern peninsula of Europe; from Berezov by deer via the Urals and St. Petersburg, thence by a circular route to Austria, from Austria through Switzerland to France, from France to Spain, and finally across the entire Iberian peninsula to Cadiz, the general direction being from Northeast to Southwest. There the continent ends and the ocean begins. Paciencia!
The police agents who accompanied me did not make the slightest attempt to invest the journey with mystery. On the contrary, they told my story in complete detail to every one interested, giving me, at the same time, the best of characters: not a counterfeiter of money but a caballero, unfortunately one who held unsuitable views. Everybody consoled me with the prospect of a very fine climate in Cadiz.
“How did you get to me?” I asked the agents.
“Very easily. By telegram from Paris.”
Just as I had thought. The Madrid police had received a telegram from the Paris prefecture: “A dangerou............