Part 11

They were still frequented by strange and sinister-looking characters. I remember one group, certainly as queer as any I have seen. Bourdin and I were seated at table when they came in excitedly--about thirty men and women, all laughing and jabbering. The men wore long hair, very wild and unkempt, with flowing black ties of “La Vallière” style. The women had short hair, cut with straight fringes. Presently another man appeared, astoundingly like Ary Scheffer’s study of Our Lord, with long pale hair, and straw-colored beard, and watery blue eyes. At his coming, the company became delirious with enthusiasm, while he went gravely round the circle and kissed each man and woman on the lips.

It was Bourdin who explained to me the mystery of these fantastic creatures. They belonged to the most advanced Anarchist society in Paris. The man who appeared last had just been acquitted by the French courts on a charge of kidnapping and locking up one of his fellow anarchists, who had betrayed the society to the police.

The only time in which I myself have been in the hands of the French police was in the early days of the war, while I was waiting in Paris for my papers as accredited war correspondent with the British Armies in the field. This unpleasant experience was due to my ceaseless curiosity in life and the rash acceptance of a casual invitation.

A friend of mine had become acquainted with two ladies who sang at “Olympia,” and I happened to be in a taxicab with him when they approached the door of his vehicle as we alighted.

It was eleven o’clock at night, and it was murmured by the two ladies that they were going to a “reception” at some apartment near the Étoile--a most aristocratic neighborhood. They would be delighted if we accompanied them. I was tired, and did not wish to go, but my friend Brown, always fresh at midnight, saw amusement ahead, and begged me to come.

“For an hour, then,” I said.

In the cab on the way to the Étoile, Brown sang mock Italian opera with one of the ladies, who had an excellent voice and a sense of humor. I exchanged a few remarks with the other lady, and was slightly disturbed by the somewhat German accent with which she spoke French.

Certainly, the apartment in which presently we found ourselves, in an avenue by the Étoile, was extremely elegant, and crowded with men and women in evening dress, who looked highly respectable. Among them were a few French officers in uniform and one English officer. The hostess was a charming-looking lady, with snow-white hair. There was a little music, a little dancing, and polite conversation. It was decorous and dull.

At the end of an hour I spoke to Brown.

“I’ve had enough of this. I’m off.”

He informed me in a whisper that if I went I should be losing something very good in the way of an adventure.

“This is, undoubtedly, one of the most criminal haunts in Paris,” he said. “I can smell abomination! Something melodramatic will happen before long, or I’ll eat my hat.”

I was surprised, and alarmed. I had no desire to be at home in a criminal haunt in time of war. I decided even more firmly to go, and went to take leave of the charming lady with the snow-white hair.

She seemed vexed that I should desire to go so soon, but seeing that I was decided, made a somewhat curious request.

“Do you mind going out by the garden entrance--through the French windows? We do not care to show lights through the front door. _C’est la guerre!_”

I went out through the garden entrance, followed by Brown, who said I was missing the fun.

It was dark in the garden, and I stumbled on the way to a little garden gate, twenty yards away from the house.

As I put my hand on the latch of the gate, I was aware of a large number of black shadows coming toward me out of the bushes beyond. Instinctively I beat a hasty retreat back to the house. Something had happened to it. Where the French windows had been was now a steel door. Brown was doing something mysterious, bending low and making pencil marks on a white slab of the wall.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“I’m identifying the house, in case of future need,” he answered.

I made a tattoo with my stick against the steel door. My one foolish desire was to get back into the house, away from those black figures outside the garden gate. It was too late. Directly I knocked on the door, a score of them rushed into the garden, and I was seized and carried in strong arms until, at a considerable distance, I was dumped down under the Eiffel Tower, in charge of a dozen _agents de police_. Groups of men and women in evening dress, some of whom I recognized as visitors at the reception of the charming lady with the snow-white hair, were also in charge of strong bodies of police. My friend Brown was a prisoner some twenty yards away. It was a cold night, but, philosophically, to the amazement of the French police, he lay down on the grass and went to sleep.

We were kept under the Eiffel Tower for two hours, at the end of which time a motor car drew up, with a gentleman wearing the tricolor sash of a French prefect. It was for him that we had been waiting. Strangely enough, we were all taken back to the apartment from which we had come, and there each person was subjected to an examination by the prefect and his assistants. There was evident terror among the men and women who had passed the evening in the house of mystery.

Brown and I were liberated after an inspection of our passports. On the way home I asked Brown for a little explanation, for I could understand nothing of the business.

He understood perfectly.

“That place was a gambling den. The police were looking for German spies, as well as French officers absent without leave. I told you we should see something worth while!”

I confess I did not think it worth while. I had had a nasty fright, caught a bad cold, and missed a good night’s sleep.

But it was certainly a little bit of melodrama, which one may find in Paris more easily than in any city in the world.

XI

After the revolution in Portugal, which led to the exile of King Manuel and the overthrow of the Royalist _régime_ in favor of a republic under the presidency of Affonso Costa, I was asked by Lord Lytton to go out and report upon the condition of the prisons in that country.

They were packed with Royalists and with all people, of whatever political opinion, who disapproved of the principles and methods of the new government, including large numbers of the poorest classes. Sinister stories had leaked through about the frightful conditions of these political prisoners, and public opinion in England was stirred when the Dowager Duchess of Bedford, who had visited Portugal, published some sensational statements. I suspected that the dear old Duchess of Bedford was influenced a good deal by sentiment for the Royalist cause, although when I saw her she was emphatic in saying that she had never met King Manuel and was moved to take action for purely humanitarian reasons. Lord Lytton, a man of liberal and idealistic mind, was certainly not actuated by the desire for Royalist or anti-republican propaganda, and in asking me to make an investigation on behalf of a committee, he made it clear that he wished to have the true facts, uncolored by prejudice. On that condition I agreed to go.

I found, before going, that the moving spirit behind the accusations of cruelty appearing in the British press against the new rulers of Portugal, and behind the Duchess of Bedford, was a little lady named Miss Tenison.

“She has all the facts in her hands,” said Lord Lytton, “and you ought to have a talk with her. You will have to make a long journey.”

I made the journey to a remote part of England, where I found a very ancient little house, unchanged by any passing of time through many centuries. I was shown into a low, long room, haunted, I am certain, by the ghosts of Tudor and Stuart England. Two elderly ladies, who introduced themselves as Miss Tenison’s aunts, sat on each side of a mediæval fireplace. Presently Miss Tenison appeared and for more than a moment--for all the time of my visit--I imagined myself in the presence of one of those ghosts which should properly inhabit a house like this--a young lady in an old-fashioned dress, so delicate, so transparent, so spiritual, that I had the greatest difficulty in accepting her as an inhabitant of this coarse and material world.

She was entirely absorbed in the Portuguese affairs, and her aunts told me that she dreamed at night about the agony of the Royalist prisoners in their dungeons. She was in correspondence with many Royalist refugees, and with those still hiding in Portugal, from whom she obtained the latest news. She had a romantic admiration--though not knowing him personally--for a certain count, who had led a counter-revolution and had been captured sword in hand, before being flung into prison and treated as a common convict. She hated Affonso Costa, the President, as Russian _émigrés_ afterward hated Lenin.

It was from this little lady, ethereal in appearance but as passionate in purpose as Lytton Strachey’s Florence Nightingale, that I gained my first insight into the Portuguese situation and my letters of introduction to some great people still hiding in Lisbon. I left her house with the sense of having begun a romantic adventure, with this remarkable little lady in the first chapter.

The second chapter of my adventure was fantastic, for I found myself in the wilds of Spain, suddenly responsible for a German wife and six bandboxes filled with the lingerie of six Brazilian beauties.... It sounds incredible, but it is true.

It happened that a tunnel fell down on the engine of a train immediately ahead of the one in which I was traveling through northern Spain on the way to Lisbon. This brought our train to a standstill in a rather desolate spot. There was vast excitement, and a babble of tongues. Most of the travelers were on their way to Lisbon, to catch a boat to Brazil which was leaving the following day. Among them was a stout little German, with a large, plump, and sad-looking wife. Neither of them could speak anything but German, but the husband, who was almost apoplectic with rage and anxiety, seemed to divine by intuition that a local train which halted at the wayside station might go somewhere in the direction of Lisbon. Entirely forgetting his wife, or thinking, perhaps that she would follow him whithersoever he went, he sprang on to the footboard of the local train, and scrambled in just as it steamed away. So there I was with the German wife, to whom I had previously addressed a few words, and who now appealed to me for advice, protection, and something to eat. The poor lady was hungry, and her husband had the money. Highly embarrassed, because I knew not how long I should be in the company of this German _Hausfrau_, I provided her with some food at the buffet, and endeavored to get some news of the best manner to reach Lisbon.

Then the second blow befell me. Six extraordinarily beautiful Brazilian girls, with large black eyes and flashing teeth, did exactly the same thing as the German gentleman. That is to say, they hurled themselves into a local train just as it was starting away. Six heads screamed out of the carriage window. They were screaming at me. It was a wild appeal that I should rescue the six enormous bandboxes which they had left on the platform, and bring them to a certain hotel in Lisbon. So there I was, with the bandboxes and the German wife.

I duly arrived in Lisbon, after a nightmare journey, with all my responsibilities, and handed over the bandboxes to the Brazilian beauties, and the German wife to the German husband. I obtained no gratitude whatever in either case.

In Lisbon I plunged straightway into a life of romance and tragedy, which was strangely reminiscent of all I had read about the French Revolution.

With my letters of introduction I called at several great houses of the old nobility, which seemed to be utterly abandoned. At least, no lights showed through the shutters, and they were all bolted and barred within their courtyards. At one house, in answer to my knocking, and the ringing of a bell which jangled loudly, there came at last an answer. A little door in the wall was cautiously opened on a chain by an old man servant with a lantern. Upon mentioning my name, and the word “Inglese,” which I hoped was good Portuguese for “English,” the door was opened wider, and the man made a sign for me to follow him. I was led into a great mansion, perfectly dark, except for the lantern ahead, and I went up a marble staircase, and then into a large salon, furnished in the style of the French Empire, with portraits on the walls of eighteenth century ladies and gentlemen in silks and brocades. In such a room as this Marie Antoinette might have sat with her ladies before the women of the markets marched to Versailles.

The old man servant touched a button, and flooded the room with the light of the electric candelabra, making sure first that no gleam of it would get through the heavy curtains over the shutters. Then he left the room, and soon afterward appeared an old lady in a black dress with a white shawl over her shoulders.

She was the aunt of one of the great families of Portugal, some of whom had escaped to England, and others of whom were in the prisons of Lisbon. She spoke harshly, in French, of the base and corrupt character of the new Portuguese Republic, and of the cruelties and indignities suffered by the political prisoners. She lived quite alone in the old mansion, not caring to go out because of the insults she would receive in the streets, but otherwise safe. So far, at least, Affonso Costa and his police had not threatened her liberty or her possessions.

In another house in the outskirts of Lisbon, with a beautiful garden, where the warm air was filled with the scent of flowers in masses of rich color, I met another lady of the old _régime_, a beautiful girl, living solitary, also, and agonized because of the imprisonment and ill treatment of her relatives. She implored me to use what influence I had, as an English journalist, to rescue those unhappy men.

It was my mission to get into the prisons, and see what were the real conditions of captivity there. After frequent visits to the Foreign Office, I received permits to visit the Penetenciaria and the Limoero, in which most of the political prisoners were confined. The guide who went with me told me that the Republic had nothing to hide, and that I could see everything and talk as much as I liked with the captives. He was certain that I should find the Penetenciaria, at least, a model prison. The other was “rather old-fashioned.”

On the whole, I preferred the old-fashioned prison. The “model prison” seemed to me specially and beautifully designed to drive men mad and kill their humanity. It was spotlessly clean and provided with excellent sanitary arrangements, washhouses, bakehouses, kitchens, and workshops, but the whole system of the prison was ingeniously and, to my mind, devilishly constructed to keep each prisoner, except a favored few, in perpetual solitude. Once put into one of those little white cells, down one of the long white corridors, and a man would never see or talk with a fellow mortal again until his term of penal servitude expired, never again, if he had a life sentence. There were men in that place who had already served ten, or fifteen, or twenty years. Through a hole in the door they received their food or their day’s ration of work. To exercise them, a trap was opened at the end of their cell, so that they could walk out, like a captive beast, into a little strip of courtyard, divided by high walls from the strip on either side. Up above was the open sky, and the sunlight fell aslant upon the white-coated walls, but it was a cramped and barren space for a man’s body and soul. Perhaps it was no worse than other European prisons, possibly much better. But it struck me with a cold horror, because of all those living beings isolated, in lifelong silence, entombed.

One corridor was set apart for the political prisoners, and when I saw them they were allowed to have their cell doors open, and to converse with each other, for a short time. Otherwise they, too, were locked in their separate cells. I spoke with a number of them, all men of high-sounding names and titles, but a melancholy, pale, miserable-looking crowd, whose spirits seemed quite broken by their long captivity. They were mostly young men, and among them was the Portuguese count who had led the counter-revolutionary rising and had been captured by the Republican troops. They had one grievance, of which they all spoke passionately. The Republic might have shot them as Royalists. At least that would have enabled them to die like gentlemen. But it had treated them like common criminals and convicts, and had even forced them to wear convict garb, to have their heads shaved, and to wear the hood with only eyeholes which was part of the dress--horrible in its cruelty--of all long-sentence men. My conversation with most of them was in French, but two young brothers of very noble family spoke excellent English. They seemed to regard my visit as a kind of miracle, and it revived hopes in them which made me pitiful, because I had no great expectation of gaining their release. When I went away from them, they returned to their cells, and the steel doors clanked upon them.

In the prison called the Limoero there were different conditions of life, enormously preferable, I thought, to the Penetenciaria, in spite of its filth and dirt and disease. There was no solitary confinement here, but crowds of men and women living in a hugger-mugger way, with free intercourse between their rooms. They were allowed to receive visitors at stated times, and when I was there the wives of many of the prisoners had come, with their babies and parcels of food. The babies were crawling on the floor, the food was being cooked on oil stoves, and there was a fearful stench of unwashed bodies, fried onions, tobacco smoke, and other strong odors.

The Fleet Prison, as described by Charles Dickens, must have closely resembled this place, in its general system of accommodation and social life, and I saw in many faces there the misery, the haggard lines, the despair, which he depicts among those who had been long suffering inmates of that debtors’ jail.

Many of the men here were of the aristocratic and intellectual classes, among them editors and correspondents of Royalist papers, poets, novelists, and university professors. They had not been charged with any crime, they had not been brought up for trial, they had no idea how long their captivity would last--a few months, a few years, or until death released them. But at least in equal proportion to the Royalists--I think in a majority--were men of poorer class--mechanics, printers, tailors, shoemakers, artisans of all kinds. They, too, were political prisoners, having been Socialists, Syndicalists, and other types of advanced democrats.

Some of the men told me that they had no idea whatever why they were lodged in Limoero. They had been arrested without charge, flung into prison without trial, and kept there without hope of release. Quite a number of them had been imprisoned by the Royalist _régime_ in the time of the monarchy, and the Republic had not troubled about them. They were just left to rot, year after year.

The political prisoners were allowed to receive food from their relatives, but many had no relatives able to provide them, and they had nothing but prison fare, which was hardly enough for life. They begged through the bars of the windows to passers-by, as I saw them, with their hands thrust through the iron gratings. Owing to the overcrowding and insanitary conditions, disease was rife, and prison fever ravaged them.

I had been told of one prison called Forte Mon Santo, on a hill some distance away from Lisbon, and as I could get no official pass to visit it, I decided to try and gain admission by other means. In the Black Horse Square at Lisbon, I hired a motor car from one of the street drivers, and understood from him that he was the champion automobilist of Lisbon. Certainly he drove like a madman and a brute. He killed three dogs on the way, not by accident, but by deliberately steering into them, and laughed uproariously at each kill. He drove through crowded streets with a screeching horn, and in the open countryside went like a fiend, up hill and down dale. I was surprised to find myself alive on the top of the hill which, as I knew by private directions, was the prison of Mon Santo.

But I could see no prison. No building of any kind stood on the lonely hilltop or on its slopes, which were bare of all but grass. All I could see was a circle of queer-looking objects like large metal mushrooms. Upon close inspection I saw that these things were ventilators for a subterranean building, and walking further, I came to a steep, circular ditch, into which some steps were cut. At the top of the steps stood a sentry with a rifle slung over his arm.

I approached this man, who regarded me suspiciously and unslung his rifle, but the glint of a gold sovereign--we used to have such things before the era of paper money--persuaded him that I was an agreeable fellow. My brutal motor driver, who spoke a bit of French, so that he understood my purpose, explained to the sentry that I was an English tourist who would like to see his excellent prison. After some debate, and a roving eye over the surrounding landscape, the sentry nodded, and made a sign for me to go down the steps, with the motor driver. I noticed that during all the time of my visit he walked behind us, with his rifle handy, lest there should be any trick on our part.

It was the most awful dungeon I have ever seen, apart from ancient dens disused since mediæval times. Completely underground, its dungeons struck me with a chill even in the short time I was there. Its walls oozed with water. No light came direct through the narrow bars of the cells in which poor wretches lay like beasts, but only indirectly from the surrounding ditch, so that they were almost in darkness. In the center of this underground fort was a cavern in complete darkness except, perhaps, for some faint gleam through a grating about two feet square, high up in the outer wall. It was just a hole in the rock, and inside were five men with heavy chains about them. Once a day the jailers pushed some loaves of bread through the grating. What went on in that dark dungeon, and in the darkness of those men’s souls, it is better, perhaps, not to imagine. The cruelty of men is not yet killed, and there are still, in the hearts of men and of nations, lurking devils worse than the wildness and ferocity of beasts....

I went to other prisons in Lisbon and Oporto. They were not like that, but, generally, like the Limoero, unclean, squalid, horrible, but with human companionship, which alleviates all suffering, if there is any kind of comradeship. In these cases one could not charge the Portuguese Republic with inflicting bodily suffering upon their prisoners in any deliberate way. The indictment against them was that, under the fair name of liberty, they had overthrown the monarchical _régime_ and substituted a new tyranny. For, among all the people I met, there were few who had been charged with any offense against the law, or given the right of defense in any trial.

A queer fellow came into my life during this time in Portugal, whose behavior still baffles me by its mystery. The episode is like the beginning of a sensational detective story, without any clue to its solution.