Memoirs of a Revolutionist · Part VI · Chapter 6 14 (1/2)

XIV

Every revolutionist meets a number of spies and “agents provocateurs” in his way, and I have had my fair share of them. All governments spend considerable sums of money in maintaining this kind of reptile. However, they are mainly dangerous to young people only. One who has had some experience of life and men soon discovers that there is about these creatures something which puts him on his guard. They are recruited from the scum of society, amongst men of the lowest moral standard, and if one is watchful of the moral character of the men he meets with, he soon notices something in the manners of these “pillars of society” which shocks him, and then he asks himself the question: “What has brought this man to me? What in the world can he have in common with us?” In most cases this simple question is sufficient to put one on his guard.

When I first came to Geneva, the agent of the Russian government who had been commissioned to spy upon the refugees was well-known to all of us. He went under the title of Count; but as he had no footman and no carriage on which to emblazon his coronet and arms, he had had them embroidered on a sort of mantle which covered his tiny dog. We saw him occasionally in the cafés, without speaking to him; he was, in fact, an “innocent” who simply bought in the kiosks all the publications of the exiles, very probably adding to them such comments as he thought would please his chiefs.

Different men began to pour in, as Geneva began to fill up with refugees of the young generation; and yet, in one way or another, they also became known to us.

When a stranger appeared on our horizon, he was asked with the usual nihilist frankness about his past and his present prospects, and it soon appeared what sort of person he was. Frankness in mutual intercourse is altogether the best way for bringing about proper relations between men. In this case it was invaluable. Numbers of persons whom none of us had known or heard of in Russia⁠—absolute strangers to the circles⁠—came to Geneva, and many of them, a few days or even hours after their arrival, stood on the most friendly terms with the colony of refugees; but in some way or other the spies never succeeded in crossing the threshold of familiarity. A spy might name common acquaintances, he might give the best accounts, sometimes correct, of his past in Russia; he might possess in perfection the nihilist slang and manners, but he never could assimilate that sort of nihilist ethics which had grown up amongst the Russian youth; and this alone kept him at a distance from our colony. Spies can imitate anything else but ethics.

When I was working with Reclus, there was at Clarens one such individual, from whom we all kept aloof. We knew nothing bad about him, but we felt that he was not “ours,” and as he tried only the more to penetrate into our society, we became suspicious of him. I never had said a word to him, and consequently he especially sought after me. Seeing that he could not approach me through the usual channels, he began to write me letters, giving me mysterious appointments for mysterious purposes in the woods and in similar places. For fun, I once accepted his invitation and went to the spot, with a good friend following me at a distance; but the man, who probably had a confederate, must have noticed that I was not alone, and did not appear. So I was spared the pleasure of ever saying to him a single word. Besides, I worked at that time so hard that every minute of my time was taken up either with the Geography or Le Révolté, and I entered into no conspiracies. However, we learned later on that this man used to send to the Third Section detailed reports about the supposed conversations which he had had with me, my supposed confidences, and the terrible plots which I was manipulating at St. Petersburg, against the Tsar’s life! All that was taken for ready money at St. Petersburg, and in Italy, too. When Cafiero was arrested one day in Switzerland, he was shown formidable reports of Italian spies, who warned their government that Cafiero and I, loaded with bombs, were going to enter Italy. The fact was that I never was in Italy and never had had any intention of visiting the country.

In point of fact, however, the spies do not always make up reports out of whole cloth. They often tell things that are true, but all depends upon the way a story is told. We passed some most merry moments about a report which was addressed to the French government by a French spy who followed my wife and myself as we were traveling in 1881 from Paris to London. The spy, probably playing a double part, as is often done, had sold that report to Rochefort, who published it in his paper. Everything that the spy had stated was correct⁠—but the way he had told it!

He wrote, for instance: “I took the next compartment to the one that Kropotkin had taken with his wife.” Quite true; he was there. We noticed him, for he had managed at once to attract our attention by his sullen, unpleasant face. “They spoke Russian all the time, in order not to be understood by the passengers.” Very true again; we spoke Russian, as we always do. “When they came to Calais, they both took a bouillon.” Most correct again: we took a bouillon. But here the mysterious part of the journey begins. “After that, they both suddenly disappeared, and I looked for them in vain, on the platform and elsewhere; and when they reappeared, he was in disguise and was followed by a Russian priest, who never left him after that until they arrived in London, where I lost sight of the priest.” All that was true again. My wife had a tooth slightly aching, and I asked the permission of the keeper of the restaurant to go to his private room, where my wife could ease her tooth. So we had “disappeared” indeed; and as we had to cross the Channel, I put my soft felt hat into my pocket and put on a fur cap; I was “in disguise.” As to the mysterious priest, he was also there. He was not a Russian, but that is irrelevant: he wore at any rate the dress of the Greek priests. I saw him standing at the counter and asking something which no one understood. “Agua, agua,” he repeated, in a woeful tone. “Give the gentleman a glass of water,” I said to the waiter. Whereupon the priest, struck by my wonderful linguistic capacities, began to thank me for my intervention with a truly Eastern effusion. My wife took pity on him and spoke to him in different languages, but he understood none of them. It appeared at last that he knew a few words in one of the South Slavonian languages, and we could make out: “I am a Greek; Turkish embassy, London.” We told him, mostly by signs, that we, too, were going to London, and that he might travel with us.

The most amusing part of the story was that I really found for him the address of the Turkish embassy even before we had reached Charing Cross. The train stopped at some station on the way, and two elegant ladies entered our already full third-class compartment. Both had newspapers in their hands. One was English, and the other⁠—a handsome woman, who spoke good French⁠—pretended to be English. After exchanging a few words, the latter asked me à brûle pourpont: “What do you think of Count Ignatyev?” and immediately after that: “Are you soon going to kill the new Tsar?” I was clear as to her profession from these two questions, but thinking of my priest, I said to her: “Do you happen to know the address of the Turkish embassy?” “Street so-and-so, number so-and-so,” she replied without hesitation, like a schoolgirl in a class. “You could, I suppose, also give the address of the Russian embassy?” I asked her, and the address having been given with the same readiness, I communicated both to the priest. When we reached Charing Cross, the lady was so obsequiously anxious to attend to my luggage, and even to carry a heavy package herself with her gloved hands, that I finally told her, much to her surprise: “Enough of this: ladies don’t carry gentlemen’s luggage. Go away!”

But to return to my trustworthy French spy. “He alighted at Charing Cross,” he wrote in his report, “but for more than half an hour after the arrival of the train he did not leave the station, until he had ascertained that everyone else had left it. I kept aloof in the meantime, concealing myself behind a pillar. Having ascertained that all passengers had left the platform, they both suddenly jumped into a cab. I followed them nevertheless, and overheard the address which the cabman gave at the gate to the policeman⁠—12, Street So-and-So⁠—and ran after the cab. There were no cabs in the neighborhood; so I ran up to Trafalgar Square, where I got one. I then drove after him, and he alighted at the above address.”

Every fact of it is true again⁠—the address and everything; but how mysterious it all reads. I had warned a Russian friend of my arrival, but there was a dense fog that morning, and he overslept. We waited for him half an hour, and then, leaving our luggage in the cloakroom, drove to his house.

“There they sat till two o’clock with drawn curtains, and then only a tall man came out of the house, and returned one hour later with their baggage.” Even the remark about the curtains was correct; we had to light the gas on account of the fog, and drew down the curtains to get rid of the ugly fog sight of a small Islington street wrapped in a dense fog.

When I was working with Elisée Reclus at Clarens, I used to go every fortnight to Geneva to see to the bringing out of Le Révolté. One day when I reached our printing-office, I was told that a Russian gentleman wanted to see me. He had already seen my friends, and had told them that he came to induce me to start a paper, like Le Révolté, in Russian. He offered for that purpose all the money that might be required. I went to meet him in a café, where he gave me a German name⁠—Tohnlehm, let us say⁠—and told me that he was a native of the Baltic provinces. He boasted of possessing a large fortune in certain estates and manufactures, and he was extremely angry against the Russian government for their Russianizing schemes. On the whole he produced a somewhat indeterminate impression, so that my friends insisted upon my accepting his offer; but I did not much like the man from first sight.

From the café he took me to his rooms in a hotel, and there he began to show less reserve, and to appear more like himself and still more unpleasant. “Don’t doubt my fortune,” he said to me, “I have also a capital invention. There’s a lot of money in it. I shall patent it, and get a considerable sum of money for it⁠—all for the cause of the revolution in Russia.” And he showed me, to my astonishment, a miserable candlestick, the originality of which was that it was awfully ugly and had three bits of wire to put the candle in. The poorest housewife would not have cared for such a candlestick, and even if it could have been patented, no manufacturer would have paid the patentee more than ten dollars. “A rich man placing his hopes on such a candlestick! This man,” I thought to myself, “can never have seen better ones,” and my opinion about him was made up. He was no rich man at all, and the money he offered was not his own. So I bluntly told him, “Very well, if you are so anxious to have a Russian revolutionary paper, and hold the flattering opinion about myself that you have expressed, you will have to deposit your money in my name at a bank, and at my entire disposal. But I warn you that you will have absolutely nothing to do with the paper.” “Of course, of course,” he said, “but just see to it, and sometimes advise you, and aid you in smuggling it into Russia.” “No, nothing of the sort! You need not see me at all.” My friends thought that I was too hard upon the man, but some time after that a letter was received from St. Petersburg warning us that we would receive the visit of a spy of the Third Section, Tohnlehm by name. The candlestick had thus rendered us a good service.

Whether by candlesticks or something else, these people almost always betray themselves in one way or another. When we were at London in 1881, we received on a foggy morning a visit from two Russians. I knew one of them by name; the other, a young man whom he recommended as his friend, was a stranger. The latter had volunteered to accompany his friend on a few days’ visit to London. As he was introduced by a friend, I had no suspicions whatever about him; but I was very busy that day and asked another friend, who lived near by, to find them a room and take them about to see London. My wife had not yet seen England, either, and she went with them. In the afternoon she returned, saying to me: “Do you know, I dislike that man very much. Beware of him.” “But why? What’s the matter?” I asked. “Nothing, absolutely nothing, but he is surely not ‘ours.’ By the way he treated the waiter in a café, and the way he handles money, I saw at once he is not ‘ours,’ and if he is not, why should he come to us?” She was so certain of the justice of her suspicions that while she performed her duties of hospitality, she nevertheless managed never to leave that young man alone in my study even for one minute. We had a chat, and the visitor began to exhibit himself more and more under such a low moral aspect that even his friend blushed for him, and when I asked more details about him, the explanations they both gave were still less satisfactory. We were both on our guard. In short, they left London in a couple of days, and a fortnight later I got a letter from my Russian friend, full of excuses for having introduced the young man, who, they had found out at Paris, was a spy in the service of the Russian embassy. I looked then into a list of Russian secret service agents in France and Switzerland, which we refugees had received lately from the Executive Committee⁠—they had their men everywhere at St. Petersburg⁠—and I found the name of that young man on the list, with one letter only altered in it.

To start a paper, subsidized by the police, with a police agent at its head, is an old plan, and the prefect of the Paris police, Andrieux, resorted to it in 1881. I was staying with Elisée Reclus in the mountains, when we received a letter from a Frenchman, or rather a Belgian, who announced to us that he was going to start an anarchist paper at Paris, and asked our collaboration. The letter, full of flatteries, produced upon us an unfavorable impression, and Reclus had, moreover, some vague recollection of having heard the name of the writer in some unfavorable connection. We decided to refuse collaboration, and I wrote to a Paris friend that we must first of all ascertain whence the money came with which the paper was going to be started. It might come from the Orleanists⁠—an old trick of the family⁠—and we must know its origin. My Paris friend, with a workman’s straightforwardness, read that letter at a meeting at which the would-be editor of the paper was present. He simulated offense, and I had to answer several letters on this subject; but I stuck to my words: “If the man is in earnest, he must show us the origin of the money.”