TWO EVENINGS.
For a rapid, short-lived acquaintanceship, above all other animals upon this terrestrial sphere, commend me to the Continental drummer. To commence, he is always easy to chum with quickly, and always ready to make the first advances. He is a salted traveller. He knows what is the best of everything, how to get it, and, moreover, how to get it cheaply. He never plagues you with "shop," or secondhand guide-book extracts, or sentiment about scenery and sunsets. Cheeriness and bons mots are part of his stock-in-trade; brazen good-fellowship is his strong specialty.
Haigh and I went up to our hotel, asked for a bedroom, and in Spanish style got a suite of apartments. We were just in time for dinner, and, having arrived en prince in our own vessel, were going to be billeted amongst the habitués of the place—garrison soldiers, petty "proprietors," and priests—who sat round the superior table in the big room. There we should have been in company that was vastly respectable and prodigiously slow. But nearer the street entrance was another smaller room, occupied chiefly by the commercial fraternity, and thither we went, the landlord fully comprehending our taste. "Gentlemen do like to have a bit of a fling to rub away the salt, don't they, señores?" said he.
There is no shyness about the drummer. Before we had eaten our preliminary olive, the fat man at the end of the table had struck up conversation with Haigh; and before the sopa was out of the room, my next-door neighbour, a dapper Marseillais in the ready-made clothing line, was calling me amigo. Whilst he helped himself from amongst the red sausages and beans and beef and pork and other trifles on the dish which held the next course, the fat Cuban sketched out a plan for the evening; and as he doused his salad with full-flavoured oil, my little Frenchman endorsed the proposal of the flaxen-haired timber agent opposite that they should stand treat. And while we munched our burnt almonds for dessert, some one ordered in a bottle of bad sherry (which, being imported, is naturally thought more of than the good country wine), and we agreed that we were all dear friends, and had known one another intimately for a matter of ten years. And then we rerolled fresh cigarettes, got our hats, and went to a café, six of us, where we crammed our petits verres with sugar-knobs and lighted them, meanwhile drinking bitter black coffee till the blue demon of the brandy should have flickered away. You know the style; it's the usual way of beginning.
After some half-hour's stay in the café we seperated—Haigh and the Cuban going off to a dance, whilst the little Frenchman carried me off elsewhere. He had not defined our destination very clearly, and I had not made inquiries, caring little where I went; but I was a little put out at finding myself, after passing a guard of soldiers who stared curiously, and going down many flights of steps, in an anarchist's club.
Perhaps the government of his most Catholic Majesty Alfonzo XIII. can hardly be termed paternal; but that was nothing to me. Politics I abhor, and anarchistic politics I particularly loathe. But as beating an abrupt retreat would have been rude, and as unnecessary rudeness is not one of my characteristics, I made the best of it, and stayed and looked about me.
One room of the place had been fitted up as a kind of chapel, with ecclesiastical candles and other properties on a table at the farther end, with portraits of Mazzini, Gambetta, Prim, and other worthies of the Red Kidney on the walls, and with orderly pews on either side of the central aisle. In this cellar temple a preacher was just winding up a fervid discourse on the comparative merits of melinite and blasting gelatine as we came up, and a minute later I was being introduced to him. I think he was the leanest man I ever came across. He stood good six feet high, and couldn't have weighed more than seven stone. You could almost see the bone of his face through the thin covering of skin; and if one might judge from the fact that his smart black frockcoat fitted like a stocking, it was fair to surmise that he was actually proud of his leanness. One got the idea that all the nourishment of his body had gone out into his long white beard.
We went out of the general hall into a smaller room, where we sat and smoked.
Taltavull, my new acquaintance, was simply charming. Till that night I had thought that an anarchist could only attain to his peculiar creed through the most comprehensive ignorance; but this man had arrived at the result through the diametrically opposite path. He spoke almost all European languages with fluency, and knew Lingua Franca, Arabic, and Sanscrit. I never met any one so widely read; nor was his reading superficial; and he possessed a memory that refused nothing. He could quote verbatim page after page of such writers as Schopenhauer, Voltaire, Mazzini. And far better than this, he had studied men of every grade in the living flesh. What his nationality was I couldn't say, though I should guess him as either a Pole or an Italian; but it is certain that he had had the constant entrée to places where a man of his opinions would presumably be looked upon with round-eyed horror. And yet he owned to never concealing his views from any man. "The sublime importance of our end, Monsieur Cospatric," said he, "justifies any means taken to attain it. We are associated with dynamite? Justly. Dynamite is a deplorable necessity."
If Taltavull had merely kept on in this strain, I should have put him down as one of those human paradoxes a man is bound to meet if he vagabondizes much, and should have forgotten him and his gruesome schemes and ideals by the next day. But he touched upon a theme which, in view of the purpose which had brought us to Minorca, made me cock my ears with a new interest.