The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I

by William James Stillman

Pending the ripening of Mazzini's scheme I waited in London, at the orders of Kossuth, but before the moment came for my undertaking this mission a new one became urgent. When the Hungarian insurrection of 1848-49 had become evidently a failure, and Kossuth was about to escape into Turkey, he decided to conceal, in some place secure from Austrian discovery, the crown jewels, including the crown of St. Stephen, which was considered by the Hungarian people as necessary to the lawful coronation of their king, and with which Francis Joseph had not been crowned; and he and Bartholomew Szemere, one of his colleagues in the ministry—employing for their operations a detachment of prisoners, who were shot after the concealment was complete—buried the jewels at some point down the Danube. Having received information that Szemere, who was then opposed to Kossuth, was about to disclose their hiding-place to the Austrian government, Kossuth determined to remove them, and organized an expedition to this end, of which I was to become the apparent head. The description of the hiding-place was written in a most complicated cipher dispatch, the key to which was contained in a stanza of a song known to Kossuth's correspondent in Pesth. Each letter in the dispatch was represented by a fraction, of which the numerator was the number of the letter in one of the lines of the song, and the denominator the number of the line. This dispatch was then written in four parts; the first, fifth, ninth, etc., letters being put in the first part; the second, sixth, tenth, etc., in the second; the third, seventh, eleventh, etc., in the third; the fourth, eighth, twelfth, etc., in the fourth, and so on to the end. Of these parts of the dispatch, written on the finest paper, I had charge of two; one for myself, and one for a person indicated at Pesth, and the other two were to go by way of Constantinople, one for the confederate who carried it and one for the correspondent who had the song-key. We were to meet and spell out the directions and go to the hiding-place, and, when the jewels were recovered, they were to be hidden in a box of a conserve for which that vicinity was noted, and then carried to Constantinople, from which point I was to take charge of them and deliver them in Boston to Dr. S.G. Howe, the well-known Philhellene.

I folded my portion of these dispatches small, wrapped them in thin gutta-percha, and, going to the most obscure shoemaker in the part of London which I knew, had the heel of one of my boots excavated and the packet deposited in the hole and covered over again by a stout heel-tap. My orders were to take at least six weeks for the journey, to go by a roundabout route, and travel as if for pleasure. From the Austrian territory I was to write to Kossuth all the political information I could collect, the messages being conveyed in a cryptograph in which the form of the letter was to be that of a correspondence between lovers. The words composing the message were to be written on spaces left in a mask of which each had a copy, and the spaces between the words then filled up so that the letter would carry some meaning when read as a whole. Love-letters were supposed to give most room for nonsense. Knowing very little French, I bought a pocket dictionary and a copy of Racine, and, during a ten days' stay in Paris, by diligent use of the former in all my transactions, I picked up enough for the needs of travel, and, spending all my leisure over the latter, I was, before my mission was over, able to converse with considerable fluency and knew my Racine thoroughly.

From Paris I made the journey to Brussels in the company of an American gentleman, Mr. Coxe, of Alabama, traveling with his wife and daughter. At Brussels I made, through the Coxes, the acquaintance of M. Le Hardy de Beaulieu, the leader of a section of the Belgian Liberals, whose father had held a command in the Belgian contingent at Waterloo. My acquaintance with M. Le Hardy lasted many years, he being much interested in America, and having, with his brother, founded a Belgian colony in Alabama. The ancestral estate of the Le Hardys included part of the field of Waterloo, and we visited it in company with M. Le Hardy, who pointed out the trenches made by the heavy artillery of Napoleon still distinguishable on the surface of the fields in spite of the subsequent ploughings. I suppose that his familiarity with the fields from his boyhood gives authority to his assurance that the depressions we saw were the effect of the ploughing of the guns in the wet, soft earth, and did not exist in the natural lay of the land, and the incident brought one very near to the great struggle which fixed for long the position of England in European politics. M. Le Hardy had been, like his father before him, urged to resume the title of nobility which the father had renounced in the warmth of the republican movement prior to the Empire, having burned the patent in the square at Brussels; but, like the father, he had always refused. He was a consistent and, as he would now be classed, a moderate republican.

Visiting Dusseldorf for the sake of the school of art there, I seemed to go into the Middle Ages. We landed from the Rhine steamer in the night, finding the streets deserted even by the police, and dimly lighted by oil lamps hung across them at wide intervals, and I wandered a long time at random with my valise in hand, searching for a hotel, and not meeting a living person to ask guidance of. I blundered at length on a little inn in whose drinking-room still burned a light, and in which I found a night's lodging. Such a primitive state of civilization was to me, fresh from Paris and Brussels, romantic. At Berlin I made the acquaintance of Varnhagen von Ense, through a letter of introduction from Frau Schmidt, my republican refugee friend of London. He treated me with great consideration, and promised me a winter of brilliant social life if I would stay at Berlin. The chief inducement offered was the acquaintance of Humboldt, then absent from the city. Of Varnhagen von Ense I retain the most delightful memory. I found him courteous, genial, and hospitable, with a large-minded outlook on politics and a great interest in America. I saw also the new museum, with Kaulbach at work on his frescoes, and, going by Dresden, reached Prague, where I began my political reports to Kossuth.

Arriving at Vienna, I was beforehand with the famous police, which I found not to merit its reputation for sharpness, and went at once, after establishing myself at the hotel, and before my name was reported to the authorities and a spy put on me, to the address of a republican, known to Kossuth, and to whom I was directed to apply for the identification of some Hungarian resident in the city on whom Kossuth could depend to reëstablish communication with the Viennese malcontents, broken by a misadventure of his former agent. This adventure Kossuth recounted to me, I suppose to keep up my courage in the perilous business he was sending me on. One of his agents had been sent on a round tour with instructions for certain officers or soldiers, and, having been detected in communication with the barracks and arrested, a memorandum book was found on him in which, amongst many addresses of persons to whom he had no mission, those to which he was directed were interspersed. All were arrested, among them the Vienna agent, who, ignorant of the reason of his arrest, suspecting treachery, and fearing the disclosures that might be extorted from him by torture, rolled himself in his bedclothes and set fire to them with his candle, the only means of suicide left him. When he felt that the burning was fatal he made an alarm and bade the attendant call the council of war, which immediately met in his cell. He then avowed his complicity in treasonable plans, and, assuring them that nothing more could be extorted from him by any torture they might inflict, that his chief would soon come and make all things right, and that there were thousands more as ready to die as he, he refused to say any more and died in silence.

My business was to find a man to take this agent's place. The individual to whom I was sent was a ribbon manufacturer on one of the main streets, and, pretending a desire to visit his weaving rooms, we went to the manufactory in the upper stories, and then I disclosed, with no preamble, my mission. The good man was in ecstasies, and to show his joy invited me down into his living apartments and introduced me to his wife, daughters, and the lover of one of his daughters, as a messenger from Kossuth! If my hair did not rise on end, I am certain that at no crisis of my life could it ever have done so. During my ten days' stay in Vienna and the four weeks I afterward passed in Pesth, I never lost a nervous apprehension of the consequences of this singular imprudence, for I was in the enemy's country, on business the slightest suspicion of which meant an obscure prison and complete disappearance from any friend. With cipher dispatches on my person in the handwriting of Kossuth, well known to all the authorities, and with my secret in the possession of five women and two men, the uneasiness I felt for the first two or three days can better be imagined than expressed. I did nothing all day long but walk the streets, drink coffee, and smoke cigars with constant apprehension of an arrest.

But I did not neglect my business. I found a Hungarian whose name Kossuth had given me as the alternative probable medium of the renewed relations with Vienna, but he not only refused to have any relations with the late dictator, but strongly warned me of the possible consequences to myself of the mission I was on, and made me see very clearly that Kossuth overrated his influence on the Hungarians after the débâcle, for which he was largely responsible. But it never occurred to me that it was possible to withdraw or do less than obey my instructions. I reported to Kossuth that the only person I could find who was willing to assume the responsibility of entering into relations with him was the ribbon-maker, and then, having acquired the confidence of the American consul, who was a zealous agent of the imperial government, and got his visé for Hungary, I made my way to Pesth.

Once on the scene of my real labors, I discovered how incompetent a conspirator Kossuth was. He had given me the name of his correspondent in Pesth and his residence, in the Karolyisches Haus, as if that were his ordinary residence, without warning me, though he knew it, that he was really in hiding from the police, and probably only to be reached with precaution and indirectly. Adopting the same tactics as in Vienna, and not to attract attention by inquiries, I went at once in a cab to the house. The porter, of course, in reply to my inquiries, being in hearing of the cab-driver, who was probably a spy, denied any knowledge of such a person. I drove back to the hotel, and then went on foot alone and asked again for the individual, but got the same reply, this time angrily delivered. Utterly at a loss what to do, I wrote at once to Kossuth that the person wanted was not at the address indicated. Instead of writing to him to find me and giving him my address, Kossuth only reiterated through the post the former instructions. I repeated the denial, and then waited. In conversation with the hotel people I inquired as fully as was possible without exciting suspicion, about persons of liberal tendencies and such as I conceived that I might make use of, and studied the position as best I could. Pending this study I was summoned to the police headquarters to give an account of myself. This I did in a manner which must have been satisfactory, as they found that I knew little German and was a very stupid and unpractical individual, which I must have really been, to find myself there. I accounted for myself as a landscape painter on his travels, and as I knew nobody and made no acquaintances they dismissed all suspicion of me, our consul's assurance no doubt covering all doubts, and I waited still. But after a few days more a convenient attack of illness gave me a pretext for calling a physician, and I chose Dr. Orzovensky, who I had learned had been chief of the medical staff under the revolutionary authorities. Through him I made such inquiries as were possible about the people to whom I was sent, and then for the first time discovered that they were all under accusation as conspirators and searched for by the police, and of this I had no warning from Kossuth.

But in all this wandering my boot-heel was wearing away, and it was a question of wearing into the packet of dispatches, or putting them in a place of security. I accordingly dug them out, and, hiding them in a convenient corner of the cupboard in my room, where they must soon have been discovered in case of a domiciliary visit, took the excavated boots out to throw them into the river, choosing the earliest darkness of the rainy evening of the same day. I knew that if the bootblack saw the excavated heel he would in all probability report the fact, and my arrest would follow. In my ignorance of the fact that the city was under martial law, and that without a pass no one could be in the streets after 8 P.M., I had waited till 9 to be screened by the darkness, and then, walking down the river on the dike, I slipped down to the water's edge by the path, and gently tossed the boots into the rapid current. Seeing the dangerous articles float away into the dark, I turned to go up the dike to the road running along the top of it, when, to my dismay, I heard a sentinel directly across the road challenge, saw the officer of the guard coming on his rounds, and heard his reply to the challenge. I hurried down the bank, hoping that I had not attracted attention, but feeling that in the contrary case I was in most imminent danger of arrest, and the thought of the dispatches left where they must be found in case of suspicion gave me a moment's anxiety. I hurried back along the water's edge till I judged that I was out of sight from the post, and then walked up on the dike and towards the hotel.

It was very dark and raining slightly, but as I came within the circle of light of one of the street lamps the vigilant eye of the officer of the guard caught me, and he hailed, "Who goes there?" I did not reply, but, acting as if I did not hear, hurried to get directly under the lamp which was near, with a feeling that if the officer saw me there he would see that I was what I pretended to be, a stranger, and also with a feeling that I was safer at a distance if the challenge were followed by a bullet. Under the lamp I stopped for the officer to come up. I was not really frightened, but I cannot deny that I felt very nervous, as he came up, and, in an inquisitorial tone, asked, "What are you doing here?" I replied in German which was certainly comical and not a little shaky, for it was a fragmentary remembrance of the German read in my early college course, and never since revived, that "I was doing nothing—that I was a strangers" (ich bin ein Fremden), and had come out to see the effects on the river, pointing to the glimmering lights; but, fortunately, my German was so funny that he burst out laughing, and after a "sehr schön, sehr schön," as I had said "strangers" in the plural, he replied, "When you are a strangers you must stay in the house," and gave me friendly directions as to how to get back to my hotel without falling in with the police, "who wouldn't let you off as I have." I was fortunate enough to arrive without any further notice. The officers of the army hated to do police service, and my inquisitor was no doubt glad not to pass me into the custody of the police. I have always wished to know the name of my protector, for such he was.