De Quesnoy succeeded in satisfying both of them, although in the case of Benigno he was compelled to use guesswork in answering most of his inquiries. The evening therefore proved a great success, and as they drove back through the cool night air to the city the brothers pressed their new friend to keep in touch with them and to come out with them again. To maintain the role he was playing he had to say that, to his regret, his very limited resources did not permit him to return their hospitality on the scale they had entertained him; but, as he had felt sure they would, they brushed that objection aside, declaring that among friends the bill should be paid by whoever happened to have most money.
Thinking over the evening as he undressed in his bed-sitting-room, with its cheap furniture and faded wallpaper, two things were uppermost in the Count's mind: one was the pleasure he had derived, after making do for a fortnight on indifferent food, from a meal of lobsters, duck and wood strawberries with cream; the other was how strange it was that Benigno, who was far the more intelligent of the two, apparently failed to see his younger brother as he was - a gross, brutal egoist who camouflaged his selfish appetites under a veneer of back-slapping good fellowship - and quite clearly worshipped the ground he walked on.
On the Monday, and again on Tuesday, to de Quesnoy's considerable annoyance Ferrer sent him students who wished to take a course in Russian; so there was nothing for it but to agree to the times that suited them and during those hours assume the role of a pedagogue. Fortunately neither of them could afford more than two hours a week, so they did not greatly interfere with his pursuit of the lines through which he hoped to succeed with his mission.
He had no place in which to give these lessons other than in his bedroom, and it was on returning to it late on the Tuesday night, when he had again been out with the Ferrer brothers, that he found that his things had been searched. Nothing had been taken, and he had little doubt that on Ferrer's instructions one of the students had returned to his room during his absence to vet its contents; so he had good reason to be glad about the precautions he had taken.
Most evenings he continued to put in at his branch of the Somaten; but in addition to Tuesday evening he also spent that of Friday with the Ferrer brothers, taking them to the club for a snack meal. He was, however, a little surprised to find that they did not know any of its members.
When Sunday morning came round again he decided to pay Ferrer another visit. To thank him for having sent the two students was excuse enough, and Ferrer received him without any trace of the moody anger he had displayed when they had last parted. After they had talked for a few minutes in the hallway of Ferrer's apartment, in order to prolong the conversation de Quesnoy asked if he might borrow a few books. Ferrer then took him down to the library, which on Sundays was closed to the public.
Having found the shelves containing books in French, de Quesnoy looked through them and chose three. One was a work in support of the expulsion of the religious Orders from France by the government of the atheist Emile Combes, another was on the brutal exploitation of the negroes in the Congo by their Belgian overlords, and the third was a translation from the German of Paul Eltz-bacher's book, Anarchism, which Dona Gulia had recommended to him.
After glancing at their titles Ferrer remarked, 'An interesting choice; but as you intend to settle here I should have thought that it would have paid you better to improve your knowledge of Spanish, rather than to struggle through serious works in French.'
De Quesnoy smiled. 'French is my second language. I both read and speak it fluently.' By way of explanation he transposed the nationalities of his parents, and added, 'My mother was a Frenchwoman.'
Ferrer raised his thinly-marked eyebrows. 'Indeed!' Then after a short pause he went on, 'That being the case I think I could offer you employment—although it would be only of a temporary nature. My French master, Emile Degas, has been ill for some time. Poor fellow, he is suffering from a cancer and in great pain. I have arranged for a new man to take his place, but he will not be arriving from France until towards the end of the month. In the meantime I would have liked to relieve Degas of his duties, but the classes must go on. Do you think you would be competent to take them, so that I could release him at once to*receive full-time treatment?'
'Certainly,' replied the Count. T have taken French classes before, and my Spanish is quite good enough for me to do so here. I would, too, be grateful for the chance to earn a little more money.'
Accordingly it was settled that on the following day he should take over from Monsieur Degas; and when he arrived at the school he found the unfortunate Frenchman only too willing to give up his duties. Ferrer explained that, as less than forty of the pupils took French, Degas held only two classes, a junior and a senior, each for an hour a day, and that the rest of his time had been spent giving instruction in cooking, as he had once been a professional chef. About the cooking lessons Ferrer said he had already made other arrangements and had relieved Degas of them nearly a month ago. He added that although Senor Chirikov would be only a part-time teacher, he wished him to enjoy the same amenities as the other masters. Then he left him with the Frenchman.
Degas showed de Quesnoy the work his two classes were doing, and later took one of them in his presence, after which he took him to the masters' common-room at the back of the house. Soon after midday the other masters began to troop in, among them Sanchez and Benigno. The former, as the Count had already learned, ran the foundry for the students who were learning metal-work, and the latter acted as Editor for the publishing business.
There were eleven masters in all and three women teachers; and as de Quesnoy shook hands with them in turn, he decided that he had rarely met a group of such strong individualists. Their clothes and manners showed them all to be eccentrics, but he soon found that, apart from Sanchez, their level of intelligence was unusually high, and he had little doubt that they were all fanatical atheists hand-picked by Ferrer to aid him in his work. Next door to the common-room there was a small dining-room, and having crowded into it they ate for lunch the dishes produced by the cooking class held that morning.
During the days that followed de Quesnoy spent most of the hours, when he was neither taking his French classes nor coaching his two private students in Russian, browsing in the Escuela Moderna library.
One thing that amazed him was the enormous number of weekly and monthly journals either openly published by anarchist groups or carrying articles in defence of anarchists who had been caught after committing outrages and brought to trial. They ran into hundreds and were produced not only in every European country but also the United States and South America. The greatest number were published in France, and that he had never before seen any of them he attributed to their probably being put on sale only in the poorer quarters of Paris, Lyons, Marseilles and other cities. Many of them had been suppressed after publishing only a few issues, but a similarity of set-up and contributors showed that in the majority of such cases the periodical had, after a short interval, been revived under another name. That this spate of agitator literature continued unabated could be taken as fair proof that Dona Gulia's contention, that hundreds of thousands of Spaniards were convinced anarchists, was correct. From that, he judged by the number of anarchist publications throughout the world, if there were a million Spanish anarchists their total number must run to anything between five and ten millions.