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Title: A Girl Among the Anarchists

Author: Isabel Meredith

Release Date: December, 2004 [EBook #7084]
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[This file was first posted on March 8, 2003]

Edition: 10

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A GIRL AMONG THE ANARCHISTS

By Isabel Meredith




PREFACE


In spite of the fact that there are certain highly respectable
individualists of a rabid type who prefer to call themselves Anarchists,
it must be owned that it requires some courage to write about Anarchism
even with the sympathy befitting a clinical physician or the scientific
detachment of a pathologist. And yet it is certain that Anarchists are
curiously interesting, and not the less in need of observation from the
fact that apparently none of the social quacks who prescribe seriously in
leading articles has the faintest insight into them as a phenomenon, a
portent, or a disease. This book, if it is read with understanding, will,
I feel assured, do not a little to show how it comes about that Anarchism
is as truly endemic in Western Civilisations as cholera is in India.
Isabel Meredith, whom I had the pleasure of knowing when she was a more
humble member of the staff of the _Tocsin_ than the editor, occupies,
to my knowledge, a very curious and unique position in the history of
English Anarchism. There is nothing whatever in "A Girl among the
Anarchists" which is invented, the whole thing is an experience told very
simply, but I think convincingly. Nevertheless as such a human document
must seem incredible to the ordinary reader, I have no little pleasure in
saying that I know what she has written to be true. I was myself a
contributor to the paper which is here known as the _Tocsin_. I have
handled the press and have discussed details (which did not include bombs)
with the editor. I knew "Kosinski" and still have an admiration for
"Nekrovitch." And even now I do not mind avowing that I am philosophically
as much an Anarchist as the late Dr. H. G. Sutton, who would no doubt have
been astounded to learn that he belonged to the brotherhood.

Curiously enough I have found most Anarchists of the mildest
dispositions. I have met meek Germans (there are meek Germans still
extant) who even in their wildest Anarchic indignation seemed as little
capable of hurting a living soul as of setting the Elbe on fire. For it
must be understood that the "red wing" of the Anarchists is a very small
section of the body of philosophers known as Anarchists. There is no doubt
that those of the dynamite section are practically insane. They are
"impulsives"; they were outraged and they revolted before birth. Most of
the proletariat take their thrashing lying down. There are some who cannot
do that. It is out of these who are not meek and do not inherit even
standing-room on the earth that such as "Matthieu" comes. Perhaps it may
not be out of place to suggest that a little investigation might be better
than denunciation, which is always wide of the mark, and that, as
Anarchism is created by the social system of repression, more repression
will only create more Anarchism. However, I am perfectly aware that the
next time a wild-eyed philosopher, who ought to be under restraint in an
asylum, throws a bomb, all the newspapers in Europe will advocate measures
for turning all the meeker Anarchists into outrage-mongers. For of the
Anarchists it is certainly true that repression does not repress.
Anarchism is a creed and a philosophy, but neither as creed nor philosophy
does it advocate violence. It only justifies resistance to violence. So
much, I think, will be discovered in this book even by a leader-writer.

In conclusion I cannot do better than quote from Spinoza's _Tractatus
Politicus:_--

"In order that I might inquire better into the matter of this science
with the same freedom of mind with which we are wont to treat lines and
surfaces in mathematics, I determined not to laugh or weep over the
actions of men but simply to understand them, and to contemplate their
affections and passions such as love, hate, anger, envy, arrogance, pity,
and all other disturbances of soul not as vices of human nature, but as
properties pertaining to it in the same way as heat, cold, storm, thunder
pertain to the nature of the atmosphere. For these, though troublesome,
are yet necessary and have certain causes through which we may come to
understand them, and thus by contemplating them in their truth, gain for
our minds as much joy as by the knowledge of things which are pleasing to
the senses."

I think that Isabel Meredith, so far as the outlook of her book extends,
is a disciple of Spinoza. But she can speak for herself.

MORLEY ROBERTS.




CONTENTS


I. A STRANGE CHILDHOOD

II. A GATHERING IN CHISWICK

III. AN ABORTIVE GROUP-MEETING.

IV. A POLICE SCARE

V. TO THE RESCUE

VI. A FOREIGN INVASION

VII. THE OFFICE OF THE _TOCSIN_

VIII. THE DYNAMITARD'S ESCAPE

IX. SOME ANARCHIST PERSONALITIES

X. A FLIGHT

XI. A CRISIS

XII. THE _TOCSIN'S_ LAST TOLL.




CHAPTER I

A STRANGE CHILDHOOD


In the small hours of a bitter January morning I sat in my room gazing
into the fire, and thinking over many things. I was alone in the house,
except for the servants, but this circumstance did not affect me. My
childhood and upbringing had been of no ordinary nature, and I was used to
looking after myself and depending on my own resources for amusement and
occupation.

My mother had died when I was yet a small child and, with my elder sister
and brother, I had grown up under our father's eye. He was a chemist and a
man of advanced ideas on most things. He had never sent us to school,
preferring to watch in person over our education, procuring for us private
tuition in many subjects, and himself instructing us in physical science
and history, his two favourite studies. We rapidly gained knowledge under
his system and were decidedly precocious children, but we had none of the
ordinary school society and routine. Our childhood was by no means dull or
mopish, for there were three of us and we got on very well together, but
we mixed hardly at all with children of our own age, our interests were
not theirs, and their boisterous ways were somewhat repellent to us.

Our father was a great believer in liberty, and, strange to say, he put
his ideas into practice in his own household. He was a devoted and
enthusiastic student, and for days, nay, weeks together, we would see but
little of him. He had fitted himself up a small laboratory at the top of
our house on which he spent all his available money, and here he passed
nearly all the time he could dispose of over and beyond that necessary for
the preparation and delivery of his scientific lectures. As we grew out of
childhood he made no difference in his mode of life. He gave us full
liberty to follow our various bents, assisting us with his advice when
requested, ever ready to provide the money necessary for any special
studies or books; taking an interest in our readings and intellectual
pursuits. The idea of providing us with suitable society, of launching us
out into the world, of troubling to see that we conformed to the ordinary
conventions of society, never occurred to him. Occasionally some old
friend of his would drop in, or some young admirer who had followed his
scientific work in the press would write asking permission to call and
consult him on some point. They were always received with cordiality, and
my father would take much trouble to be of any assistance he could to
them. We children used generally to be present on such occasions, and
frequently would join in the conversation, and thus we got to know various
people, among whom foreigners and various types of cranks were fairly in
evidence.

We lived in a large old-fashioned house in Fitzroy Square where our
father had settled down somewhere in the seventies soon after his marriage
to a South American Spaniard, whom he had met during a scientific research
expedition in Brazil. She was a girl of seventeen, his junior by some
twenty years. During his journeys into the interior of Brazil he had
fallen seriously ill with malarial fever, and had been most kindly taken
in and nursed by a coffee-planter and his family. Here he had met his
future wife who was acting as governess. She was of Spanish descent, and
combined the passionate enthusiasm of a Southerner with the independence
and self-reliance which life in a new and only partially civilised country
breeds. She was an orphan and penniless, but our father fell in love with
her, attracted doubtless by her beauty and vivaciousness in such striking
contrast with his bookish way of life, and he married her and brought her
home to London. He truly loved her and was a good husband in all essential
respects, but the uncongenial climate and monotonous life told on her
health, and she died three years after my birth, much mourned by her
husband, who plunged all the more deeply into scientific research, his
only other thought being a care for our education. He had lived on in the
same old house which grew somewhat dingier and shabbier each year, whilst
the neighbourhood fell from its pristine respectability to become the
resort of foreigners of somewhat doubtful character, of Bohemian artists
and musicians.

As I sat gazing into the fire many pictures of those old days rose before
me. I saw our large drawing-room with its old-fashioned furniture,
handsome, often beautiful, but ill-kept; its sombre hangings and fine
pictures. I recalled a typical scene there with a large fire burning
cheerily in the big grate, relieving the gloom of a late winter afternoon
with the bright flickering of its flames. Ensconced in a roomy arm-chair,
our father is seated by the fire in a skullcap and list slippers, with his
favourite cat perched on his knee. Opposite him sit two ladies, the elder
of whom--a quaint, nice-looking old lady, dressed neatly in black, but
whose innate eccentricity succeeded in imparting something odd to the
simplest and quietest of attires--is leaning eagerly forward, pouring
forth a long tale of woe into my father's sympathetic ear. She is
denouncing the London roughs, landlords, and police, who, apparently, are
all in league to ruin her and turn her cats astray upon an unkind world.
The brutality of the English poor, who consider their duty towards the
feline race fully performed when they have fed them, and who pay no more
attention to their morals and higher feelings than if they were stocks and
stones, arouses her ire; sympathy is what she needs, sympathy to help her
to face the world and continue her crusade against cruelty. She says all
this in a scattered and disconnected style, jumping from one point to
another, turning occasionally to her friend for support or confirmation.
This friend is a meek, subdued-looking person of uncertain age, somewhat
washed-out and bedraggled in appearance. Her attire is nondescript, and
seems to consist of oddments bought solely because they were cheap and
bearing no relation whatever one to the other. Mrs. Smuts, growing more
and more absorbed in the course of her harangue on the great cat question,
states that she believes in marrying cats young in life and looking
strictly after their morals; and as she appeals to Miss Meggs whilst
voicing this sentiment, the latter timidly interjects, "But do you think,
my dear Maria, that cats can maintain themselves chaste on a meat diet? I
never give mine anything more exciting than cold potatoes and rice
pudding, and I find that they thrive on it, Mr. Meredith!"

At this point we children, stifling our laughter, rush headlong from the
room, to vent our mirth in safety in the kitchen.

Another frequent visitor whom my imagination summoned from the grave in
which he had lain now for several years past, was a tall, thin,
delicate-looking man of some thirty years of age. He was by birth a
Frenchman, but had lived mostly in England, his parents having come over
as political exiles from the tyranny of Louis Napoleon, afterwards
settling permanently in this country. He was an engineer by profession,
but a poet at heart, and all his spare time and thought he devoted to
tackling the problem of aerial navigation. His day was spent earning a
scanty living in a shipbuilding yard, but his evenings and nights were
passed in constructing a model of a flying-machine. He would bring his
drawings round to our father for discussion and advice; and although he
never attained success, he was always hopeful, trusting that some one of
the ever fresh improvements and additions which his fertile brain was
always busy conceiving would solve the difficulty which had hitherto beset
him. His sallow face with its large dreamy eyes and his spare figure, clad
in an old bluish suit, rusty with age and threadbare with brushing, stand
out clear in my memory. There was also an old professor, a chemist like my
father, who often assisted him in his experiments. He was somewhat
formidable in appearance, wearing gold spectacles, and helping himself
freely to the contents of a snuff-box, but he was one of the most
kind-hearted of men. Children were great favourites with him, and his
affection was returned with interest as soon as the shyness consequent on
his somewhat gruff manner was overcome. He used to enjoy drawing us out,
and would laugh heartily at our somewhat old-fashioned remarks and
observations, at which we used to grow very indignant, for we were
decidedly touchy when our dignity was at stake. He had nicknamed me
Charlotte Corday, for, after a course of Greek and Roman history, studied
in Plutarch and Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar," I had plunged into the
French Revolution, glorying in its heroisms and audacity, and it had
become a favourite amusement with all three of us to enact scenes drawn
from its history, and to recite aloud, with great emphasis if little art,
revolutionary poetry. The old professor loved to tease me by abusing my
favourite heroes; and when he had at last roused me to a vigorous
assertion of revolutionary sentiments, he would turn to my father and say,
"There's a little spitfire for you; you will have to keep a look-out or
she will be making bombs soon and blowing us all up," at which my father
would smile complacently.

Our father was very charitable. He did not like to be bothered or
disturbed, but he would willingly give a little assistance when asked, and
the result was that our door was always besieged by beggars of various
nationalities, Spaniards and Italians forming the chief contingent.
Generally they confined themselves to sending in notes, which used to be
returned with a shilling or half-crown as the case might be, but sometimes
one would insist on a personal interview. I remember one wild-looking
Hungarian, whose flowing locks were crowned by a sort of horse's
sun-bonnet, who used to rush round on one of those obsolete bicycles,
consisting of an enormously high wheel on the top of which he was perched,
and a tiny little back one. He was generally pursued by a crowd of hooting
boys, advising him to "get 'is 'air cut," and inquiring, "Where did you
get that 'at?" He used to insist on seeing my father; but the help he
solicited was not for himself but for various political refugees in whom
he was interested. One day the professor happened to meet this
wild-looking creature at our door, and inquired of my father who that
maniac might be. "Oh, he is a Hungarian refugee; a good fellow, I believe.
I have noticed something rather odd in his appearance, but I do not
consider him mad," replied his friend.

Amid such surroundings we grew up. My elder sister, Caroline, had a
notable musical gift, and even as a small child had a fine voice, which
developed into a rich contralto. Our father, always anxious to do his duty
by us, gave her a first-rate musical education, sending her abroad to
study under famous Continental teachers, and at eighteen she made her
first appearance in public, exciting much attention by the powerful
dramatic qualities of her voice. It was evident that her right course was
to go in for operatic singing, and this she did. She continued on the most
affectionate terms with her family, but naturally her pursuit took her
into quite another path of life, and we saw less and less of her as time
went on. This threw my brother and myself more together. There was only a
year's difference between us, and we studied together, walked, talked,
played, and read together--in fact, were inseparable. Raymond was no
ordinary boy. In character and in manners he was very like my father. His
favourite study was physical science in its various branches; mine,
history and sociological subjects. He saw things from the scientific
standpoint, I from the poetical and artistic; but we were both by nature
enthusiastic and dreamers, and sympathised heartily with each other's
views. His ambition was to become a famous explorer; mine, to die on a
scaffold or a barricade, shouting Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.

Our father took a great pride in Raymond, and carefully supervised his
studies. He passed various brilliant examinations, and at eighteen, having
decided to go in for medicine, was already walking a hospital. Shortly
after this our father died suddenly. He was at work as usual in his
laboratory when he was seized by a paralytic stroke, and in three days he
was dead.

This blow quite stunned us for a time. Our father was everything to us;
and the possibility of his death we had never contemplated. Though, as I
have explained, he had always left us free to follow our own devices,
still he was the centre round which our family life circled; we were
passionately attached to him, and now that he was gone we felt at a loss
indeed. We had no relatives living of our father's; our mother's family we
had never known, and they were too distant to be practically available.
Our father's friends were not such as to be of much help to us. Cat
enthusiasts and scientific dreamers are all very well in their way, but
they almost always take far more than they give in the mart of friendship.
The old professor had preceded my father to his grave.

Our father left us comfortably off. The house was our own, and property
yielding a comfortable income was divided equally between us. Our home
seemed desolate indeed without our father, and very gloomily did the first
months of his absence pass; but in time hope and youth reasserted
themselves and we gradually settled down to much our old way of life.
Caroline obtained several engagements and was still studying
enthusiastically. Raymond passed most of his time at the hospital, where
he had rooms, though he frequently came home; I was the only one who had
not a definite occupation. I read a great deal and wrote a little also,
chiefly studies on historical subjects which interested me, but I had
printed nothing. In fact I had never been in the way of the literary
world, and did not know how to set about it. Time used often to hang
rather heavily on my hands in the big house where I was generally alone. I
was the housekeeper, but such cares did not take up much of my time. The
result of so much solitude and lack of occupation was that I became
restless and dissatisfied. Mere reading without any definite object did
not and could not suffice me; to write when there seemed no prospect of
ever being read, and keenly alive as I was to my own deficiencies, did not
attract me; friends I might say I had none, for the few people my father
knew were interested in him and not in us children, and ceased to frequent
our house after his death. Caroline's musical friends did not appeal to
me, so that the whole interest of my life was centred round my brother.
When he came home we used always to be together, and conversation never
flagged. Never having been to school he had none of the schoolboy's
patronising contempt for a sister. We had always been chums and
companions, and so we continued, but whereas, as children, it was I, with
my more passionate and enterprising nature, who took the lead, now it was
he who, mixing with the outer world, provided the stimulus of new ideas
and fresh activities for which I craved. Brought suddenly face to face,
after the studious seclusion of home, with the hard facts of life as seen
in a London hospital, he had begun to take a deep interest in social
questions. The frightful havoc of life and happiness necessitated by the
economic conditions of nineteenth-century society, impressed him deeply,
and he felt that any doctor who looked upon his profession as other than a
mere means to make money must tackle such problems. Following up this line
of thought he became interested in economics and labour questions. His
views were the result of no mere surface impression, but the logical
outcome of thought and study, and he arrived at socialism by mental
processes of his own, uninfluenced by the ordinary channels of propaganda.
I shared his interests and read on parallel lines. We had no friends in
Socialist circles, no personal interest of any kind balanced our judgment.
The whole trend of our education had been to make independent thinkers of
us. What we saw in the whole problem was a question of justice, and for
this we were ready and anxious to work. A new interest was thus brought
into our lives, which, in my case, soon became all-absorbing. I was always
begging my brother to bring me home fresh books. The driest volumes of
political economy, the most indigestible of philosophical treatises,
nothing came amiss. From these I passed on to more modern works. Raymond
had made friends with a student who was a professed socialist and through
him he came into possession of a number of pamphlets and papers, all of
which I devoured eagerly, and some of which made a lasting impression on
my mind. Krapotkin's "Appeal to the Young" was of this number. I remember
in my enthusiasm reading it aloud to my sister Caroline, who, however,
took scant interest in such matters, and who tried, but in vain, to put a
damper on my enthusiasm.

I was always fond of scribbling, and the outcome of all this reading was
that I, too, flew to pen and paper. I used to read my papers to Raymond on
those rare occasions when I fancied I had not done so much amiss. They
would provide the material for an evening's conversation, then I would
toss them aside and think no more about them. One day, however, Raymond
brought his Socialist friend home with him. It seems they had talked about
me and my all-absorbing interest in social subjects. Hughes, my brother's
friend, had been surprised to hear from Raymond that I knew no socialists
in the flesh, and that all my hero-worship was laid before the altar of
mental abstractions, of my own creation for the most part.

Great was my excitement when Raymond told me that I might expect him and
his friend, of whom I had heard so much, to turn up together one Sunday
evening. So great was my ignorance of the world, so wild my enthusiasm,
that I imagined every socialist as a hero, willing to throw away his life
at a moment's notice on behalf of the "Cause." I had had no experience of
the petty internal strifes, of the jealousies and human frailties which a
closer knowledge of all political parties reveals. I remember how ashamed
I felt of the quite unostentatious comfort of our home, how anxious I was
to dissemble the presence of servants, how necessary I thought it to dress
myself in my oldest and least becoming clothes for the occasion, and how
indignant I felt when Caroline, who was going off to sing at a concert
that evening, said, on coming in to wish me good-bye, "Why, surely,
Isabel, you're not going to receive that gentleman looking such a fright
as this?" As if a Socialist could care for dress! How I felt he would
despise me for all the outward signs which proved that I was living on the
results of "unearned increment" (_vide_ Karl Marx) and that I was a
mere social parasite!

When at last the longed-for, yet dreaded moment came, I was surprised,
relieved, and I must add somewhat disappointed, at seeing a young man
looking much like any other gentleman, except that he wore a red tie, and
that his clothes were of a looser and easier fit than is usual. "What a
jolly place you have!" he exclaimed after my brother had introduced us and
he had given a look round. I felt considerably relieved, as I had quite
expected him to scowl disapproval, and my brother, after saying, "Yes, it
is a nice old house; we are very fond of it," suggested that we should
adjourn to supper.

During this repast I took an animated part in the conversation, which
turned on recent books and plays. At last reference was made to a book,
"The Ethics of Egoism," which had excited much attention. It was a work
advocating the most rabid individualism, denying the Socialist standpoint
of the right to live, and saying that the best safeguard for the
development and amelioration of the race lay in that relentless law of
nature which sent the mentally and morally weak to the wall. I had read
the book with interest, and had even written a rather long criticism of
it, of which I felt distinctly proud. In the course of the discussion to
which this book gave rise among us, my brother mentioned that I had
written something on it, and Hughes begged me to read my performance.
Though I felt somewhat diffident, I acceded, after some persuasion, to his
request, and was elated beyond measure at earning his good opinion of my
effort.

"By George, that's about the best criticism I've read of the work. Where
do you intend publishing it, Miss Meredith?"

"Oh, I had never thought of publishing it," I replied; "I have never
published anything."

"But we cannot afford to lose such good stuff," he insisted. "Come,
Raymond, now, don't you think your sister ought to get that into print?"

"I think you should publish it, Isabel, if you could," he replied.

"Could! Why any of our papers would be only too delighted to have it. Let
me take it down to the _Democrat_," he said, mentioning the name of a
paper which Raymond often brought home with him.

"Oh, if you really think it worth while, I shall be only too pleased," I
replied.

Thus was effected my first introduction to the actual Socialist party. My
article was printed and I was asked for others. I made the acquaintance of
the editor, who, I must confess, spite of my enthusiasm, soon struck me as
a rather weak-kneed and altogether unadmirable character. He thought it
necessary to get himself up to look like an artist, though he had not the
soul of a counter-jumper, and the result was long hair, a velvet coat, a
red tie, bumptious bearing, and an altogether scatter-brained and fly-away
manner. In figure he was long and willowy, and reminded me irresistibly of
an unhealthy cellar-grown potato plant. My circle of acquaintances rapidly
enlarged, and soon, instead of having too much time on my hands for
reading and study, I had too little. At one of the Sunday evening lectures
of the Democratic Club, at which I had become a regular attendant, I made
the acquaintance of Nekrovitch, the famous Nihilist, and his wife. I took
to him instinctively, drawn by the utter absence of sham or "side" which
characterised the man. I had never understood why Socialism need imply the
arraying of oneself in a green curtain or a terra-cotta rug, or the
cultivation of flowing locks, blue shirts, and a peculiar cut of clothes:
and the complete absence of all such outward "trade marks" pleased me in
the Russian. He invited me to his house, and I soon became a constant
visitor. In the little Chiswick house I met a class of people who
stimulated me intellectually, and once more aroused my rather waning
enthusiasm for the "Cause." The habit of taking nothing for granted, of
boldly inquiring into the origin of all accepted precepts of morality, of
intellectual speculation unbiassed by prejudice and untrammelled by all
those petty personal and party questions and interests which I had seen
occupy so much time and thought at the Democratic Club, permeated the
intellectual atmosphere. Quite a new side of the problem--that of its
moral bearings and abstract rights as opposed to the merely material right
to daily bread which had first appealed to my sense of justice and
humanity--now opened before me. The right to complete liberty of action,
the conviction that morality is relative and personal and can never be
imposed from without, that men are not responsible, or only very partially
so, for their surroundings, by which their actions are determined, and
that consequently no man has a right to judge his fellow; such and similar
doctrines which I heard frequently upheld, impressed me deeply. I was
morally convinced of their truth, and consequently more than half an
Anarchist. The bold thought and lofty ideal which made of each man a law
unto himself, answerable for his own actions only to his own conscience,
acting righteously towards others as the result of his feeling of
solidarity and not because of any external compulsion, captivated my mind.

The Anarchists who frequented Nekrovitch's house were men of bold and
original thought, the intellectual part of the movement, and I was never
tired of listening to their arguments. Meantime the more I saw of the
Social Democrats the less I felt satisfied with them. A wider experience
would have told me that all political parties, irrespective of opinion,
are subject to much the same criticism, and that Socialist ideas are no
protection against human weaknesses; but extreme youth is not compromising
where its ideals are concerned, and I expected and insisted on a certain
approach to perfection in my heroes. True, Nekrovitch made me hesitate
some time before taking the final step. His attitude in such discussions
was one of sound common sense, and he never ceased reminding his Anarchist
friends, though all in vain, that we must live in our own times, and that
it is no use trying to forestall human evolution by some thousand years.

At home I had become more and more my own mistress. I was now full
eighteen years of age, and had always been accustomed to think and act for
myself. Caroline, with whom I was on most affectionate terms, despite our
frequent differences on politics, had accepted an engagement as _prima
donna_ with a travelling opera company which was to visit the United
States and the principal cities of South America; her engagement was to
last two years, and she had left just three weeks before the opening of my
first chapter.

Raymond slept at home, but as the date of his final examination drew near
he was more and more occupied, and frequently whole weeks passed in which
I only caught a glimpse of him. He knew and sympathised with my new line
of thought; he had accompanied me more than once to the Nekrovitchs', whom
he liked much, but he had no longer the time to devote much thought to
such matters. Of money I always had a considerable command; ever since our
father's death I had kept house, and now that Caroline was away I had full
control of the household purse.

Turning over all these thoughts in my mind as I sat toasting my feet
before the fire, I felt more and more inclined to throw in my lot with the
Anarchists. At the same time I felt that if I did take this step it must
be as a worker and in no half-hearted spirit. The small hours of the
morning were rapidly slipping by as I turned at last into bed to dream of
Anarchist meetings, melting into a confused jumble with the rights of cats
and the claims of the proletariat.



CHAPTER II

A GATHERING IN CHISWICK


As my first actual acquaintance with Anarchists was effected in
Nekrovitch's house, it will not be out of place for me to give a slight
sketch of the gatherings held there and of my host himself.

An interminably dreary journey by tram and rail, omnibus and foot, the
latter end of which lay along a monotonous suburban road, brought you to
the humble dwelling of the famous Nihilist. Here from time to time on
Sunday evenings it was my wont to put in an appearance towards ten or
eleven, for the journey was deceptively long from Fitzroy Square, and
Nekrovitch, like most Russians, was himself of so unpunctual and irregular
a nature, that he seemed to foster the like habits in all his friends. The
nominal hour for these social gatherings to commence was eight, but not
till past nine did the guests begin to assemble, and till midnight and
later they would come dribbling in. Only one conscientiously punctual
German was ever known to arrive at the appointed hour, but the only reward
of the Teuton's mistaken zeal was to wait for hours in solitary state in
an unwarmed, unlighted room till his host and fellow-guests saw fit to
assemble.

The meeting-room, or parlour, or drawing-room in Nekrovitch's house was
by no means a palatial apartment. Small and even stuffy to the notions of
a hygienic Englishman, and very bare, scanty in furniture, and yet poorer
in decoration, this room bore evidence to its owners' contempt for such
impedimenta, and their entire freedom from slavery to household gods. It
was evidently the home of people used to pitching their tent often, and to
whom a feeling of settled security was unknown. But its occupants usually
made up for any deficiencies in their surroundings.

The company was always of a very mixed cosmopolitan character--Russian
Nihilists and exiles, English Liberals who sympathised with the Russian
constitutional movement, Socialists and Fabians, Anarchists of all
nationalities, journalists and literary men whose political views were
immaterial, the pseudo-Bohemian who professes interest in the "queer side
of life," all manner of faddists, rising and impecunious musicians and
artists--all were made welcome, and all were irresistibly attracted
towards the great Russian Nihilist.

The most notable figure in this assembly, and he certainly would have
been in most assemblies, was Nekrovitch himself. Nekrovitch was
essentially a great man; one of those men whom to know was to admire and
to love; a man of strong intellect, and of the strong personal magnetism
which is so frequently an adjunct of genius. Physically he was a huge
powerful man, so massive and striking in appearance that he suggested
comparison rather with some fact of nature--a rock, a vigorous forest tree
--than with another man. He was one of those rare men who, like mountains
in a landscape, suffice in themselves to relieve their environments,
whatever these may be, from all taint of meanness. He stood out from among
his guests the centre of conversation, of feeling, and of interest. He was
almost invariably engaged in eager conversation, pitched in a loud tone of
voice, broken at intervals when he listened to the other disputants, while
puffing the cigarettes which he was constantly rolling, and looking
intently out of his deep-set penetrating eyes.

Nekrovitch's wife, a Russian like himself, had been a student of medicine
at the Russian University until, along with her husband, she had been
compelled to take flight from the attentions of the Russian police. She
was a curly-headed brunette, with bright hazel eyes and a vivacious
manner; a very intelligent and highly "simpatica" woman, as the Italians
would put it.

Round Nekrovitch there always clustered an eager crowd of admirers and
intimates, discussing, disputing, listening, arguing. They were mostly
foreigners, of the shaggy though not unwashed persuasion, but two English
faces especially attracted notice. One belonged to a young woman, still on
the right side of thirty, dressed without exaggeration in the aesthetic
style, with a small but singularly intellectual head and an argumentative
manner, whom I knew as Miss Cooper. The other was a man of some
thirty-seven years, with auburn hair, which displayed a distinct tendency
to develop into a flowing mane; tall, slim, and lithe of limb, with a
splendid set of teeth, which showed under his bushy moustache whenever his
frank, benevolent smile parted his lips. He was somewhat taciturn, but
evidently tenacious; a glance at his spacious forehead and finely-shaped
head revealed a man of mind, and the friendly, fearless glance of his eyes
betokened a lovable nature, though, as he listened to his opponents or
answered in his low distinct voice, there was an intensity and fixedness
in their depth not incompatible with the fanatic.

This Dr. Armitage was one of the most noticeable figures in the English
Anarchist movement, and it was with him that I first discussed Anarchist
principles as opposed to those of legal Socialism. Nekrovitch and others
often joined in the discussion, and very animated we all grew in the
course of debate. Nekrovitch smiled sympathetically at my whole-hearted
and ingenuous enthusiasm. He never made any attempt to scoff at it or to
discourage me, though he vainly attempted to persuade me that Anarchism
was too distant and unpractical an ideal, and that my energies and
enthusiasm might be more advantageously expended in other directions.
"Anyway," he once said to me, "it is very agreeable to a Russian to see
young people interested in politics and political ideals. It reminds him
of his own country."

Among the other Anarchists who frequented Nekrovitch's house was the
Anarchist and scientist, Count Voratin, a man who had sacrificed wealth
and high position and family ties for his principles with less fuss than
another rich man would make in giving a donation to an hospital. He seemed
always absolutely oblivious of his own great qualities, as simple and
kindly in manners as a _moujik_ but with a certain innate dignity and
courtliness of demeanour which lifted him above most of those with whom he
came in contact. I nourished an almost passionate admiration for Voratin
as a thinker and a man, and his writings had gone far to influence me in
my Anarchist leanings. Never shall I forget the excitement I felt when
first I met him at Nekrovitch's house. I reverenced him as only a youthful
disciple can reverence a great leader.

From Armitage and Nekrovitch I heard much from time to time of another
Russian Anarchist, Ivan Kosinski, a man actively engaged in the Anarchist
propaganda all over Europe. He was much admired by them for his absolute
unswerving devotion to his ideas. A student and a man of means, he had
never hesitated between his interests and his convictions. He had come
into collision with the Russian authorities by refusing to perform
military service. In prison he would not recognise the right of judges and
jailers, and had consequently spent most of his time in a strait waistcoat
and a dark cell. His forte was silence and dogged unyielding obstinacy. On
escaping from Russian prisons he had gone to America: he had starved and
tramped, but he had never accepted any sort of help. How he lived was a
mystery to all. He was known to be an ascetic and a woman-hater, and had
been seen at one time selling fly-papers in the streets of New York. In
revolutionary circles he was looked up to as an original thinker, and it
was rumoured that he played a leading part in most of the revolutionary
movements of recent years. He was also engaged on a life of Bakounine
which was to be the standard work on the famous revolutionist, for which
purpose he was always reading and travelling in search of material.

And at last one evening Nekrovitch announced that Kosinski was expected.
I had heard so much about this man that I spent my whole evening in a
state of suppressed excitement at the news. For many months past I had
sympathised with the Anarchist principles, but I had taken no particular
steps towards joining the party or exerting myself on its behalf. I was
waiting for some special stimulus to action. Half unconsciously I found
myself wondering whether Kosinski would prove this.

I had passed a pleasant evening in the little Chiswick house between the
usual political and ethical discussions and the usual interesting or
entertaining company. I had assisted at a long discussion between Miss
Cooper and Dr. Armitage, which, commencing on the question of Socialism,
had gradually deviated into one on food and dress reform, a matter upon
which that lady held very strong views. I had felt a little irritated at
the conversation, for I entertained scant sympathy for what I regarded as
hygienic fads; and the emphasis with which the lady averred that she
touched neither flesh nor alcohol, and felt that by this abstinence she
was not "besotting her brain nor befouling her soul," amused me much. Dr.
Armitage, to my surprise, expressed some sympathy with her views, and
treated the question with what I considered undue importance. This
discussion was brought at last to a termination by Miss Cooper breaking
off for a meal (she always ate at regular intervals), and retiring into a
corner to consume monkey-nuts out of a hanging pocket or pouch which she
carried with her.

The evening advanced, and I began to despair of Kosinski's ever arriving.
Every time there was a knock at the door, I wondered whether it was the
much-expected Anarchist, but I was repeatedly disappointed. Once it was
the musical infant prodigy of the season whose talents had taken London by
storm, another time it was a Nihilist, yet another a wild-looking Czech
poet. One loud rat-tat made me feel certain that Kosinski had arrived, but
I was again disillusioned, as an aesthetic, fascinating little lady made
her entry, dragging triumphantly in tow a reluctant, unengaging and
green-haired husband. Nekrovitch gave me a significant glance. "So sorry
to be so late," the little lady began in a high-pitched voice, "but I had
to attend a meeting of our society for the distribution of sanitary
dust-bins; and Humphry got quite disagreeable waiting for me outside,
although he was well wrapped up in comforters and mits. My dear Anna (this
to Madame Nekrovitch), _do_ tell him that he is most absurd and
egoistic, and that it is his duty to think less of personal comfort and
more of humanity."

At this last word the injured Humphry, who had approached the fire, and
was attempting to thaw his nose and toes, gave utterance to a suppressed
groan; but a cup of steaming tea and some appetising buttered toast
diverted his spouse's thoughts, and she was soon deep in a confidential
chat with Anna.

At last, long after eleven, appeared the new-comer of whom I had heard so
much. I must confess that my preconceived notions (one always has a
preconceived notion of the appearance of a person one has heard much
spoken of) fell to the ground. I had imagined him dark and audacious, and
I saw before me a tall, big, well-built man, with a slight stoop in his
shoulders, fair of skin, with a blonde beard and moustache, lank long
hair, a finely-cut, firm-set mouth, and blue dreamy eyes, altogether a
somewhat Christ-like face. He was clad in a thick, heavy, old-fashioned
blue overcoat with a velvet collar, which he refused to remove, baggy
nondescript trousers, and uncouth-looking boots. He saluted his host and
hostess in an undemonstrative style, bowed awkwardly to the other guests,
and settled down to crouch over the fire, and look unostentatiously
miserable.

From the first moment Kosinski interested me. His manners were not
engaging; towards women especially he was decidedly hostile. But the
marked indifference to opinion which his bearing indicated, his sincerity,
his unmistakable moral courage, perhaps his evident aversion to my sex,
all had for me a certain fascination.

I felt attracted towards the man, and was pleased that a discussion on
Anarchism with Armitage at last afforded me an opportunity of exchanging a
few words with him--even though on his side the conversation was not
altogether flattering to myself. It happened in this way.

Nekrovitch, Armitage, and myself had, according to our wont, been
discussing the great Anarchist question. For the hundredth time the
Russian had endeavoured to persuade us of the truth and the reason of his
point of view.

"So long as men are men," he maintained, "there must be some sort of
government, some fixed recognised law--organisation, if you will, to
control them."

"All governments are equally bad," answered the doctor. "All law is
coercion, and coercion is immoral. Immoral conditions breed immoral
people. In a free and enlightened society there would be no room for
coercive law. Crime will disappear when healthy and natural conditions
prevail."

And Nekrovitch, perceiving for the hundredth time that his arguments were
vain, and that Armitage was not to be moved, had left us to ourselves and
gone across to his other guests. Doctor Armitage, always eager for
converts, turned his undivided attention to me.

"I hope yet to be able to claim you for a comrade," he said: "you are
intelligent and open-minded, and cannot fail to see the futility of
attempting to tinker up our worn-out society. You must see that our
Socialist friends have only seized on half-truths, and they stop short
where true reform should begin."

"I can quite see your point of view," I replied; "in fact I am more than
half a convert already. But I should like to know what I can do. I have
been interested now in these problems for a year or two, and must confess
that the electioneering and drawing-room politics of Fabians and Social
Democrats are not much to my taste; in fact I may say that I am sick of
them. A few men like our friend Nekrovitch, who ennoble any opinions they
may hold, are of course exceptions, but I cannot blind myself to the fact
that ambition, wire-pulling, and faddism play a prominent part in the
general proceedings. On the other hand you seem to me to sin in the
opposite direction. No organisation, no definite programme, no specific
object!--what practical good could any one like myself do in such a party?"

The doctor smiled a quiet smile of triumph as he proceeded to overthrow
my objections: "Why, the very strength of our party lies in the fact that
it has not what you are pleased to call an organisation. Organisations are
only a means for intriguers and rogues to climb to power on the shoulders
of their fellow-men; and at best only serve to trammel initiative and
enterprise. With us every individual enjoys complete liberty of action.
This of course does not mean to say that several individuals may not unite
to attain some common object, as is shown by our groups which are
scattered all over the globe. But each group is autonomous, and within the
group each individual is his own law. Such an arrangement, besides being
right in principle, offers great practical advantages in our war against
society, and renders it impossible for governments to stamp us out. Again,
as to our lack of programme, if a clear grasp of principle and of the
ultimate aim to be attained is meant, it is wrong to say we have no
programme, but, if you mean a set of rules and formulas, why, what are
they after all but a means of sterilising ideas? Men and their
surroundings are unceasingly undergoing modification and change, and one
of the chief defects of all governments and parties hitherto has been that
men have had to adapt themselves to their programmes, instead of their
programmes to themselves. We make no statement as to specific object: each
comrade has his own, and goes for it without considering it necessary to
proclaim the fact to the whole world. Now you ask me how you could help
this movement or what you could do, and I have no hesitation in saying,
much. Every revolution requires revolutionists, we need propagandists, we
need workers, we need brains and money, and you have both."

"So you think that one ought to place one's property at the service of
the Cause, and that thus one is doing more good than by helping in the
ordinary way?"

"Why, of course, the revolutionist aims at eradicating the causes of
poverty and vice, whereas benevolence, by making it just possible for
people to put up with their circumstances, only strengthens the chains
which hold mankind in slavery."

We had unconsciously raised our voices in the heat of discussion, and
Kosinski, who had caught our last observations, broke in unexpectedly. It
was the first time he had opened his mouth to any purpose, and he went
straight to the point: "It is you bourgeois Socialists, with your talk of
helping us, and your anxiety about using your property 'to the best
advantage,' who are the ruin of every movement," he said, addressing me in
an uncompromising spirit. "What is wanted to accomplish any great change
is enthusiasm, whole-hearted labour, and where that is, no thought is
taken as to whether everything is being used to the best advantage. If you
are prepared to enter the movement in this spirit, without any backward
notion that you are conferring a favour upon any one--for indeed the
contrary is the case--well and good: your work will be willingly accepted
for what it is worth, and your money, if you have any, will be made good
use of; but if not, you had better side with your own class and enjoy your
privileges so long as the workers put up with you."

These outspoken remarks were followed by a momentary silence. Mrs.
Trevillian looked dismayed; Miss Cooper evidently concluded that Kosinski
must have dined on steak; Dr. Armitage agreed, but seemed to consider that
more amenity of language might be compatible with the situation.
Nekrovitch laughed heartily, enjoying this psychological sidelight, and I,
who ought to have felt crushed, was perhaps the only one who thoroughly
endorsed the sentiment expressed, finding therein the solution of many
moral difficulties which had beset me. Kosinksi was right. I felt one must
go the whole length or altogether refrain from dabbling in such matters.
And as to property I again knew that he was right; it was what I had all
along instinctively felt. Private property was, after all, but the outcome
of theft, and there can be no virtue in restoring what we have come by
unrighteously.

Small things are often the turning-point in a career; and, looking back,
I clearly see that that evening's discussion played no small part in
determining my future conduct. I was already disposed towards Anarchist
doctrines, and my disposition was more inclined towards action of any
order than towards mere speculation. I was the first to speak. "Kosinski
is quite right; I am the first to recognise it. Only I think it a little
unfair to assume me to be a mere bourgeois, attempting to play the part of
lady patroness to the revolution. I am sure none who know me can accuse me
of such an attitude."

Kosinski grumbled out a reply: "Well, of course I may be mistaken; but I
have seen so many movements ruined by women that I am rather distrustful;
they are so rarely prepared to forgo what they consider the privileges of
the sex--which is but another phrase for bossing every one and everything
and expecting much in return for nothing; but of course there may be
exceptions. Perhaps you are one."

Nekrovitch laughed aloud: "Bravo, bravo, you are always true to yourself,
Kosinski. I have always known you as a confirmed misogynist, and I see you
still resist all temptations to reform. You carry boorishness to the verge
of heroism."

The hours had slipped by rapidly, and Mrs. Trevillian took the hint which
her spouse had long tried to give by shuffling restlessly in his seat and
casting side glances at the clock which pointed to half-past one. She rose
to go. "We really must be leaving--it is quite late, and Humphry is never
fit for anything unless he gets at least six hours' sleep. Good-bye;
thanks for such a pleasant evening," and she bustled out, followed by her
husband. I rose to follow her example and, turning a deaf ear to
Nekrovitch, who remarked, "Oh, Isabel, do stay on; it is not yet late, and
as you have lost your last train it is no use being in a hurry," I shook
hands with my friends, including Kosinski, who had once more subsided into
a corner, and left, accompanied by Dr. Armitage, who offered to walk home
with me.

We walked rapidly on through the keen night air. I felt excited and
resolute with the feeling that a new phase of existence was opening before
me. Dr. Armitage at last spoke. "I hope, Isabel"--it was usual in this
circle to eschew surnames, and most of my friends and acquaintances called
me Isabel in preference to Miss Meredith--"I hope, Isabel, that you will
come to our meetings. I should like you to know some of our comrades;
there are many very interesting men, quite original thinkers, some of
them. And I think human beings so often throw light on matters which one
otherwise fails to grasp."

"I should much like to," I replied, "if you can tell me how and when; for
I suppose one requires some sort of introduction even to Anarchist
circles."

"Oh, that is easy enough," he replied. "I have often mentioned your name,
and the comrades will be very glad to see you; we make no sort of mystery
about our meetings. There will be a meeting at the office of our paper,
the _Bomb_, next Saturday. Do come. The business on hand will perhaps
not interest you much, but it will be an opportunity for meeting some of
our men, and I shall be there."

"Oh, I shall be so glad to come!" I exclaimed. "What will you be
discussing?"

"Well, to tell the truth, it is a somewhat unpleasant matter," replied
the doctor with some hesitation in his voice. "There have been some
strange reports circulating about the Myers case, and we are anxious to
get at the truth of the business. It may strike you as a rather unsuitable
introduction, but come nevertheless. The movement is always in need of new
blood and fresh energies to keep it from narrowing its sphere of activity,
and it is well that you should know us as we are."

"Very well, I will come if you will give me the direction."

"Let us say nine o'clock at the office of the _Bomb_ in Slater's
Mews, ---- Street; you will find me there."

"Agreed," I replied, and conversation dropped as we walked rapidly along.
I was much occupied with my own thoughts and Dr. Armitage was noted for
his long periods of silence. At last we reached my doorstep. I fumbled for
my latch-key, found it, and wished my friend good-night. We shook hands
and parted.



CHAPTER III

AN ABORTIVE GROUP-MEETING


Before describing the strange committee or group-meeting about to be
dealt with, it is necessary to say a few words concerning the mysterious
affair which gave rise to it.

On the 17th of December 189- the posters of the evening papers had
announced in striking characters:--

"DEATH OF AN ANARCHIST: ATTEMPTED OUTRAGE IN A LONDON PARK."

That same afternoon a loud explosion had aroused the inhabitants of a
quiet suburban district, and on reaching the corner of ---- Park whence
the report emanated, the police had found, amid a motley debris of trees,
bushes, and railings, the charred and shattered remains of a man. These,
at the inquest, proved to have belonged to Augustin Myers, an obscure
little French Anarchist, but despite the usual lengthy and unsatisfactory
routine of police inquiries, searches, and arrests, practically nothing
could be ascertained concerning him or the circumstances attending his
death. All that was certain was that the deceased man had in his
possession an explosive machine, evidently destined for some deadly work,
and that, while traversing the park, it had exploded, thus putting an end
both to its owner and his projects.

Various conflicting theories were mooted as to the motive which prompted
the conduct of the deceased Anarchist, but no confirmation could be
obtained to any of these. Some held that Myers was traversing London on
his way to some inconspicuous country railway station, whence to take
train for the Continent where a wider and more propitious field for
Anarchist outrage lay before him. Others opined that he had contemplated
committing an outrage in the immediate vicinity of the spot which
witnessed his own death; and others, again, that, having manufactured his
infernal machine for some nefarious purpose either at home or abroad, he
was suddenly seized either with fear or remorse, and had journeyed to this
unobserved spot in order to bury it. The papers hinted at accomplices and
talked about the usual "widespread conspiracy"; the police opened wide
their eyes, but saw very little. The whole matter, in short, remained, and
must always remain, a mystery to the public.

Behind the scenes, however, the Anarchists talked of a very different
order of "conspiracy." The funeral rites of the poor little Augustin were
performed with as much ceremony and sympathy as an indignant London mob
would allow, and he was followed to his grave by a goodly _cortège_
of "comrades," red and black flags and revolutionary song. Among the chief
mourners was the deceased man's brother Jacob, who wept copiously into the
open grave and sung his "Carmagnole" with inimitable zeal. It was this
brother whose conduct had given rise to suspicion among his companions,
and "spies" and "police plots" were in every one's mouth. The office of
the _Bomb_, as being the centre of English anarchy, had been selected
as the scene for an inquiry _en group_ into the matter.

Thus on a wet and chilling January evening--one of those evenings when
London, and more especially squalid London, is at the height of its
unattractiveness--I set out towards my first Anarchist "group-meeting."
And certainly the spirit which moved me from within must have been strong
that the flesh quailed not at the foul scenery amid which my destination
lay.

Half-way down one of the busiest, grimiest, and most depressing streets
in the W.C. district stands a squalid public-house, the type of many
hundreds and thousands of similar dens in the metropolis. The "Myrtle
Grove Tavern," pastoral as the name sounds, was not precisely the abode of
peace and goodwill. From four A.M., when the first of her _habitués_
began to muster round the yet unopened doors, till half-past twelve P.M.,
when the last of them was expelled by the sturdy "chucker-out," the
atmosphere was dense with the foul breath and still fouler language of
drunken and besotted men and women. Every phase of the lower order of
British drinker and drunkard was represented here. The coarse oaths of the
men, mingled with the shriller voices of their female companions, and the
eternal "'e saids" and "she saids" of the latter's complaints and disputes
were interrupted by the plaintive wailings of the puny, gin-nourished
infants at their breasts. Here, too, sat the taciturn man, clay pipe in
mouth, on his accustomed bench day after day, year in year out, gazing
with stony and blear-eyed indifference on all that went on around him;
deaf, dumb, and unseeing; only spitting deliberately at intervals, and
with apparently no other vocation in life than the consumption of
fermented liquor.

The side-door for "jugs and bottles" gave on to a dirty and odoriferous
mews, down which my destination lay. The unbridled enthusiasm of eighteen
years can do much to harden or deaden the nervous system, but certainly it
required all my fortitude to withstand the sickening combination of beer
and damp horsy hay which greeted my nostrils. Neither could the cabmen and
stablemen, hanging round the public-house doors and the mews generally, be
calculated to increase one's democratic aspirations, but I walked
resolutely on, and turning to my left, dexterously avoiding an unsavoury
heap of horse manure, straw, and other offal, I clambered up a break-neck
ladder, at the top of which loomed the office of the _Bomb_.

The door was furtively opened in response to my kick by a lean,
hungry-looking little man of very circumspect appearance. He cast me a
surly and suspicious glance, accompanied by a not very encouraging snarl,
but on my mentioning Dr. Armitage he opened the door a few inches wider
and I passed in.

It took me some seconds before I could accustom my eyes to the fetid
atmosphere of this den, which was laden with the smoke of divers specimens
of the worst shag and cheapest tobacco in the metropolis. But various
objects, human and inanimate, became gradually more distinct, and I found
myself in a long, ill-lighted wooden shed, where type and dust and
unwashed human beings had left their mark, and where soap and sanitation
were unknown. Past the type racks and cases, which occupied the first half
of this apartment, were grouped benches, stools, packing-cases, and a few
maimed and deformed chairs for the accommodation of the assembly. Then
came a hand printing-press, on which were spread the remains of some
comrade's repast: the vertebral column of a bloater and an empty
condensed-milk can, among other relics. The floor, from one extremity to
the other of the "office," was littered with heaps of unsold revolutionary
literature, the approximate date of which could be gauged by the thickness
of dust in which it was smothered. On the walls and from beams and rafters
hung foils and boxing-gloves; artistic posters and cartoons, the relics of
a great artist who had founded the _Bomb_, and the effigies of divers
comrades to whom a pathway to a better world had been opened through the
hangman's drop. But what most riveted my attention was an indistinct
animate _something_ enveloped in a red flag, rolled up in a heap on
the frouziest and most forbidding old sofa it had ever been my lot to
behold. That this _something_ was animate could be gathered from the
occasional twitchings of the red bundle, and from the dark mop of black
greasy hair which emerged from one end. But to what section of the animal
kingdom _it_ belonged I was quite at a loss to decide. Other stray
objects which I noted about this apartment were an ostentatious-looking
old revolver of obsolete make, and some chemical bottles, which, however,
contained no substance more dangerous than Epsom salts.

The human occupants were not less noticeable than the inanimate, and some
of them are deserving of our attention.

The man Myers, round whom the interest of the meeting was principally
centred this evening, was to all appearances a mean enough type of the
East End sartorial Jew. His physiognomy was not that of a fool, but
indicated rather that low order of intelligence, cunning and intriguing,
which goes to make a good swindler. The low forehead, wide awake, shifty
little eyes, the nose of his forefathers, and insolent lock of black hair
plastered low on his brow--all these characteristics may frequently be met
with in the dock of the "Old Bailey" when some case of petty swindling is
being tried.

Next Myers I noticed Dr. Armitage, who stood out in striking contrast
from the rest of his companions. The smile with which he welcomed me was
eloquent of the satisfaction with which he noted this my first entrance
into an Anarchist circle.

The short bench on which he sat was shared by a man in corduroys of the
navvy type, a large honest-looking fellow whose views of the Social
question appeared to be limited to a not very definite idea of the
injustice of third-class railway travelling and the payment of rent, and
he expressed his opinions on these knotty problems with more freedom and
warmth of language than was perhaps altogether warranted by the occasion.

Gracefully poised on one leg against an adjoining type-rack leaned a tall
youth with fair curling hair, a weak tremulous mouth, and an almost
girlish physiognomy. This youth had been drummed out of the army, the
discipline of which he had found too severe, for feigning illness, since
when he had passed his time between the bosom of his family, the
workhouse, and the Anarchist party. He paid very little attention to the
proceedings of the meeting, but discoursed eloquently, in a low voice, of
the brutality of his parents who refused to keep him any longer unless he
made some attempt to find employment. I remember wondering, _en
passant_, why this fair-haired, weak-kneed youth had ever entered the
Anarchist party; but the explanation, had I but known, was close at hand.

This explanation was a square-built, sturdy-looking man of some forty
years. His appearance was the reverse of engaging, but by no means lacking
in intelligence. He was ill-satisfied and annoyed with the universe, and
habitually defied it from the stronghold of a double bed. Thither he had
retired after the death of his father, an old market-porter, who had been
crushed by the fall of a basket of potatoes. The son saw in this tragic
circumstance the outcome and the reward of labour, swore a solemn oath
never to do a stroke of work again, threw up his job, and from that day
became a confirmed loafer in the Anarchist party. Some months previously,
while propagandising in the workhouse, he found the youth there, and
learned from his own lips how, being disinclined to become a burden on his
poor old parents after his exit from the army, he had seen no other
alternative but to become a pauper, and make the best he could of the
opportunities afforded him by the poor-rates. From the workhouse he was
dragged triumphantly forth by his new friend, and became an easy convert
to anarchic and communistic principles.

The only feminine element in this assembly was a fair, earnest-looking
Russian girl, whose slight knowledge of English did not allow her to
follow the proceedings very accurately. She was an almost pathetic figure
in her naïve enthusiasm, and evidently regarded her present companions as
seriously as those she had left behind her in Russia, and seemed to
imagine they played as dangerous a rôle, and ran the same risk as they did.

There were several others present among whom the loafer type was perhaps
in the ascendant. But there were also many of the more intelligent artisan
class, discontented with their lot; labourers and dockers who had tramped
up after a hard day's work, a young artist who looked rather of the Social
Democratic type, a cabman, a few stray gentlemen, a clever but never-sober
tanner, a labour agitator, a professional stump-orator, and one or two
fishy and nondescript characters of the Hebraic race. O'Flynn, the printer
of the _Bomb_, was a cantankerous Irishman with a taste for
discoursing on abstract questions, concerning which he grew frightfully
muddled and confused. He had a rather mad look in his eye and a
disputatious manner.

When at last inquiry was made whether all companions expected were
present, the red flag began to quiver and writhe most noticeably and
finally to unfurl, and there emerged from its depths the dirtiest and most
slovenly man I had ever seen, and the frouziest and most repulsive of
dogs. This man, if man I may call him, was bony and ill-built, and
appeared to consist largely of hands and feet. His arms were abnormally
long and his chest narrow and hollow, and altogether he seemed to hang
together by a mere fluke. His ill-assorted limbs were surmounted by a
sallow, yellowish face, large repulsive lips, and a shapeless nose, and to
him belonged the long, black greasy hair which I had already noted amid
the folds of the red banner. Large gristly ears emerged from his uncombed
mop of hair, and the only redeeming feature about the abject creature was
his large, brown, dog-like eyes. He crept forward, grinding his teeth and
rubbing his bony hands, and subsided into a waste-paper basket which was
the only available seat left unoccupied.

And now at last, after much talking and shifting about, and not before a
young German hairdresser had been stationed with one eye glued to a hole
in the outer wall of the shed, in order to make sure that no detective was
listening outside, the proceedings commenced.

Banter, the little man who had opened the door to me, rose to his feet,
cleared his throat, and said "_Com_rades" in a stentorian voice. Then
followed a long and rambling statement which he read out, from amid the
grammatical inaccuracies and continual digressions of which I was enabled
to gather that he had noticed of late something very peculiar about the
conduct of Jacob Myers, who had appeared to exercise undue influence and
power over his brother Augustin; that, moreover, Jacob had been seen by a
third party drinking a glass of rum in the "Nag and Beetle" in company
with a well-known detective, and that, in final and conclusive proof of
some very fishy transactions on his part, three undeniable half-crowns had
been distinctly observed in his overcoat pocket the previous week. "And
how should he come by these by honest means?" indignantly inquired Banter.
"He says he's out of work, and he's not got the courage to steal!"

"'Ear, 'ear! Why pay rent to robber landlords?" the navvy, Armitage's
neighbour, ejaculated at this juncture, after which irrelevant inquiry he
spat defiance at Society.

Then followed the speeches for the prosecution, if the use of such a word
may be permitted in connection with an Anarchist transaction. The chief
accusations made against Myers were his violent blood-and-thunder speeches
which he had in no wise carried out in action, but which he had delivered
under the eyes and in the hearing of the police who had listened and seen
it all with quite commendable Christian forbearance. Besides this several
sensational articles had appeared in the daily press in connection with
Augustin's death, exaggerating the importance of the affair and hinting at
dark plots; of which articles he was suspected of being the author. Jacob
was in fact accused of having egged on his unfortunate brother to his doom
in order that he might turn a little money out of the transaction between
newspaper reports and police fees. It apparently mattered little to this
modern Shylock whence came his pound of flesh or what blood ran or
congealed in its veins.

Through all these statements and questions Myers sat in stolid and
insolent silence--occasionally whistling snatches of some music-hall air.
At last when reference was made to some chemicals which he was alleged to
have procured and handed on to his brother, he roused up from his affected
indifference and appealed to Armitage for assistance. "Dr. Armitage
knows," he exclaimed indignantly, "that I only procured the sulphuric acid
from him for domestic purposes."

My eyes were riveted on the doctor's face, and only to one who knew him
well could the expression be at all decipherable. To me it distinctly
denoted disappointment--that humiliating sense of disappointment and
disillusion which must invariably come upon a man of strong and fanatical
convictions when brought into contact with the meanness and cowardice of
his fellows.

Dr. Armitage was a fanatic and an idealist, and two convictions were
paramount in his mind at this time: the necessity and the justice of the
"propaganda by force" doctrine preached by the more advanced Anarchists,
and the absolute good faith and devotion to principle of the men with whom
he was associated. A man of the Myers type was quite incomprehensible to
him. Not for a single instant had Armitage hesitated to throw open the
doors of his Harley Street establishment to the Anarchists: to him the
cause was everything, and interests, prudence, prospects, all had to give
way before it. And here was this man who had professed the same principles
as himself, with whom he had discoursed freely on the necessity of force,
who had openly advocated dynamite in his presence--this man who had spoken
of the revolution and the regeneration of Society with the same warmth as
himself--talking of "domestic purposes," and ready to recant all that he
had preached and said. And what lay behind this reticence and these
denials? Treachery of the basest kind, and the most sordid, abominable
calculations which it was possible to conceive.

These thoughts I read in the doctor's face, and turning my eyes from him
to the abject Jacob I could only wonder at the naïve sincerity of
Armitage, which could ever have laid him open to such illusions and
disillusions.

After some seconds' hesitation Armitage replied: "I do not desire or
intend to go into any details here concerning my past conversations or
relations with Jacob Myers, neither do I consider myself in any way bound
to discuss here the motives which prompted, or which I thought prompted
his actions, and the requests he made of me. As Anarchists we have not the
right to judge him, and all we can do is to refuse to associate ourselves
any further with him, which I, for one, shall henceforth do. The knowledge
of his own abominable meanness should be punishment enough for Myers."

The doctor's words were received with very general approval.

"Armitage is perfectly right," said Carter. "We Anarchists cannot pretend
to judge our fellows, but we can form our own opinions and act
accordingly. Myers' conduct proves him to be no better than a spy; we of
the _Bomb_ can have no further relations with him."

"Damn about judging and not judging," exclaimed a sturdy-looking docker.
"All I know is that if Myers does not quickly clear out of the _Bomb_
I'll kick him out. He ought to be shot. I don't pretend to understand none
of these nice distinctions. I call a spade a spade, and if...."

"'Ear,'ear! Down with ..." commenced Elliot again, and Jacob opened his
mouth to speak, but he was saved from any further need of self-defence or
explanation, for at this moment the door of the office was broken rudely
open and there entered like a hurricane a veritable fury in female form--a
whirlwind, a tornado, a ravening wolf into a fold of lambs. This
formidable apparition, which proved to be none other than the wife of the
suspected Myers, amid a volley of abuse and oaths delivered in the
choicest Billingsgate, pounced down on her ill-used husband, denounced
Anarchy and the Anarchists--their morals, their creeds, their hellish
machinations; she called on Jehovah to chastise, nay, utterly to destroy
them, and soundly rated her consort for ever having associated with such
scoundrels. And thus this formidable preacher of dynamite and disaster was
borne off in mingled triumph and disgrace by his indignant spouse.



CHAPTER IV

A POLICE SCARE


I left the office of the _Bomb_ towards 1 A.M., undecided whether to
weep or to laugh at what I had witnessed there. This, my first
introduction into an English Anarchist circle had certainly not been very
encouraging, but I was too deeply persuaded of the truth and justice of
the Anarchist doctrines to be deterred by such a beginning, and I did not
for one instant waver from my resolve to enter and take part in the
"movement." That some insincere and dishonest men and some fools should
also play their part in it I from the first recognised as inevitable, but
I could not see that this affected the Anarchist principles or rendered it
less necessary for those believing in them to advocate and spread them.
Dr. Armitage accompanied me part of my way home and we talked the matter
over _en route_. "Why trouble ourselves," he exclaimed, "about a few
unprincipled men in such a wide, such a universal movement? Our objects
and ideals are too far above such considerations to allow us to be
influenced by them. Men like Myers are but the outcome of unnatural and
vitiated conditions; they are produced by the very society which it is our
object to abolish--as all manner of disease is produced by vitiated air.
With better conditions such men will disappear; nay, the very possibility
of their existence will be gone."

"But in the meantime," I rejoined, "they are surely damaging our Cause,
and scenes like the one we have just witnessed would, if known to the
public, bring our party into ridicule and discredit."

"The Cause is too great and too high to be influenced by such men or such
scenes," answered the doctor with conviction. "Moreover it is our duty to
bring fresh blood and life into the party, so that no place will be left
to renegades of the Myers type."

And in face of Armitage's unswerving faith and optimism my moment of
disgust and perplexity passed, and I felt more than ever determined to
bring my quota of time and strength to the propagation of the Anarchist
ideals. "I have only seen a very limited and narrow circle," I said to
myself; "the field is wide, and I only know one obscure and unclean corner
of it. I cannot judge from this night's experience."

As far as the squalor of the men and their surroundings was concerned,
although it was at first something of a shock to me, I did not allow
myself to be disconcerted on its account. I had no desire or ambition to
be a mere dilettante Socialist, and as dirt and squalor had to be faced,
well, I was ready to face them. A famous Russian writer has described a
strange phase through which the Russian youth passed not many years since,
the "V. Narod" ("To the People!") movement, when young men and girls by
the thousands, some belonging to the highest classes in society, fled from
their families, tore themselves free from all domestic and conventional
yokes, persuaded that it was their duty to serve the cause of the masses,
and that in no way could they better accomplish this object than by
settling in the people's midst, living their life, taking part in their
work. I was passing through a similar phase of mental evolution.

I felt a strong desire to free myself from all the ideas, customs, and
prejudices which usually influence my class, to throw myself into the life
and the work of the masses. Thus it was that I worked hard to learn how to
compose and print, that I might be of use to the Cause in the most
practical manner of all--the actual production of its literature. Thus it
was also that I resolutely hardened myself against any instinctive
sentiments of repulsion which the unclean and squalid surroundings of the
people might raise in me. I remember reading an article by Tolstoi which
appeared in the English press, dealing with the conditions of the Russian
_moujik_, in which he clearly and uncompromisingly stated that in
order to tackle the social problem, it is necessary to tackle dirt and
vermin with it. If you desire to reach your _moujik_ you must reach
him _à travers_ his dirt and his parasites: if you are disinclined to
face these, then leave your _moujik_ alone. It was in fact a case of
"take me, take my squalor." I determined to take both.

Dr. Armitage left me at the corner of Oxford Circus, but before I had
taken many steps farther, I heard him suddenly turn round, and in an
instant he had come up with me again.

"By the way, Isabel," he exclaimed, "I was quite forgetting to mention
something I had done, to which I trust you will not object. You know how
full up my place is just now with hard-up comrades. Well I took the
liberty to send on to you a young Scotchman, I forget his name, who has
just tramped up from the North; a most interesting fellow, rather
taciturn, but with doubtless a good deal in him. He had nowhere to pass
the night, poor chap, and no money, so I told him that if he waited on
your doorstep some time after midnight you would be certain to give him a
night's lodgings when you returned. Did I do right?" and the doctor's
kindly face beamed with the look of a man who expected approbation.

"Ye--es," I gasped out, somewhat taken aback, "quite right, of course;"
for I felt that any hesitation would be feeble, a mere relic of bourgeois
prejudice.

And, sure enough, on reaching my domicile, I found installed on the
doorstep a most uncouth and villainous-looking tramp. Taciturn he
certainly was, for he scarcely opened his mouth to say "Good-evening," and
indeed during the three days of his residence with me he hardly ever
articulated a sound. As I was getting out my latch-key the local policeman
chanced to pass: "That fellow has been hanging about for the last hours,
miss," he said to me. "Shall I remove him for you?"

"Certainly not," I replied firmly, and opening the door, I requested my
unknown comrade to enter. I can still see in my mind's eye that
constable's face. It looked unutterable things.

After conducting the tramp to the pantry, and letting him loose on a cold
pigeon-pie and other viands, and finally installing him on the study sofa,
I retired to my own apartment, well prepared to enjoy a good night's rest.

This was destined, however, to be of short duration. Towards 6.30 I was
roused from sleep by a loud rat-tat at the front door and, the servants
not being up at such an hour, and suspecting that this early visit was in
some way connected with the Anarchists, I hastily slipped on a wrapper and
ran downstairs.

On opening the door I found one of the members of the previous night's
meeting, the taciturn hero of the potato tragedy.

"It's rather early to disturb you," he began, "but I came to let you know
that last night, after you had all gone, Comrades Banter and O'Flynn were
arrested."

"Arrested!" I exclaimed, as yet unused to such incidents; "why, what on
earth are they charged with?"

"Well," answered Carter, "the charge is not yet very clear, but so far as
we can understand, it is in some way connected with the Myers business.
They are charged with manufacturing explosives, or something of the sort.
The fact is, the police and Jacob Myers are at the bottom of the whole
matter, and Banter, O'Flynn, and Augustin have all played into their
hands."

"Come in here," I interrupted, leading the way to the dining-room. "Let
us sit down and talk the matter over together;" and we entered, Carter
casting a distinctly disapprobatory glance at the "bourgeois luxury" of
this apartment.

As soon as we were seated my companion returned to the question of the
moment. "I fear," he said, "that it is rather a serious affair for the
comrades. That Myers is a police emissary there can no longer be any
reasonable doubt, and the death of his brother is clear proof that he has
not been wasting his time lately. And it is only too likely that the same
hand which provided Augustin with explosives may have placed similar
material in the possession of Banter and O'Flynn."

"How abominable!" I exclaimed indignantly.

"Yes, but Anarchists should not be stupid enough to take any one into
their confidence in such matters," returned Carter. "It is merely
encouraging _mouchards_ and police plots. However, the question now
is--What can be done to help the comrades out of the mess?"

"I am willing to do my best," I answered; "only tell me how I can be of
use."

"You can be of great use, if you care to be," answered Carter. "A
barrister must be procured to defend them, witnesses must be found, money
procured (and here he cast a side-glance at my plate), and some one ought
to interview the comrades in Holloway, and take some food to the poor
fellows."

"I am quite willing to do my best in all these matters," I answered
enthusiastically.

Carter stayed some little while longer instructing me in the various
things I was to do, and then left me, retiring presumably to his double
bed again, for I saw no more of him till long after the trial was over. He
had handed the work over to me, and doubtless felt that so far as he was
personally concerned his responsibilities were at an end.

As soon as the morning papers arrived I scanned them eagerly and from
them learned further particulars of the arrest. A widespread conspiracy
was suspected, the object of which was to blow up the West End of London,
and leaders were devoted to the denunciation of the Anarchists and their
infamous teachings. Explosives, it was alleged, had been found in the
possession of the arrested men, "evidently destined to carry into effect
the deadly work which was only stopped by the hand of God in Queen's Park
three weeks ago."

Having disposed of a hasty breakfast, I left the house, and my morning
was spent in places which were new and strange to me--Holloway Jail, the
Old Jewry, and the Middle Temple. Holloway Prison was my first
destination, for before any other steps could be taken it was necessary to
ascertain what views the prisoners themselves held as to the course to be
adopted in their defence.

I awaited my turn in the prison waiting-room along with a motley crowd of
other visitors--burglars' and forgers' wives, pickpockets' mates, and the
mother of a notorious murderer among others. Their language was not very
choice when addressing the jailers, but sympathetic enough when talking
among themselves and inquiring of one another, "What's your man up for?"
or, "How did your mate get copped?" I felt painfully conscious of the
tameness of my reply: "It's a friend: incitement to murder." How far more
respectable murder itself would have sounded in the midst of such superior
crime!

One burglar's spouse confided to me that her husband had been "at it for
years, but this was the first time he'd been copped:" which latter
incident she seemed to consider an unpardonable infringement of the
privileges and rights of citizenship. She was a bright buxom little woman
and had evidently flourished on his plunder.

In striking contrast to the burglar's wife, I noticed the daughter of a
would-be suicide, a tall, beautiful girl, who formed a pathetic contrast
to her surroundings. Her unfortunate father--an unsuccessful musician--had
succumbed in the struggle for an honest life, and the cares of a large
family had driven him to desperation. As I gazed at the poor girl with her
tear-swollen eyes and noted her extreme thinness and the shabbiness of her
well-worn clothes, and as, from her, my eyes turned to the cheerful
burglar's wife, I meditated on the superiority of virtue over dishonesty
--especially in the reward accorded to it.

At last, having stated my name, the name of my prisoner, the relationship
or lack of relationship between us, and declared my non-connection with
the case, and having received a tin number in return for this information,
I was ushered through various passages and apartments into a kind of dark
cage, separated by a narrow passage from a still darker one, in the depths
of which I perceived my Anarchist, O'Flynn, as soon as my eyes had grown
accustomed to the darkness. I had several questions to ask him during the
few minutes at our disposal, and conversation was anything but easy; for
on all sides of me other prisoners and their relatives were talking,
weeping, arguing, disputing, and shouting one another down with all their
might and lungs.

Two things struck me in Holloway Prison on this my first visit to such a
place. Firstly, the outward cleanliness, and I might almost say
pleasantness, of the place; and secondly, the illogical nature of the law
which treats the unconvicted men, who in its eyes are consequently
innocent, like convicted criminals. Nothing could be more uncomfortable
and unattractive than the conditions under which the detained men are
allowed to see their relatives; no privacy of any sort is allowed them,
the time allotted is of the briefest, and only one visitor a day is
permitted to pass. The censorship over books allowed is very strict and
hopelessly stupid, and altogether everything is made as uncomfortable as
possible for those under detention.

Later in the course of my Anarchist career I had occasion to visit
Newgate on a similar errand, and was struck by the same incongruity in the
system. The external impression made by Newgate was very different,
however.

There is no suggestion of pleasantness about Newgate. It strikes you
indeed as the threshold of the gallows, and is calculated to arouse qualms
in the most strenuous upholder of capital punishment. A constant sense of
gloom is settled like a pall over the whole building, blacker even than
the soot and grime which encrust it. Inside, the dreary atmosphere is
ominous of the constant vicinity of the hangman's drop, doors seem for
ever to be swinging heavily and locking, keys and chains clanking, and
over all the uncompromising flagstaff looms like an embodied threat.

After my many dreary wanderings round London, the clambering in and out
of omnibuses and other vehicles, and prison interviews, I found the
old-world tranquillity of the Temple quite a relief.

Here began a new order of search. I had to find a barrister, and that
without delay. But how, whom, and in what court or lane did the right man
dwell? During one brief moment indeed my thoughts turned towards our
family solicitor as a possible counsellor in this matter, but only to be
promptly diverted into other channels. That worthy gentleman's feelings
would certainly not have withstood so rude a shock. I could picture him,
in my mind's eye, slowly removing his gold pince-nez and looking at me in
blank but indulgent surprise, as at one who had suddenly taken leave of
her senses. No, this would never do. Barristers by the score must surely
reside in the labyrinths of the Temple, and I determined to seek one first
hand.

And thus it was that, after some little hesitation, I finally ascended
the stairs of a house in Fig Tree Court in the hope that J. B. Armstrong,
Esq., selected at random, might answer my purpose.

The clerk who opened the door looked politely surprised at my appearance
and inquired my business, into which I promptly plunged headfirst. His
eyebrows gradually ascended higher and higher into the regions of his
hair, and his face grew stern and sad as I proceeded. "Allow me to
inquire," he interrupted, "the name of the solicitor who is instructing
the case."

"I have not got a solicitor," I replied, somewhat taken aback.

Then he re-opened the door. "I feel confident, madam, that Mr. Armstrong
would not care to undertake such a case. Good morning."

I retired from this gentleman's presence neither bent nor broken, though
slightly disappointed. "So it is usual to engage a solicitor first," I
reflected, "and to communicate through him with the barrister, is it?
Well, a solicitor can't be afforded here and we must do without him." The
Anarchist in me revolted at such red-tapeism. "Well, here's for another
plunge," I said to myself; "let us try a B this time. C. Bardolph sounds
promising." And I ascended another staircase and knocked at another
inhospitable door.

Mr. Bardolph I saw in person, a very pompous gentleman with manners the
reverse of polite. He could scarcely contain his outraged feelings when it
came to the question of the solicitor. "I can have no connection with such
a case," he said firmly, and I again retired, feeling quite disreputable.

My next defeat occurred in the chambers of Mr. Anthony C. Frazer. No
sooner did my eyes fall on that gentleman than I regretted my entry, and
the utter hopelessness of my mission was borne in upon my mind, for I was
beginning to realise the difficulties of the situation and to scent
failure in the very air. Mr. Frazer requested me to be seated and eyed me
curiously, as though I were some queer zoological specimen recently
escaped from captivity, and listened with an incredulous smile to my
narrative. He did not even wait for the missing solicitor. "This is
scarcely in my line, madam," he said, rising. "You have certainly made
some mistake." And he left his clerk to accompany me to the door.

I descended the stairs from this gentleman's chambers feeling distinctly
crestfallen and tired, and at my wits' ends as to where next to go, when,
turning the corner into another court, I became aware of rapid footsteps
in my pursuit, and next moment I was overtaken by the youth who had
ushered me out from the scene of my last defeat.

"I think, miss," he began, "that I can direct you to a--er--barrister who
would just do for your business. On no account say that I recommended you
to him, or you will get me into trouble. But you try Mr. Curtis in Brick
Court. He undertakes the defence of burglars and swindlers and all sorts
of people, and you'll find him cheap and satisfactory."

I thanked the youth, and although this did not strike me as altogether
the most promising introduction, I thought it best to try my luck in this
new direction, and, having at length discovered the house, I ascended the
three rickety flights of stairs which led to Mr. Curtis's apartment and
entered.

This Curtis was a small, wizened old man, of obsolete cut, but with
remarkably up-to-date manners, and a pair of keen little eyes, penetrating
as Röntgen rays. His hair was weedy, and his clothes snuffy and
ill-fitting; but spite of this there was something uncommonly brisk and
wide awake about the little man, and a certain business-like directness in
his manner which impressed me favourably. I felt hopeful at once.

One of the first remarks he addressed to me--for we primarily discussed
the financial aspect of his services--struck me by reason of its
uncompromising common sense. "Five guineas down and another three next
Tuesday, miss, and I make no inquiry where the money comes from," he said,
"not so long as it is the current coin of the realm and paid punctually.
Without this, however, I cannot undertake or proceed with the case."

On my immediately producing the required sum he requested me to be
seated, and sitting down opposite me himself, he asked me for full
particulars of the case. These I gave him to the best of my ability and he
took notes.

The question of witnesses he tackled with the same uncompromising lack of
veneer which had characterised his remarks on the money question.
"Witnesses to character and so forth must be found," he said, "the more
authentic and reputable the better, but at all costs they must be
procured. Whom can you suggest?"

I confessed that I could for the moment think of nobody.

"You will think of somebody," he replied persuasively, "you _must_
remember somebody," and there was that in his voice which did not brook or
encourage contradiction, "some one in a respectable position, of course,"
he continued, "a man pursuing one of the liberal professions, or a
business man of means. Plenty of doctors and professional men among your
people, are there not? The evidence of such a man would carry weight. The
court's belief in a witness's veracity is, generally speaking,
proportionate to his means. Doubtless you will be able to think of a
desirable man ... who knows the prisoners," he added, rapidly turning over
his notes, and speaking in such a manner as to convey to me the idea that
the exact extent of the witness's knowledge of the prisoners was not of
any very great consequence, so long as he was prepared to swear to their
respectability, and that his banking account and general appearance were
satisfactory.

"I will look round and let you know the result to-morrow," I answered.

"Good," replied Curtis, "two witnesses at least, and men of position and
education at all costs. Good afternoon."

I had enough to do during the remainder of the day in finding those
witnesses, but found they were at last, though not without a tremendous
effort on my part and some considerable degree of ingenuity. When attired
in some of my brother Raymond's discarded clothes, and produced for
Curtis's inspection the following day, they really made a respectable
couple, and I felt proud of them--one a physician of superior
accomplishments and aristocratic appearance, the other a master-tailor, of
prosperous if not very _distingué_ presence. I likewise discovered a
cabman who had been present in Hyde Park at an allegedly incriminating
speech made by Banter; and on jogging his memory with a little whisky he
distinctly recalled several points valuable to the defence.

Up till the very day of the trial my time was kept well occupied with
such errands. Indeed, remarkable as the fact may appear, practically the
whole labour of preparing the defence devolved upon me.

It was neither an easy nor a very encouraging task. The greater number of
the English Anarchists mysteriously disappeared at this approach of
danger. Mindful of the truth of the axiom that discretion is the better
part of valour, A thought it well to suddenly recollect his duties towards
his family; B discovered that he had a capacious stomach, which required
feeding; C, that the Anarchist policy was in discord with his own true
principles. At such a moment, therefore, and surrounded, or rather
unsurrounded by such men, the task in front of me was not easy, and in the
actual state of public opinion it was not very hopeful either.

Public feeling was against the Anarchists. So long as violence and
outrage had been reserved entirely for the benefit of foreign climes, the
British public had regarded the Anarchists with tolerance and equanimity.
But the mysterious death of Myers had alarmed and disquieted it, and heavy
sentences were generally invoked against the prisoners.

That the whole conspiracy was a got-up affair between Jacob Myers and the
police was evident. Neither Banter nor O'Flynn was a dangerous man; a
little loud and exaggerated talk was the utmost extent of their
harmfulness. Neither of them was any better capable of making a bomb than
of constructing a flying-machine, and they were less capable of throwing
it than of flying. But political detectives would have a slow time of it
in this country unless they occasionally made a vigorous effort on their
own behalf, and an unscrupulous and impecunious man like Myers proved a
valuable tool to help such gentlemen along, and fools of the Banter type
suitable victims.

And thus it was that these two men now found themselves in the dock with
twelve serious-minded tradesmen sitting in solemn conclave to consider
their crimes.

The trial itself was a ridiculous farce. Jacob Myers, who would have been
the one witness of any importance, was not subpoenaed; he had in fact
discreetly quitted the country under his wife's escort. The police, with
imperturbable gravity, brought ginger-beer bottles into court which had
been found in O'Flynn's apartment, and which, they averred, could be
converted into very formidable weapons of offence. Many gaseous speeches
made by the prisoners, or attributed to them, were solemnly brought up
against them, and a shudder ran through the court at the mention of such
phrases as "wholesale assassination" and "war to the death."

The evidence, however, sufficed to impress the jury with the extreme
gravity of the case and to alarm the public, and the prisoners were found
guilty.

I well recollect the last day of the trial, which I attended throughout
in more or less remote regions of the Old Bailey, recruiting recalcitrant
witnesses, sending food in to the defendants, &c. Two other cases were
being tried at the same time, one of which was a particularly revolting
murder, for which three persons were on trial. The prisoners' relatives
were waiting below in a state of painful excitement. "Guilty or not
guilty," was on all their lips, "release or penal servitude, life or
death, which was it to be?" Friends were constantly running in and out of
the court giving the women news of the progress of the trials. "It is
looking black for the prisoners!" "There is more hope!" "There is no
hope!" and finally "guilty" in all the cases was reported. The wife of a
horrible German murderer who had strangled his employer's wife, while a
female accomplice played the piano to divert her children's attention from
her cries, swooned away at the news. O'Flynn's old mother went into
hysterics and became quite uncontrollable in her grief when, a few minutes
later the news, "Five years' penal servitude," was brought down.



CHAPTER V

TO THE RESCUE


The first weeks of my experience in the Anarchist camp had flown by with
astounding rapidity. The chapter of my experiences had opened with the
expulsion of an alleged spy and _agent provocateur_, and had closed
with a sentence of penal servitude passed on two of my new-found comrades.
Between these two terminal events I seemed to have lived ages, and so I
had, if, as I hold, experience counts for more than mere years. Holloway
and Newgate, Slater's Mews and the Middle Temple, barristers and
solicitors, judges and juries and detectives; appointments in queer places
to meet queer people--all this had passed before me with the rapidity of a
landscape viewed from the window of an express train; and now that the
chapter had closed, I found that it was but the preface to the real
business I had set my shoulder to.

The morning after the conclusion of the trial I met Armitage by
appointment, and together we wended our way towards Slater's Mews. The
doctor was preoccupied, and for some minutes we proceeded in silence; the
problem of what to do with the _Bomb_ was evidently weighing on his
mind. At last he spoke: "It is our duty," he said, "to see that the
movement be not unduly crippled by the loss of these two men. Poor
fellows, they are doing their duty by the Cause, and we must not shirk
ours. The _Bomb_ must be kept going at all costs; we can ill afford
to lose two workers just now, but the loss of the paper would be a yet
more severe blow to our movement. How thankful I am that you are with us!
It is always so. The governments think to crush us by imprisoning or
murdering our comrades, and for one whom they take from us ten come to the
fore. I am sure you must agree with me as to the paper."

"I quite agree with you in the main," I replied, "but I fear that the
_Bomb_ itself is past hope. It strikes me it had got into somewhat
bad hands, and I fear it would be useless to try to set it on its feet
again. It is hardly fair to a paper to give it a Jacob Myers for editor.
Really it seems to me to have died a natural death. The entire staff has
disappeared--Myers, the editor; Banter, the publisher; O'Flynn, the
printer--who remains? where are the others? It seems to me they have all
vanished and left no trace behind."

"Oh, that is hardly the case, I think," said the doctor in a tone of
deprecation. "I went up to the office last night and found Short sleeping
on the premises."

"Short? Is not he the man whom I first saw wrapped in the red flag of
glory?"

"Yes, that is the man; perhaps his appearance is somewhat
disadvantageous, but he is constant to the Cause, anyhow."

"Well, I should not have thought him much of a staff to lean on; still,
appearances are often deceptive. But, anyhow, do you not think it would be
advisable to start a new paper, rather than to attempt to galvanise a
corpse?"

"The idea would not be a bad one; in fact I think you are right, quite
right," returned Armitage. "It is not wise to put new wine into old skins.
Anyhow, here we are, I dare say other comrades have mustered in the office
who will have something to say in the matter."

We had now reached our destination, and passing the curious scrutiny of
several cabmen and scavengers assembled at the entrance of the mews, we
prepared to ascend the break-neck ladder leading to the office. I had but
put my foot on the first step when I heard the loud yelping of a dog
followed by a string of oaths, and the office door opened, emitting a tall
brawny man in shirt-sleeves with a very red face and close-cropped hair,
who appeared holding out at arm's length a pair of tongs which gripped
some repulsive-looking fronts and collars. On seeing me, he exclaimed,
"Take care," and proceeded to drop the objects on a heap of rubbish below.
We were both somewhat surprised at this apparition, but realised without
difficulty that the office was still in the possession of the police. They
were, in fact, contrary to the doctor's expectation, the sole occupants of
the place. The comrades had not seen fit so far to muster round the paper.
To say there was none, however, is an injustice, for there on the sofa,
still huddled in the red flag, lay Short, apparently little affected by
what had taken place since I last saw him. He had been aroused from his
slumbers by the yelping of his dog, whose tail had been trodden on by one
of the detectives, and he had raised himself on his elbow, and was looking
round, uttering curses volubly. He nodded slightly on seeing us enter, but
did not change his position. There he lay, quite heroic in his immovable
sloth; of all the many fighters he alone remained staunch at his post; and
that because he was positively too lazy to move away from it.

Dr. Armitage on entering had gone up to one of the three detectives and
spoken to him, and the man now turned to me.

"We are just having a final look round before leaving, miss," he
remarked. "It is not at all pleasant work, I assure you, to be put in to
search such a filthy place. Look there," he exclaimed, pointing at the
recumbent Short with his outstretched tongs. "I shall have to burn every
rag I have on when it is over, and I'd advise you to be careful," and he
resumed his occupation, which consisted in raking out some old papers,
while his two companions, having contrived to resume an official
appearance, prepared to leave.

The police once gone Dr. Armitage and I found ourselves in sole
possession of the office and the lethargic Short. It was no sinecure, to
be sure. Heaps of "pie," some due to the police and some to Banter, who
previous to his arrest had put his foot through several "forms" which it
was inadvisable to let fall into the hands of the police, encumbered the
floor. Everything was intensely chaotic and intensely dirty, from the type
cases and the other scanty belongings to the dormant compositor. Armitage
understood nothing of printing and I very little, and there we stood in
the midst of a disorganised printing-office whence all had fled save only
the unsavoury youth on the couch. I looked at Armitage and Armitage looked
at me, and such was the helpless dismay depicted in our faces that we both
broke into a laugh.

"Well," I said at last, "what shall we do? Suggest something. We cannot
stay on here."

"The only thing I can think of," he rejoined after a pause, "is that I
should go around and look up some of the comrades at their addresses
whilst you remain here and get Short to help you put up the type, &c., as
best you can, so that we may remove it all elsewhere. Here certainly
nothing can be done and we must start our new paper amidst new
surroundings."

"So you are thinking of starting a new paper?"

We looked round, surprised at this interruption, for Short had apparently
returned to his slumbers, but we now saw that he had emerged from the
banner and was standing behind us, fully dressed (I discovered later on
that he had discarded dressing and undressing as frivolous waste of time),
a queer uncouth figure with his long touzled black hair and sallow,
unhealthy face. He had a short clay pipe firmly set between his teeth, and
his large lips were parted in a smile. He held his head slightly on one
side, and his whole attitude was somewhat deprecatory and cringing.

"Well," said the doctor, "Isabel and I think that would be the best plan.
You see the _Bomb_ seems thoroughly disorganised, and we think it
would be easier and better to start afresh. I was just saying that I would
go round and hunt up some of the comrades and get their views on the
subject."

"Oh," rejoined Short, "you can save yourself that trouble. One half of
them will accuse you of being a police spy, the others will be ill or
occupied--in short, will have some excuse for not seeing you. They are all
frightened out of their lives. Since the arrest of Banter and O'Flynn I
have not seen one of them near the place, though I have been here all the
time."

This remark confirmed what we both half suspected; and as Short, who by
right of possession seemed authorised to speak on behalf of the
_Bomb_, seemed willingly to fall in with our idea of starting a new
paper, taking it for granted--which I was not exactly prepared for--that
he would install himself in the new premises as compositor, we decided to
take practical steps towards the move. Short informed us that six weeks'
rent was owing, and that the landlord threatened a distraint if his claims
were not immediately satisfied; and in spite of the advice, "Don't pay
rent to robber landlords," which stared us in the face, inscribed in
bright red letters on the wall, I and Armitage between us sacrificed the
requisite sum to the Cause.

Whilst we were discussing these matters the dog warned us by a prolonged
bark that some one was approaching, and the new-comer soon appeared. He
greeted Short, who introduced him to us as Comrade M'Dermott. He shot a
scrutinising glance at us from his keen grey eyes and proceeded to shake
hands with friendly warmth.

He was a very small man, certainly not more than five feet high, thin and
wiry, with grey hair and moustache, but otherwise clean-shaven. His
features were unusually expressive and mobile from his somewhat scornful
mouth to his deep-set, observant eyes, and clearly denoted the absence of
the stolid Saxon strain in his blood. His accent too, though not that of
an educated man, was quite free from the hateful Cockney twang. His dress
was spare as his figure, but though well worn there was something spruce
and trim about his whole demeanour which indicated that he was not totally
indifferent to the impression he created on others. He looked round the
"office," took a comprehensive glance at Short, who was occupying the only
available stool and smoking hard with a meditative air, and then walked
over to me, and addressing me in an undertone, with the same ease as if he
had known me all my life, he said, with a twinkle in his eye, jerking his
head in the direction of Short, "There's a rotten product of a decaying
society, eh?" This remark was so unexpected and yet so forcibly true, that
I laughed assent.

"So you're the only ones up here," he continued. "I expected as much when
I heard of the raid on the office. I was up in the North doing a little
bit of peddling round the country, when I read the news, and I thought I'd
come to London to see what was up. What do you think of doing with the
paper anyway? It seems a pity the old _Bomb_ should die. It would
mean the loss of the only revolutionary organ in England."

"Oh, it must not die," I replied, "or at least if it cannot be kept up,
another paper must take its place. Comrade Armitage agrees with me in
thinking that that would be the best plan. You see this place looks
altogether hopeless."

Armitage, who had been engaged in looking over some papers, now joined us
and the conversation became general.

"Well, how did you get on up North?" inquired Short, who seemed to wake
up to a sense of actuality. "How did you hit it off with young Jackson?
Did you find him of much use?"

"Use!" retorted M'Dermott with an infinite depth of scorn in his voice.
"A fat lot of use he was. If it was a matter of putting away the grub, I
can tell you he worked for two, but as to anything else, he made me carry
his pack as well as my own, on the pretext that he had sprained his ankle,
and his only contribution to the firm was a frousy old scrubbing-brush
which he sneaked from a poor woman whilst I was selling her a ha'p'orth of
pins. He seemed to think he'd done something mighty grand--'expropriation'
he called it; pah, those are your English revolutionists!" and he snorted
violently.

Short gave vent to an unpleasing laugh. He always seemed to take pleasure
at any proof of meanness or cowardice given by his fellows. Armitage
looked pained. "Such things make us long for the Revolution," he said.
"This rotten society which breeds such people must be swept away. We must
neglect no means to that end, and our press is one. So now let's set to
work to move the plant and start a new paper, as we seem all agreed to
that plan. Who'll go and look for a suitable workshop?"

Short volunteered, but M'Dermott scouted the idea, declaring that the
mere sight of him would be enough to frighten any landlord, and this we
all, including Short, felt inclined to agree with. At last we decided to
fall in with M'Dermott's suggestion that he and I should sally forth
together. "You see, my dear," he said with almost paternal benevolence,
"you will be taken for my grand-daughter and we shall soften the heart of
the most obdurate landlord."

The field of our researches was limited by a few vital considerations.
The rent must not be high. For the present anyhow, the expenses of the
paper would have to be defrayed by Armitage and myself. Short had proposed
himself as printer and compositor, on the tacit understanding of free
board and lodging, and the right to make use of the plant for his own
purposes; I was willing to give my time to the material production of the
paper, and to contribute to its maintenance to the best of my ability; and
Armitage's time and means were being daily more and more absorbed by the
propaganda, to the detriment of his practice; but he was not of those who
can palter with their conscience. The individual initiative inculcated by
Anarchist principles implied individual sacrifices. Another consideration
which limited our choice was that the office must be fairly central, and
not too far from my home, as, spite of my enthusiasm for Anarchy, I could
not wholly neglect household duties. We talked over these points as we
walked along, and M'Dermott suggested Lisson Grove, where a recent
epidemic of smallpox had been raging, as likely to be a fairly cheap
neighbourhood, but after tramping about and getting thoroughly weary, we
had to acknowledge that there was nothing for us in that quarter. We were
both hungry and tired, and M'Dermott suggested a retreat to a neighbouring
Lockhart's. Seated before a more than doubtful cup of tea, in a grimy
room, where texts stared at us from the walls, we discussed the situation,
and decided to inquire about a workshop which we saw advertised, and which
seemed promising. Our destination led us out of the slummy wilderness into
which we had strayed, into cleaner and more wholesome quarters, and at
last we stopped before some quite imposing-looking premises. "We seem
destined to consort with the cabbing trade," I remarked; "the last office
was over a mews, this place seems to belong to a carriage-builder." There
was, however, no other connection between the unsavoury mews and the
aristocratic carriage-yard, whose proprietor, resplendent in side-whiskers
and a shiny chimney-pot hat, advanced to meet us, a condescending smile
diffusing his smug countenance. I explained to him our object, and he
showed us over the shop, which consisted in a large loft, well lighted and
fairly suitable, at the back of the premises.

In answer to Mr. White's inquiries, I informed him that I needed it as a
printing-office, for a small business I had, and he quite beamed on me,
evidently considering me a deserving young person, and expressed the
opinion that he had no doubt I should get on in that neighbourhood.

M'Dermott, who was greatly enjoying the fun of the situation, here broke
in: "Yes, sir, my grand-daughter deserves success, sir; she's a
hardworking girl, is my poor Emily," and here he feigned to wipe away a
tear, whilst casting a most mischievous side-glance at me.

"Dear, dear, very affecting, I'm sure," muttered the prosperous
carriage-builder.

Everything was soon satisfactorily settled. I gave him my name and
address, and that of my brother's Socialist friend as a reference, and we
agreed that I should move in on the following Monday morning.

Great was the amusement at Slater's Mews at the account of our
adventures, given with a few enlargements by M'Dermott. He had an artist's
soul, and would never consent to destroy the effect of a tale by slavish
subservience to facts.

"Well, I fear he will find he has taken in wolves in sheep's clothing,"
Armitage remarked; "anyhow, I am thankful that matter is settled and that
we can get to work without further delay. I met Kosinski, and he has
promised to give us a hand with the move. I shall not be able to be here
all the time as I have to attend an operation on Monday, but I will put in
an hour or two's work in the morning. I suppose I can get in if I come
here at five on Monday morning?" he said turning to Short who was "dissing
pie," his inseparable clay pipe still firmly set between his yellow and
decayed teeth.

"Oh, yes. I shan't be up, but you can get in," the latter surlily
remarked. He was evidently no devotee of early hours.

On Monday a hard day's work awaited me. At Slater's Mews I found the poor
doctor, who had already been there some two hours, packing up the
literature, tying up forms, and occasionally turning to Short for
instruction or advice.

The latter, seated on a packing-case, was regaling himself on a bloater
and cheesecakes, having disposed of which he took up a flute and played
some snatches of music-hall melodies. He seemed quite unconcerned at what
took place around him, contenting himself with answering Armitage's
questions. Soon after I arrived on the scene Kosinski appeared. It was the
first time I had seen him since the memorable evening at Chiswick, and I
felt a little nervous in his presence, overcome by a half-guilty fear lest
he should think I was merely dallying, not working in true earnest. I was
conscious of my own sincerity of purpose, yet feared his mental verdict on
my actions, for I now realised that his uncompromising words and scathing
denunciation of dilettanteism had had much to do with my recent conduct;
more than all Armitage's enthusiastic propagandising, much as I liked,
and, indeed, admired the latter. Kosinski shook hands with Armitage and
Short. The latter had stepped forward and assumed an air of unwonted
activity, having pulled off his coat and rolled up his shirt sleeves, and
there he stood hammering up a form and whistling "It ain't all Lavender"
--very appropriate verses, considering the surroundings. The Russian
merely recognised my presence with a slight bow, not discourteous, but
characterised by none of the doctor's encouraging benevolence; I, however,
felt more honoured than snubbed, and worked away with a will.

"Well, I must be going," said Armitage; "it is nearly ten, and at
half-past eleven I have an appointment at a patient's house. You will
stay, won't you, Kosinski, and help our comrades to move the plant?"

"I will do what I can," replied the Russian. "I do not understand
printing, but I will wheel the barrow, and do anything I may be told."

"That's right. Well, good luck to you, comrades. I will try and get round
about five. I suppose you will then be at the new place?"

"Oh, yes," I replied, "you will be in time to help us get things
ship-shape."

"Well, good-bye, Isabel; good-bye, comrades," and he was off.

For some time we all worked with a will. Kosinski was set to stowing away
the literature in packing-cases. Short "locked up" forms and "dissed" pie,
and I busied myself over various jobs. M'Dermott had come round, and he
stood at my elbow discussing the propaganda and the situation generally.
He was much rejoiced at the turn matters were taking on the Continent, and
deplored the lukewarmness of English Anarchists. "You cannot have a
revolution without revolutionists," was a favourite phrase of his, and he
was at no trouble to conceal his opinion of most of the comrades. I was as
yet too new to the movement and too enthusiastic to endorse all his
expressions, but the little man was congenial to me; his Irish wit made
him good company, and there was an air of independent self-reliance about
him that appealed to me.

"That Kosinski's a good fellow," he continued. "He knows what Revolution
means. Not but what there is good material in England too, but it is
_raw_ material, ignorant and apathetic, hoodwinked and bamboozled by
the political humbugs."

"Have you known Kosinski long?" I inquired, interrupting him, for I saw
he was fairly started on a long tirade.

"Oh, some seven years," he replied. "He was over here in '87 at the time
of the unemployed riots; he and I were at the bottom of a lot of that
movement, and we should have had all London in revolt had it not been for
the palaver and soft-soap of the official labour-leaders. After that he
went to America, and has only been back in England some six months."

Our preparations were now well advanced, and M'Dermott and I set out to
procure a barrow whereon to transport our belongings.

I had expected on my return to find everything in readiness. Short had
spoken as if he would work wonders, and I had hoped that within an hour we
should be off. What was my surprise, then, to find that during the
half-hour of my absence a change had come o'er the scene. Instead of the
noise of the mallet locking up forms, the melodious notes of a flute
greeted my ear as I approached the office, and I must confess that my
heart sank, though I was not yet prepared for the truth. On entering I
found things just as I had left them, not a whit more advanced, but Short
was again seated, and opposite him lounged the weak-kneed youth whom I had
noted on the occasion of my first group-meeting, Simpkins by name, as I
had since found out; between them stood the small hand-press which Short
had promised to take to pieces for removal, on the "bed" of which now
stood three bottles of ginger-beer, a parcel of repulsive and
indigestible-looking pastry, and a packet of tobacco. My look of dismay
and surprise was answered by Short, who explained that his friend had come
up, bringing with him the wherewithal for this carouse; which statement
Simpkins supplemented by the information that he had been occupied that
week in "planting" an aunt and possessing himself of his share of the
good lady's property.

"My married sister got in first, but father waited his opportunity, and
whilst they went out to 'ave a 'alf-pint at the pub round the corner, he
got in. They thought themselves mighty clever, for they had locked the
door and taken the key, but father got in by the scullery window which
they had forgotten to latch, and when they came back they found themselves
sold. The guv'nor's a sharp one, 'e is, but I was fly too; 'e always keeps
me short, grumbles 'cause I won't let myself be exploited by the
capitalists; but I did 'im this time. I 'ad a good old-fashioned nose
round whilst the guv'nor left me in charge whilst 'e went for a drink, and
I found ten bob the old girl 'ad 'idden away in a broken teapot, so I just
pocketed 'em. We planted 'er the day before yesterday; she was insured for
twelve quid, an' everything was done 'ansome. Yesterday I felt awful bad,
but to-day I thought I'd come an' see 'ow the paiper was getting on."

"Well, you see we're moving," I said. "If you care to give us a hand
you'll be welcome. Come, Short, the barrow's here; let's get the things
down."

"Oh, I'm going to have a half-day off," was his cool reply; "I'm tired.
Armitage woke me up at five this morning, and I couldn't get any sleep
after he came, he made such a damned noise."

"But surely you're going to help us get this move over; to-morrow you can
sleep all day if you like."

"You can do as you like; I'm not going to move," was his only reply, and
he calmly filled his pipe and puffed luxuriously. Simpkins giggled feebly;
he evidently was wavering as to his proper course, but Short's calm
insolence won the day.

I confess that at the moment I was blind to the humour of the situation.
I fancy people with a keen sense of humour are rarely enthusiasts;
certainly when I began to see the ludicrous side of much of what I had
taken to be the hard earnest of life, my revolutionary ardour cooled. My
indignation was ready to boil over; I could have wept or stamped with
annoyance. "Oh, but you _must_ help!" I exclaimed. "You promised. How
are we ever to do anything if you go on like this?"

Short merely puffed at his pipe complacently.

For the first time since his arrival Kosinski spoke. I had almost
forgotten his presence; he was working quietly, getting things ready, and
now he stepped forward.

"The comrade is right," he said; "he does not want to work; leave him
alone; we can do very well without him. Let us get off at once. There is
enough ready to make a first load, anyhow."

The calm indifference of Kosinski seemed to take some of the starch out
of Short, who looked more than foolish as he sat over his ginger-beer,
trying to feign interest in the flagging conversation with Simpkins. I was
relieved at the turn matters had taken, which threw the ridicule on the
other side, and before long we were ready, little M'Dermott having made
himself very useful, running actively up and down the ladder laden with
parcels. We must have looked a queer procession as we set off. The long
stooping figure of Kosinksi, wrapped in his inseparable dark-blue
overcoat, his fair hair showing from under his billycock hat, pushing the
barrow, heavily laden with type-cases and iron forms, packets of
literature and reams of printing paper; I in my shabby black dress and
sailor hat, bearing the furled-up banner, and M'Dermott following on
behind, carrying with gingerly care a locked-up form of type, the work of
poor Armitage, which was in imminent danger of falling to pieces in the
middle of the street. We found that quite a crowd of loafers of both
sexes, the habitués of the "Myrtle Grove Tavern," had assembled outside to
witness our departure, and, as I never missed an opportunity to spread the
light, I distributed among them some hand-bills entitled "What is
Anarchy?" regardless of their decidedly hostile attitude. The London
loafer has little wit or imagination, and their comments did not rise
above the stale inquiry as to where we kept our bombs, and the equally
original advice bestowed upon Kosinksi to get 'is 'air cut. A half-hour's
walk brought us to our destination, but our Odyssey was not so soon to
end. The man who accompanied the carriage-builder when he showed us over
the shop was waiting at the entrance to the yard, and, recognising me, he
asked me to step into the office. He had a rather scared appearance, but I
did not notice this particularly at the moment, and supposing that Mr.
White wanted to give me the keys I told my friends I should be back in a
minute. The carriage-builder was awaiting me in the little office where he
usually received his fashionable clients. He was still the self-same
consequential figure, resplendent in broadcloth and fine linen, but the
benevolent smile had vanished from his unctuous features, and he looked
nervous and ill at ease.

"I am sorry to say, Miss Meredith," he began, "that I find I am unable to
let you the shop. I much regret having caused you inconvenience, but it is
quite impossible."

This was a staggerer for me. Everything had been settled. What could have
happened?

"What on earth does this mean?" I exclaimed. "Why, Saturday evening you
called at my house and told me you were satisfied with the references, and
that I could move in to-day."

The poor man looked quite scared at my indignation.

"I am very sorry, I assure you, but I cannot let you the shop," was all
he replied.

"But surely you will give me some explanation of this extraordinary
behaviour. I am not to be trifled with in this way, and if you will not
answer me I will get some of my friends to speak to you."

This last threat seemed quite to overcome him. He looked despairingly at
me, and then determined to throw himself on my mercy.

"Well, you see, the fact is I did not quite understand the nature of your
business--that is to say, I thought it was a printing business just like
any other."

Light dawned upon me. The police had evidently been at work here. I was
too new to the revolutionary movement to have foreseen all the
difficulties which beset the path of the propagandist.

"And since Saturday night you have come to the conclusion that it is an
_un_usual printing office?" I inquired somewhat derisively. I could
still see in my mind's eye the benevolent smile and patronising
condescension with which he had beamed on M'Dermott and me on the occasion
of our first meeting.

"You are a sensible person, Miss Meredith," he said, with an almost
appealing accent, "and you will, I am sure, agree with me that it would be
impossible for me to have revolutionary papers printed on my premises. It
would not be fair to my clients; it would interfere with my business
success. Of course every one has a right to their opinions, but I had no
idea that you were connected with any such party. In fact I had gone out
of town, and intended staying away two or three days when yesterday
afternoon I received this telegram," and he handed me the document. It was
from Scotland Yard, and warned him to return at once as the police had
something of importance to communicate.

"Of course I came back," continued the tremulous White. "At first I
thought it must be all a mistake, but I was shown a copy of the
_Bomb_, and told that that was what you intended printing. Now you
must agree that this is not a suitable place for such an office."

"I cannot see," I replied with some warmth, "that it can make any
difference to you what I print. I pay you your rent, and we are quits. Of
course if you refuse to give me the keys of the shop I cannot force myself
in, but I have reason to think that you will regret your extraordinary
conduct."

"Is that a threat?" inquired White, growing visibly paler, and glancing
nervously towards the door.

"No, it is only the expression of a personal opinion," I replied. At this
moment the door opened, and M'Dermott appeared.

"Well, are you coming with the keys? We are getting tired of waiting," he
inquired.

"This man," said I, pointing with scorn at the abject carriage-builder,
"now refuses to let me the shop on the ground that he disapproves of
revolutionary literature."

M'Dermott gave a low whistle, "Oh, that's how the wind blows, is it?" he
remarked; "I thought I saw some 'narks' hanging round. So this is the turn
your benevolent interest in my grand-daughter has taken? Well, come along,
Isabel, we have no time to waste, and I am sure this good gentleman will
not feel comfortable till we are off the premises. He is afraid we might
waste some dynamite on him, I do believe."

At the word dynamite White seized a bell-pull and rang it violently, and
we could not help laughing heartily, as we left the office, at his evident
terror. Whilst crossing the yard we saw two well-known detectives lurking
on the premises. White had evidently thought it necessary to take
precautions against possible outrage.

We found Kosinski patiently waiting. He did not seem much surprised at
our news, and in answer to my inquiry as to what on earth we were to do,
he suggested that we should take the barrow back to Slater's Mews, and
then resume our search for a shop. This advice was so obvious and tame
that it almost surprised me coming from him, still there was nothing for
it, and back we went, looking somewhat more bedraggled (it had now come on
to rain) and decidedly crestfallen. We found Short as we had left him, but
I was still too indignant at his conduct to deign to answer his inquiries.
I was tired and worried, and could almost have wept with annoyance.
Kosinski at last came to the rescue. When he had brought the last parcel
up the stairs and deposited it on the floor he came up to me.

"If you like we might go and look at a workshop I have heard of and which
might suit. Some German comrades rented it for some time; I believe they
used it as a club-room, but I dare say it would answer your purpose, and I
believe it is still unoccupied."

Of course I readily assented; it was indeed a relief to hear of some
definite proposal, and together we set off. Little M'Dermott, who
evidently did not much relish Short's company, armed himself with leaflets
and set off on a propagandising expedition, and Kosinski and I wended our
way in search of the office. At last we stopped in front of a little
green-grocer's shop in a side street off the Hampstead Road. "The place I
mean is behind here," explained Kosinski; "the woman in the shop lets it;
we will go in and speak with her."

Kosinski stepped inside and addressed a voluminous lady who emerged from
the back shop.

"Oh, good day, Mr. Cusins," she exclaimed, a broad smile overspreading
her face; "what can I do for you?"

Kosinksi explained our errand, and the good lady preceded us up a narrow
yard which led to the workshop in question. She turned out to be as
loquacious as she was bulky, a fair specimen of the good-natured cockney
gossip, evidently fond of the convivial glass, not over-choice in her
language, the creature of her surroundings, which were not of the
sweetest, but withal warm-hearted and sympathetic, with that inner hatred
of the police common to all who belong to the coster class, and able to
stand up for her rights, if necessary, both with her tongue and her fists.
She showed us over a damp, ill-lighted basement shop, in a corner of which
was a ladder leading to a large, light shop, which seemed well suited to
our purpose, meanwhile expatiating on its excellencies. I was satisfied
with it, and would have settled everything in a few minutes, but Mrs.
Wattles was not to be done out of her jaw.

"I'm sure you'll like this place, my dear, and I'm glad to let it to you,
for I've known your 'usband some time. I used to see 'im come when those
others Germans was 'ere, and----"

"Kosinski is not my husband," I interrupted. "I'm not married."

"Oh, I see, my dear; just keeping company, that's all. Well, I don't
blame yer; of course, 'e is a furriner; but I'm not one to say as
furriners ain't no class. I was in love with an I-talian organ-grinder
myself, when I was a girl, and I might 'ave married 'im for all I know, ef
'e 'adn't got run in for knifin' a slop what was always a aggravatin' 'im,
poor chap. And I don't say but what I shouldn't be as well off as what I
am now, for Wattles, 'e ain't much class."

I ventured some sympathetic interjection and tried to get away, but her
eye was fixed on me and I could not escape.

"It was a long time before I forgot 'im, and when my girl was born I
called 'er Ave Maria, which was a name I used to 'ear 'im say, and a very
pretty one too, though Wattles does say it's a 'eathen-sounding name for
the girl. I was just like you in those days, my dear," she said, surveying
my slim figure with a critical eye. "No one thought I should make old
bones, I was that thin and white, and nothin' seemed to do me no good; I
took physic enough to kill a 'orse, and as for heggs an' such like I eat
'undreds. But, lor', they just went through me like jollop. It was an old
neighbour of ours as cured me; she said, says she, 'What you want, Liza,
is stimilant; stout 'ud soon set you right.' An' sure enough it did. I
took 'er advice, an' I've never 'ad a day's illness since, though
Wattles's been mighty troublesome at times, and would 'av driven me to my
grave long ago if it 'adn't been for stout. You should take it, miss;
you'd soon be as like me, and as 'arty too. Two glasses at dinner and two
at supper is my allowance, and if I chance to miss it, why I jest seems to
fall all of a 'eap like, an' I 'ears my in'ards a gnawin' and a gnawin'
and a cryin' out for stout."

I felt quite overcome at this charming picture of my future self, if only
I followed Mrs. Wattles's advice. I expressed my intention of thinking the
matter over, and, after shaking hands, paying a deposit on the rent--which
she informed me she should expend in drinking my health--and settling to
move in on the morrow, I made good my escape.

Cheered and elated by our success, I returned with Kosinksi to the office
of the _Bomb_. He was naturally very nervous and reticent with women,
but the events of this long day had broken down some of the barriers
between us, and I found it less difficult to talk to him as we trudged on
our way.

"I hope you will help us with the new paper," I said. "I feel really very
unfit for the responsibility of such a task, but Armitage thinks I shall
manage all right, and I do not wish to be a mere amateur, and shirk the
hard work entailed by our propaganda. You see, I remember your words that
night at Chiswick. I hope you do not still think that I am merely playing."

He positively blushed at my words, and stammered out: "Oh no, I do not in
the least doubt your sincerity. I am sure you do your best, only I have
seen so much harm done by women that I am always on my guard when they
propose to share in our work. But you are not a woman: you are a Comrade,
and I shall take much interest in your paper."

We met Armitage coming up Red Lion Street. He greeted us with a look of
relief. "Where on earth have you been?" he exclaimed; "I went to the
address you gave me, but when I inquired for you the fellow looked as
scared as if he had seen a ghost, and said he knew nothing about you, that
I must have made a mistake; and when I insisted and showed him the address
you had written, seemed to lose his head, and rang a bell and called for
help as if I were going to murder him. I thought he must be mad or drunk,
and so turned on my heel and came away. In the yard I recognised some of
our friends the detectives, and I felt quite anxious about you. At
Slater's Mews the door is locked; there is no light, and nobody answered
when I knocked. I am quite relieved to see you. I was beginning to fear
you had all got run in."

"Well, you see we are still alive and in fighting form. As you say the
_Bomb_ has closed, I suppose Short has gone off to the music-hall
with Simpkins, as he hinted at doing. Anyhow, come home with me; you too,
Kosinksi, if you don't mind; there is a lot to say, and many things to
settle, and we can settle everything better there than here in the street."

My proposal was agreed to, and we all three repaired to Fitzroy Square,
where over a cup of tea we settled the last details of the move, including
the name of our new paper, which was to be known as the _Tocsin_.



CHAPTER VI

A FOREIGN INVASION


Thus was the question of the new paper and its quarters settled. The
shop, as I had hoped, did well enough for our purposes. True, the district
in which it lay was neither salubrious nor beautiful, and the constant and
inevitable encounters with loquacious Mrs. Wattles and her satellites
something of a trial; but we were absorbed in our work, absorbed in our
enthusiasms, utterly engrossed in the thought of the coming revolution
which by our efforts we were speeding on.

During the first months, besides writing and editing the _Tocsin_, I
was very busily employed in learning how to set type, and print, and the
various arts connected with printing--and as I grew more proficient at the
work my share of it grew in proportion.

The original staff of the _Tocsin_ consisted of Armitage, Kosinksi,
and myself, with Short occupying the well-nigh honorary post of printer,
aided by occasional assistance or hindrance from his hangers-on. But our
staff gradually increased in number if not in efficiency; old M'Dermott
was a frequent and not unwelcome visitor, and as time went on he gradually
settled down into an inmate of the office, helping where he could with the
work, stirring up lagging enthusiasms, doing odd cobbling jobs whenever he
had the chance, and varying the proceedings with occasional outbursts of
Shakespearian recitation. These recitations were remarkable performances,
and made up in vigour for what they perhaps lacked in elegance and
_finesse_. Carter would at times put in an appearance, mostly with a
view to leaning up against a type-rack or other suitable article of
furniture, and there between one puff and another at his pipe would
grumble at the constitution of the universe and the impertinent exactions
of landlords. Another Englishman who in the earlier days frequented the
_Tocsin_ was a tall, thoughtful man named Wainwright, belonging to
the working-classes, who by the force of his own intelligence and will had
escaped from the brutishness of the lowest depths of society in which he
had been born.

Thus with little real outside assistance we worked through the spring and
early summer months. Besides bringing out our paper we printed various
booklets and pamphlets, organised Anarchist meetings, and during some six
weeks housed a French Anarchist paper and its staff, all of whom had fled
precipitately from Paris in consequence of a trial.

The lively French staff caused a considerable revolution in Lysander
Grove, which during several weeks rang with Parisian argot and Parisian
fun. Many of these Frenchmen were a queer lot. They seemed the very
reincarnation of Murger's Bohemians, and evidently took all the
discomforts and privations of their situation as a first-class joke.
Kosinksi detested them most cordially, though, spite of himself, he was a
tremendous favourite in their ranks, and the unwilling victim of the most
affectionate demonstrations on their part: and when, with a shrug of his
shoulders and uncompromising gait, he turned his back on his admirers,
they would turn round to me, exclaiming fondly--

_"Comme il est drole, le pauvre diable!"_

They could not understand his wrath, and were obstinately charmed at his
least charming traits. When he was singularly disagreeable towards them,
they summed him up cheerfully in two words, _Quel original!_ They
soon learned, however, not to take liberties with Kosinski, for when one
sprightly little man of their number, who affected pretty things in the
way of cravats and garters, presumed to dance him round the office, the
Russian, for once almost beside himself, seized his persecutor by the
shoulders and dropped him over the balustrade below, amid the cheers of
all present.

He appeared, however, to be their natural prey, and his quaint habit of
stumbling innocently into all manner of blunders was a perpetual fount of
amusement to the humour-loving Gauls. His timidity with women, too, was a
perennial joy, and innumerable adventures in which he figured as hero were
set afloat.

One little escapade of Kosinski's came somehow to the knowledge of the
French Comrades, and he suffered accordingly. Although careless and shaggy
enough in appearance in all conscience, Kosinski happened to be
fastidiously clean about his person. I doubt whether he was ever without a
certain small manicure set in his pocket, and an old joke among his
Russian friends was that he had failed to put in an appearance on some
important occasion--the rescue of a Nihilist from prison, I believe
--because he had forgotten his tooth-brush. This was of course a libel and
gross exaggeration, but his extreme personal cleanliness was none the less
a fact. Now when he first reached London he had scarcely left the station,
besooted and begrimed after his long journey, when his eye was arrested by
the appearance of a horse-trough. "Most opportune!" mused Kosinski, "how
public-spirited and hygienic this London County Council really is!" and
straightway divesting himself of his hat and collar and similar
encumbrances, and spreading out on the rim of the trough his faithful
manicure set and a few primitive toilette requisites secreted about his
person, he commenced his ablutions, sublimely unconscious of the attention
and surprise he was attracting. Before long, however, a riotously amused
crowd collected round, and the Russian had finally to be removed under
police escort, while attempting to explain to the indignant officer of the
law that he had merely taken the horse-trough as a convenient form of
public bath for encouraging cleanliness among the submerged tenth.

With the departure of the _Ça-Ira_ the office resumed once more,
during a brief interval, the even tenor of its ways. Kosinski who, in a
spirit of self-preservation, had practically effaced himself during its
sojourn, made himself once more apparent, bringing with him a peculiar
Swede--a man argumentative to the verge of cantankerousness--who for hours
and days together would argue on obscure questions of metaphysics. He had
argued himself out of employment, out of his country, almost out of the
society and the tolerance of his fellows. Life altogether was one long
argument to this man, no act or word, however insignificant, could he be
induced to pass over without discussing and dissecting, proving or
disproving it. Free-love was his particular hobby, though this, too, he
regarded from a metaphysical rather than a practical point of view. Like
everything else in his life it was a matter for reason and argument, not
for emotion; and he and Kosinski would frequently dispute the question
warmly.

One day, not long before Christmas, and after I had been nearly a year in
the movement, when all London was lost in a heavy fog and the air seemed
solid as a brick wall, there landed at the _Tocsin_ a small batch of
three Italians fresh from their native country. It was the year of the
coercion laws in Italy, of the "domicilio coatto" (forced domicile), and
the Anarchists and Socialists were fleeing in large numbers from the
clutches of the law.

None of these Southerners had ever been in England before, and having
heard grim tales of the lack of sunshine and light in London, they took
this fog to be the normal condition of the atmosphere. Stumbling into the
lighted office from the blind stifling darkness outside, the leader of the
party, a remarkably tall handsome man well known to me by reputation and
correspondence, gave vent to a tremendous sigh of relief and exclaimed in
his native tongue:

"Thank Heaven, friends, we have overcome the greatest danger of all and
we are here at last, and still alive!"

They then advanced towards me and Avvocato Guglielmo Gnecco held out his
hand. "You are Isabel Meredith?" he said in a sonorous voice, and I gave
an affirmative nod. "I am very glad to meet you at last, Comrade," and we
all shook hands. "So this is London! I had heard grim enough tales of your
climate, but never had I conceived anything like this. It is truly
terrible! But how do you live here? How do you get through your work?...
How do you find your way about the streets? Why, we've been wandering
about the streets ever since eleven o'clock this morning, walking round
and round ourselves, stumbling over kerb-stones, appealing to policemen
and passers-by, getting half run over by carts and omnibuses and cabs.
Giannoli here sees badly enough at all times, but to-day he has only
escaped by the skin of his teeth from the most horrid series of deaths. Is
it not so, Giacomo?" Giannoli, who had been engaged in enthusiastic
greetings with Kosinski, who was evidently an old friend, looked up at
this.

"Oh, I've had too much of London already," he exclaimed fervently. "We
must leave here for some other country to-night or to-morrow at the
latest. We should be better off in prison in Italy than at liberty here.
You see, Comrade," he said, turning to me with a smile, "we Anarchists all
belong to one nationality, so I have no fear of wounding your patriotic
sentiments."

"But London is not always like this, I assure you," I began.

"Oh, make no attempt to palliate it," Gnecco interrupted. "I have heard
English people before now defending your climate. But I see now only too
well that my compatriots were right in calling it impossible, and saying
that you never saw the sun here," and all attempts to argue them out of
this conviction proved futile.

The avvocato, as above mentioned, was an exceptionally good-looking man.
Fully six feet two inches in height, erect and slim without being in the
least weedy, he carried his head with an air of pride and self-confidence,
and was altogether a very fine figure of a man. His features were regular
and well cut, his abundant hair and complexion dark, and his eyes bright
with the vivacity of the perennial youth of the enthusiast. The delicacy
of his features, the easy grace of his walk, and the freedom and
confidence of his manners, all suggested his semi-aristocratic origin and
upbringing. He was evidently a man of romantic tastes and inclinations,
governed by sentiment rather than by reason; a lover of adventure, who had
found in Anarchism an outlet for his activities. His eloquence had made
him a considerable reputation all over Italy as an advocate, but the
comparative monotony of the life of a prosperous barrister was distasteful
to him, and he had willingly sacrificed his prospects in order to throw in
his lot with the revolutionary party.

Giannoli, in his way, was an equally interesting figure. Between Gnecco
and himself it was evident that there existed the warmest bonds of
fraternal affection--a sentiment whose fount, as I discovered later, lay
in a mutual attachment for a certain Milanese lady, who on her side fully
reciprocated their joint affection. Both these Italians were warm
exponents of the doctrine of free-love, and, unlike their more theoretic
Northern confréres, they carried their theories into practice with
considerable gusto. Many Anarchists of Teutonic and Scandinavian race
evidently regarded free-love as an unpleasant duty rather than as a
natural and agreeable condition of life--the chaff which had to be
swallowed along with the wheat of the Anarchist doctrines. I remember the
distress of one poor old Norwegian professor on the occasion of his
deserting his wife for a younger and, to him, far less attractive woman--a
young French studentess of medicine who practised her emancipated theories
in a very wholesale fashion.

"I felt that as an Anarchist it would have been almost wrong to repel her
advances," the distressed old gentleman confided to me. "Moreover, it was
ten years that I had lived with Rosalie, uninterruptedly.... _Cela
devenait tout-à-fait scandaleux, Mademoiselle_.... I no longer dared
show myself among my comrades."

I felt quite sorry for the poor old fellow, a humble slave to duty, which
he performed with evident disgust, but the most heroic determination.

Giannoli, when seen apart from Gnecco, was a tall man. But at the time of
his arrival in London he was already falling a victim to ill-health; there
was a bent, tired look about his figure, and his features were drawn and
thin. A glance at him sufficed to reveal a nervous, highly-strung
temperament; his movements were jerky, and altogether, about his entire
person, there was a noticeable lack of repose. He was about thirty-five
years of age, though he gave the impression of a rather older man. The
fact that he was very short-sighted gave a peculiar look to his face,
which was kindly enough in expression; his features were pronounced, with
a prominent nose and full, well-cut mouth hidden by a heavy moustache.
There was a look of considerable strength about the man, and fanatical
determination strangely blended with diffidence--a vigorous nature
battling against the inroads of some mortal disease.

The third member of the trio was a shortish, thickset man of
extraordinary vigour. He somehow put me in mind of a strongly-built,
one-storey, stone blockhouse, and looked impregnable in every direction;
evidently a man of firm character, buoyed up by vigorous physique. He was
a man rather of character than of intellect, of great moral strength
rather than of intellectual brilliancy--a fighter and an idealist, not a
theoriser. I knew him very well by renown, for he was of European fame in
the Anarchist party, and the _bête noire_ of the international
police. Enrico Bonafede was a man born out of his time--long after it and
long before--whose tremendous energy was wasted in the too strait limits
of modern civilised society. In a heroic age he would undoubtedly have
made a hero; in nineteenth-century Europe his life was wasted and his
sacrifices useless. These men, born out of their generation, are tragic
figures; they have in them the power and the will to scale the heights of
Mount Olympus and to stem the ocean, while they are forced to spend their
life climbing mole-hills and stumbling into puddles.

Such, briefly, were the three men who suddenly emerged from the fog into
the office of the _Tocsin_, and who formed the vanguard of our
foreign invasion. All three were at once sympathetic to me, and I viewed
their advent with pleasure. We celebrated it by an unusually lavish
banquet of fried fish and potatoes, for they were wretchedly cold and
hungry and exhausted after a long journey and almost equally long fast,
for of course they all arrived in a perfectly penniless condition.

Seated round a blazing fire in M'Dermott's _eleutheromania_ stove
(the old fellow had a passion for sonorous words which he did not always
apply quite appositely) the Italians related the adventures of their
journey and discussed future projects. As the fog grew denser with the
advance of evening, and it became evident that lodging-searching was quite
out of the question for the time being, it was agreed that we should all
spend the night in the office, where heaps of old papers and sacking made
up into not altogether despicable couches. Moreover, publication date was
approaching, and at such times we were in the habit of getting later and
later in the office, the necessity for Short's assistance rendering it
impossible to get the work done in an expeditious and business-like way.

We worked on far into the night, the Italians helping us as best they
could with the printing, one or other occasionally breaking off for a
brief respite of slumber. We talked much of the actual conditions in
Italy, and of the situation of the Anarchist party there; of how to keep
the revolutionary standard afloat and the Anarchist ideas circulating,
despite coercion laws and the imprisonment and banishment of its most
prominent advocates. Kosinksi joined enthusiastically in the discussion,
and the hours passed rapidly and very agreeably. I succeeded at length in
dissuading Giannoli and Gnecco from their original intention of
precipitate flight, partly by repeatedly assuring them that the state of
the atmosphere was not normal and would mend, partly by bringing their
minds to bear on the knotty question of finance.

The three Italians settled in London; Gnecco and Bonafede locating
themselves in the Italian quarter amid most squalid surroundings; while
for Giannoli I found a suitable lodging in the shape of a garret in the
Wattles's house which overlooked the courtyard of the _Tocsin_. They
were frequently in the office, much to the indignation of Short, who could
not see what good all "those ---- Foreigners did loafing about." Short, in
fact, viewed with the utmost suspicion any new-comers at the _Tocsin_.

"These foreigners are such a d----d lazy lot," he would say; "I hate
them!" and there was all the righteous indignation in his tones of the
hard-worked proletariat whose feelings are harrowed by the spectacle of
unrighteous ease. Short had a habit of making himself offensive to every
one, but for some mysterious reason no one ever took him to task over it.
It was impossible to take Short seriously, or to treat him as you would
any other human being. When he was insolent people shrugged their
shoulders and laughed, when he told lies they did not deign to investigate
the truth, and thus in a despised and unostentatious way--for he was not
ambitious of _réclame_--he was able to do as much mischief and set as
many falsehoods afloat as a viciously-inclined person with much time on
his hands well can. His physical and mental inferiority was his
stock-in-trade, and he relied on it as a safeguard against reprisals.

After a prolonged period of fog the real severity of the winter set in
towards the end of January. One February morning, after all manner of
mishaps and discomfort, and several falls along the slippery icy pavement,
I arrived at the office of the _Tocsin_. The first thing that struck
my eye on approaching was the unusual appearance of the Wattles's
greengrocery shop. The shutters were closed, the doors still unopened.
"What has happened?" I inquired of a crony standing outside the
neighbouring pub. "Surely no one is dead?"

"Lor' bless yer, no, lydy," answered the old lady, quite unperturbed,
"yesterday was the hanniversary of old Wattles's wedding-day, and they've
been keepin' it up as usual. That's all."

I was about to pass on without further comment when my attention was
again arrested by the sound of blows and scuffling inside the shop,
mingled with loud oaths in the familiar voice of my landlady, and hoarse
protests and entreaties in a masculine voice.

"But surely," I urged, turning once more to my previous informant, "there
is something wrong. What is all that noise?" as cries of "Murder! murder!"
greeted my ear.

"Why, I only just told you, my dear," she responded, still quite unmoved,
"they've been celebratin' their silver weddin' or somethin' of the sort.
It's the same every year. They both gets roarin' drunk, and then Mrs.
Wattles closes the shop next mornin' so as to give 'im a jolly good
'idin'. You see, these hanniversaries make 'er think of all she's 'ad to
put up with since she married, and that makes things a bit rough on poor
old Jim."

Perceiving my sympathy to be wasted I proceeded, and on entering the
office of the _Tocsin_ I found that here, too, something unusual was
going on.

A perfect Babel of voices from the room above greeted my ear, while the
printing-room was bedecked with a most unsightly litter of tattered
garments of nondescript shape and purpose laid out to dry. I was not
surprised at this, however, as I had long grown used to unannounced
invasions. Unexpected persons would arrive at the office, of whom nobody
perhaps knew anything; they would stroll in, seat themselves round the
fire, enter into discussion, and, if hungry, occasionally partake of the
_plat du jour_. The most rudimentary notions of Anarchist etiquette
forbade any of us from inquiring the name, address, or intentions of such
intruders. They were allowed to stay on or to disappear as inexplicitly as
they came. They were known, if by any name at all, as Jack or Jim,
Giovanni or Jacques, and this was allowed to suffice. Every Anarchist
learns in time to spot a detective at first sight, and we relied on this
instinct as a safeguard against spies.

But on reaching the composing-room on this particular morning an
extraordinary sight presented itself. Accustomed as I was to the
unaccustomed, I was scarcely prepared for the wild confusion of the scene.
What at first sight appeared to be a surging mass of unwashed and unkempt
humanity filled it with their persons, their voices, and their gestures.
No number of Englishmen, however considerable, could have created such a
din. All present were speaking simultaneously at the top of their voices;
greetings and embraces mingled with tales of adventure and woe. The first
object which I managed to distinguish was the figure of Giannoli
struggling feebly in the embrace of a tall brawny, one-eyed man with thick
curling black hair, who appeared to be in a state of demi-déshabille. By
degrees a few other familiar figures became one by one discernible to me
as I stood mute and unobserved at the head of the stairs. Bonafede and
Gnecco were there; they, too, surrounded by the invading mob, exchanging
greetings and experiences. Old M'Dermott, standing up against his stove,
was striking a most impressive attitude, for the old fellow had to live up
to the reputation he had established among foreigners of being the
greatest orator in the English revolutionary party. Two cloddish-looking
_contadini_ stood gazing at him, rapt in awe. Kosinksi stood little
apart from the rest, not a little bewildered by the enthusiastic reception
which had been accorded him by old friends. In one corner, too, I
recognised my old friend Short, fully dressed, as usual, in his frowsy
clothes, as though eternally awaiting the call-to-arms, the long-delayed
bugles of the social revolution; there he lay, much as when I first set
eyes on him, wrapped up in old banners and rugs, blinking his eyes and
muttering curses at the hubbub which had thus rudely interrupted his
slumbers.

The others were quite new to me. They were evidently all of them Italians
--some ten or twelve in number--though at the first glance, scattered as
they were pell-mell among the printing plant of the overcrowded work-room,
they gave an impression of much greater number. They appeared mostly to
belong to the working-classes. Their clothes, or what remained of them,
were woefully tattered--and they were few and rudimentary indeed, for most
of what had been spared by the hazards of travel were drying down below.
Their hair was uncut, and beards of several days' growth ornamented their
cheeks. Their hats were of incredible size and shape and all the colours
of the rainbow seemed to be reproduced in them. Littered around on divers
objects of furniture, they suggested to me a strange growth of fungi.

My advent, as soon as it was perceived amid the confusion and noise of
the scene, created something of a sensation, for by now my name had become
well known in the International Anarchist party. "Isabel Meredith" was
exclaimed in all manner of new and strange intonations, and a host of
hands were extended towards me from all directions.

At last Gnecco managed to make his voice heard above the din of his
compatriots. "All these comrades," he explained in Italian, "have escaped
like ourselves from the savage reaction which actually holds Italy in its
sway. They arrived this morning after a fearful journey which lack of
money compelled them to make mostly on foot."

Before he could get any further an outburst of song interrupted his words
as the whole band broke into an Anarchist war-whoop. This over, my
attention was arrested by the groans of a dark young man of
extraordinarily alert physiognomy who had shed his boots and was gazing
dolefully at his wounded feet. "What would I not give," he exclaimed, "to
be back in prison in Lugano! Oh for the rest and comfort of those good old
times!" He was utterly worn out, poor fellow, nipped up with the cold, and
seemed on the verge of tears.

"Well," exclaimed M'Dermott at last, "propaganda implies propagandists,
and propagandists entail bellies! All these fellows seem pretty well
starving. What would they say to a little grub?"

On my interpreting the old fellow's suggestion he and it were received
with universal acclaim. Bonafede produced from the innermost depths of his
pockets a huge quantity of macaroni which was put on to boil, and several
bottles of wine; one of the new arrivals, a sober-looking young fellow
with a remarkably long nose, contributed an enormous lobster which he had
acquired _en route_, while Kosinski volunteered to fetch bread and
other provender. A Homeric repast ensued, for all these Anarchists had
cultivated the digestions of camels; they prepared for inevitable fasts by
laying in tremendous stores when chance and good fortune permitted. While
they were eating a noticeable silence fell on the scene, and I had leisure
to observe the immigrants more in detail.

Beppe, the tall, one-eyed man, already referred to, seemed to be the life
and spirit of the band. He was a rollicking good-natured fellow, an
unpolished _homme du peuple_, but not inadmirable in his qualities of
courage and cheerfulness--the kind of man who would have cracked a joke on
his death-bed and sung lustily _en route_ to the gallows. He
possessed, too, a heroic appetite, and as he made away with enormous heaps
of macaroni his spirits rose higher and higher and his voice rose with
them.

The long-nosed youth was something of an enigma. From the scraps of
conversation which, during the repast, fell principally on the subject of
food, or the lack of food, during the tramp, I gathered that they had
relied principally on his skill and daring in the matter of foraging to
keep themselves from actually dying of hunger on their journey. Yet there
was about him such a prudent and circumspect air that he might well have
hesitated to pick up a pin that "wasn't his'n." He was evidently of an
acquisitive turn, however, for over his shoulder was slung a bag which
appeared to contain a collection of the most heterogeneous and
unserviceable rubbish conceivable. "_Eh!... possono servire!_" ...
was all he would volunteer on the subject when I once chaffed him on the
subject of his findings. "They may serve yet!..."

Somehow this youth struck me at once as a man who had made a mistake. At
home as he appeared to be among his comrades, there was yet something
about him which suggested that he was out of his proper sphere in the
midst of the Anarchists, that he was _desorienté_. He was cut out for
an industrious working-man, one that would rise and thrive in his business
by hard work and thrift; he was destined by nature to rear a large family
and to shine in the ranks of excellent family men. He was moulded for the
threshold, poor boy, neither for the revolutionary camp nor for the
scaffold, and it was thwarted domestic instinct which led him to steal.
There was good nature in his face and weakness; it was the face of a youth
easily led, easily influenced for good or bad. As a revolutioniser of his
species he was predestined to failure, for years would certainly show him
the error of his ways. Old age seemed to be his proper state, and youth in
him was altogether a blunder and a mistake. I found myself vainly
speculating what on earth could have led him among the Anarchists.

The others comprised a silent young artisan who was evidently desperately
in earnest with his ideas, a red-haired, red-bearded Tuscan of clever and
astute aspect, a singularly alert and excitable-looking young man of
asymmetrical features, who looked half fanatic, half criminal, and others
of the labouring and peasant class. One other of their number arrested my
attention, a stupid, sleepy young man, who seemed quite unaffected by the
many vicissitudes of his journey. His features were undefined and his
complexion undefinable, very greasy and suggestive of an unwholesome
fungus. He was better dressed than his companions, and from this fact,
combined with his intonation, I gathered that he belonged to the leisured
classes. There was something highly repellent about his smooth yellow
face, his greasiness and limp, fat figure. M'Dermott christened him the
"Buttered muffin."

Dinner over, the one-eyed baker, Beppe, proceeded to give us their news,
and to recount the vicissitudes of their travels. Gnecco and Giannoli were
anxious for news of comrades left behind in Italy. So-and-so was in
prison, another had remained behind in Switzerland, a third had turned his
coat, and was enjoying ill-gotten ease and home, others were either dead
or lost to sight.

The present party, who were mostly Northern Italians, had left Italy
shortly after Giannoli and Gnecco, and had since spent several weeks in
Italian Switzerland, whence at last they had been expelled in consequence
of the circulation of an Anarchist manifesto. Beppe gave a glowing account
of their stay in Lugano, and consequent flight to London. "You know," he
said, "that I reached Lugano with two hundred francs in my pocket in
company with all these comrades who hadn't got five francs among them. It
is not every one who could have housed them all, but I did. I could not
hire a Palazzo or a barrack for them, but we managed very comfortably in
one large room. There were fourteen of us besides la Antonietta. There was
only one bed, but what a size! We managed well enough by sleeping in two
relays. However, even in two relays it took some organisation to get us
all in. It was a fine double bed, you know, evidently intended for three
or four ... even for five it was suitable enough, but when it came to
seven!... there was not much room for exercise, I can tell you.... But
with four at the top and three at the bottom, we managed, and Antonietta
slept on a rug in a cupboard. We did our best to make her comfortable by
sacrificing half our clothes to keep her warm, but we might have saved
ourselves the trouble, for she deserted us for the first bourgeois who
came along. She was not a true comrade, but I will tell you all about her
later on.

"We had some trouble with the landlord, a thick-headed bourgeois who got
some stupid idea into his head about overcrowding. I have no patience with
these bourgeois prejudices. One day he came round to complain about our
numbers, and at not receiving his rent. But we were prepared for him. We
assembled in full force, and sang the _Marseillaise_ and the _Inno
dei Lavoratori_, and danced the _Carmagnole_. I took out my eye
and looked very threatening--one glance at us was enough for the old
fellow. He made the sign of the cross and fled before we had time to tear
him to pieces.

"Well, my two hundred francs was a very large sum, and not paying the
rent was economical, but it dwindled, and I had to look round again for
ways and means to feed us all. The money came to an end at last and then
the real struggle began. Old Castellani, the landlord, kept a large stock
of sacks of potatoes in a cellar, and every day he used to go in and take
a few out for his own use, and then lock the cellar up again, mean old
brute! But once again I was one too many for him. I collected large
quantities of stones in the day-time, and then at night with a skeleton
key I had acquired--it came out of Meneghino's bag which we always jeered
at--I let myself in and from the farthest sacks I abstracted potatoes and
refilled them with stones. I calculated that at the slow rate he used them
he would not notice his loss till March. What a scene there will be then,
_Misericordia_! During the last fortnight of our stay we lived almost
entirely on my potatoes. I don't know how the devil they would all have
got on without me. It is true that a waitress at the Panetteria Viennese
fell in love with Meneghino, and used to pass him on stale bread; but then
you all know his appetite! He ate it nearly all himself on the way home.
One day I sent Bonatelli out to reconnoitre. He returned with _one
mushroom_!" It would be quite impossible to convey an idea of the
intense contempt contained in these last words. It was a most eloquent
denunciation of impotence and irresolution.

"All the same we had a grand time in Lugano. And the week I and Migliassi
spent in prison was a great treat. Why, they treated us like popes, I can
tell you--as much food as you like, and the best quality at that; no work,
a comfortable cell, and a bed all to yourself! And the bread! I never
tasted anything like it in my life: they sent to Como for it all. Lugano
bread was not good enough. Ah, Swiss prisons are a grand institution, and
I hope to spend a happy old age in such a place yet.

"Then came Bonafede's manifesto, and that scoundrel Costanzi betrayed us
all to the police. Then the real trouble began. We had not ten francs
among the lot of us, and we twelve had orders to clear out of the country
within forty-eight hours! Once again they were all at a loss but for me!"
and here he tapped his forehead in token of deference to his superior
wits. "I had noticed the fat letters Morì received from home the first day
of every month, and how jolly quiet he kept about them. I also noticed
that he used to disappear for a day or two after their receipt, and return
very sleepy and replete, with but scant appetite for dry bread and
potatoes."

At this point Morì, the greasy Neapolitan youth, blinked his eyes and
laughed foolishly. He seemed neither ashamed of himself nor indignant at
his companions, merely sluggishly amused.

"Well," continued Meneghino, "that letter was just due, and I intercepted
it. It contained one hundred and eighty francs; would you believe me? and
that went some way to get us over here. Altogether we managed to collect
sufficient money to carry us to the Belgian frontier, and for our passage
across from Ostend. But that tramp across Belgium, _dio boia_!"

Here a clamour of voices interrupted Beppe, as each one of the travellers
chimed in with a separate account of the horrors of that ghastly tramp
across country in mid-winter.

For many years Europe had not experienced such an inclement season.
Everywhere the cold counted innumerable victims. Along the country
highways and byways people dropped down frozen to death, and the paths
were strewn with the carcasses of dead birds and other animals who had
succumbed to the inclemency of the elements. All the great rivers were
frozen over, and traffic had to be suspended along them. Unwonted numbers
of starving sea-gulls and other sea-birds flocked to London in search of
human charity, for the very fishes could not withstand the cold, and the
inhospitable ocean afforded food no longer to its winged hosts. All Europe
was under snow; the railways were blocked in many places, and ordinary
work had to be suspended in the great cities; business was at a
stand-still.

Neither the temperaments nor the clothes of these Italians had been equal
to the exigencies of their march in the cruel Northern winter. As they
tramped, a dismal, silent band across Belgium, the snow was several feet
deep under foot, and on all sides it stretched hopelessly to the horizon,
falling mercilessly the while. Their light clothing was ill adapted to the
rigours of the season; boots gave out, food was scanty or non-existent,
and they had to rely entirely on the fickle chances of fortune to keep
body and soul together. By night, when chance allowed, they had crept
unobserved into barns and stables, and, lying close up against the dormant
cattle, they had striven to restore animation to their frozen limbs by
means of the beasts' warm breath. Once an old farm-woman had found them,
and, taking pity on their woebegone condition, had regaled the whole party
on hot milk and bread; and this was now looked back on as a gala day, for
not every day had afforded such fare. At times in the course of their
weary tramp the Anarchists had made an effort to keep up their flagging
spirits by means of song, revolutionary and erotic, but such attempts had
usually fallen flat, and the little band of exiles had relapsed into
gloomy silence as they tramped on noiselessly through the snow. One of
their number had quite broken down on the road and they had been compelled
to leave him behind. "Lucky fellow, that Morelli," exclaimed Meneghino,
"enjoying good broth in a hospital while we were still trudging on through
that infernal snow!"

"And Antonietta?" inquired Giannoli, when the relation of these
adventures had terminated. "You have not yet told us her end, nor how she
incurred your displeasure."

"Oh, Antonietta!" exclaimed Beppe. "I was forgetting. You who believed
her to be such a sincere comrade will scarcely credit her baseness. She
ran away with a horrible bourgeois; she was lured away from the Cause by a
bicycle! Yes, Antonietta weighed a bicycle in the scales against the
Social Revolution, and found the Social Revolution wanting! So much for
the idealism of women! Never speak to me of them again. The last we saw of
her she was cycling away in a pair of breeches with a disgusting banker.
She laughed and waved her hand to us mockingly, and before we had time to
utter a word she was gone. I never shall believe in a woman again!"

His indignation choked him at this point, and only the expression of his
mouth and eye told of the depth of scorn and disgust which he felt for the
young lady who had thus unblushingly cycled away from the Social
Revolution.



CHAPTER VII

THE OFFICE OF THE _TOCSIN_


To the ordinary citizen whose walk in life lies along the beaten track
there is a suggestion of Bohemianism about the office of any literary or
propagandist organ; but I doubt whether the most imaginative among them in
their wildest moments have ever conceived any region so far removed from
the conventions of civilised society, so arbitrary in its hours and
customs, so cosmopolitan and so utterly irrational as the office of the
_Tocsin_.

In other chapters I attempt to describe the most noticeable among the
genuine Anarchists who belonged to it, but I wish here to convey some
faint idea of the strange medley of outside cranks and _déclassés_
whose resort it in time became. There appeared to be a magnetic attraction
about the place to tramps, _désoeuvrés_ cranks, argumentative people
with time on their hands, and even downright lunatics. Foreigners of all
tongues assembled in the office--Russians, Italians, French, Spaniards,
Dutch, Swedes, and before very long they practically swamped the English
element. The Anarchist and revolutionary party has always been more
serious on the Continent than in England, and what genuine Anarchists
there are here are mostly foreigners.

Trades and industries of the most heterogeneous kinds were carried on at
the _Tocsin_ by unemployed persons who could find no other refuge for
their tools nor outlet for their energies. In one corner old M'Dermott
settled down with his lasts and leather, and there industriously hammered
away at his boots, alternating his work with occasional outbursts of
Shakespearian recitation. In winter the old fellow was positively snowed
up in the office, where he crouched shivering over the fire until the
advent of spring revived him. On the first warm sunny day he suddenly
flung down his tools, and rushing out into the courtyard amazed and
terrified Mrs. Wattles and her colleagues by shouting at the top of his
voice, "Let me shout, let me shout, Richard's himself again!" "'E gave me
such a turn, Miss, with 'is carryin's on that I got the spasims again, an'
I don't know what ever I shall do if I can't find the price of a
'alf-quartern o' gin." And I took the hint, for Mrs. Wattles's alliance
was no despicable possession among the savages of Lysander Grove.

A shed was erected in the corner of the composing-room, which served by
night as a dormitory for numbers of otherwise roofless waifs, and here
during the daytime a young Belgian and his wife set up a small factory of
monkeys up sticks, which when completed they proceeded to sell in the
streets. In another corner two Italians settled down to manufacture a
remarkable new kind of artificial flower with which they traded when
opportunity permitted. Small plaster-casts of Queen Victoria and Marat
were also manufactured here. When the influx of starving Italians
necessitated it, a kind of soup-kitchen was inaugurated over which Beppe
presided, and very busy he was kept too, manufacturing _minestras_
and _polenta_, a welcome innovation to me, I may mention, after a
long régime of small and nauseous tarts, bread and jam, and cheese. In
short, the headquarters of the _Tocsin_, besides being a printing and
publishing office, rapidly became a factory, a debating club, a school, a
hospital, a mad-house, a soup-kitchen and a sort of Rowton House, all in
one.

When I look back on the scene now, and recall all the noise and hubbub,
the singing, the discussions and disputes, the readings, the hammerings on
this side, the hangings on that, the feeding, and M'Dermott's
Shakespearian recitations, I find it very difficult to realise the amount
of hard work which I and the other few serious and earnest comrades got
through.

The chief impediment to the progress of the work, however, was Short, the
compositor. On close acquaintance with this creature, I found that he did
not belie my first impression of him as the laziest and most slovenly of
men; and I soon realised the two dominant characteristics which had made
of him a Socialist--envy and sloth. So deeply was he imbued with envy that
he was quite unable to rest so long as anyone else was better off than
himself; and although he did not care one jot for "humanity" of which he
prated so freely, and was incapable of regenerating a flea, he found in a
certain section of the Socialist and Anarchist party that degree of
dissatisfaction and covetousness which appealed to his degraded soul.
Besides which the movement afforded him grand opportunities for living in
sloth and sponging on other people.

Short was not without his humorous side, however, when only you were in
the right mood to appreciate it. His envy of the superiority which he
noted in others was only equalled by his intense contempt for himself.

I can still picture the poor brute lying with his dog in a corner of the
office amid a heap of rubbish, unwashed, unkempt (he never divested
himself of his clothes), and verminous in the extreme. There he would blow
discordant notes on a mouth-organ, or smoke his rank old pipe, eat jam
tarts, and scowl his wrath and envy on the world. If he could get hold of
some unoccupied person to whom he could retail all the latest bits of
Anarchist scandal, or from whom he could ferret out some little private
secrets, he was contented enough, or, leaning out of the office window he
would deliver a short autobiographical sketch to the interested denizens
of the surrounding courts. A small bill, posted outside the office door,
announced that Short was prepared to undertake extraneous jobs of printing
on his own account; and this was responsible for many of the queer
customers who found their way to the office of the _Tocsin_.

One of the queerest of all the queer oddities who haunted it was a small
man of hunted aspect, known to every one as the "Bleeding Lamb." He had
acquired this peculiar name from the title of a booklet which he had
written under the direct inspiration of the Holy Ghost, a sort of
interpretation of the Apocalypse, wherein was foretold a rapid termination
of the universe. The printing of the "Bleeding Lamb" was undertaken by
Short, whose dilatoriness in executing his work doubtless prolonged by a
few years the existence of the terrestrial globe.

There was all the fervour of a prophet in the eye of the "Bleeding Lamb,"
but inspiration ceased here, and even what there was of inspired and
prophetic in his eye was overcast by a certain diffident and deprecating
look. He was the victim, poor man, of a twofold persecution in which
heaven and earth joined hands to torment him--the archangel Michael and
the Metropolitan police being the arch offenders.

One of the first things that struck you about the Bleeding Lamb was the
helpless look of his feet. They were for ever shuffling and stumbling,
getting in the way, and tripping up himself and others. His hands too had
a flabby and inefficient expression, and his knees were set at a wrong
angle. His stature was insignificant, his colouring vague; longish hair
and beard of a colourless grey matched the grey of his prophetic and
persecuted eye.

He would enter the office furtively, and cast a rapid glance round as
though he almost expected to find the archangel Michael or an inspector of
the Metropolitan police lurking in a corner, and it would take him some
few seconds before he could muster up sufficient courage to inquire, as
was his invariable custom, whether anyone had been round to ask after him.
On being assured that no one had called for that purpose he appeared
relieved, and gradually, as he became more and more reassured, he would
warm to his subject of the coming cataclysm, and launch out into prophecy.
"Ah," he exclaimed to me one day after a long discourse on the universal
destruction at hand, "won't Queen Victoria just shiver in her shoes when
she receives the revised edition of the 'Bleeding Lamb.' Little does she
dream at this moment of what is in store for her." I recollect also that
Nelson was in some way connected with his prophecies and his perplexities,
but in what particular connection is not quite clear to my mind. The
sympathy which he apparently felt for the Anarchists was, I suppose, due
to the fact that they too were engaged--on a somewhat smaller scale it is
true--on a policy of destruction, and also to their avowed antagonism to
the law and the police, whether metropolitan or otherwise.

The Bleeding Lamb had a formidable rival in the field of prophecy in the
person of another strange frequenter of our office--a demure-looking
gentleman named Atkinson who professed to be the reincarnation of Christ,
and who preached the millennium. He was a less depressed-looking person
than the Bleeding Lamb--whom he treated with undisguised contempt--and
affected a tall hat and Wellington boots. The Lamb, on his side, denounced
the Messiah as a fraud, and went so far as to suggest that he had only
taken to prophecy when the alteration in the fashion of ladies' pockets
compelled him to abandon his original profession. "That Lamb is not quite
right in the upper storey," whispered Atkinson to me one day; "he may even
become dangerous, poor creature!" Shortly afterwards I was taken aside by
the gentleman in question who warned me to keep my purse in safety as
"that Messiah is no better than a common thief."

The approach of either of these prophets was invariably the signal for a
stampede on Short's part, who, never having completed his work, dreaded
encountering the mournful scrutiny and reproachful bleating of the Lamb no
less than the sad, stern rebukes and potential Wellington boots of the
Messiah. Into no single item of the day's programme did he put so much
zest as into the grand dive he would make into any available hiding-place,
and he would lie for hours flat on his stomach under M'Dermott's bed
sooner than "face the music."

One day the perspiring Lamb entered the office red in the face and
considerably out of breath, rapidly followed by a lugubrious individual,
talking volubly in an argumentative monotone. This person seemed to be
very indignant about something.

"Marcus Aurelius was a just ruler and a philosopher," he was saying, "and
he saw the necessity for suppressing the Christian factions. He was among
the severest persecutors of the early Christians.--What does that argue,
you fool?"

"Nothing against my contention with regard to the seven-headed beast in
the Apocalypse," replied the Bleeding Lamb with a defiant snort.

"The seven-headed beast has nothing to do with the case," retorted his
interlocutor, putting all the warmth into his monotonous drawl of which he
appeared capable. "The seven-headed beast can't alter history, and my case
is conclusively proved in the course of this little work, to the
production of which I have devoted the best years of my life. The
seven-headed beast indeed! Pshaw for your seven-headed beast, you
dunder-headed dreamer!"

Whilst I gazed on dumbfounded at this little scene, making futile efforts
to grasp the vexed point under discussion, the strange new-comer, whom the
Lamb addressed as Gresham, deposited on the floor a huge and shapeless
brown-paper parcel, under whose weight he was staggering, and sitting down
by its side he carefully untied the string, and dragged triumphantly forth
tome after tome of carefully-written MSS., which he proceeded to read out
without further preamble.

"'Atheism _v._ Christianity,'" he drawled, commencing at the title,
"'being a short treatise on the Persecutions of the Early Christians, the
object of which is to prove that they were persecuted by the just emperors
and protected by the unjust; that, consequently, they were wrong; that
Christianity is wrong, and the Deity a palpable fraud; by Tobias Jonathan
Gresham,'--and let the seven-headed beast in the Apocalypse put that in
his pipe and smoke it!" casting a defiant glance at the Bleeding Lamb.

As this concluding remark was made in the same monotone as the foregoing
sentence, I was at some loss to determine whether or not it formed part of
the title of that momentous work.

The Bleeding Lamb here cast me a knowing glance, which said as plainly as
words that his unfortunate acquaintance was mad, but that it was as well
to humour him, and so he magnanimously sat down on a stool facing his
rival, while the latter proceeded to read out his book, which was destined
soon to mount up the long list of Short's sins of typographical omissions.
This was but the herald of a long series of readings from the "short
treatise," which were carried on at intervals for some weeks. Minute after
minute and hour after hour Gresham drawled on from one tedious reiteration
to another, never raising his voice nor altering its key, till a sense of
dizziness overcame his audience, and his voice became as the singing in
one's ears which accompanies high fever or heralds a faint. Indeed I have
never suffered from fever or faintness since that date without my
sensations recalling Gresham's dreary, argumentative drawl; then gradually
his voice would grow fainter and somewhat spasmodic, until at length it
gave way to snores, as the weary Lamb and the atheist Lion, like the kid
and the leopard of Isaiah, sank down together in a confused heap on the
floor, and there slept out a miniature fulfilment of the word of the
prophet.

Then there was a Polish count who found his way to the _Tocsin_--a
most deplorable aristocratic débris, who might have stepped straight out
of the pages of Dostoievsky. I never set eyes on a more depressed-looking
mortal than Count Voblinsky. He looked as though he bore on his bent
shoulders the weight of all the ill-spent lives in Christendom. He was a
damp, unwholesome-looking man, whose appearance suggested long confinement
in a cellar. He was pale and hollow-eyed, and almost mouldy; altogether a
most cadaverous-looking person. He was always attired, even at eleven
A.M., in an old dress suit, green and threadbare with age, and a furry
tall hat, into which garments he seemed to have grown and taken root. But
despite the decay of his person and his attire, there was a certain degree
of aristocratic refinement about Voblinsky's features, last ghastly traces
of his ancient nobility. He vaguely recalled to my mind a long-ago
Continental trip of my childhood, and an unfortunate elephant in the
Marseilles Jardin des Plantes who, from long inactivity in the corner of
his cage, had become overgrown with moss. There was the same incongruous
touch of erstwhile nobility, the same decay, the same earthy smell. By
what shady and circuitous paths had the unfortunate count reached this
unhappy pass? Perhaps his wife was responsible; for if ever woman was
calculated not to lead her mate on to higher and better things it was the
Countess Voblinska. The countess was worse than slovenly: she was
downright dirty. Her tumbled, frowsy hair, with patches of golden dye in
it, was surmounted by an appalling hat of incongruous dimensions and
shape, trimmed with what appeared to be archaeological relics, thick in
dust. To approach it brought on a perfect paroxysm of sneezing. Her
clothes, which were very greasy and never brushed, hung together by
strings, tatters, and safety-pins. Her hands and face were begrimed with
several coats of dirt, and a top coat of _poudre de riz_. No ordinary
imagination dared speculate on what lay hidden beneath those tattered rags
she wore. She gesticulated much, and discoursed on the subject of some
lecture she was to give, in the intervals of volleying forth abuse and
swearing in Parisian argot at her long-suffering husband, who received it
all with most ludicrous courtesy. Often a strong smell of gin mingled with
the eloquent flow of the countess's language.

On the whole, however, the Anarchists and their queer associates might be
regarded as a fairly temperate set. One of the most potent causes of drink
is the monotony of the existences led by most people, the hopeless
dreariness of their confined, narrow lives, the total lack of interest and
excitement. This is not the case in revolutionary circles, where not only
are there plenty of ideas afloat to occupy men's minds and distract them
from the narrow circle of their dreary domestic lives, but where also the
modern craving for excitement, factitious or otherwise, finds plenty of
nourishment.

The office of the _Tocsin_, however, did not lack the occasional
presence of the habitual drunkard. There was one queer fellow who
frequently put in a dissipated appearance for the purpose of complaining
of the ill-usage to which his wife's tongue subjected him. He looked
forward to the Social Revolution as the only escape from this thraldom,
and certainly no man ever made more strenuous, albeit ill-directed
efforts, on its behalf.

Then there was a bibulous Welshman who at times would startle the
unwashed denizens of the neighbouring slums by appearing in a tall hat and
irreproachable shirt front. He was a doctor by profession, who succeeded
in maintaining a certain reputation in polite circles, but an alcoholic
soaker by inclination, one of those men who somehow contrive to keep ahead
of ruin by sleeping out periods of financial distress in friends' houses.

Our proof-reader was a benevolent old gentleman of obsolete customs, who
in an age of open-air cures still wore a mouth and nose respirator. He was
such an eminently respectable person that I never could quite understand
why he associated himself with anything so disreputable as the
_Tocsin_. I always half suspected that he came there principally on
my account, chivalrously determined that I should not be surrounded
_solely_ by scum. But besides this motive he had some pretensions to
being a man of advanced views, and was a purchaser of "advanced"
literature. The introduction of this into the precincts of his home was a
great trial to his better half, who had no kind of sympathy with such
leanings. New-fangled ideas of any description were tabooed by her, and
all preachers and holders of such she unconditionally consigned to
hell-fires. Her husband she regarded as a brand to be snatched from the
burning, and she and a few select female relatives worked hard to snatch
him. But although new-fangled ideas on social organisation and political
economy were bad enough, one thing alone was beyond all human endurance to
the mind of Mrs. Crawley, and that one thing was free-love.

One day Mr. Crawley brought home "The Woman Who Did," and neglected to
conceal it. It was found by his wife lying on the dining-room sofa.

"My fingers itched to seize and burn the impudent huzzy, lying there as
unconcerned as though she had been the 'Private Meditations and Prayers of
the Rev. Bagge,'" Mrs. Crawley confided to her Aunt Elizabeth, "but it was
a six-shilling book, and I knew how Crawley valued it, and for the life of
me I did not dare touch it."

It was a sore trial indeed to Mrs. Crawley to live under the same roof
with such a person, but she dared not so far outrage the feelings of one
whom she had sworn to love, honour, and obey, as to execute the offending
lady. She long meditated some revenge, some outlet for her outraged
feelings; it was long in coming, but come it did at last. The "Man Who
Didn't" followed in the footsteps of his irregular mate, and in a
fourpenny-halfpenny edition. This was more than the worthy matron could
stand, and either he or she herself must leave the house. She summoned
Aunt Elizabeth, a lady of irreproachable moral standard, the whites of
whose eyes had a habit of turning up spasmodically, and the corners of
whose mouth down, and to her she unburdened her feelings.

"My dear Eliza," she said, "I have too long tolerated 'The Woman Who
Did,' but when it comes to the 'Man Who Didn't,' that--er--well, that
disgusting 'Man Who Didn't'--and how am I to know that he didn't, the
brazen creature!--it is time I asserted my authority. I cannot and I will
not stand him."

The offending and irresolute gentleman was then seized upon with a pair
of tongs, carried in solemn procession to the remotest room in the house,
and burnt. The sanctity of matrimony had reasserted its rights.

A young bank clerk who accompanied Crawley to the office was a type of
what I might call the conscientiously unprincipled man. It being wrong to
steal, he made a point of annexing small objects. Cleanliness is next to
godliness, and he devoted himself heroically to dirt; it was not at all
his natural tendency, and the more disagreeable he found it the more
strenuous was he in its pursuit. Being by nature punctual, he made it an
absolute point of honour never to keep an appointment; and, as a lover of
domestic peace, he was for ever working his way into scrapes and rows. He
was a comical object, with his limp yellow hair brushed ferociously on
end, and his mild yellow eyes scowling defiance at mankind.

When the Cuban revolution broke out a wave of sympathy for the oppressed
islanders passed over the whole civilised world, and nowhere did this find
a warmer echo than in the Anarchist party and the _Tocsin_ group.
Many Anarchists were in favour of going out to the assistance of the
insurgents. Opinion was divided on the question. Some said: "It is our
duty to remain in Europe to carry on the work of Anarchist propaganda
here. The Cuban revolution is a race struggle, and no concern of ours."
Others said: "We Anarchists are internationalists, and in whatsoever part
of the world there is revolt against oppression, and wherever the
revolutionary forces are at work, there is our opportunity to step in and
direct those forces into the proper course, towards Anarchism." These
Anarchists saw in the uprising of this small and comparatively
insignificant race against the Spanish throne the possible dawn of a
wider, vaster struggle, in which the whole world would join hands to lay
low thrones, altars, and judgment seats.

A small band of Italian comrades, led by an adventurous Sicilian, got up
a subscription for the purpose, and left the office of the _Tocsin_,
amid great revolutionary enthusiasm, to journey to the assistance of the
insurgent island. Only one of their number ever returned alive to Europe
to tell of the horrors and hardships of the fierce struggle there endured,
of the cruelty of the Spaniards, and the uselessness of the fight from the
Anarchist point of view.

The Cuban fever was very catching, and after the departure of this first
band there was a regular epidemic of departure at the _Tocsin_.
Carter and Simpkins turned up at the office one afternoon very much in
earnest about it all and persuaded that a little British grit was what was
needed in Cuba, "to keep things humming." Simpkins recalled his old army
days and the valour he had several times displayed when under the
influence of liquor. He waved an old belt appertaining to those times, and
would, I believe, have sung something about the Union Jack and the beer of
old England, had not his friend recalled him to a better sense of his duty
as an Anarchist and Internationalist. It appeared that Carter had come
into a small sum of money consequent on the death of an uncle, with which
he was bent on paying their passage out to Cuba. "What is an Anarchist to
do in this wretched country?" he asked. "I am tired of lying in bed
waiting for the revolution. It's too slow coming." "Yah!" muttered Short
under his breath to me, "the springs are out of order, and he finds it
hard. That's about how much he cares for the revolution."

After Carter and Simpkins had taken their leave of the staff of the
_Tocsin_ I watched a very moving scene from the window, when they
bade good Mrs. Wattles farewell. The good lady was very deeply affected,
and with tears in her eyes she begged them to think again before betaking
themselves to "them furrin' parts" where she had heard "the drink was
something awful and not fit for a Christian stomach." She was only half
reassured when told that rum came from somewhere in that direction.

But Carter and Simpkins never reached Cuba. Some few minutes' walk from
the office of the _Tocsin_, at the corner of Lysander Grove, stood an
inviting house of call, the "Merry Mariners," where the valiant warriors
dropped in on their way, to refresh themselves, perhaps in anticipation of
the dreary prospect which Mrs. Wattles's words had opened before them.
When several hours later Short returned from his accustomed evening stroll
round the neighbourhood, he described with great relish the pitiable
termination of their voyage. He had found Carter just sober enough to cart
his incapacitated disciple home on a wheelbarrow, after which he painfully
betook himself to his bed, there to bemoan the tardiness of the
revolution, and the broken condition of the spring mattress.

"And won't his guv'nor just give Simpkins a ragging when he gets home.
He'll give him Cuba," gloated the unsympathetic printer.

Another relief expedition from the _Tocsin_ met with scarcely more
brilliant success. Beppe and Meneghino set out under the guidance of old
M'Dermott, on tramp to Cardiff, whence they hoped to work their way out to
the insurgent island. They, too, set out full of brave hopes and generous
enthusiasm, but with too confident a trust in the beneficence of
Providence as caterer to their material needs on the journey. Before a
fortnight had elapsed, they also were back at the office, Beppe bearing
the poor old Irishman on his shoulders in a quite crippled and exhausted
condition. He had to be put to bed, and remained there several weeks,
before he was in a fit state to get about again. They all complained
bitterly of the inhospitality of the country-folk to whom they had
appealed for help, and of the uncourteous reception they had met with in
the Cardiff docks. Poor Meneghino reached London barefooted, his faithful
canvas bag hanging disconsolately over his shoulder--and all with woefully
vacant stomachs. They formed a comically dismal group as they collapsed
into the office in an exhausted heap.

       *       *       *       *       *

Amid these many strange and dubious, ludicrous or pathetic characters,
some few heroic figures appeared. From time to time there came into our
midst Vera Marcel, the Red Virgin of the barricades, the heroine of the
Commune of Paris--a woman of blood and smoke and of infinite mercies
towards men and beasts. I can see her still, almost beautiful in her
rugged ugliness, her eyes full of the fire of faith and insane fanaticism,
her hair dishevelled, her clothes uncared for. I can hear the wonderful
ring of her tragic voice as she pleaded the misery of the poor and
suffering, of the oppressed, the outcast, the criminal, the rejected, and
as it rose higher and higher to invoke fire and sword and bloodshed in
expiation. Then I seem to hear its magic and inspired ring as her
wonderful faith conjured up visions of the future when the whole of
humanity shall live in peace and brotherhood, and the knife, which in time
of revolution had shed the blood of the oppressors, shall "cut nothing
deadlier than bread." A strange gaunt figure she was, a woman who had
never hesitated at shedding blood in the good Cause, nor feared to face
death for it; but with her friends, and especially with children and dumb
animals, she was as gentle as the gentlest of her sex; and no words can
describe the extreme sweetness of her voice.

As publication time approached, all-night sittings became necessary, when
all this heterogeneous assembly met together, and amidst Anarchist song
and Anarchist enthusiasm forwarded or hindered, each in his degree, the
publication of the _Tocsin_. I can see in my mind's eye the
much-littered, overcrowded office in all the confusion of those nights,
with its dark corners hidden in shadow, where slept tired fighters weary
of the fray, and its brightly-lighted patches, under the lamps, where the
work of the night was being carried on. Some dozen voices, more or less
musical, are chanting Anarchist war-songs, and the _Inno di Caserio_
and the _Marseillaise_ ring out through the open windows to the
dormant or drunken denizens of Lysander Grove. The Reincarnation is
patiently turning the wheel of the printing machine, and rolling out
fresh _Tocsins_, thinking, no doubt, of that tocsin which, at no
distant date, shall ring out from a loftier sphere to rouse the deluded
inhabitants of this globe to a different millennium from that dreamed of
by Anarchists. But, whatever his thoughts, he grinds away with much
Christian endurance and fortitude. Wainwright, who is tired after a long
turn at the wheel, subsequent to a hard day's work in the brick-yard, is
relating to a few interested listeners the strange story of his life, or
discussing points of Anarchist principle and propaganda.

Then, somehow, the Bleeding Lamb would find his way in, and looking over
at his reincarnated rival at the wheel with undisguised contempt, he
whispers: "I know what sort of a wheel his unhallowed hoof ought to be
turning!"

Armitage and Kosinski at such times would be busy folding the papers,
both absorbed in their work, happy to think that they were thus advancing
the great Cause. And Short, shivering discontentedly at the cold, or
swearing amid much perspiration at the heat, would smoke his pipe and eat
his unattractive pastry, whilst crawling into his rugs and banners, until
Beppe, in an outburst of indignation, drags him out by the scruff of the
neck and compels him to lock up the forms.

One night there was a grand banquet, for Beppe had turned in, bearing
under his long cloak a prime conditioned tom-cat, whose disconcerted mews
were rapidly ended by a dexterous twist of the neck, and whose plump
person was before long stewing in wine and vinegar in the _Tocsin_
stockpot, after his liver had been previously fried for the private
consumption of the ever-hungry Beppe.

When this succulent repast had been disposed of towards 3 A.M. (all the
_Tocsin_ workers had admirable digestions) a brief respite from work
ensued, during which Beppe sang pieces of Italian opera, accompanied by
Gnecco on his mandolin, and M'Dermott treated us to brief recitations from
Shakespeare. Much stamping and gesticulation accompanied, I remember, the
soliloquy of Hamlet, and our flesh crept at the witches' incantations from
"Macbeth." The old cobbler delighted in Shakespeare and dictionaries,
between the perusal of which he spent most of his time. "Like Autolycus in
the 'Winter's Tale,'" he said to me one day, "I am a 'snapper-up of
unconsidered trifles,' and during the riots of 18--I snapped up a
sufficient number of these to enable me to set myself up with a small
library, and I did no work during eighteen months, devoting my entire time
to Shakespeare and Johnson's Dictionary."

Sometimes a phrenologist who had strayed into our midst would follow on
with a brief phrenological séance, and nothing afforded the comrades more
satisfaction than to be informed that their bumps showed undoubted
criminal propensities.

Then again the heavy roll of the machine would drown all lesser noises
with its monotonous grinding, as the most resolute and earnest among us
returned undaunted to the fray, whilst others, less energetic, curled up
on the floor in varying uncomfortable attitudes about the office--inside
the dormitory shed and out, propped against posts and type-racks, or
stretched on stacks of paper--and slumbered in blissful ignorance of the
future fortunes of the _Tocsin_.



CHAPTER VIII

THE DYNAMITARD'S ESCAPE


May-Day was at hand, and we had been working all night at the office of
the _Tocsin_ in order to have the paper ready in time to distribute
to the provincial groups. Since Friday morning I had hardly left the
office at all--merely going home for dinner and returning at once to the
fray--and by four o'clock Sunday morning we had rolled off the last of the
five thousand copies of the _Tocsin_, which, along with two thousand
leaflets drawn up by myself and Armitage, were ready for distribution. The
1st of May fell on the following Wednesday, and we had for once the
satisfaction of knowing that we had taken Time by the forelock.

Short had retired to his shake-down in the dormitory about midnight, and
the loud creaking of his boots against the boards was the only sign he
gave of life. Kosinski, Armitage, and Giannoli, after making up and
addressing the last parcel, had left for their respective abodes; Beppe
and Meneghino, having turned the wheel the whole evening, had fallen to
sleep exhausted, stretched on a bench in the machine-room; and I, after
having partaken of a cup of tea and some hot buttered toast which old
M'Dermott had provided for me, sat nodding and dozing on one side of the
fire. The old cobbler had fallen fast asleep on the other side while
poring over a dictionary, noting down sonorous and impressive-sounding
words with which to embellish the oration he intended to deliver on
May-day in Hyde Park.

About half-past five, just as the first cold rays of the chilly spring
dawn cast a ghastly blue light on the dormant figures around me, deadening
the yellow flame of the lamp which was burning itself out, I was roused
from my torpor by a light rap at the outside door. In the office all was
quiet, but for the heavy and rhythmic snores of the weary comrades, and
wondering who could claim admittance at such an unearthly hour, I rose
with a shiver and opened the door. To my surprise I found myself face to
face with Bonafede.

Since that bitter January day when Bonafede and his companions had
emerged from the London fog and made their unexpected entrance on the
scene of the _Tocsin_, I had not seen very much of him, though we had
never quite lost sight of one another, and I frequently heard his news
through mutual friends. As I have already stated, Gnecco and Bonafede had
retired to lodgings in the Italian quarter in the unsavoury neighbourhood
of Saffron Hill. They had a little money, but only enough to last for two
or three weeks. Gnecco had a few valuables in the shape of a gold watch
and chain, a pearl breast-pin, and a fur-lined coat, and he soon had
recourse to my friendly help to dispose of these articles to the best
advantage with a pawnbroker, and on the proceeds, eked out by some small
help which he received from his family, he managed to rub along, and he
and his mandolin were soon familiar features at the office. But with
Bonafede the case was different. He was a man of too active and
independent a character to be long idle. He was by profession an engineer,
and in Italy, before his career had been interrupted by his political
activity, he had held an important post on the Italian railways. But for
many years his life had been a stirring one, and he had learned to turn
his hand to whatever offered, and had in turn worked as a dock labourer, a
sailor before the mast, a gilder employed in church decorations, a
house-decorator in a lunatic asylum and a cutter-out of military trousers
at Marseilles, a warehouse porter and a navvy. Whatever job turned up he
accepted; if it was work at which he had no experience he would look up
some comrade in that line and get from him a few hints, and this,
supplemented by reading up particulars in some trade encyclopaedia at a
public library, enabled him to accomplish his task satisfactorily. He had
hardly been in London a fortnight when he looked about him for work, and,
nothing better offering, he engaged himself as washer-up at one of
Veglio's many restaurants. After six weeks he was rescued from the
uncongenial drudgery of scullion by a comrade, a fellow-Calabrian, who
earned a good living as decorator of West-end cafés, and who took on
Bonafede to assist him in frescoing a ceiling at the Trocadero, not,
however, before the latter had laid the foundations of a _lega di
resistenza_ between the Italians employed in restaurant kitchens. At
the end of a month the ceiling was painted, and Bonafede parted company
with his compatriot, pocketing £10, plus his keep whilst the job lasted.
One of his first steps was to visit me at the office of the _Tocsin_
and arrange for the printing of an Italian pamphlet and of a booklet of
revolutionary songs, the production of Gnecco, which were to be smuggled
into Italy for distribution. The cost of paper and carriage of these works
ran into the better part of £3. With the remaining cash in his pocket,
Bonafede went to look up old friends and comrades in the French and
Italian quarters. A's wife was expecting her confinement, B needed an
outfit in order to enter on a job as waiter which he had secured at a
club; C had been out of work for three months and had five small mites to
feed and clothe, and so forth. At the end of this expedition rather less
than 15s. remained in his pocket, and once more he sought employment.
This time he got taken on by a contractor who asphalted the London
streets, a work done entirely by Italians. Here he remained for nearly two
months, during which time he organised the men into a union and induced
them to strike for better conditions. The men won their point, and
returned to work on the condition that the agitator who had got up the
strike should be dismissed, and Bonafede left of his own accord, unwilling
to cause loss to the men by prolonging the struggle. After a few weeks'
enforced idleness, during which he was lost sight of by the comrades, he
reappeared one evening at a group meeting held at our office, and informed
us that he was taken on as electrician at the Monico.

Ten days had now passed since I last saw him, and my expression was
eloquent of my amazement at his unexpected appearance.

"You are surprised at my coming at such an unusual hour, Comrade," he
began with his strong Calabrian accent; "but you will understand when I
tell you that ever since yesterday evening I have been awaiting an
opportunity to get round here without being followed by my guardian angels
of Scotland Yard. Gnecco told me that you were passing the night in the
office, and so I seized on a favourable moment and came." He stopped,
glanced round the room, walked up to the bench on which the two Italians
were sleeping the sleep of the just, and having satisfied himself that no
one could overhear us he explained the motive of his visit to me.

"You doubtless know that Jean Matthieu, suspected of complicity in the
P.... bomb explosions, has been hiding in London for some time past." I
nodded assent: he had even been pointed out to me one evening by Giannoli
at a meeting in the East End.

"Well, since yesterday we have the certainty that the police are on his
track, that they are aware of his whereabouts. It has become absolutely
necessary for him to leave London without further delay--within the next
twenty-four hours. Everything is arranged. The police will be watching the
Continental trains, so he will go for the present to Leicester, and stay
with a comrade who has a French wife, and who will pass him off as his
wife's uncle. From there we hope, within a week or so to get him off to
America; but all this requires money: the least that we can give him is
twenty pounds. I had five by me, left with me to make use of for the
Cause, a few French comrades have handed me over another seven. But we are
still in need of eight pounds to make up the necessary sum. Could you let
us have it?"

The last days of the month always found me at the end of my resources. I
had but two pounds in my purse. "What a pity," I exclaimed, "that you
could not let me know yesterday! Today is Sunday; it will be impossible
for me to get at any money. Raymond is certain only to have a pound or two
on him, if he has as much; the Bank is closed. I have some jewellery by me
on which I could easily raise ten or twelve pounds, but the pawn-shops are
not open on Sundays. What am I to do? Can you not wait until tomorrow?"

Bonafede explained that every minute was of consequence: Matthieu must
leave at once or he would inevitably be arrested. We both remained silent,
hesitating, for a few minutes. At last he spoke: "Madame Combrisson has
the money by her, I am sure, but she will never give it. You say, however,
you have some jewellery that you would be willing to pledge: perhaps with
that as security she would advance us the money. Anyhow we can but try."

It was arranged that I should go home for my valuables and repair to the
house of the Combrissons, where, Bonafede informed me, Matthieu was at
that moment concealed.

"But do you think he is safe there?" I inquired.

"Oh yes, perfectly. Jules is a good comrade, and both he and his wife
have every reason to wish to remain on good terms with the Anarchists.
They know on which side their bread is buttered. I shall go now and you
will find me at the Combrissons'."

I knew the French couple well by reputation, though I had never yet
crossed their threshold. Combrisson had come over to England some twelve
years ago; he had been mixed up in the Anarchist propaganda, and had seen
fit to expatriate himself; it was rumoured that he had been actively mixed
up with a gang of coiners, amongst whom were several Anarchists who
thought it good warfare to make the hated bourgeois pay for the propaganda
by falsifying the currency. They had not been long in London when they
took a large house in Grafton Street, letting out rooms to comrades. They
also kept on the ground floor a small _depôt_ of foreign
revolutionary literature, and received for a consideration the
correspondence of the refugees. Combrisson, who worked as a carpenter and
joiner, had the reputation of being a good comrade, and always set down to
his wife's account all actions not strictly in accordance with the
principles of solidarity, such as turning out comrades who did not pay
their rent, refusing small loans and subscriptions, and such like.

By eight o'clock I was in Grafton Street. As I turned down the corner
which leads from the Tottenham Court Road, I became aware that I was being
followed. A young man with a sandy moustache, a celestial nose, and fishy
blue eyes, got up to look like a counter-jumper on a holiday, whom I had
long since learned to know as Detective Limpet, was walking a few steps
behind me on the other side of the road. I stopped at Number 9, my
destination, and I saw Limpet likewise stop outside a public-house which
stood opposite, and exchange a few words with a hulking brute leaning
against the wall, characterised by a heavy jaw, lowering brows, and a
strong Irish brogue, in whom I recognised Detective O'Brien. They both
turned their eyes on me as I stood on the door-step pulling the bell
handle, and I saw a stupid grin overspread the countenance of the Limpet.

The door was opened by a little maid-of-all-work who seemed doubtful as
to whether she should let me in or no, till a head adorned with
curl-papers appeared above the kitchen steps, calling out in a shrill
voice, "Jane, you fool, show the young lady in."

Next minute I was in the front kitchen, where Madame Combrisson, her
husband, and Bonafede awaited me.

The house was a good-sized, solidly-built one, originally intended for a
gentleman's residence, but fallen now on evil days. An odour of fried
onions and sawdust pervaded the establishment, for Madame Combrisson
boarded three or four of her lodgers, regaling them principally on
"_soupe à l'ognon_," and Combrisson carried on in the back kitchen
his carpentry business at which he kept these same lodgers employed,
paying them in kind with food and house-room, and doling out a few
shillings now and again as pocket-money. In this way he succeeded in
combining philanthropy and business, and though, after a few months, his
employees invariably left as soon as they had learned a little of the
English language and English prices, still there were always new-comers
willing, nay anxious, to replace them.

After a few preliminary words of introduction, I produced the jewellery
for Madame Combrisson's inspection. She was a small wiry woman, with hard,
covetous grey eyes, grizzled hair screwed up in a tight knot on the top of
her head, a nose like the beak of a bird of prey, and thin blue lips. Her
eyes lit up as her hands turned over the little diamond brooch and
finely-chased gold bracelet which I submitted to her inspection.

"Of course I am not a judge," she said, "but I should think we could
easily raise a little money on these. I wish I had it myself, I would
willingly give it for the Cause, but, _que voulez vous,
mademoiselle_? we are but poor folk; however, I know some one near here
who might perhaps be able to oblige us; I will go and see."

Bonafede winked at me and I could see that he considered the matter
settled. He and Combrisson left the kitchen and I remained alone with
madame, who proceeded to take her fringe out of the curl-papers, and to
exchange her petticoat and red flannel jacket for a somewhat rusty black
dress. Whilst performing her toilette she eyed me carefully. I noticed
that since she had inspected the jewellery she had involuntarily assumed a
more respectful tone in addressing me. "I hear from the comrades that you
are very active in the Cause, mademoiselle; have you been long in the
movement?"

I replied that it was getting on for two years.

"And your family, are they Anarchists also?"

I explained that my parents were dead and that I was the only one of my
family who worked in the movement. She seemed surprised at this
information, "But you must be rich," she said: "that jewellery you have
brought is very beautiful; you are young, you could enjoy yourself, mix
with those of your own class; why do you work in a printing-office
instead?"

"But I am an Anarchist. We must all do what we can to help the Cause, I
do my best; not more, however, than other comrades."

She seemed by now to have summed me up, though I was evidently still
somewhat of a mystery to her, and she merely said:--

"Oh, of course we are all Anarchists; we all do our best for the Cause."

As she was leaving, Bonafede came down and said that Matthieu would like
to see me if I saw fit, and together we mounted to the back attic where
the dynamitard was concealed.

Nobody could have guessed on sight that the puny little man before me
could be the dreaded Anarchist for whom the police of Europe had been
searching high and low during the past seven months. Matthieu was a tailor
by trade, and his physique bore traces of the sedentary work and of the
long hours passed in close unhealthy rooms. He was slightly hunchbacked,
his chest narrow and hollow, his legs bowed; his pale blue eyes with their
swollen red lids had the strained expression of one accustomed to make use
of the last rays of daylight before lighting the lamp. His massive jaw and
firm round chin, and high narrow forehead were the only features which
revealed in him the man of action and the fanatic. Yet this was the man
who, by a series of explosions culminating in the blowing up of a police
station, had spread terror in the ranks of the French bourgeoisie.

We shook hands, and I told them how I had been followed by Detective
Limpet and how he and O'Brien were stationed opposite the house.

"Yes," said Bonafede, "it is certain that they suspect Matthieu's
presence here; we must try to get rid of them in some way for a short
while; set them off on some false scent, so as to enable our comrade to
leave the house."

"If you would only let me do as I wish," broke in Matthieu, "I would soon
be out of this. I have a good revolver and I am not afraid to use it. I
would make a rush for it, and ten to one I should get off scot-free; and
anyhow better be taken fighting than caught like a rat in a hole."

We both tried to dissuade him, arguing that there was always time to take
such a step, and that with a little patience and ingenuity it was almost
certain that a means would be found for his safe escape.

In a few minutes Madame Combrisson entered the room. She handed me over
£10 and a receipt for the pledges, adding that her friend would not be
induced to lend more. I handed the sum over to Bonafede. He had now £22 in
hand, so that the financial side of the difficulty was solved. Madame
Combrisson, however, had news. A neighbour had informed her that Chief
Inspector Deveril had been seen in the street, and that, after giving
instructions to his two subordinates not to move from their post of
observation, he had left, it was supposed, in order to procure a
search-warrant. This news filled us with alarm. Almost any minute now the
police might claim entrance to the house, and then Matthieu would
inevitably be caught. What was to be done? I was told off to look out of a
front window from behind a curtain and report on the situation, but only
to return with the news that Limpet and O'Brien were both leaning airily
on their sticks studying the heavens with imperturbable calm. Matthieu was
growing restless. He walked up and down the small room like a caged beast,
nervously clutching at the revolver which he kept in his trouser pocket.
Madame Combrisson kept bemoaning her fate, saying that it would be the
ruin of her house if the police entered. Bonafede alone remained calm and
collected. At last he exclaimed, looking at his watch, "It is now past
eleven, in another half-hour the public-houses will open, let us hope that
our friends below may turn in to refresh themselves. In that minute
Matthieu must escape; we must have everything ready; he had better change
his clothes and disguise himself as much as possible. We will leave
together; we are both armed, and if the worst comes to the worst we will
sell our lives dearly."

"Oh, my poor house, my poor house!" moaned madame, "this business will be
the death of us all."

Bonafede turned on her savagely. "This is no time for recriminations," he
exclaimed. "Sharpen your wits and see if you cannot find some means of
getting rid of those spies. You are clever enough when it is a question of
serving your own interests."

Madame Combrisson seemed electrified by these words.

"I will try, Comrade, only give me time to think." Next minute, she
exclaimed, "How would it do to send down two of the comrades to pick a
quarrel in the street? They could start a fight, a crowd will assemble,
the detectives will go to see what is up, and you and Matthieu can avail
yourselves of the confusion to escape."

"Good!" replied Bonafede, "go and see about it at once. I will help
Matthieu to get ready, and you, Isabel, be on the look-out, and let us
know when the right moment has come."

I stationed myself behind the curtain at the front parlour window. In a
few minutes I saw a young German who lodged in the house rush up the area
steps into the street, followed by Combrisson. They were both shouting and
gesticulating loudly, and Combrisson seemed to be demanding money which
the other refused. A few passers-by stopped to listen to the two
foreigners, who danced around, growing ever more noisy; but Limpet and
O'Brien stood firm. They looked at the combatants, but seemed to consider
the matter as a joke, and only crossed over to our side of the way when
they saw a crowd begin to assemble. The quarrel between Combrisson and his
lodger began to flag when they saw that their object had failed, and the
German soon walked off in the direction of Tottenham Court Road. I watched
the detectives cross over to their former post of observation, and was
just going to inform the comrades of the negative result of this manoeuvre
when I saw Inspector Deveril coming down the street. For a second I stood
paralysed with apprehension: all was up with my friends! Next moment I had
climbed the four flights, and given the dreaded news.

Matthieu rushed to the attic window. It gave on to a wide gutter which
ran along several roofs. "This is my only means of escape. I will get into
one of these other houses by the skylight, and escape at the front door
whilst they are searching here."

"And if any one tries to stop you?" I exclaimed.

"So much the worse for them," he replied, clutching his revolver.

He was already outside the window when Bonafede spoke, advising him to
wait a minute whilst we saw what was going on. As soon as the police
knocked, he could carry out his plan. To be noticed by them on the roof
would be fatal to its success.

At that moment Combrisson rushed in. "I cannot tell what has happened.
Deveril spoke to those two spies and has walked off. The public-house has
opened, Limpet has gone inside, and only O'Brien remains on guard."

We all three went downstairs to watch proceedings, leaving Matthieu by
the window, ready at a moment's notice to put his desperate project into
execution.

Sure enough, all was quiet in the street below; passers-by were hurrying
home to their Sunday dinners, the smell of which pervaded the street and
house, and O'Brien stood at the door of the opposite pub, leaning
gracefully on his stick and gazing at the windows of our house. We stood
watching for about a quarter of an hour, fully expecting to see the police
appear; the room had gradually filled with the lodgers, all on the _qui
vive_, and jabbering fluently in foreign tongues. As nobody came and
all seemed quiet, Bonafede and I returned upstairs to reassure Matthieu.

In a few minutes we heard a ring at the door.

"It is they!" we exclaimed, and Matthieu leapt to the window, whilst
Bonafede rushed to the door, which burst open, giving admittance to a
strange-looking figure. The new-comer had the slight build and nervous
carriage of a Frenchman, but was got up in the most aggressively British
attire. Clean-shaven, with a short bulldog pipe in the corner of his
mouth, a billycock hat set rather jauntily on his head, a short,
drab-coloured overcoat of horsy cut, black and white check trousers,
red-skin riding gloves, square-toed walking shoes, a light cane, and a
rose in his buttonhole; you would have taken him at first sight for a
sporting tipster. Matthieu, who had stopped short at this sudden
apparition, and Bonafede, both stood staring in amazement. The new-comer
looked at them with a wicked twinkle in his eye, and burst out into a
hearty laugh.

"Why, it is you, Sylvestre," the Italian at last said, whilst Matthieu
jumped down into the room. "But what on earth have you done to yourself? I
should never have recognised you?"

"Ah! so I look in character, then? If you did not recognise me no wonder
that I was able to take in those gaping clodhoppers, fresh from their
turnip-fields, in the street below. I have news for you. Just listen," but
here he broke off, for, looking round the room, he had caught sight of me
(I had stood speechless in a corner whilst this scene was enacted). "First
though, my dear fellow, I must beg you to introduce me to the lady. The
emotions of the moment seem to have made you and Matthieu forget all
manners."

Bonafede turned smilingly towards me, and introduced us: "Armand
Sylvestre, a French comrade; Isabel Meredith, editor of the _Tocsin_"

The Frenchman made me an elegant and profound bow in strange contrast
with his sporting appearance, removing his hat, which he had till then
kept on.

"But what has happened to you, Sylvestre?" exclaimed Matthieu. "Your hair
has turned purple."

"Oh, for Heaven's sake don't look at my hair. A most awful fate has
befallen it. Yesterday I heard from Cotteaux that you intended leaving
soon, so I settled to come down here this morning, and thought it would be
as well to disguise myself; one never knows, one can sometimes get such a
lot of fun out of those heavy-witted, pudding-eating police. So I asked
Marie to go into a West End hairdresser's and procure some black hair-dye,
as I know my gold locks are well known to our friends below. She asked for
some, explaining that it was for theatricals, and last night I tried it.
With what result you see!--and mind I only made up my mind to come out
after washing it some dozen times. Now, with a hat on, it's not very
noticeable, but if you could have seen it last night; it had turned the
real imperial shade of purple! It was a sight for the gods!"

We all laughed heartily at his adventure, the humour of which was
heightened by the mock pathos and tragedy with which he narrated it. But
Matthieu, who was straining his ears to catch the slightest sound
downstairs, asked him to proceed with his news.

"_Oh, mais vous saves, mademoiselle, votre pays est tout-à-fait
épatant_," he began, turning to me. "As I came down the street I
noticed Deveril speaking with those two satellites of his outside the 'Cat
and Mouse.' I at once guessed something was up here, and thought I would
try and pump them, so I walked into the bar and asked in my best English
accent for a whisky and soda, throwing down a half-sovereign to pay for
it, and began talking about racing bets with the barman. As I expected,
after a few minutes, Limpet entered, asking for a glass of bitter; he soon
got interested in our talk. I was giving tips with the air of a Newmarket
jockey, and as he had finished his drink I offered to treat him. He
hesitated, saying that he was in a hurry, and I then pumped the whole tale
out of him, how he and his comrade were watching this house, where they
had reason to know that a dangerous French Anarchist was concealed, and so
forth and so on.

"'But,' I said, 'if this is so, why do you not get a warrant to search
the house?' And he then explained to me that the inspector had wished so
to do, but that the magistrate, spite of his entreaties, had refused to
sign the warrant because it was Sunday!! Yes, this is an extraordinary
country. Society must be saved, but before everything the Sabbath must not
be broken. _C'est delicieux!_ Having gained this information, I
politely wished him good day, and walked over to this house. You should
have seen the faces of those two men. I expect their mouths are open
still."

We all stared at each other at this information. This, then, was the
secret of the situation. The English Sunday had saved our comrade!
Bonafede went downstairs to summon the Combrissons and relieve their
minds. We had now nearly twenty-four hours before us; it was certain that
till nine o'clock on Monday morning the search-warrant would not be
signed. In this interval Matthieu must leave the house, but how?

Sylvestre, who evidently looked upon the whole question as a good joke
--_une bonne blague_--suggested that the dynamitard should dress up
in his sporting attire; he urged that the detectives had seen him enter
and could not be surprised at his leaving, and that this would be the best
solution of the difficulty. The idea seemed feasible, and it was tried on.
Matthieu got into the check trousers and horsy overcoat, but the effect
was too ludicrous, and he was the first to laugh at the figure he cut in
the looking-glass. Something else must be found. Madame Combrisson came to
the rescue. She reminded us of a Jewish comrade, also a tailor by trade,
who was not unlike Matthieu, being slightly hunchbacked. Her idea was to
get him round, dress him in the fugitive's clothes, let Bonafede call a
cab in an ostentatious style, into which the false Matthieu was to jump
and drive off; the detectives would probably follow on their bicycles, and
then was our opportunity. Only, how to get this man on to the scene
without his advent being noticed by them? For if he were seen to enter,
the game was up; his exit would not cause surprise. We were still face to
face with the same difficulty, and Matthieu once more began to pace the
room like a wild beast in a cage.

Sylvestre broke the silence. "The only way out of the difficulty is to
disguise our man. Dress him up as a woman; he will then enter without
causing observation."

In a few minutes all was settled. I was to leave with the hand-bag in
which I had brought in the jewellery to be pawned; but this time it was to
contain a dress belonging to Madame Combrisson. With this I was to proceed
to the lodging of the Jewish comrade, Yoski, taking care to lose on the
way any detective who might be following me. Yoski was to dress himself in
the woman's clothes, and return with me to Grafton Street, care being
taken that the detectives should notice his entry. He was then to exchange
his female attire for Matthieu's clothes and drive off in a cab, as
previously arranged, and then Matthieu, in his turn donning the skirt and
blouse, was to leave the house on my arm, whilst the police would be
rushing after a red-herring. Sylvestre turned a somersault to express his
joy, and, slapping Matthieu on the shoulder, said, "Why, before long,
_mon vieux_, you will again be treading the flags of Paris, and, let
us hope, frightening the bourgeois out of their wits."

By two o'clock I was on my way. When I left the house Deveril was talking
with O'Brien over the way; Limpet had disappeared for the time being. The
inspector at once noticed my presence, and, calling to a corner-boy
lounging at the public-house door, he spoke to him, pointing me out, and
this "copper's nark" followed doggedly in my steps. Yoski lived in a
turning off the Mile-End Road, but anxious to give no inkling as to my
destination, I turned in the opposite direction, and after a lengthy
_détour_ stopped at my own door. I stayed indoors nearly an hour,
hoping that my attendant's patience would give out, but he showed no signs
of moving, time was precious, and I decided to set out once more. This
time I walked down the Euston Road to the beginning of Marylebone Road,
where I jumped on to a bus going towards Maida Vale. The youth did
likewise, and at the beginning of the Kilburn High Street I descended,
making my way up that dreary road. I began to despair of ridding myself of
my pursuer. I was miles out of my way, the hours were passing, and he
still dogged my steps. I trudged along, weary and worried, weighed down
with the responsibility of my position. Suddenly my eyes caught sight of a
solitary hansom coming slowly towards me, I hurried forward, the youth was
some paces behind me on the other side of the road, and before he had time
to realise what I was up to I had boarded that hansom and shouted to the
cabman, "Five shillings, if you set me down at Baker Street Station in ten
minutes," and away we went. I looked out of the spy window in the back of
the cab and saw my "nark" standing staring in the middle of the road. At
Baker Street I took a ticket for the Edgeware Road and there I jumped into
a train for Aldgate Station. When I once more found myself in the streets
I looked carefully around me and to my relief was able to assure myself
that no one was following me. Taking a circuitous route, for greater
precaution, I at last reached my destination.

I seemed to be in a foreign country. Dark-eyed comely women and pretty
children, dressed in gay colours, were walking up and down. The shop-signs
and advertisements were mostly written in Hebrew characters, loud
conversation in a foreign language accompanied by vivacious gesticulation,
caught the ear. The narrow, dirty street was swarming with inhabitants,
the front doors were mostly open, and many people had placed chairs on the
doorsteps and pavement and were sitting out, though it would be an
euphemism to speak of enjoying the fresh air in such a neighbourhood. The
house at which I stopped was a six-roomed "cottage," but whilst I stood on
the doorstep, waiting to gain admittance, at least fourteen persons passed
in and out. At last a wizened old woman, scrutinising me suspiciously,
answered my inquiries.

"Yoski! yes, he live on the tird floor back, vis his vife and schwester.
Yes, you will find him in."

Yoski was a small, unhealthy-looking man, not much unlike Matthieu,
though darker in colouring, and of a weaker type of face. He was a
serious, silent, earnest man, a model of solidarity, regularly setting
aside his weekly contribution to the Cause out of his meagre earning on
which he had to maintain a wife and four children and a young sister. They
all lived in the one room, but one felt that this did not cause them any
suffering; they were evidently used to it. The three grown-ups were all at
work when I entered, and the children clustered round like inquisitive
little animals. I explained briefly my identity and the object of my
visit, talking English, which was not understood by his female relatives.
He nodded gravely, and said: "But I cannot change here; it would cause too
much curiosity. I will tell my wife that I must go with you for some work,
and I will go into the room of a friend of mine who is out and dress
there." He did as he said and we left the room together.

On the landing I handed him the bag. "Is everything here?" he inquired,
"hat and all?"

The hat! Who had thought of it? And yet without that it was impossible to
go out.

"Cannot you get at your wife's or your sister's?" I inquired.

"Impossible," he replied, "they would never give me a moment's peace till
they knew why I wanted it. You might, however, try with Rebecca Wiesmann;
she is a comrade and lives two streets farther down. Do not, however, tell
her all this matter; make up some story and see if you can manage."

Much doubting my success, I went round to Rebecca's. I had seen her
sometimes at meetings, but I felt that she would be surprised at my
appearance, and still more at my errand. Still there was nothing for it,
the shops were all shut, and so I went round to her. This girl lived
alone, having separated from her parents, who were strictly orthodox and
intolerant Jews. She was indeed taken aback at seeing me, but did not like
to refuse my request. I told her that I was expected at a comrade's house,
that I had been followed by detectives and wished to lose sight of them,
and she, with the foreign Jews' dread of policemen as omnipotent beings,
swallowed the tale and provided me with a showy best hat quite unlike my
own. This I donned and left with my own in a paper under my arm, in spite
of her pressing offer to keep it for me.

In a few minutes I was knocking at the door Yoski had pointed out to me.
I found him ready, carefully shaved of his moustache, and quite
transformed in appearance. The hat and veil completed the disguise. By six
o'clock we were in Grafton Street. I was relieved to find that Deveril had
left, and that only Limpet and O'Brien were on guard. They took a good
stare at us as we passed them by.

Combrisson himself opened to us. "Oh, here you are at last. We began to
fear you would never come. It has been as much as we could do to prevent
Matthieu from spoiling everything by making a rush for it. Come in, there
is not a moment to lose. Deveril may be back any minute, and he's not so
easily gulled as those two mugs."

We found Matthieu in a state of great nervous excitement. The long,
anxious hours of waiting had told on him. A nervous twitch convulsed his
mouth. He jumped spasmodically to his feet as we entered the room. "At
last," exclaimed Bonafede, with a sigh of relief on seeing us. "Now,
Matthieu," he said, laying a hand encouragingly on the man's shoulder,
"there is no time to be lost. Isabel will go downstairs whilst you two
exchange clothes. As soon as you are ready I will fetch the cabs. Be
courageous, and, above all, calm, and in half-an-hour all will be over."

I went downstairs with Madame Combrisson, and we paced nervously up and
down the front parlour. Every other minute one of us went to look out of
the window. It was nearly dark. The street lamps were lighting up, and
still the two detectives watched on the other side of the road.

"Where is Sylvestre?" I at last inquired, to break the tense silence.

"Who knows? He left about half-an-hour ago, saying he would soon be back.
He is off on some madcap expedition, you may be sure. He is a dreadful
_farceur._"

At that moment no fewer than three barrel-organs came up the street,
stopped nearly opposite the house, and started playing "The man who broke
the bank at Monte Carlo," and other similar classics. I was at the window
and saw Sylvestre go gravely up to the detectives, bow, say a few words,
and cross over to our door. Madame rushed out to open to him.

"So here you are, Mademoiselle. All is well, I hope?" he inquired.

I nodded assent.

"Oh, what a game it will be to see their faces to-morrow when Deveril
comes round with his warrant! Meanwhile, I was sure those poor devils were
boring themselves to death, so I went down to the Italian quarter and
brought back these musicians. I have just told them that I hope the music
will help them to pass a pleasant half-hour."

Just then Bonafede came down, followed by the false Matthieu. The lower
part of his face was concealed in a muffler, and the illusion was really
very deceptive.

"I am going now for the cab," said the Italian. As soon as I return Yoski
must hurry out, jump in rapidly, and drive off. I shall be waiting for
you, Isabel, and Matthieu with a cab just by Shoolbred's; time to leave
the house five minutes after the departure of Yoski. Here is Matthieu;
you, Madame Combrisson, see if his dress is right; now I am going."

"Wait a minute," exclaimed Sylvestre, "give me a bottle of whisky and two
glasses, I will go over and offer some to the 'tecs; it will look as if I
am trying to distract their attention from Bonafede and the cab, and will
lend truth to the scene."

All passed off to perfection. As the hansom drew up, Sylvestre, with a
polite bow, offered a drink to Limpet and O'Brien. The latter caught sight
of the cab, just as the false Matthieu hurriedly jumped in, and, pushing
the Frenchman roughly aside, he leapt on his bicycle and rushed off in
pursuit just as the cab disappeared round the street corner. Bonafede had
quietly slipped off down the Tottenham Court Road. Limpet was pacing up
and down distractedly, uncertain whether to stick to his post or join his
comrade in pursuit. In five minutes' time I quietly walked out, arm in arm
with Matthieu, turning round on the doorstep to shake hands with Madame
Combrisson. We walked boldly past Limpet, and were soon at Shoolbred's,
where I left the dynamitard with Bonafede, and, taking a roundabout walk,
returned within half-an-hour to Grafton Street. In an hour's time Bonafede
joined us. "All is well!" he exclaimed; "within a couple of hours our
comrade will be safe in Leicester. It has been an anxious day, but it has
ended better than I had dared hope for."

"And now let us get some dinner," broke in Sylvestre, "I am just fainting
with hunger. Here is a sovereign, Madame; see if you can get us something
fit to eat, though I fear that, with this hateful English Sunday,
everything will be shut."

"Do not abuse the English Sunday," rejoined Bonafede, "to its sanctity we
owe our friend's escape."

We were soon enjoying a supper which Madame Combrisson got in from the
neighbouring Italian restaurant. We were all in high spirits, and laughed
and chatted freely. Limpet, and O'Brien who had returned after satisfying
himself as to the true identity of the false Matthieu, who had driven
straight home, kept pacing up and down in front of the area railings,
evidently half suspecting that we had played them a trick.

All that night we sat round the kitchen fire, chatting and dozing
alternately. At midnight Deveril came, accompanied by two other officers,
who relieved Limpet and O'Brien. The next morning, as the clock hands
pointed to 9.15, a loud rat-tat resounded through the house. Deveril, with
our two friends of the previous day, accompanied by three uniformed
policemen, were on the doorstep. Combrisson opened to them with his most
engaging smile. He politely read the warrant which the inspector handed
him, and bowed him in, saying that he was happy that he should persuade
himself that Matthieu was not, and never had been, on the premises.
Deveril seemed rather taken aback by this reception, but was too sure of
his case to feel much doubt.

Never shall I forget that man's face when, after a three hours' hunt in
every hole and corner of the building he had to come down persuaded that
his victim had escaped him.

He was perfectly green with rage. Turning to Bonafede who, with us
others, was sitting in the front parlour, he said, "Well, Signore, you
have been one too much for me on this occasion, but remember, he laughs
best who laughs last. We shall doubtless meet again soon."

Bonafede merely shrugged his shoulders and turned aside, whilst the
crestfallen Limpet, who had evidently received a severe wigging from his
superior for allowing his quarry to escape, turned on me a look of intense
hatred and hissed out,

"Remember, miss, you may not always be in London; you will yet pay me for
this!" and with this melodramatic threat he and his comrades departed
amidst the jeers of the assembled lodgers.

In the street they were met by deafening shouts of "Vive Deveril! Hurrah
for the detective force!" Sylvestre, who had slipped out a few minutes
before the arrival of the police, had assembled in the road all the
Italian comrades of the _Tocsin_ group, several Frenchmen of his own
acquaintance, and four or five organ-grinders, and amidst the ironic
cheers of their enemies, the dejected guardians of law and order made
their shamefaced exit from the scene.



CHAPTER IX

SOME ANARCHIST PERSONALITIES


There has been of late years a remarkable, and, on the whole, a very
futile tendency among certain men of science to dissect and classify
abnormal people and abnormal ideas, to discover that geniuses are mad, and
that all manner of well-intentioned fanatics are born criminals.

But there were elements in the Anarchist party which defied the science
of the psychological analyst, so strangely and intricately were the most
heterogeneous qualities blended in certain of their number--fanaticism,
heroism, criminality, and not unfrequently a spicing of genius.

The primary difference between the ordinary normal man and the fanatic
--as between the normal man and the madman or the genius--is the totally
different standpoint whence each views life. This it is which renders it
impossible for the normal man really to understand or judge fanatics. He
cannot grasp their motive, their point of view, and is therefore morally
incapable of judging them.

Among the Anarchists, who may be said to represent the intellectual
rather than the material side of the Socialist movement--there were many
fanatics. This fanaticism showed itself in different ways--sometimes in
the most admirable self-abnegation, in the sacrifice of wealth, position,
and happiness; frequently in abnormal actions of other kinds, and most
noticeably in deeds of violence.

Very diverse in nature were the motives which prompted the committal of
these acts of violence--these assassinations and dynamite explosions--in
different men. With some it was an act of personal revolt, the outcome of
personal sufferings and wrongs endured by the rebel himself, by his family
or his class. In others violence was rather the offspring of ideas, the
logical result of speculation upon the social evil and the causes thereof.
These Anarchists referred to their actions as Propaganda by Deed.

Émile Henry, the dynamitard of the Café Terminus, belonged to the number
of what I may call the theoretical dynamitard. His terrible acts were the
outcome of long and earnest thought; they were born of his mental analysis
of the social canker. He committed them not in moments of passion, but
with all the _sang froid_ of a man governed by reason. His defence
when on trial was a masterpiece of logical deduction and eloquent
reasoning.

To the average man it is no doubt very difficult to conceive that when he
threw his bomb among the crowd in the Café Terminus, maiming and killing
indiscriminately, Émile Henry was performing his duty according to his own
lights just as much as a soldier when he obeys orders and fires on the
enemy, a city man when he embarks on the day's business, or a parson when
he preaches a sermon against prevailing vices. It was his sermon--however
vigorously preached--against the prevailing vices and injustices of
Society, and against the indifference which all classes displayed towards
these. He took upon himself to strike a blow against this indifference on
behalf of all the weaker and more unfortunate members of society. Being a
man of intellect and some culture, he could not, like his more ignorant
_confrères_, imagine that one man or one small group of men, was
responsible for these. Earnest thought and reflection told him that if any
section of society suffered, then society at large was guilty: all the
thoughtless, all the indifferent members of society were equally
responsible for its abuses. Now this may be true enough theoretically, but
no one but a fanatic or a madman would carry the reasoning farther to the
point of saying: "Society at large is guilty; society at large must
suffer. Society is fairly well represented by the mixed crowd in a café. I
will attack this crowd indiscriminately, and kill as many of their number
as I can. I will unreluctantly end my days on the scaffold in order to
accomplish this very obvious duty;" and proceed from words to deeds.

There is something terribly, if pervertedly logical in this reasoning,
and although nothing could be farther from the attitude of the ordinary
delinquent, it is no doubt more dangerous to the peace and continuance of
society; and such was the attitude and the reasoning which rendered the
Anarchists so formidable, and which led up to many of their most terrible
outrages. Émile Henry was in his own way a well-meaning youth; kindly in
private life, frugal in his habits; studious, industrious, and free from
vice, he lived with his old mother and mixed little with his fellows, and
no one who knew him could have suspected that this quiet, studious boy
would have developed into the terrible assassin whose act sent a thrill of
horror through the world.

To Anarchists of this order, abstract ideas and opinions replaced all the
ordinary forces of life. Their every action was prompted by some theory,
and they fashioned their lives to fit their peculiar views of what it
ought to be. Émile Henry belonged to this number no less than Kosinski,
Bonafede, and certain so-called Christian Anarchists. For in some fanatics
the Anarchist ideas, instead of leading to violence, led to the absolute
negation and rejection of it.

Among the many frequenters of our office and of the weekly discussion
meetings held there, was a Christian Anarchist, one of those holding what
was known as the "non-resistance to evil" creed. He, too, was a man who
fitted his life to his ideas, who lived in ideas, whose whole being
centred round his ideas. He was a religious fanatic whose course had
deviated into strange paths.

Norbery was a pale, anxious-looking Lancashire man, with weak, restless
eyes and a resolute mouth, who did not lack a certain dignity of bearing.

Both the organisationists and the individualists united in abusing and
despising the Christian Norbery, but no amount of insults or invective
ruffled his temper or aroused his wrath. "When you preach force or use
force," he said to his opponents, "you imitate the very methods used by
Governments. You will never attain universal peace and brotherhood by such
means. As Anarchists we have no right to use other than passive
resistance, for by using coercion we are defeating our own ends and
justifying the actions of our persecutors."

The more indignant his Anarchist opponents became in the course of
debate, the calmer and more complacent grew Norbery. "Abuse me," he would
say, "insult me, use violence towards me, if you will; I shall turn the
other cheek." Once a hot-headed Italian Anarchist lost patience with him
and threw him downstairs. He lay where he fell with a sprained ankle,
repeating good words from the Sermon on the Mount, until his adversary,
overcome with shame and remorse, picked him up and bandaged his injured
limb. Once during certain strike riots in the North of England, Norbery
journeyed to the scene of trouble to preach passive measures and the
Anarchist principles to the rioters. He was dragged from his platform by
the police and badly hustled and knocked about. But Norbery was determined
on having his say; he procured a chain and padlock, chained himself to a
lamppost, threw away the key, and resumed the interrupted course of his
harangue. A large crowd gathered round the persistent orator, attracted
partly by his eloquence and partly by the novelty of his situation. The
police hurried to the scene and tried to drag him down; his coat and
shirt, torn to shreds, remained in their hands, while the semi-naked
Anarchist preached away to the constantly increasing crowd. The officers
of the law foamed with rage, and threatened and pommelled the enchained
and defenceless Norbery. Norbery grew more eloquent and more argumentative
under this treatment. Nearly an hour passed before a file could be
procured and the chain severed, and by that time Norbery had ample
opportunity to finish his discourse, and was conveyed to the police
station in a fainting and exhausted condition.

Armitage and I engaged in endless discussions with Norbery on the
question of violence, maintaining on our side that violence could only be
overcome by violence, and that, however peaceful our ultimate aims might
be, force must inevitably be used towards their attainment. We argued and
adduced reasons in support of our views, and Norbery argued and adduced
counter-reasons in support of his views, but neither the one nor the other
of us was ever in the least affected by his opponent's eloquence, and at
the end of the discussion we were all, if anything, more staunchly
persuaded of the sense and justice of our own case than at the start. So
much for the profitableness of debate between confirmed partisans.

Émile Henry was representative of the theoretical dynamitard; Matthieu,
like Ravachol, of the dynamitard by passion. A----, who belonged rather to
the Ravachol type, and ended by killing one of the crowned heads of
Europe, was during a few weeks a frequenter of the _Tocsin_. He had
turned Anarchist in revolt against the society which had cramped his life,
starved him in childhood, overworked his body, underfed his mind, where he
had found neither place nor welcome. Born into the lowest depths of
society, dragged up amid criminals and drunkards, he had spent his early
years between the streets and the jail-house, at times working his
undeveloped muscles, at other times begging or picking pockets.

"It is all very well," he said to me one day, "for those on the top rungs
of the ladder to talk of the unrelenting laws of nature and the survival
of the fittest. For my part I have felt very forcibly one great law of
nature, the law of self-preservation: the right to live when you have once
been born, the right to food and to the pleasures of life, and I
determined to survive at all costs. When my stomach is empty and my boots
let in water, the mere sight of a replete and well-clothed man makes me
feel like murder. It may be true that it is natural for the strongest and
the best men to rise above their fellows, but even this is not the case in
our society of to-day. The weakest and the worst have somehow got to the
top, and giants are bolstering up the impotence of dwarfs. These dwarfs
are crushing the life-blood out of us. We must pull them down, exterminate
them; we must turn the whole world upside down before we can create a new
and better order of things."

His action was not a theoretical protest translated into deeds; it was an
act of vengeance, of personal and class revenge.

Giannoli was a type apart. His desires and actions were responsible for
his views. They coloured and distorted his opinions and destroyed all
sense of proportion. An incident in his private life would stand up
giant-like in the way of all the doctrines in the world, dwarfing opinions
and creeds. He was a physically active man and his ideas grew out of his
life, whereas men like Kosinski might be said to abandon the material life
in the pursuit of an ideal.

Giacomo Giannoli was a man of some education, and no ordinary degree of
natural refinement and culture, one whom you would pronounce at first
sight to be a gentleman. He was the son of a fairly well-to-do builder in
a provincial town of Lombardy, and had received a good general education
in boyhood. Early left an orphan by his father's death, he had inherited
his business, and for some years he carried it on prosperously, living
with his mother and sisters. But before he was two-and-twenty his
naturally erratic disposition asserted itself, and he chafed under the
restraints and monotony of life in a small provincial town. He sold up his
business at a great loss, well-nigh ruining his family, had it not been
for his mother's small private means; and with his share of the proceeds
of the sale he travelled about for some years, leading a roving life, and
devoting most of his time and cash to the Anarchist propaganda, constantly
getting into troubles and bothers, at times in hiding, at others in
prison, always in difficulties, growing harder and harder up as the months
went by, and his moderate means slipped through his untenacious fingers.

Two convergent factors had led up to this sudden change in his life.
Firstly, an incident of a private nature which revolutionised his notions
of individual morality, and secondly, the discovery of the Anarchist
doctrines which gave form to his new views. The incident which was
primarily responsible for his new views of life, he recounted to me not
long after his arrival in London.

"It was a woman," he said, "who completely altered my views of life, and
made me see how perverted and unnatural are our ideas of sex and love and
morals, and, in short, of everything. She was an ignorant peasant girl who
lived in a neighbouring village, but a woman of rare mind and character. I
shall never forget her, nor what I owe her. I was a young fellow of some
twenty-one years at the time, and I loved this girl with all the passion
and faith of a youth of those years. Teresina loved me in return, and for
some two years we lived on happily till one day it was brought to my
knowledge that she was unfaithful to me. I was beside myself with grief
and mortification and jealous fury. For some hours I just raged up and
down my room like one demented, crying like a child one minute, cursing
and meditating revenge the next. I felt that I must have blood at all
costs to appease my passion--Teresina's or her lover's, or somebody's. I
was to meet Teresina that evening as usual towards nine o'clock, and I
thought the intervening hours would never go by. One hope suddenly
suggested itself to me, and I clung desperately to it. 'Perhaps it is
false!' I said to myself. 'I will ask Teresina. It is all a lie,' and then
'Proofs, proofs, I must have proofs!' I cried, and once more my thoughts
turned back to murder. Thus I went through the long hours, and at last
evening came--a beautiful warm May evening, and long before the appointed
hour I was at our rendezvous in a deserted _podere_ on the
mountain-side, overgrown with flags and other spring flowers, among which
the fireflies were flitting noiselessly. I had no eyes for the beauty of
the scene, however. I paced up and down waiting for my sweetheart, cursing
the treachery of women and the blindness of men. Suddenly she appeared,
dark against the clear evening sky, graceful, gay, and unconscious as
ever. Without a word of welcome I rushed at her, seized her by the arm,
and hurled forth all my accusations and all my reproaches.

"'Tell me it is not true,' I cried at last, 'tell me it is not true, or I
will kill you where you stand!'

"I expected the usual routine of tears and protestations of innocence,
all the lies and subterfuges with which women are wont to defend
themselves against the unreasoning savagery of their mates. I was
disappointed. Teresina stood perfectly silent till I had finished
speaking; then without flinching, without one instant's hesitation, she
answered, 'It is true. Every word of it is true.'

"If the moon and the stars had all dropped simultaneously out of heaven
at my feet I should not have been more astonished. The calmness of her
answer, the steady earnestness of her gaze as she looked back fearlessly
into my eyes, her utter lack of subterfuge, took away my breath. I dropped
her arm and stood staring at her, bereft of speech and understanding. At
last I blurted out stupidly that I did not understand her, that I must be
going mad, and entreated her to explain.

"'I said it was true; that I love Giordano, and have accepted his love,'
she answered. Still I did not fully grasp her meaning.

"'But, Teresina, I thought that you loved me; have you lied to me then?'
I exclaimed.

"'No, I have not lied,' she answered me. 'I have never lied to you,' and
she took my hand in her strong little hand, and led me like one blind or
intoxicated to the projecting root of a tree close by, and there sat down
by my side.

"'Listen,' she said, still holding my hand in hers, 'I ought to have told
you what I have to say before now. I only hesitated because I knew it
would cause you acute suffering at first ... until you could understand.
Believe me, I do love you as much as ever I did, and I could not bear even
the thought of living without you. I love Giordano too, in a different way
it is true, but still I love him. He has not got your mind or your heart,
or your wonderful knowledge' (she was a very ignorant girl, so far as
learning was concerned, and my small knowledge of books appeared to her
little short of miraculous, poor child!), 'but then he has some qualities
you do not possess. Well, I love him for these, and I enjoy being with him
in a quite different way from what I experience with you.'

"I was silent, and she continued after a short pause:--

"'Nothing is more brutish or more selfish than jealousy, my friend. If I
thought another woman could give you a moment's happiness, I should say:
"Take it, enjoy it!" We do not grudge our friends every moment of
enjoyment not enjoyed in our company. We wish them other friendships and
other joys. What is there in the love between man and woman which should
make us so selfish and so unreasonable? For my part, I must have freedom
at all costs, absolutely at all costs. It is dearer to me than anything
else in life, and I had sooner sacrifice even love and happiness; indeed,
I cannot love or be happy without it. For God's sake grant me this liberty
as I grant it to you! Take my love as I can give it to you, but do not ask
me to be your slave on its account! Be sure you have my heart, and little
of it remains to be squandered in other directions. What does the rest
matter? I do not grudge you your loves, your pleasures, your caprices! Do
not grudge me mine. Life is necessarily full of sorrows; do not let us
embitter it unnecessarily.'

"She ceased speaking. She had risen to her feet and stood in front of me
as she spoke, then as she finished she sank down on her knees by my side.

"'Do you understand?' she asked me. 'Can you love me on these terms?
liberty--absolute liberty for us both?'

"I answered 'Yes,' nor did I ever regret the answer.

"I think that was the most momentous day in my life, for it wrought the
greatest change in me. My eyes were opened by the peasant girl's words,
and from that evening forward I regarded life quite differently. For the
first time I realised the necessity to the individual to enjoy absolute
personal freedom in love as in all else in life. All my previous ideas and
prejudices appeared to me monstrous and iniquitous. I saw the falseness of
all our ideas of morality, the absurdity of placing conventions before
nature and the detestable character of our dealings with women and of our
attitude in such matters. And with this suddenly awakened vision I looked
anew on life, and it seemed to me that till then I had never lived. All
that which I had before taken for granted I now began to question. I found
that instead of thinking out life's problems for myself I had allowed
myself to grow into other peoples' ideas, that I had tacitly taken for
right what they had pronounced right, and for wrong what they had
stigmatised as wrong. My spiritual world now turned, as it were, a
complete somersault, and I was re-born a new man--an Anarchist.

"I and Teresina and Giordano lived very happily for some months, much to
the scandal of the narrow-minded, bigoted village folk, until I was
compelled to absent myself from the country owing to some little
disturbances in the neighbourhood in which I had got implicated.

"Teresina followed me into exile, and with little intermission remained
with me during all those early years of wanderings and adventure. She
cared little about Anarchist doctrines, though herself a born rebel and an
innate Anarchist. She did more for me than all the doctrines in the world.
Poor child! When at last I got through all my money, and life from day to
day grew harder and more precarious, food scantier, clothes raggeder, and
surroundings more dangerous, she still remained faithful to me in her own
way, but the life was too hard for her. We had spent the summer in Paris,
and there I had got seriously implicated in a little Anarchist venture and
found it necessary to flee the country with all haste. Teresina followed
me into Belgium in the bitter winter weather. She died of consumption in a
Brussels hospital shortly after our arrival."

Such, in his own words, were the influences and the circumstances which
revolutionised Giannoli's entire life and his outlook on things. He became
one of the leaders of the most advanced section of the "Individualist
Anarchists," who maintain that not only is government of man by man wrong
and objectionable, but that no ties or obligations of any sort bind men
together. The ethics of "humanity" and "brotherhood" are unknown to these
Anarchists. They recognise no laws, social or moral, no obligations or
duties towards their fellows, no organisation or association of any sort.
They claim absolute freedom for the individual, freedom to live, die,
love, enjoy, think, work, or take--this freedom in each individual only
curtailed by others claiming equal rights. And I am bound to admit that
the question whether such individual freedom would not tend to individual
licence and domination by the stronger and cleverer or more unscrupulous
man in the future, met with little consideration.

That it led to such licence in the present among themselves was an
indubitable fact. All the individualist Anarchists agreed that, being at
war with existing society, which interfered with, coerced, and used
violence towards them, they were at liberty to use all means against
society in retaliation--force and even fraud if expedient. But the less
intelligent and more ignorant men who came in contact with these
principles considered themselves not only at liberty to use all means
against society, the enemy; but honour or scruples of any sort among
themselves were tabooed. A naturally honourable man like Giannoli was, of
course, free from the danger of falling victim to such perverted
sophistry. But the manner in which these doctrines succeeded in perverting
the minds of fairly intelligent and well-meaning men is illustrated by the
following incident.

One evening, some months after the advent of Giannoli and his friends,
there arrived at the office of the _Tocsin_ a small party of three
men and one woman--all of them Spaniards. They requested me to help them
to procure lodgings for the night, and, as they knew nothing of the
English language, to assist them the following morning in procuring
tickets, etc., with a view to their immediate re-departure for the States.
Giannoli, who knew the men, having spent some years in Spain, explained to
me that the leader of the party, a handsome, well-spoken young man, was an
engineer belonging to a good Barcelona family. The second one, a
good-natured giant, was his brother and an engineer like himself. The
third male member of the party was a lanky, scrofulous journalist, a man
of many words and few wits. The lady, a pretty brunette, was their
"compagna." She had escaped from her family and eloped with Fernandez,
the engineer, but was apparently shared on communistic principles.

I settled the party for the night in a small hotel and procured their
tickets for the morrow's journey, after which they proceeded to hand over
to Giannoli, with many cautions and precautions, a mysterious linen bag
which, it was whispered, contained some twelve thousand lire in bank-notes
(about five hundred pounds sterling). Then, having been assured by
Giannoli that I was to be trusted, they told me their story.

The two brothers, the engineers, had till quite recently been employed by
a large electrical engineering firm in Barcelona, of which an elder
brother, some years their senior, was the manager. For some time the two
younger men had been engaged, unknown to their family, in Anarchist
propaganda, and had fallen in with the section of the _individualisti_.
Fernandez was in love with Adolfa, the daughter of a well-to-do merchant,
and had secretly talked her over to his own ideas. The girl's parents
objected to the match on account of the extreme youth of the couple--the
girl was not quite eighteen and the young man still considerably under
age. Therefore they settled to elope, and Fernandez's brother and Vanni,
their journalist friend, expressed a desire to form an addition to the
elopement. This Fernandez had at first objected to, but the girl, who had
made rapid strides into the Giannolian free-love theories, insisted. Lack
of money formed the only obstacle to this scheme, but an unforeseen
circumstance enabled them to remove it.

The eldest brother, who had charge of the finances of the establishment,
and whose business it was to pay the men their wages, wished to absent
himself from the works for a few days, and, without the knowledge of his
employers, he broke rules to the extent of handing over to his brother
Fernandez, as to one beyond suspicion, the men's wages--the five hundred
pounds now contained in the mysterious linen bag.

"Now," argued Fernandez to himself, "I, as an Anarchist, do not recognise
private property, nor any set moral laws. The company's money is the
result of plunder; they can afford to lose it and have no right to it; I
stand desperately in need of it--and it is in my hands.... My brother?...
oh, my brother, he is after all nothing but a bourgeois, and I, as an
Anarchist, admit of no family ties."

Thus when, two days later, the unfortunate manager returned, he found his
brothers gone, the money nowhere to be found, and disgrace and ruin ahead.
Driven to despair, and not knowing in what direction to turn for the
necessary sum, the wretched man ended his perplexities with a bullet. This
was the first news which greeted the runaways on their arrival in the
States.

Now the younger brothers who had perpetrated this cruel thing were not
hardened criminals. From what little I saw of them, they appeared to be
kindly, courteous, and, by nature, fairly honourable men. What they lacked
was moral strength. Under ordinarily good influences they would have acted
in an ordinarily proper way. They had not the force of character necessary
for handling the Anarchist individualist doctrines, which, excellently as
they may work with men of character, are fatal to weaker men. The man who
recognises no law outside himself must be capable of governing himself.

The office of the _Tocsin_ was the constant scene of debate and
dispute between the two rival camps in the Anarchist party--the
organisationists and the individualists. Bonafede and Gnecco belonged to
the former, while most of the active staff of the _Tocsin_--myself
among others--adhered to the latter section. A curious feature of the
matter--and I fancy it is not exclusively characteristic of the Anarchist
party--was the amount of invective and hatred, which both factions ought
properly to have expended on the common enemy, but which instead they
spent most of their time in levelling at one another. A casual witness of
these internal strifes might have imagined that the two parties were at
the antipodes in their ideas and objects, rather than comrades and
participators in a common belief. Their dissensions were alone forgotten
in a common hatred of government and existing society. And even in their
efforts to upraise the social revolution--the great upheaval to which all
Anarchists aspired--I doubt whether there lurked not some secret hope that
the detested rival faction might be demolished in the fray. Bonafede and
Giannoli were warm friends personally, and held one another in great
esteem. Yet I can clearly recollect Giannoli one evening, with tears in
his eyes, assuring me that his first duty when the Revolution broke out
would be to disembowel his dear friend.

"He is my friend," Giannoli said to me, "and I love him as such, and as a
man I admire him. But his doctrines are noxious; in time of Revolution
they would prove fatal to our Cause; they would be the undoing of all the
work for which we have suffered and fought. Organise a Revolution, indeed!
You might as well attempt to organise a tempest and to marshal the
elements into order! I know Bonafede to be above personal ambition, but,
take my word for it, most of these organisationists hope to organise
themselves into comfortable places when their time comes! It is our duty
to destroy them."



CHAPTER X

A FLIGHT


No man, having once thrown himself into an idea, was ever more sincerely
convinced of the truth of his beliefs or more strenuous in his efforts to
propagandise them than Giannoli. To destroy utterly the fabric of existing
society by all possible means, by acts of violence and terrorism, by
expropriation, by undermining the prevailing ideas of morality, by
breaking up the organisations of those Anarchists and Socialists who
believed in association, by denouncing such persons and such attempts, by
preaching revolution wherever and whenever an opportunity occurred or
could be improvised, to these objects he had blindly devoted the best
years of his life. His was a gospel of destruction and negation, and he
was occupied rather in the undoing of what he had come to regard as bad
than with any constructive doctrines.

All existing and established things were alike under his ban: art no less
than morals and religion. He nourished a peculiar hatred for all those
links which bind the present to the past, for ancient customs and
superstitions, for all tradition. Had it been in his power he would have
destroyed history itself. "We shall never be free," he used to say, "so
long as one prejudice, one single ingrained belief, remains with us. We
are the slaves of heredity, and of all manner of notions of duties, of the
licit and the illicit."

One day I took him to the National Gallery. I was quite unprepared for
the effect of this step. He walked about nervously for some time, looking
from one picture to another with evident displeasure. At last he stopped
in front of Leonardo's "Madonna delle Roccie," and remained gazing at it
for some minutes in silence, while a heavy frown gathered round his brows.
"I hate art," he exclaimed at last. "I consider it one of the most noxious
influences in the world. It is enervating and deteriorating. Art has
always been the slave of religion and superstition, from the ancient
Egyptians and Assyrians to our own times. You see something beautiful,
perhaps, in these pictures, in these saints and Madonnas and Immaculate
Conceptions? Well, when I look at them, all the darkest pages of history
seem to open before me, and generations upon generations of superstitious
slaves, toiling on and suffering with the ever-present terror of
hell-fires and chastisement, pass before my mental vision. I should love
to burn them all, to raze all these galleries and museums to the ground,
and libraries with them. For what are libraries but storehouses of human
superstition and error? We must free ourselves from the past, free
ourselves utterly from its toils, if the future is to be ours. And we
shall never free ourselves from the past until we have forgotten it. Let
us leave here. I cannot stand it any longer! I do not know which is most
repugnant to me, the asceticism of these early Christians or the senseless
fantasies of the Greeks," and without further ado he fled.

Fired by this gospel of destruction, he spent his life wandering about
Europe, never resting for a month together, wrenching himself free from
all those ties which might curtail the freedom of his actions. Although
not fashioned by nature for enduring hardships, he alternately suffered
cold, hunger, heat, fatigue, privations, and dirt. In Paris one week,
making a brief sojourn in Spain the next, fleeing thence under warrant of
arrest to find himself some days later in hiding in Italy; at times in
prison, always in danger and uncertainty; starving one day, in fairly
flourishing conditions the next, never certain what fortune the morrow
might bring: thus the years went by, until, escaping from _domicilio
coatto_, or worse, in Italy, he had at length made his way to London
and the office of the _Tocsin_, quite broken down in health after the
long winter tramp. As I knew him, among his few personal friends, Giannoli
was loyal and honourable in the extreme, independent and proud. Like many
other Anarchists he entertained an almost maniacal prejudice against plots
and conspiracies of any kind, maintaining that such organisations were
merely police traps and death-gins. "Propaganda by deed"--outrage, in
short--they maintained should, and could, be the outcome only of entirely
individual activity. Never, indeed, did police or press make a greater
blunder than when they attributed deeds of violence to associations and
large conspiracies, and sought for or denounced accomplices. Every one of
those outrages and assassinations which startled Europe was the act of a
single man, unaided by, and frequently unknown to other Anarchists.

This horror of plots and associations was, when I first met him, one of
the most noticeable traits about Giannoli. He was beginning to lose his
earlier assurance, worn out by the roving life he had led, and was growing
suspicious in the extreme. "Such-a-one is a police emissary," or
"So-and-so is not to be trusted" were words constantly on his lips.

To me he took a great liking, and he always showed implicit faith in me
both as an Anarchist and an individual. "You are a true Anarchist," he
said to me one day, "and I would trust you with anything, _even_" and
he emphasised the word so as to give greater weight to the compliment,
"_even_ with _explosives_"

His suspiciousness, however, grew by leaps and bounds during his sojourn
in London. Every day he threw out hints against some new person or some
fresh imaginary conspiracy. There was a plot brewing, he informed me,
among various false comrades to ruin him. He was the victim of a
conspiracy to deprive him of his liberty and perhaps even of his life. Not
a day passed but some covert threat was made against him; men whom he had
believed his comrades, and to whom he--fool that he was!--had confided the
deadliest secrets in the past, had given him to understand the power they
held over him, and had made it clear that they would avail themselves of
it should it serve their purpose. "What fools we Anarchists are," he
exclaimed to me one day, "ever to feel any confidence in any one! We are
no longer free men when we have done this. We are slaves."

I watched the progress of this monomania with painful interest, for among
all the Anarchists there was no individual for whom I entertained a more
genuine regard than for Giannoli. One of the worst aspects of the matter,
moreover, was that I was really unable to judge how far Giannoli's
suspicions were true and how far imaginary. As to his sincerity there was
no possibility of doubt, and this lent to all he said an air of
verisimilitude which was most convincing. I did not know the majority of
the other Italians well enough to feel positive as to their honesty, and
many of them were uncertain and somewhat suspicious characters. Morì, for
instance--the youthful Neapolitan already referred to, the enigmatic
"buttered muffin"--was quite incomprehensible. He was a youth of no
particular intelligence, and certainly of no ideality or genuine political
or anti-political convictions, and I was quite at a loss to conjecture why
he had followed the Anarchists into exile--his only apparent reason being
a disinclination to study and a desire to escape from school. When
Giannoli informed me that he was a police-spy I really did not know
whether to believe him or not.

And as the weeks passed on, Giannoli's condition grew worse and worse,
and I could see that a crisis must inevitably follow. Nor was I mistaken
in this conviction.

Late one afternoon, towards the end of September, I was busy in the
printing-room "making up" the pages of the forthcoming number of the
_Tocsin_, when, looking up from my work on which I was very intent, I
saw Giannoli walk in hurriedly with his usual restless step, and look
about the place in a nervous short-sighted way, evidently in search of
somebody. He was just about to leave again, not having noticed me, when I
called to him. "Oh, Isabel," he replied, evidently much relieved, "are you
here then!" and he came up to me. "I did not see you!" and then, casting a
glance round the room, he inquired, "Are we quite alone?"

"There are others upstairs," I answered. "If you wish to speak to me
alone I will come to your room a little later, when I have finished this
work."

"Oh, thank you, thank you," he exclaimed; "I _must_ speak to you; I
shall wait for you till you come;" and he hurried away, once more looking
furtively round the office as though fearing he were watched.

From his manner it was evident to me that he was terribly perturbed about
something and that his fears and suspicions were reaching a climax.
"Whatever can be the matter?" I asked myself as I hammered away at my
form. "Has anything serious really happened?"

Towards seven o'clock I left the printing-office and the work to the
tender mercies of Short, who was just writhing out of a peaceful sleep of
some hours' duration on the "bed" of the machine, and made my way towards
Giannoli's room, which though quite close was by no means easy of access.
Turning to my right, half-way down the court-yard, I passed into Mrs.
Wattles's house, at the summit of which my friend was located; and here at
once my progress was arrested by that lady herself, only half sober and in
a mood evidently requiring sympathy.

"Oh, my dear," she exclaimed, "are you going up to see that pore young
man? I don't know what's gone wrong with 'im of late, but for all the
world 'e looks as if 'e were sickening for something. To look at 'im's
enough. It just sets my inn'ards all of a 'eave and a rumble, and I 'ave
to take a little drop o' something warm to settle 'em again."

"Damnation!" I muttered inwardly at finding myself trapped at such a
moment; but there was nothing for it; I had to wait and hear out the long
and weary recital of the sickness and agony of her deceased son, to whom
she had suddenly discovered a resemblance in Giannoli. At the end of a
long discourse, full of those "sickening details" in which women of her
class delight, she summed up her case with a brief but telling epitome of
his career, to the effect that he never smoked, nor drank, nor swore, but
that he "only gave one sniff and died;" and I, determined to escape from
the inevitable sequel, when Wattles senior's vices would be declaimed in
contrast to the son's virtues, beat a hasty retreat. A few scraps of this
anticlimax, mingled with hiccups and sobs, wafted after me as I wended my
way up the uneven wooden stairs. At the top of these a perilous-looking
ladder gave access to a trap-door, through which I dexterously made my way
into Giannoli's room.

The interior was familiar to me--a squalid little den, some ten feet
square, whose dirty, brown-paper-patched window looked out over the
chimneys and yards of the "Little Hell" district. In one corner of the
room was a mysterious cupboard, through which a neighbouring chimney
contrived to let in a constant supply of filthy black smoke. The bare
unwashed boards were rotting away, and at one spot the leg of the bed had
gone through the floor, to the considerable alarm of its dormant occupant.
The wall-paper, which had once been a gorgeous combination of pink and
cobalt and silver, was tattered and discoloured, and so greasy that one
might imagine that generations of squalid lodgers had made their meals off
it. The furniture consisted of a small table, now covered with a perpetual
litter of papers; a ramshackle wash-hand stand, on which a broken
vegetable dish served as a receptacle for soap and such objects; a bed,
which bred remarkable crops of fleas, and to which clung an old patchwork
quilt, but which was otherwise poor in adornment; a chair, and an old
travelling-box. As I have already mentioned, a trap-door in the floor gave
access to this apartment. There was no other door.

When I entered Giannoli was sitting at his table with his face buried in
his hands, so deeply absorbed in his own reflections that for some seconds
he did not notice my advent. When at last I made my presence known to him
he gave a violent start, and, holding out both his hands, he wrung mine
for some moments in silence. Then he motioned me to the box; I seated
myself; once more he became silent; then, suddenly raising his head, he
looked me full in the face.

"Do you know why I wished to speak to you?" he asked; "can you guess? Oh,
it is no light matter, Isabel, which has led me to trouble you, no
pleasant matter either. I am on the brink of ruin, threatened and betrayed
by my most trusted friends. I must leave here at once, go right away from
London and England. My life is not safe here for another day." He spoke in
Italian, and as he grew more excited his voice rose higher and higher,
though every now and again he was minded to control it, as though fearing
he might be overheard. "Yes," he continued, "those men whom I have most
trusted, whom I have treated as my own brothers, with whom I have often
shared my last shilling and the very clothes off my back, have turned
against me. They are in league to destroy me. They are plotting against my
liberty and my life!" For some minutes he raved on in this style, every
now and again breaking off into curses, while I listened half horrified,
half incredulous.

"For goodness' sake," I exclaimed at last, "do try and be calmer,
Giannoli, and tell me what has happened and what you wish me to do."

"You are right," he answered, making an effort to control himself; "I
must explain the matter or you cannot understand.... I will talk to you
frankly, for you at any rate are above suspicion. You may perhaps be aware
that I have been connected with many serious Anarchist ventures in the
past. The explosions at St. ----, the affair in V---- three years ago, the
sacking of the bank in Barcelona. All of these were, of course, very
dangerous matters, in which I risked my life; but it all tended towards
the destruction of society, and I readily took the risk. As far as
possible I avoided taking other comrades into my confidence--partly out of
regard for my own safety, partly with a view to theirs. To one or two
well-trusted men, however, I confided my projects, so that in case of my
arrest all proper measures might be taken." (Gnecco was one of these
"trusted comrades," B---- and Morì were others.) "I was mistaken in my
estimate of these men, mistaken in my confidence in them. From their lips
my secret has been wormed or bought by others, until now it has become a
byword, and every indiscreet fool and paid spy in our midst knows the tale
of my past better than I do myself. I no longer dare attend our meetings,
for all around me I hear whisperings and insinuations, and my name being
passed from one mouth to another along with references to my past actions.
The torture is becoming unendurable. Some of these cowards even descend to
taunting me with their knowledge; and when I, in any way, cross their
purposes in our discussions, they threaten me covertly with exposure. That
disgusting young fool, Morì, only to-day, being jealous of me in some
trivial matter, tried to intimidate me by hinting at the V---- affair. I
felt that I could have struck him down where he stood; and then a sense of
my own impotence overtook me, and I stood there, silent and confused,
trying to laugh the matter off, as though I had not grasped his meaning.
But I can stand this state of things no longer: it is driving me mad. When
I am alone now I suddenly start with the feeling that some one is coming
on me unawares. This afternoon, wishing to be alone and to think matters
over, I took a walk about the Park, but the very trees seemed to be
whispering about me, and before long I perceived that I was followed, that
my movements were being dogged step by step. When I am alone in my room
they do not even leave me in peace. They obtain entrance here by means of
that Wattles woman, who is evidently in their pay. B---- cannot forgive me
for not having appropriated to our private use the money expropriated in
Barcelona for the propaganda; and this indeed is one of their principal
grievances against me. Would you believe it, Isabel, last night he
actually got into this house and woke me from sleep by shouting the name
of the bank through that hole? When I rushed down to find him, determined
to teach him a sound lesson, he was gone. But what use is there in my
enlarging on this subject? You cannot fail to see the danger I am in, and
the absolute imperative necessity for flight. Another day's
procrastination may be my undoing. Who knows what signal they are awaiting
to denounce me, and how many others may be implicated in my ruin? I must
get away from here; I must flee in absolute secrecy, and none of them must
be allowed to suspect where I am gone. You and Kosinski alone I can trust.
You alone must be in the secret of my flight. Will you help me, Isabel?"
and at this point Giannoli seized my hand, and then, overcome and unnerved
by excitement, he allowed his head to sink on to the table and sobbed
convulsively.

My head was fairly swimming by this time. How far was all this true? how
far the imaginings of an over-wrought, over-excited brain? However, the
immediate urgencies of the situation gave me no time to carefully weigh
the matter. I must either act or refuse to act, thereby leaving my friend
alone to his despair and possible ruin. I decided on the former course.

"I think that you exaggerate, Giannoli," I answered him. "You are ill and
over-wrought, and require rest and change. Get away from here by all means
if there is any danger in remaining, but do not take too gloomy a view of
the situation. I am at your disposal and willing to help you in every way
in my power. Tell me where you think of going, and what I can do. But in
the meantime, had we not better get supper somewhere, and discuss the
situation over a little reassuring food?"

This unheroic but practical suggestion met with poor Giannoli's
approbation, and he confessed to not having broken his fast all day. He
also seemed relieved at the prospect of leaving the vicinity of the office
where he was convinced that spies surrounded him, and having thanked and
re-thanked me over and over again for my proffered assistance, he led the
way down the ladder, and together we gained the street. I was horribly
shocked at the haggard strained look of the unfortunate Italian which the
clearer light down here revealed. He had aged ten years since his arrival.
We made our way towards a small restaurant in Soho frequented principally
by the lower order of _cocotte_, and here over a savoury but
inexpensive meal we discussed our plans.

"I can scarcely dare believe that this hell is coming to an end!"
exclaimed Giannoli. "The assurance of your sympathy is already lightening
my burden. I am beginning once more to take hope and courage! Oh, to have
at last left that awful den where night and day I have felt myself watched
by unseen treacherous eyes, and my every breath noted by my enemies! I
shall never put foot there again. You and Kosinski must get my things away
from there to-night, and to-morrow I leave London by the first continental
train."

"Where do you purpose going?" I inquired.

"To South America, as soon as the arrival of funds will allow it, but,
this not being practicable for the moment, I propose going first to
Lisbon. There I will hide for a few weeks until I restart for Buenos
Ayres, and I trust that this will have the advantage of putting my
'friends' off the track. Even for this little voyage I do not at the
present moment possess the necessary funds, but in this you can no doubt
assist me, for in a few days I expect some thirty pounds from my relations
in Italy. If you will return to my room to-night you might rescue my
guitar and what few little objects of value I possess and pawn them, and
burn all papers and documents of any kind."

"You have left everything till rather late!" I could not help exclaiming,
not a little taken aback at the amount to be done, and at the rapidly
advancing hour.

Supper over, I left Giannoli in Oxford Street, and made tracks for his
lodging, which by great good luck I reached without any obstruction. I
locked myself in, rescued a few papers of importance, burnt the rest, put
his scanty personal belongings together in a box which it had been agreed
I was subsequently to send Kosinski to fetch, and having secured his
guitar, a silver-handled umbrella, and two or three other articles of
small value, I proceeded with these to a neighbouring pawnbroker. I may
mention here that since my connection with the Anarchist movement, and its
consequent demands on my pocket, I had become quite familiar with the ins
and outs, and more especially the ins, of these most invaluable relatives.

I reached the side door of Mr. Isaac Jacob's establishment on the stroke
of eleven, but as Providence and would-be drunkards had mercifully
ordained that pawnbrokers should remain open later than usual on Saturday,
I was still able to effect an entrance. I laid my goods down on the
counter, and politely requested the temporary loan of 3 pounds. "Three
pounds for this damned lot of old rubbish," exclaimed the indignant Jew.
"Do you take this for a public charity? It's not worth fifteen shillings
to me, the whole lot!" and he turned the things over with his greasy
hands, as though they were objectionable offal. We finally compromised for
thirty-two shillings, with which sum in my pocket I triumphantly sallied
forth.

My next move was to disinter Kosinski, whom I felt pretty certain of
finding at a certain coffee-stall where, at that advanced hour, he was in
the habit of making his one and only diurnal, or rather nocturnal repast.
This coffee-stall was situated at the corner of Tottenham Court Road and a
side street, and there, sure enough, stood Kosinski, munching sardines on
toast, and buns, and drinking coffee, surrounded by a motley group of
cabmen and loose women. These had evidently grown used to his regular
attendance and treated him with marked respect and friendliness, many of
the unfortunate women having often had to thank him for a meal and the
price of a night's lodging when luck had failed them in other directions.

Kosinski was somewhat taken aback at my sudden appearance. "You, Isabel!"
he exclaimed in some confusion, "what can have brought you here? But may I
offer you a little supper? These buns are excellent!"

Tired and worried as I was, I could not help smiling at the awkward
manner in which he made this offer. "No, thank you," I answered, "I am not
hungry. I have come to fetch you in connection with a rather important
matter. Can you come with me when you have finished your supper?"

"Yes, certainly," answered Kosinski, "if there is anything I can do. Just
let me finish these few mouthfuls and I will follow you. In the meantime
will you explain what is the matter?"

Without further ado I explained to him the whole Giannoli affair as I
understood it. It was a relief to me to do so, and I was anxious to hear
his opinion. He was silent for some minutes after I had finished speaking,
and munched reflectively the last relics of his supper.

"I am afraid," he said at last, "that Giannoli is not quite well--not
quite well, mentally, I mean," he added after a slight pause. "At the same
time, it is quite possible that there is some truth in what he suspects.
Spies have always been abundant in our party and Giannoli is a very likely
victim. He has been imprudent in the past, too believing and too
foolhardy. I do not know very much about the men whom he primarily
suspects, but Gnecco certainly I believe to be above suspicion. In any
case it will be safer for him to leave.... I am ready now.... What can I
do? Where are you going?"

"Home, and to bed," I answered. "I have been on my feet all day and I am
very tired. Moreover, there is nothing that I can do till to-morrow."

I then explained to him what he was to do, where we were to meet on the
following morning, and where he could find Giannoli that night. He
acquiesced and we parted.

Early the following morning I found Giannoli and Kosinski, as
prearranged, awaiting my arrival under the bridge of Waterloo Station.
Both looked very washed out, with the fagged and pasty look of people who
have been up all night. They were strolling up and down, carrying
Giannoli's box between them, and making a fine but very obvious show of
indifference towards a policeman who eyed them suspiciously. "Here, move
on, you fellows," he was saying gruffly as I came up with them, and on
perceiving me they seemed glad enough to be able to do so.

"That stupid policeman wanted to arrest us as rogues and vagabonds,"
Kosinski explained to me as we made our way towards a neighbouring
coffee-shop for breakfast. "A pretty fix that would have been just now! We
had scarcely settled down for a quiet sleep on the box when the meddlesome
fool came up and asked our names and addresses, what we had there, what we
were doing at that hour, and threatened to take us in charge unless we
moved on. When I explained that we were simply waiting for our train he
laughed, and said that was a likely tale! If you had not come along and
thus confirmed our assertion that we expected a friend, I really believe
he would have arrested us."

"Well, is everything arranged?" I inquired as we settled down to our
breakfast. "How did you get on last night?"

"Oh, we have had nothing but mishaps and adventures all night," returned
Kosinski. "What a night! Thank goodness it is over at last. After you
left, towards one o'clock, I went off to Giannoli's room to fetch his box.
I confess that I felt a little nervous about this, for I dreaded an
encounter with that horrible Mrs. Wattles. She talks and talks and talks
to me whenever she sees me, and insists upon asking the most indelicate
questions. She is a perfect savage. But no matter; let me get on. As I
crawled upstairs, I heard her in her room abusing her poor husband in the
most disgusting terms. I held my breath and crept up. I found the trunk
right enough in the corner, though it was none too easy to find, as there
was no light in the room, and I was afraid of lighting even a match for
fear of attracting attention. But on the way down a terrible accident
occurred. My foot caught in a scrap of oilcloth at the top of the stairs,
just outside Mrs. Wattles's room, and I fell. Crash down the stairs went
the box, and I rattled after it. The noise, of course, brought Mrs.
Wattles screaming and swearing to the door. Then, bruised and bewildered
as I was, I seized on the box and fled. Down the remaining stairs, out
through the door, and into the street, I ran as for dear life. Oh I have
never run like that before, Isabel! I remember years ago, when escaping
from prison in Russia, my life depended on the efficiency of my legs. But
I did not run with such fervour as I ran last night from that woman. I
still feel unspeakably grateful when I think that I escaped without being
recognised. She raced down after me, but being half-drunk she fell in the
passage, and it was that which saved me.... I found Giannoli in Trafalgar
Square."

The remainder of the night they had spent peacefully enough, wandering
about the streets, occasionally being "moved on" by a policeman, until the
sceptical officer already referred to had evinced an intention of
arresting them both as rogues and vagabonds. I could not help smiling at
the peremptory manner in which poor Giannoli's adventures had almost been
brought to a conclusion.

I gave Giannoli the proceeds of the previous night's pawnings, and I and
Kosinski turned out on the table what money we had about us. It was just
sufficient to cover the expenses of the first stage of Giannoli's journey.

We proceeded--a quaint procession--to the station. Kosinski led the way
with head bent forward and even resolute tread, apparently untired and
unaffected by his night's vicissitudes, with the much battered box on his
shoulders. Behind him followed Giannoli and myself, the former nervous and
unstrung, constantly turning from right to left with the idea that we were
being followed. In the station, half deserted this Sunday morning, we had
another long wait. We talked of many things together, and I had never
found Kosinski so friendly and communicative before. There existed between
Giannoli and himself the keen sympathy and understanding of two men
equally devoted to an idea, equally willing to sacrifice everything to it.
The Russian was more of a philosopher than the Italian, more engrossed in
abstractions, more oblivious of his own personality, and this it was that
had saved him from the possibility of Giannoli's terrible malady. At the
same time he was by no means inclined to make light of Giannoli's fears,
and together they talked them over, Kosinski promising to investigate them
after his friend's departure, and to see if it was possible to discover
who was really at fault.

"No man can ever hold such threats over me," said Kosinski, "for I have
never taken any one into my confidence. I have always acted alone. Some
day it may fall to my lot to pay with my life for some action on behalf of
our ideas. When that moment comes I shall be ready for the sacrifice."

"I too," exclaimed Giannoli with fervour--"I too would not hesitate to
make the sacrifice if I felt the right moment had arrived. If to-morrow
--if at this very moment--I saw the means of advancing the Anarchist cause
by the sacrifice of my life, I would give it without regret or hesitation.
But to lose it for no purpose, before I have finished my work, to fall a
victim to the envy and treachery of my own comrades, and to involve others
in my own ruin, I cannot bear. When my time comes to die I wish to feel
that my death is at any rate of some use. There are moments when an
Anarchist can help his ideas on better by dying than by living. But for me
the moment is not yet quite ripe."

He then relapsed into silence, and the two friends sat together,
engrossed in their own reflections, without saying a word.

After a time Giannoli turned to me: "I will write to you as soon as I
reach Lisbon, Isabel, and let you know how I am getting on. There at least
I am little known, and I will stay with an old friend whose sincerity is
above suspicion--Avvocato Martini. You and Kosinski are the only two
persons whom I regret in leaving London. You have done more for me than I
can ever thank you for. You have saved my life, and although I do not
value life for itself, it may be of value to our Cause, and I hope yet to
give it for some good purpose. Give what explanation you think fit of my
disappearance. Above all, let no one suspect where I am gone."

The train left at ten o'clock. Giannoli was deeply affected at parting
from us, and as the train was about to leave he seized our hands and
embraced us. "Something tells me," he exclaimed, "that I shall never see
either of you again. Write to me sometimes and bear me in mind. Do not
believe any lies you may be told about me. I have only our principles at
heart. Good-bye," and the train steamed out of the station.

I remained alone with Kosinski. The hour was still quite early, and there
was much to be talked over together. "Let us go to some picture gallery,"
I suggested, "so as to talk things over and to settle what we are to give
out concerning Giannoli's disappearance."

"No, please, don't," answered the Russian in genuine alarm; "you know how
I hate art, Isabel. It goads me to madness. We must think of some other
place."

We strolled out of the station together and wended our way across the
bridge and along the Strand, up by St. Martin's Church, and eventually
found ourselves close to old St. Giles's Churchyard. "Let us sit down
here," I said, indicating a seat; "I am tired of walking."

"It is little better than a picture gallery," murmured Kosinski, "but it
will do if you are tired," and we sat down. Kosinski advised me to feign
absolute ignorance of Giannoli's whereabouts and to set afloat the idea of
his having committed suicide. He asked me to let him know as soon as I
received news from the fugitive, and he, in the meantime, would
investigate the matter of the "conspiracy." As we parted he said to me:

"I am very glad, Isabel, that I have had to deal with you in this matter.
You may sometimes have thought me unduly harsh in my estimate of your sex.
I am not without reason in this. Women are rarely of much use in a
movement like ours. They so rarely seem able to forget _themselves_,
to detach themselves from the narrow interests of their own lives. They
are still the slaves of their past, of their passions, and of all manner
of prejudices. But you are different.... There have even been moments when
I felt that I had other things to say to you, things which it is better to
leave unsaid. I must not be guilty of the weakness which I condemn in
women. An Anarchist's life, you see, is scarcely his own. He has no time
to indulge in personal sentiment. Good-bye," and before I had time to
answer he was gone.

I returned home and spent the remainder of the day locked in my room,
absorbed in many conflicting thoughts. I was grieved beyond words at
Giannoli's trouble, at the possibility of foul play, at the almost more
grievous possibility of mental disorder in him. Then again and again
Kosinski's last words recurred to me, and I could not help reflecting
that, slight as they were, he had probably never said so much to any other
woman. I was compelled to admit to myself that the Russian, for all his
strange ideas and brusque manners, had grown to be a great deal to me. But
I felt that he was a hopeless case--the kind of man to whom personal
happiness was unknown, and who would succeed in rendering unhappy any one
rash enough to care for him. "How easy happiness might be," I reflected,
"with our ideas, with our freedom from prejudice. And yet it is these very
ideas which will ruin his life, which----" Half unconsciously I found that
my thoughts had been drifting from abstract ideas and abstract enthusiasms
to persons, and with this divorce from abstractions began a feeling of
weariness, of nausea. I thought of Kosinski's words again, of his contempt
for personal sentiment in an Anarchist, of what he had said about women;
and I struggled hard within myself to turn my thoughts into other
channels. It was useless, and at last, weary of the effort, I retired to
bed and took refuge in slumber.

During the following weeks I worked on fairly regularly at the
_Tocsin_ and saw Kosinski not unfrequently, on which occasions he
most carefully avoided any recurrence of personalities, however vague
these might be. Giannoli's disappearance created considerable commotion,
and every one was at a loss to imagine what could have become of him. My
relations with those Italians whom he had suspected were naturally very
strained and uncomfortable, for I did not know what to think of them, how
far to trust or mistrust them. Kosinski, as promised, investigated the
matter as carefully as he could, but the exact truth was difficult to
ascertain. Gnecco we neither of us for one instant suspected, but we felt
some degree of uncertainty about the others. Whether or no there had been
some amount of unclean work going on, it was anyway quite certain that a
great part of Giannoli's suspicions were the outcome of his overwrought
and exhausted mental condition.

About a fortnight after his departure I received at last a letter from
Giannoli. This consisted of a few words, written evidently in much hurry
and perturbation of spirit. He thanked me for the money from his
relatives, which I had forwarded, which would, he said, enable him to
leave at once for Argentina. "It has arrived in the very nick of time," he
wrote, "for here I am no longer safe. Avvocato Martini, of whom I spoke to
you in such high terms, is not to be trusted. He intercepts my letters,
and has, I believe, communicated with my enemies in London. Thank Heaven!
I am now able to get away. In South America I shall once more settle down
to the propaganda work, and I shall be out of the power of these
informers. My old friend, Giovanni Barelli, awaits me there. We shall live
together and life will once more become endurable. I am anxious to hear
from Kosinski. What is the result of his inquiries? My best love to him
and to you, dear friend, and again a thousand thanks to you both. I will
write at greater length from America."

I showed the letter to Kosinski. He read it through with a serious
expression. "I fear," he said, "that it is a case of hallucination, and
that there is but very slight foundation of truth to his suspicions. I
have looked into the matter and can see no adequate grounds for suspecting
the men whom he regarded as his enemies over here. Giannoli exaggerates
and distorts everything. I must write to him and try to reassure him about
this. I will tell him that he is mistaken. We cannot afford to lose such a
comrade."

"Beware," I returned half in jest--"beware, lest you too fall under his
ban."

"Oh, there is no fear of that," answered Kosinski with assurance. "He
knows me too well. I am the oldest friend he has. I can and must tell him
the truth."

Kosinski wrote, and the weeks passed on. A month after Giannoli's arrival
in Buenos Ayres I received another letter from him. Once again he declared
that he was not safe, that he must take flight. Barelli, of whom he had
always spoken with the most brotherly affection, had turned against him.
He and other false comrades had entered into a plot to murder him, and at
the time of writing he had fled from their ken and was in hiding in some
remote and populous district, awaiting the arrival of money which would
enable him to return to Europe. Then, later on, there arrived another
letter from Lisbon, disconnected in matter, shaky in writing, full of the
wildest and most improbable statements.

"I feel like a hunted animal," he wrote; "I have been driven about from
pillar to post, from one end of the civilised world to another. I am
growing very weary of all this, and am trying to devise how to terminate a
situation which is growing intolerable. Here I am again in hiding, and
dare not venture from my lair till the dead of night. What money I had is
almost at an end. My clothes are falling off my back. I have not changed
my linen for weeks, having forgotten my old valise in my hurried departure
from Buenos Ayres. My health is failing, and I feel utterly helpless and
wretched. You would be horrified if you could see me now. I am ill, and at
night I can get no sleep. Every moment I expect them to break in, murder
me, and seize my papers. Those devils from Buenos Ayres are already on my
track. I have not heard from Kosinski. His letter has no doubt been
intercepted. As soon as possible I shall proceed to Gibraltar. I am
thinking out a plan to end all this. _Do you understand?_"

Some weeks later I received from Gibraltar a letter in which Giannoli
informed me that yet once more he was compelled to abscond himself,
further plottings against him rendering this necessary. He had been
seriously ill, he wrote, and his strength was quite giving out. He was, at
the time of writing, on the eve of departure for Barcelona, where he was
determined "to end it all." He had at last received Kosinski's letter, and
would write at greater length from Barcelona. He warned me to beware of
false friends.

These last sentences troubled me very much. What could it all mean? What
was impending? And Kosinski; did he doubt _him_ too?

But this state of uncertainty as to his meaning was destined to be but of
short duration. Barely a week had elapsed since my receipt of the above
letter when, as I stood alone in the composing-room one morning, I was
surprised to see the figure of an unknown man appear above the balustrade
leading from below. He was evidently a foreigner and a Southerner, and
walking straight up to me he asked in Italian, but with a distinct Spanish
accent, "Are you Isabel Meredith?"

On my answering in the affirmative, he handed me a sealed note on which
was written my name in Giannoli's familiar hand.

"This is for you," he said, "I bring it direct from Barcelona. It is
strictly private. Good morning," and as mysteriously as he had appeared he
was gone.

Even before opening it, the shaky writing on the envelope told me only
too eloquently that matters were no better with Giannoli at the time he
penned it. Moreover, I felt certain, from the extraordinary nature of its
delivery, that it must contain news of exceptional moment. A dull, sick
feeling of dread overcame me as I stood irresolute, holding the unopened
letter in my hand. I was tempted to put it aside and postpone the
knowledge of any unpleasant news it might contain. I knew this, however,
to be a weakness, and so with an effort I tore it open. It read as
follows:--

"DEAREST FRIEND,--This is a letter which it would be unsafe to consign to
the post. Therefore I send it to you by hand, by means of an old friend
who can be trusted. He is not a comrade, and has no knowledge of its
contents. A few days back I wrote to you from Gibraltar, telling you of
the serious break-down in my health, and of the circumstances which had
compelled me once again to leave Lisbon. Now, at last, I feel in a measure
more composed, for my resolution is taken, and I mean to end my life--not
without benefit to our Cause, I hope. You are the only person with whom I
am communicating. Even Kosinski has been bought over by my enemies. A
letter from him was forwarded to me in Lisbon, in which he sided with the
spies who have been trying to ruin me, and which contained covert threats
which I understood only too well. Thus another illusion is shattered! The
burden of all these disillusions, all these disgusts and disappointments,
is too heavy to bear any longer. I must get away from it all before my
health and intellect are completely shattered. I have always thought
suicide a cowardly death for an Anarchist. Before taking leave of life it
is his duty to strike a final blow at Society and I, at least, mean to
strike it. Here the moment is in every way ripe. Ever since the explosion
in Madrid, eight months ago, the Anarchists have been the victims of the
most savage persecutions. I have seen one man with his nails torn off, and
another raving mad with thirst, after having been kept without water, and
fed on salt cod during sixty hours. Others have been tortured in prison in
other ways--some tortures so vile and filthy that I would not tell you of
them. I write this in order to show you that the moment is ripe here for
some vigorous act of reprisal. It is impossible to strike a blow at all
those who are responsible, for the whole of Society is to blame: but those
most guilty must suffer for it. I am prepared to strike my final blow
before I take my leave, and you will learn from the papers in a few days'
time the exact nature of the act I contemplate.

"And now I must beg you to pardon me for all the trouble and disturbance
I have occasioned you, dear friend; I can never thank you enough. You, and
you alone, have been true to me. For your own sake, I entreat you also to
beware of false friends--especially avoid Kosinski.----Yours ever,

"GIACOMO GIANNOLI."



CHAPTER XI

A CRISIS


The flight of Giannoli, and all the worry and turmoil occasioned thereby,
told on my health. I did not admit as much to myself, and I still kept on
at the paper as usual through the very thick of it all. For one thing,
this was necessary in order not to arouse the curiosity of many of the
comrades, and moreover there is no doubt that whatever line of life we may
adopt we gradually become the creatures of our habits, however much we may
scoff at such a notion. Thus, though I had grown out of the first stage of
youthful enthusiasm when I revelled in squalor and discomfort, and
sincerely believed myself to be one of the hubs round which the future
Revolution and the redemption of mankind circled, and though experience
had opened my eyes to much that was unlovely, and not a little which was
despicable, in my associates, still I stuck at my post and continued my
work on the paper.

On arriving at the office towards nine every morning, my first task was
to get Short out of pawn in the neighbouring coffee-shop, where he retired
--regardless of the fact that his pockets were but capacious vacuums--in
order to regale himself on shop eggs and fly-blown pastry, and where his
person was detained as a pledge till my purse redeemed him.

I would then work away, "dissing" or "comping," "locking up forms," or
writing a "leader," till some of the Italians, keenly alive to their
ownership of stomachs, would call me off to partake of a Milanese
_minestra_, or to pronounce on the excellencies of a mess of
_polenta_. Then would follow an hour devoted to digestion and talk,
when Short, if in a bad temper, would smoke abominable shag, and raise the
bowl of his clay pipe into quite perilous proximity with his eyebrows, and
if genially inclined, would entertain some one member of the company to
dark tales and fearsome hints as to the depraved habits and questionable
sincerity of his or her dearest friend.

He had of late developed a great interest in my welfare, and Kosinski had
been his special butt. He had always hated the latter on account of his
vast moral superiority to himself, and seemed specially desirous of
discrediting him in my eyes. The Russian came pretty frequently to the
office during the months following on Giannoli's disappearance. He was
always singularly uncommunicative about his own concerns; his intimate
friends were not aware of his address; how he lived or what his home life
was none seemed to know; and, indeed, he was one of those men who, without
ever saying a word to that effect, make one feel that their private life
is no concern of any one but themselves. Short, however, hinted at things
he _could_ say if he _would_, spoke in general terms of the
disgracefulness of exploiting the affections of women, referred in an
undertone to "that Kosinski's" luck, adding that, of course, one had a
right to act according to one's inclination, still Anarchists should set
an example, &c., &c. I, of course, took such observations at their true
value; I knew Short and Kosinski too well to give two thoughts to the
matter. Still when, on top of all this mysterious talk, I received
Giannoli's letter, in which he spoke of his folly in trusting his supposed
friend, and accused him of being neither more nor less than an agent in
the hands of the International police, I felt my brain whirl, and really
wondered whether I was the sole sane person in a mad world, or whether the
reverse were not the case.

It was now some weeks since I had last seen Dr. Armitage. He had written
to explain his absence, alleging stress of work, in which I readily
believed; for though I knew his regular practice had been much neglected
during the preceding year, I also knew that there was not an Anarchist
within twenty miles who did not expect him to attend on himself and family
when in illness or trouble, an obligation with which the doctor willingly
complied, though not only did he take no fees, but generally had to
provide the patients with all their creature comforts. No sort of change
had occurred in our relations to each other, but lately he had seemed more
than ever preoccupied, absorbed in the propaganda, ever devising new plans
for spreading the "movement." He seemed less and less inclined to keep up
his West End connection, and confessed that he had but scant patience
wherewith to listen to the polite ailments and sentimental troubles of
fashionable ladies. He had given much time to the _Tocsin,_ writing
many really remarkable papers for it, but lately, since Kosinski had come
more to the front, and I had been so much taken up with Giannoli's
affairs, he had, perhaps intentionally, kept more away from the office.

It was with a feeling of real pleasure that I saw him enter at last one
Saturday evening early in April. I had been feeling tired and depressed,
and only by an effort of will had I kept myself at my work. I was struck
at the change that a few weeks had wrought in the doctor's appearance. His
hair had grown unusually long, quite noticeably so, his tall figure was
somewhat bent, and there was an unusual appearance about his dress. He had
not yet cast aside the garb of civilisation, but his trousers evinced a
tendency to shrink, and he appeared to contemplate affecting low necks in
the matter of shirts. His feet were shod in sandals of a peculiar make,
and there was a feverish look in his eyes. As he came towards me his
characteristic kindly smile lit up his drawn features, and he grasped my
hand with friendly warmth. I was delighted to see him, but somewhat
shocked at the alteration in his looks. In answer to my inquiries as to
his prolonged absence, he explained that he had been very busy for one
thing, and that he had also been much preoccupied with his own thoughts on
questions of principle and propaganda.

"You know, Isabel," he said, "my habit of silence when confronted by
mental problems. I think I must belong to the race of ruminating animals,
and it is only by quietly chewing the cud of my ideas that I can digest
and assimilate them. It used to be just the same in my student days, and
doubtless the habit will stick to me through life. When I have once
thought out a point, and settled in my own mind on the right course of
action, I am not as a rule troubled by hesitation or doubts, and then I
like to talk and discuss, but the initial stage seems to need solitude.
Besides, I know you have been very much taken up of late months. I have
seen Kosinski sometimes, and had your news from him. You are not looking
well; you must have been overtaxing your strength, and need a rest."

"Doctor, cure yourself, I might well say," I rejoined. "There is nothing
much amiss with me. I am a little fagged perhaps, nothing more. But you
look very much run down. I am sure you have been neglecting yourself very
much of late."

"Oh, no, on the contrary," replied the doctor, "I have been giving much
thought lately to food and dress reform in their bearings on the social
question, and I have been putting some of my ideas into practice in my own
person. I have never felt in better health. All superfluous fat has been
got rid of, and my mind feels singularly lucid and clear. I have been
going on quite long rounds propagandising, often walking as much as twenty
and thirty miles a day, and, thanks to my somewhat more rational dress and
to my diet of raw oatmeal and fresh fruit, I have found no difficulty in
so doing. But will you not come for a walk with me? It is a beautiful
evening, and here the atmosphere is so close and stuffy. Do come, I should
so enjoy a quiet talk with you. I have much I want to say to you, and I
have come this evening in the hope of an opportunity to say it."

I agreed, and we sallied forth. At the entrance to the courtyard we
encountered Mrs. Wattles holding forth to a group of gossips amongst whom
stood Short (for no scandal-mongering was too trivial to interest him), on
the disappearance of Giannoli from her house and her suppositions as to
his fate--a theme of which she never wearied. I managed to slip by without
attracting her attention, so absorbed was she with the enthralling
mystery, only to find myself in for another almost worse danger. For there
at the corner of P. Street and the Euston Road stood the Bleeding Lamb,
surrounded by a hooting and uproarious crowd. He had, it appeared,
interrupted the Gospel-preaching of the Rev. Melchisedek Hicks with some
inappropriate inquiry as to the probable whereabouts of Nelson on the
resurrection day. This was considered irreverent by the admirers of the
Rev. Hicks, who forthwith began to jibe and jeer at the Bleeding Lamb,
who, in his turn, exchanging the meekness of the traditional victim for
the righteous indignation of a prophet misjudged, had volleyed a torrent
of abuse on all present, consigning them unconditionally to hell-fire. As
Armitage and I neared the scene a constable was taking the names and
addresses of all concerned, and was manifesting his intention of marching
off the poor Lamb to durance vile.

Armitage took in the situation at a glance, and, hurrying up, addressed
the man in blue. "I know this man very well, officer," he said in an
authoritative voice. "I can answer that he gives his name and address
correctly; there is no need to arrest him."

"And who are _you?_ I should like to know," inquired the irate
policeman; "I think I can answer for your address, Colney Hatch ain't far
off the mark."

"This is my card," answered the doctor, handing one over to the constable
with a dignified gesture. The latter seemed somewhat impressed and taken
aback, and after grumbling some remarks in an undertone and eyeing the
Lamb in a suspicious and unconvinced manner, he told him to be off sharp
if he did not wish to find himself in the cells, and then vented his
spleen and unappeased zeal on behalf of his country by cuffing, shoving
and abusing the corner-boys who had assembled to witness the fun. We
availed ourselves of the consequent confusion to make good our escape,
dodging the Lamb, who manifested an intention of coming along with us; and
soon we found ourselves, thanks to a penny tram fare, in fresher, cleaner
quarters. We got down at the corner of Parliament Hill. The sun had just
set and the clear spring twilight lent a wonderful charm of serene peace
to the scene. The undulating expanse of Heath was growing darker and
darker; in the west still lingered the last sunset hues of pink and
saffron and green; and overhead in the deep blackening blue of night the
stars were just becoming visible. We had strolled on in silence for some
time, hushed by the solemn stillness of the evening. At last Dr. Armitage
exclaimed, "Ah, Isabel, how I sometimes long for rest and peace, and sweet
wholesome surroundings! How beautiful life might be passed with a
companion such as you. The earth is beautiful, man is naturally good; why
cannot we all be happy?"

I was a little taken aback at the doctor's remark, though I had half
expected something of the sort. During the early months of my Anarchist
career, when battling with the first difficulties of starting the
_Tocsin_, we had been so constantly together that we had got into a
way of divining each other's thoughts and feelings almost without the need
of words. We never thought or talked of anything but abstract questions of
principle or the immediate needs of the propaganda, yet, as was only
natural, an undercurrent of personal sympathy had sprung up between us
which I had felt to be somewhat more pronounced on the doctor's side than
on my own. However, with him, excess of emotion always manifested itself
in renewed and redoubled zeal for the propaganda, leading him to elaborate
some quite extraordinary schemes for advancing the Cause, such as, for
instance, supplementing his daily work by keeping a coffee-stall at night,
as he considered that such a plan would afford an excellent opportunity
for quiet personal argument and for the distribution of literature to
probable converts; so that he had never broached personalities in any
definite style. Then events had followed on one another with surprising
rapidity; the advent of the Italian refugees had contributed to change the
_personnel_ if not the principles of the _Tocsin_; a common
friendship for Giannoli had brought Kosinski and myself more together and
I had, always had a decided sympathy for the Russian, increased perhaps by
the instinctive feeling that if there were one man who would refuse to
budge one inch from his principles for a woman that man was he. I seemed
to have lived ages, my character was developing, a sense of humour was
gradually modifying my views of many matters, and during these last few
months Armitage and I had drifted somewhat apart.

There was something pathetic in his voice that night as he spoke. His
whole appearance told me that he had been passing through an acute mental
and moral crisis, and a queer feeling came over me which seemed to warn me
that something irreparable was about to take place between us. I felt deep
sympathy for this noble nature struggling for the ideal in a world all out
of gear; so thoroughly unselfish and self-sacrificing as hardly to grasp
clearly the personal side of its sufferings, and slowly and unconsciously,
in its very effort to free itself from material trammels, falling a victim
to monomania--striving too high only to fall in a world where the sublime
is divided by but a step from the ridiculous, and where all are capable of
laughing and sneering, but few indeed of appreciating qualities such as
Armitage possessed.

"We might well ask 'what is happiness?'" I rejoined in answer to his
remark, anxious to steer the conversation clear of personalities. "How
vain and trivial all our struggles seem whenever we find ourselves face to
face with the serene indifference of Nature. What are we, after all, but
fretful midges whizzing out our brief hour?"

"Ah, one is often tempted to think so," answered Armitage--and I confess
that I gave vent to a sigh of relief as I realised that he was now started
on a discussion--"but as long as injustice prevails we must continue the
struggle. I often long for rest, silence, oblivion; but the mood passes
and I awake more keenly alive than ever to the greatness of our Cause, and
our duty toward the propaganda. Nothing must be allowed to interfere with
our devotion to it, and, what is more, Isabel, we must strive to live in
such a way as to free ourselves from all considerations that might hamper
our action on its behalf. We must simplify our lives; we must not neglect
to set an example even in small matters. The material claims of life
absorb far too much of our time. We are constantly selling our birthright
for a mess of pottage. We shall never be truly devoted propagandists till
we have freed ourselves from all care for the morrow."

"You are right," said I, "but such ideas may be carried to an excess. We
must live our lives; and as that is so we must attend more or less to our
personal wants."

"That I do not deny, Isabel," answered the doctor; "what I aim at is to
simplify them as much as possible. Thanks to my new diet I shall never
have to waste time to procure the wherewithal to fill my stomach. Nuts and
raw fruit are easily procured, and contain all the elements essential to
physical health. I am sure you will agree with me on this point when you
have considered it at length. Then again in the matter of dress, what
could be more hateful or harmful than our modern costume? It is awful to
think of the lives wasted in useless toil to produce the means by which a
so-called man of fashion contrives to make himself hideous and ridiculous
in the eyes of all sensible people. Besides there is no doubt that we are
all the creatures of our surroundings, and so the influence of food and
dress on character must be inestimable."

"Oh, doctor, do not harp so on this dress and food question!" I could not
help exclaiming. "Really, seriously, I think you have let your mind run
somewhat too much in a groove lately. Talk of vegetarianism and dress
reform! why, what you need, it seems to me, is a steak at the Holborn and
a starched shirt collar! Seriously, it grieves me to think that you should
be giving yourself up so entirely to such notions. I consider you could do
far more good to the Cause by keeping up your practice, pursuing your
studies, and working on the lines you used to be so successful in."

Hardly had I spoken than I regretted the hastiness of my remark. I could
see at a glance that my friend was pained, more at feeling that I was out
of sympathy with him than at my actual words. He suggested that we should
turn homewards. We were nearing Fitzroy Square when he exclaimed--

"You know, Isabel, that I have always had a great admiration for you. I
have thought you would prove one of the great figures of the coming
Revolution; I still think so, but I see that our ways are parting. You
laugh at me; yet I feel sure that my position is right. I am sorry I have
not your sympathy in my work. I had counted on it; I had come this evening
to tell you so. Perhaps some day you will understand my views and agree
with them. Till then, good-bye. I am due at a comrade's house at
Willesden; he is going in for the No Rent Campaign, and I have promised to
help him move to-night, but first I must go home and get out of these
cumbersome clothes into a more rational dress; coats and trousers impede
one's every thought and movement. Good-bye," and he grasped my hand and
was off, walking with a rapid, almost feverish stride.

On reaching home the servant informed me that a gentleman had called for
me, and that on hearing I was out he had expressed his intention of
returning. The girl could not remember his name, but I gathered from her
description that he was a foreigner.

Just then a ring at the door interrupted her remarks, and I was surprised
to see Kosinski enter the room. He walked straight up to me with an
unwonted look of perturbation about him.

"Could you come with me at once?" he said in low, hurried tones.

"Where?" said I, feeling quite alarmed. "What is the matter?"

"With me, to my room. I need the help of some woman, but there is no time
to waste. I will explain _en route_. Will you come?"

"Certainly, at once," and I walked out with him.








I had not chanced to see him since Giannoli's last letter in which he was
denounced as belonging to the ranks of the Italian's false friends, since
when I had only heard the insinuations of Short, which, as can easily be
imagined, had not deeply impressed me, coming from such a quarter. Still I
should not have been surprised had I felt a momentary embarrassment at
finding myself suddenly in his company, and under such decidedly unusual
circumstances, but such was not the case. No one could look into
Kosinski's steady grey eyes and earnest face, pale with the inward fire of
enthusiasm, and not feel conscious of standing face to face with one of
those rare natures who have dedicated themselves, body and soul, to the
service of an ideal. I walked on hurriedly, keeping up with his swinging
stride, wondering where we were going, but not liking to break in on his
reserve by probing questions. Suddenly he seemed to wake to a sense of
reality, and turned sharply round to me.

"We are going to my room in Hammersmith," he said. "I want your
assistance, if you care to come; there is a woman there dying, a friend of
mine. You are the only person of whom I should care to ask such a favour.
Will you come? I hardly think it will be for many hours."

So then Short was right; there was a woman at the bottom of Kosinski's
life; and simultaneously with this idea there flashed across my brain a
feeling of shame at having for one instant entertained a mean thought of
my friend. "I will come," I answered; "you did well to count on my
friendship." We hurried on for several minutes in silence. Then again
Kosinski spoke:

"I had best tell you a little how matters stand," he said. "I am not fond
of talking about private concerns, but you have a right to know. Eudoxia
has lived with me for the past two years. I brought her over with me from
America. She has been suffering with consumption all this while, and I do
not think she will last the night."

"Is she a comrade?" I ventured to inquire.

"Oh, no. She hates Anarchists; she hates me. It will be a blessing to
herself when she is laid to rest at last. She was the wife of my dearest
friend, perhaps my only friend outside the Cause. Vassili had a great
intellect, but his character was weak in some respects. He was full of
noble ambitions; he had one of the most powerful minds I have known, a
quite extraordinary faculty for grasping abstract ideas. I was first drawn
towards him by hearing him argue at a students' meeting. He was
maintaining a fatalistic paradox: the total uselessness of effort, and the
vanity of all our distinctions between good and bad. All our acts, he
argued, are the outcome of circumstances over which we have no control;
consequently the man who betrays his best friend for interested motives,
and the patriot who sacrifices happiness and life for an idea are morally
on the same footing--both seek their own satisfaction, aiming at that goal
by different paths; both by so doing obey a blind impulse. I joined in the
argument, opposing him, and we kept the ball going till 4 A.M. He walked
with me to my lodgings and slept on a rug on the floor, and we became fast
friends. But though his mind was strong, he was swayed by sensual
passions. He married young, burdening himself with the responsibility of a
woman and family, and went the way of all who do so. He would have lost
himself entirely in the meshes of a merely animal life; he seemed even to
contemplate with satisfaction the prospect of begetting children! But I
could not stand by and witness the moral degradation of my poor friend. I
kept him intellectually alive, and when once stimulated to mental
activity, no one was ever more logical, more uncompromising than he. Soon
after my imprisonment he got implicated in a conspiracy and had to flee to
America. When I arrived there after my escape I found him in the most
abject condition. His wife, Eudoxia, was ill with the germs of the disease
which is now killing her, and was constantly railing at him as the cause
of their misfortune, urging him to make a full confession and throw
himself on the mercy of the Russian authorities. Poor thing! she was ill;
she had had to leave behind her only child, and news had come of its
death. Vassili would never have done anything base, but he had not
sufficient strength of character to rise superior to circumstances.
Another weak trait in him was his keen sensibility to beauty. It was not
so much the discomfort as the ugliness of poverty which irked him. I have
always noted the deteriorating effect art has on the character in such
respects. He was grieved at his wife's illness, goaded to desperation by
her reproaches, sickened by the squalor of his surroundings, and instead
of turning his thoughts inwards and drawing renewed strength and
resolution from the spectacle of the sufferings caused by our false
morality and false society, he gave way completely and took to drink. When
I found him in New York he was indeed a wreck. He and his wife were living
in a filthy garret in the Bowery; he had nothing to do, and had retired
permanently on to a rotten old paillasse which lay in a corner; his
clothes were in pawn; he could not go out. Eudoxia earned a few cents
daily by slaving at the wash-tub, and most of this he spent in getting
drunk on vile, cheap spirits. When he saw me arrive he railed at me as the
cause of all his woes; blamed me for having dragged him on to actions he
should never have done if left to himself; and pointing to his wife and to
the squalid room, he exclaimed, 'See the results of struggling for a
higher life.' Eudoxia, for her part, hated me, declaring that I was
responsible for her husband's ruin, and that, not content with making his
life a hell on earth, I was consigning his soul to eternal perdition. Then
Vassili would burst into maudlin tears and weep over his own degeneracy,
saying that I was his only true friend. I grieved at the decay of a fine
mind; there was no hope now for him; I could only wish that his body might
soon too dissolve. I gave him what little help I could, and he soon drank
himself to death. I was with him at the last. He seemed overcome by a
great wave of pity for himself, spoke tearfully of the might-have-beens,
blamed me for having urged him to deeds beyond his strength, and ended by
exclaiming that he could not even die in peace, as he did not know what
would become of his poor wife, whose strength was already rapidly failing.
'I am leaving her friendless and penniless. I dragged her away from a
comfortable home, promising her happiness. She has had to sacrifice her
only child to my safety, and now, prematurely old, soured by misfortune
and illness, I am abandoning her to fight for herself. She is my victim
and yours, the victim of our ideas; it is your duty to look after her.' I
promised him so to do, and she has been with me ever since."

I had walked on, absorbed in the interest of his tale, heedless of the
distance we were covering, and now I noticed that we were already skirting
Hyde Park, and reflected that our destination must still be far ahead.

"As your friend is so ill had we not better take the 'bus? You said we
were going to Hammersmith, and there is still quite a long walk ahead of
us," I suggested after a few minutes.

"Oh, are you tired?" he inquired; "I ought to have thought of it. I
always walk." I noticed that his hand strayed into the obviously empty
pocket of his inseparable blue overcoat, and a worried look came into his
face. I at once realised that he had not a penny on him, and deeply
regretted my remark. Not for worlds would I have suggested to him paying
the fares myself, which I should have thought nothing of doing with most
of the others.

"Oh, it was not for me," I hastened to rejoin, "I am not in the least
tired; I only thought it would be quicker, but after all we must now be
near," and I brisked up my pace, though I felt, I confess, more than a
little fagged.

Again we trudged on, absorbed in our thoughts. At last, to break the
silence I inquired of him if he had seen Armitage lately.

"It must be quite ten days now since I last saw him at a group-meeting of
the Jewish Comrades. I fear he is developing a failing common to many of
you English Anarchists; he is becoming something of a crank. He talked to
me a lot about vegetarianism and such matters. It would be a thousand
pities were he to lose himself on such a track, for he has both intellect
and character. He is unswerving where principle is at stake; let's trust
he will not lose sight of large aims to strive at minor details."

Again a silence fell on us. My companion was evidently reviewing his
past; my brain was occupied in blindly searching the future; what would
become of us all? Kosinski, Armitage, myself? Vassili's words, "This is
the result of struggling for a higher life," haunted me. Should we after
all only succeed in making our own unhappiness, in sacrificing the weak to
our uncompromising theories, and all this without advancing the cause of
humanity one jot? The vague doubts and hesitations of the past few weeks
seemed crystallising. I was beginning to mount the Calvary of doubt.

After a quarter of an hour Kosinski exclaimed: "Here we are. You must not
be taken aback, Isabel, if you get but scant thanks for your kindness.
Eudoxia is not well disposed towards our ideas; she looks upon her life
with me as the last and bitterest act in the tragedy of her existence.
Poor thing, I have done what I could for her, but I understand her point
of view."

Without further ado we proceeded along the passage and up the mean wooden
staircase of a third-rate suburban house, pushing past a litter of
nondescript infancy, till we stopped before a back room on the top floor.
As Kosinski turned the door handle a woman stepped forward with her finger
to her lips. "Oh, thank Gawd, you're here at last," she said in a whisper,
"your sister's been awful bad, but she's just dozed off now. I'll go to my
husband; he'll be in soon now."

"Thanks, Mrs. Day. I need not trouble you further. My friend has come to
help me."

The landlady eyed me with scant favour and walked off, bidding us
good-night.

The room was of a fair size for the style of dwelling and was divided in
two by a long paper screen. The first half was evidently Kosinski's, and
as far as I could see by the dim light, was one litter of papers, with a
mattress on the floor in a corner. We walked past the screen; and the
guttering candle, stuck in an old ginger-beer bottle, allowed me to see a
bed in which lay the dying woman. There was also a table on which stood
some medicine bottles, a jug of milk, and a glass; an armchair of frowsy
aspect, and two cane chairs. The unwashed boards were bare, the room
unattractive to a degree, still an awkward attempt at order was
noticeable. I stepped over to the bed and gazed on its occupant. Eudoxia
was a thin gaunt woman of some thirty-five years of age. Her clustering
golden hair streaked with grey; small, plaintive mouth, and clear skin
showed that she might have been pretty; but the drawn features and closed
eyelids bore the stamp of unutterable weariness, and a querulous
expression hovered round her mouth. The rigid folds of the scanty
bedclothes told of her woeful thinness, and the frail transparent hands
grasped convulsively at the coverlet. As I gazed at her, tears welled into
my eyes. She looked so small, so transient, yet bore the traces of such
mental and physical anguish. After a moment or two she slowly opened her
eyes, gazed vacantly at me without apparently realising my presence, and
in a feeble, plaintive voice made some remark in Russian. Kosinski was at
her side immediately and answered her in soothing tones, evidently
pointing out my presence. The woman fixed on me her large eyes, luminous
with fever. I stepped nearer. "Is there anything I can do for you?" I
inquired in French. "No one can do anything for me except God and the
blessed Virgin," she replied peevishly, "and they are punishing me for my
sins. Yes, for my sins," she went on, raising her voice and speaking in a
rambling delirious way, "because I have consorted with infidels and
blasphemers. Vassili was good to me; we were happy with our little Ivan,
till that devil came along. He ruined Vassili, body and soul; he killed
our child; he has lost me. I have sold myself to the devil, for have I not
lived for the past two years on his charity? And you," she continued,
turning her glittering eyes on me, "beware, he will ruin you too; he has
no heart, no religion; he cares for nothing, for nobody, except his cruel
principles. You love him, I see you do; it is in your every movement, but
beware; he will trample on your heart, he will sacrifice you, throw you
aside as worthless, as he did with Vassili, who looked upon him as his
dearest friend. Beware!" and she sank back exhausted on the pillows, her
eyes turned up under her eyelids, a slight froth tinged with blood
trickling down the corners of her mouth.

I was transfixed with horror; I knew not what to say, what to do. I put
my hand soothingly on her poor fevered brow, and held a little water to
her lips. Then my eyes sought Kosinski. He was standing in the shadow, a
look of intense pain in his eyes and on his brow, and I knew what he must
be suffering at that moment. I walked up to him and grasped his hand in
silent sympathy; he returned the pressure, and for a moment I felt almost
happy in sharing his sorrow. We stood watching in silence; at regular
intervals the church chimes told us that the hours were passing and the
long night gradually drawing to its close. Half-past three, a quarter to
four, four; still the heavy rattling breath told us that the struggle
between life and death had not yet ceased. At last the dying woman heaved
a deep sigh, she opened her wide, staring eyes and raised her hand as if
to summon some one. Kosinski stepped forward, but she waved him off and
looked at me. "I have not a friend in the world," she gasped; "you shall
be my friend. Hold my hand and pray for me." I knelt by her side and did
as I was bid. Never had I prayed since I could remember, but at that
supreme moment a Latin prayer learned in my infancy at my mother's knee
came back to me; Kosinski turned his face to the wall and stood with bowed
shoulders. As the words fell from my lips the dying woman clutched my hand
convulsively and murmured some words in Russian. Then her grasp loosened.
I raised my eyes to her face, and saw that all was over. My strained
nerves gave way, and I sobbed convulsively. Kosinski was at my side.

"Poor thing, poor thing!" I heard him murmur. He laid his hand
caressingly on my shoulder. The candle was flaring itself out, and
everything assumed a ghastly blue tint as the first chill light of dawn,
previous to sunrise, stole into the room. I rose to my feet and went over
to the window. How cold and unsympathetic everything looked! I felt
chilly, and a cold shudder ran down my limbs. Absolute silence prevailed,
in the street, in the house, in the room, where lay the dead woman staring
fixedly before her. Kosinski had sunk into a chair, his head between his
hands. I looked at him in silence and bit my lip. An unaccustomed feeling
of revolt was springing up in me. I could not and did not attempt to
analyse my feelings, only I felt a blind unreasoning anger with existence.
How stupid, how objectless it all seemed! The church clock rung out the
hour, five o'clock. Kosinski rose, he walked to the bedside, and closed
poor Eudoxia's staring eyes, and drew the sheet over her face. Then he
came over to me.

"I shall never forget your kindness, Isabel. There is yet one thing I
will ask of you; I know that Eudoxia wanted a mass to be said for her and
Vassili; will you see about carrying out this wish of hers? I cannot give
you the money to pay for it; I have not got it."

I nodded in silent consent.

He paused a few minutes. He seemed anxious to speak, yet hesitated; at
last he said, "I am leaving London, Isabel, I can do nothing here, and I
have received letters from comrades in Austria telling me that there
things are ripe for the Revolution."

I started violently: "You are leaving! Leaving London?" I stammered.

"Yes, I shall be able to do better work elsewhere."

I turned suddenly on him.


"And so you mean to say that we are to part? Thus? now? for ever?" A
pained look came into his eyes. He seemed to shrink from personalities.
"No," I continued rapidly, "I will, I must speak. Why should we ruin our
lives? To what idol of our own creation are we sacrificing our happiness?
We Anarchists are always talking of the rights of the individual, why are
you deliberately sacrificing your personal happiness, and mine? The dead
woman was right; I love you, and I know that you love me. Our future shall
not be ruined by a misunderstanding. Now I have spoken, you must answer,
and your answer must be final."

I looked at him whilst the words involuntarily rushed from my lips, and
even before I had finished speaking, I knew what his answer would be.

"An Anarchist's life is not his own. Friendship, comradeship may be
helpful, but family ties are fatal; you have seen what they did for my
poor friend. Ever since I was fifteen I have lived solely for the Cause;
you are mistaken in thinking that I love you in the way you imply. I
thought of you as a comrade, and loved you as such."

I had quite regained my self-possession. "Enough," I said, interrupting
him. "I do not regret my words; they have made everything clear to me. You
are of the invincibles, Kosinski; you are strong with the strength of the
fanatic; and I think you will be happy too. You will never turn to
contemplate regretfully the ashes of your existence and say as did your
friend, 'See the result of struggling for a higher life!' You do not, you
cannot see that you are a slave to your conception of freedom, more
prejudiced in your lack of prejudice than the veriest bourgeois; that is
your strength, and it is well. Good-bye."

He grasped my proffered hand with warmth.

"Good-bye, Isabel. I knew you were not like other women; that _you_
could understand."

"I can understand," I replied, "and admire, even if I deplore. Good-bye."

Slowly I moved towards the door, my eyes fascinated by the rigid lines of
the sheet covering the dead woman; slowly I turned the handle and walked
down the mean wooden staircase into the mean suburban street.



CHAPTER XII

THE _TOCSIN'S_ LAST TOLL


As I walked home from Kosinski's in the early morning I felt profoundly
depressed. The weather had turned quite chilly and a fine drizzling rain
began to fall, promising one of those dull, wet days of which we
experience so many in the English spring. The streets were deserted but
for the milkmen going their rounds, and the tired-looking policemen
waiting to be relieved on their beats. I felt that feeling of physical
exhaustion which one experiences after being up all night, when one has
not had the opportunity for a wash and change of clothes. I was not
sleepy, but my eyes were hot and dry under their heavy eyelids, my bones
ached, my muscles felt stiff; I had the uncomfortable consciousness that
my hair was disordered and whispy, my hat awry, my skin shiny; and this
sub-consciousness of physical unattractiveness heightened the sense of
moral degradation.

I felt weary and disgusted, and it was not only, nor even principally,
the knowledge that Kosinski had gone out of my life which accounted for
this. I felt strangely numbed and dull, curiously able to look back on
that incident as if it had occurred to some one else. Every detail, every
word, was vividly stamped on my brain: I kept recurring to them as I
trudged along, but in a critical spirit, smiling every now and again as
the humour of some strangely incongruous detail flashed across my brain.

What really weighed me down was a sense of the futility, not only of
Anarchist propaganda but of things in general. What were we striving for?
Happiness, justice? And the history of the world shows that man has
striven for these since the dawn of humanity without ever getting much
nearer the goal. The few crumbs of personal happiness which one might hope
for in life were despised and rejected by men like Armitage, Kosinski, and
Bonafede, yet all three were alike powerless to bring about the larger
happiness they dreamed of.

I had acquired a keener sense of proportion since the days when I had
first climbed the breakneck ladder of Slater's Mews, and I now realised
that the great mass of toiling humanity ignored our existence, and that
the slow, patient work of the ages was hardly likely to be helped or
hindered by our efforts. I did not depreciate the value of thought, of the
effort made by the human mind to free itself from the shackles of
superstition and slavery; of that glorious unrest which spurs men on to
scrutinise the inscrutable, ever baffled yet ever returning to the
struggle, which alone raises him above the brute creation and which, after
all, constitutes the value of all philosophy quite apart from the special
creed each school may teach; and I doubted not for a moment that the yeast
of Anarchist thought was leavening the social conceptions of our day.

But I had come to see the almost ludicrous side of the Anarchist party,
especially in England, considered as a practical force in politics. Short
and Simpkins were typical figures--M'Dermott, an exceptionally good one
--of the rank and file of the English party. They used long words they
barely understood, considered that equality justified presumption, and
contempt or envy of everything they felt to be superior to themselves.
Communism, as they conceived it, amounted pretty nearly to living at other
people's expense, and they believed in revenging the wrongs of their
classes by exploiting and expropriating the bourgeois whenever such action
was possible without incurring personal risk. Of course I was not blind to
the fact that there were a few earnest and noble men among them, men who
had educated themselves, curtailing their food and sleep to do so, men of
original ideas and fine independent character, but I had found that with
the Anarchist, as with the Socialist party, and indeed all parties, such
were not those who came to the surface, or who gave the _ton_ to the
movement. Then, of course, there were noble dreamers, incorrigible
idealists, like Armitage, men whom experience could not teach nor
disappointment sour. Men gifted with eternal youth, victimised and
sacrificed by others, yet sifting and purifying the vilest waste in the
crucible of their imaginations, so that no meanness, nor the sorrow born
of the knowledge of meanness in others, ever darkens their path. Men who
live in a pure atmosphere of their own creation, whom the worldly-wise
pity as deluded fools, but who are perhaps the only really enviable people
in the world. Notable, too, were the fanatics of the Kosinski type, stern
heroic figures who seem strangely out of place in our humdrum world, whose
practical work often strikes us as useless when it is not harmful, yet
without whom the world would settle down into deadly lethargy and
stagnation. Then in England came a whole host of cranks who, without being
Anarchists in any real sense of the word, seemed drawn towards our ranks,
which they swelled and not infrequently brought into ridicule. The
"Bleeding Lamb" and his atheist opponent Gresham, the Polish Countess Vera
Voblinska with her unhappy husband who looked like an out-at-elbows mute
attached to a third-rate undertaker's business, a dress-reforming lady
disciple of Armitage, a queer figure, not more than four feet in height,
who looked like a little boy in her knickers and jersey, till you caught
sight of the short grizzled hair and wrinkled face, who confided to me
that she was "quite in love with the doctor, he was so _quaint_;" and
numerous others belonged to that class; and finally a considerable
sprinkling of the really criminal classes who seemed to find in the
Anarchist doctrine of "Fais ce que veux" that salve to their conscience
for which even the worst scoundrels seem to crave, and which, at worst,
permitted them to justify their existences in their own eyes as being the
"rotten products of a decaying society." Such were the heterogeneous
elements composing the Anarchist party with which I had set out to reform
the world.

The neighbouring church chimes rang out half-past six as I approached
home, and on reaching the doorstep of the Fitzroy Square house I found my
brother Raymond just letting himself in. On seeing me he exclaimed, "Oh,
Isabel, where have you been so early?--though really your appearance
suggests the idea that you have never been to bed rather than that you
have just risen!" I confirmed his suspicion and together we entered his
study.

"Well, where have you been? Is there something new on with the
Anarchists? I have seen so little of you for the past six months that I
feel quite out of the world--your world at least."

It was a great relief to me to find my brother so conversable. We had
both been so occupied of late in our respective ways that we had had but
scant opportunity for talk or companionship. Raymond had now started
practising on his own account; he was popular with his poor patients in
the crowded slums round King's Cross, amongst whom his work chiefly lay,
and day and night he toiled in their midst. Certainly the sights he saw
there were not calculated to destroy his revolutionary longings, though
they were often such as might well have made him doubt of the ultimate
perfectibility of the human race.

"Oh, I am so glad to find you, Raymond, and I should enjoy a nice long
talk together; but you must be tired; you have, I suppose, only just come
in after working all night?"

He explained to me that he had been summoned after midnight to attend a
poor woman's confinement, and had stayed with her till past four, when,
feeling more inclined for a walk than for his bed, he had wandered off in
the direction of Highgate and had only just got home.

"By the way, Isabel," he said, "as I was coming down the Caledonian Road
I met your friend Armitage. He is a good fellow whom I have always liked,
so I stopped him and we had a chat. He explained to me that he was attired
in his new pedestrian costume, which indeed struck me as almost
pre-Adamite in its simplicity. He had been helping some of his friends to
move--to shoot the moon, I fancy, would describe the situation. He
inquired of me what I was doing, and we got talking on all sorts of
scientific and philosophic problems. It is extraordinary what an intellect
that man has. Only he lives too much in a world of his own creation; he
seems absolutely oblivious of self, and I feel sure his hygiene and
vegetarianism are simply the outcome of his desire to free himself from
all worldly cares which might impede his absolute devotion to his Cause.
He seems to have practically abandoned his practice. As we were wandering
on rather aimlessly, I suggested accompanying him home, but he did not
appear to jump at the idea, and as I know that it is not considered
etiquette amongst you folk to press inquiries as to address and so on, I
was going to drop the subject; but Armitage, after a short silence,
explained that the fact was he had not exactly got a home to go to. I
concluded that he was in for the bother of changing diggings, and made
some sympathetic remark to that effect; but he said that was not exactly
the case--that, in fact, he had given up having a fixed abode altogether.
As you can imagine, Isabel," continued my brother, "this information
somewhat staggered me. I knew through you that he had long ago given up
his Harley Street establishment and moved into more populous quarters,
where I quite supposed him still to be residing. But he calmly went on to
explain, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, that he
had been in need of a rather considerable sum of money some weeks back for
purposes of propaganda, and that, not knowing where else to obtain the
money, he had sold up all his belongings and cleared out of his lodgings
without paying his rent, 'by way of an example.' All this he explained
with the air of a man adducing an unanswerable argument, and as his manner
did not admit of remonstrance, I simply asked him what he thought of doing
now, which started him off on a long account of the opportunities for
propaganda afforded by such establishments as Rowton House, the casual
wards, and the Salvation Army Shelters. 'We want to get at the oppressed,
to rouse them from their lethargy of ages, to show them that they too have
rights, and that it is cowardly and wicked to starve in the midst of
plenty; we want to come amongst them, not as preachers and dilettantists,
but as workers like themselves, and how can this be done better than by
going in their midst and sharing their life?' I could not but feel
amazement and admiration at the enthusiasm and sincerity of this man,
mingled with sorrow at the thought that such an intellect as his should be
thus wasted. He is a man who might have done almost anything in the
scientific world, and now he seems destined to waste his life, a dreamer
of dreams, a sort of modern St. Francis in a world lacking in idealism,
and where he will be looked upon as a wandering lunatic rather than a
saint."

I sat silent for a few minutes. I had not quite realised that poor
Armitage had come to this--a frequenter of casual wards, a homeless and
wandering lunatic; my brother was right, the world would judge him as
such. I was not, however, in the least surprised at the news.

The servants had by now come down and we had breakfast brought to the
study, and I gave Raymond an account of my night's proceedings. When I
concluded my brother said,

"Well, Isabel, you will remain almost alone at the _Tocsin_.
Kosinski is leaving, Giannoli is gone, Armitage is otherwise occupied.
Will you be able to keep it going?"

"Oh, I could keep it going," I replied. "There are still a lot of
comrades hanging on to it; new ones are constantly turning up. The work
can be done between us, there is no doubt of that. It is rather of myself
that I doubt. I begin to feel isolated in the midst of the others; I
cannot believe that people like Short and Simpkins can change Society;
they would have to begin reforming themselves, and that they are incapable
of. I can admire a man like Kosinski: I cannot exactly sympathise with
him. As to Armitage, I can only grieve that he should thus waste his life
and talents. Probably, had he thought a little more of his personal
happiness, he would have avoided falling a victim to monomania, for such
he is in part. And then--and then--it is not only of others that I doubt,
but of myself. Am I really doing any good? Can I sincerely believe that
the _Tocsin_ will help towards the regeneration of mankind? Can
mankind be regenerated? When such questions never occurred to me, or, if
they did, were answered by my brain with an unhesitating affirmative, then
it was easy to work. No difficulties could daunt me; everything seemed
easy, straightforward. But now--but now...."

"Well, then, why don't you give it up, Isabel?" "Give it up? Oh, how
could I? I have never really thought of that. Oh no; the paper must come
out. I have undertaken it. I must go on with it."

"And you an Anarchist! Why, I always thought you believed in the absolute
freedom of the individual, and here you are saying that you must go on
with a work in which you no longer feel the requisite confidence, for the
mere reason that you once, under other circumstances, started it."

"You are right, Raymond, logically right, but life is not ruled by logic,
whether we be Anarchists or Reactionaries. I feel that I could not give up
the _Tocsin_, my interests centre round it; besides, I do not say
that I have altered my ideas; I am still an Anarchist, I can honestly work
for the Cause; I only said that I doubt. I feel depressed. Who has not had
at times periods of depression and doubt?"

"Well, we shall see," replied Raymond. "I got a letter from Caroline last
night which I wanted to show you. She says she will be home in another
three months, as she has accepted a further engagement for the States now
that her tour is nearly over. When she comes home it will be a little
company for you in the house. She has friends, and she is sure to be much
sought after now, as she seems fairly on the road to becoming a celebrity
in the musical world."

I read the long letter, written in the brilliant style which
characterised everything about Caroline. She described her triumphs in the
various cities of the Argentine and Brazil, the receptions given in her
honour, the life and society of these faraway countries, with a brightness
and humour which brought home to me the whole atmosphere of the places and
people she described. Caroline had always been fond of society, and even
before leaving England had become quite a favourite in musical circles;
but her quick, bright intelligence had never allowed her to be blind to
much that was vulgar and ludicrous in her surroundings. I was truly glad
to think that we should meet again before long. The common memories and
affections of our childhood formed a solid basis for our mutual
friendship, but I could not help smiling as I read the last paragraph of
her long epistle: "I expect by now Isabel has had time to grow out of her
enthusiasm for revolutions and economics, and will feel less drawn towards
baggy-trousered democrats and unwashed philosophers than when I left.
Perhaps she may even have come round to my view of life, _i.e._, that
it is really not worth while taking things too tragically, and that it is
best to take the few good things life brings us without worrying one's
brains about humanity. Selfish, is it not? But I have generally noticed
that it is your stern moralists and humanitarians who cause the most
unhappiness in the world. Anyhow, if Isabel is less wrapped up in
Socialism and Anarchy we shall be able to have a good time when I come
home. I am sure to be asked out a good deal, and if the fashionable people
who patronise musical celebrities are not free from their foibles and
ridicules we shall anyhow be able to amuse ourselves and laugh at them up
our sleeves."

So Caroline already counted on my having outgrown Anarchy and unwashed
philosophy, as she phrased it, and grown into drawing-room etiquette! But
she was wrong! I should go on with the _Tocsin_. I should still work
in the Cause; I had done so till then, and what had happened since
yesterday to alter my intentions? Nothing, or at least nothing of outward
importance. Only, since my last interview with Armitage and my parting
with Kosinski, I had begun to formulate to myself many questions which
till then I had only vaguely felt. Still I repeated to myself that I
should go on with the paper, that I should continue to lead the same life.
Of course I should! How could I do otherwise? And even if I had changed
somewhat in my ideas and my outlook on life, I certainly did not feel even
remotely attracted towards the sort of society Caroline referred to. I had
a vivid recollection of once accompanying her to an _at home_, given
in a crowded drawing-room, where the heavily-gilded Louis XV. mirrors and
Sevres vases and ornaments, with their scrolls and flourishes, all seemed
to have developed the flowing wigs which characterised the Roi Soleil, and
where the armchairs and divans were upholstered in yellow and pink satin,
and decked out with ribbon bows to resemble Watteau sheep. Oh no;
certainly I should not exchange the low living and high thinking of my
Anarchist days for such artificiality and vulgar display. Sunday was
generally a very busy day with me, almost more so than week-days, for
there were meetings to be held, literature to be sold and distributed, and
lectures and discussions to be attended. I was in the habit of rising
rather late, as very often Saturday night was an all-night sitting at the
office of the _Tocsin_, and Sunday morning was the only time I found
it convenient to pay a little attention to the toilet. But I used
generally to manage to be by twelve in some public place, and help Short
and M'Dermott to start a meeting. Short, influenced by his inherent
laziness, had succeeded in persuading the Italians that he was a great
orator, and that they could not better forward the Cause in their new
country than by carrying for him the movable platform from which he
delivered his spirited harangues; so that one or two of them were
generally present helping to form the nucleus of an audience, and ready to
lend their valid support should any drunken loafer or top-hatted
bourgeois, outraged in his feelings, attempt to disturb the proceedings.
Hyde Park was generally my destination in the afternoon, and in the
evening we used to repair in force to the hall of the Social Democrats,
there to take part in the discussion which followed the lectures, or else
some meeting in Deptford, Canning Town, or Stratford would claim my
attendance. But on this particular Sunday I felt too tired and despondent
to think of rushing out in my usual style.

I shut myself in my room and tried to rest, but I could not free myself
from the sights and thoughts which had beset me during the night. The
words of Kosinski's friend, "And this is what comes of struggling for the
higher life," still haunted me; the dead woman, staring blindly into space
rose before me, an image of the suffering forced on the weak by the
strong. Then my thoughts reverted to Giannoli. What was he doing? I had
not heard from him for over a month, and his last letter had been far from
reassuring. He hinted at some desperate enterprise he was engaged on, and
as I had no further news of him from any quarter I thought it not unlikely
that he had been arrested, and was, even then perhaps, suffering unknown
tortures in one of those dreaded Spanish prisons, where the old systems of
the Inquisition still prevail, though modern hypocrisy requires that all
should pass in silence and darkness, content on these conditions never to
push too closely its inquiries, even though some crippled victim who may
escape should rouse for a moment a spasmodic outburst of indignation in
the civilised world. And even were this not his fate, it was a sad enough
one in all conscience: to rush all over the world, wrecked in health,
driven from place to place by his wild suspicions, the offspring of a
diseased imagination; deprived of friends, for his mania of persecution
drove them off; deprived of means, for he had sacrificed his all to the
propaganda, and his health and mode of life did not permit of any settled
occupation. I felt strangely anxious about him, and this led my thoughts
back once more to Kosinski, with whom I had been brought so closely into
contact through our relations with Giannoli. I should never see him again
in all probability. He had told me he was going to Austria. He too
belonged to the _knights of death_, as an Italian comrade had named a
certain section of the Anarchists; and he was working out his inevitable
destiny. I wondered now how I had ever allowed myself to conceive of him
otherwise. I had always known it was impossible, and I felt that it was
only an impulse of rebellion against fate which had led me to speak.

Finding sleep out of the question, I got up and attempted to write an
article which I had promised to bring down to the _Tocsin_ the
following morning. The subject I had chosen was "The Right to Happiness,"
and I argued that man has a right not only to daily bread, as the
Socialists maintain, but also to happiness, consisting in the fullest
development and exercise of all his faculties, a condition only possible
when the individual shall be perfectly free, living in a harmonious
society of free men, untrammelled by artificial economic difficulties, and
by superstitions inherited from the past. Some days previously we had had
a discussion on the subject at the office of the _Tocsin_, and I had
maintained my views victoriously against the pessimistic dogmatism of a
German comrade. But now my arguments seemed hollow to myself, mere
rhetoric, and even that of third-rate quality. Happiness! Did not the mere
fact of attaining our desires deprive them of their charm? Life was an
alternating of longing and regret. I pushed paper and pen aside, and began
roaming aimlessly about the house. The large old-fashioned rooms impressed
me as strangely silent and forlorn. I wandered up to the attic which our
father had used as a laboratory, and which had always struck us children
as a mysterious apartment, where he did wonderful things with
strange-shaped instruments and bottles which we were told contained
deadly poison. His apparatus was still ranged on the shelves, thick in
dust, and the air was heavy with the pungent smell of acids. The large
drawing-rooms with their heavy hangings looked shabbier and dingier than
of old; I could not help noticing the neglected look of everything. I had
hardly entered them during the past year, and now I vaguely wondered
whether Caroline on her return would wish to have them renovated. Then I
remembered how I had received there for the first time, some four years
ago, my brother's Socialist friend, and I could not help smiling as I
recollected my excitement on that occasion. I was indeed young in those
days! I picked up a book which was lying on a table thick in dust, and sat
down listlessly in the roomy arm-chair by the fireside, which had been my
father's favourite seat. I began turning the pages of a volume, "The
Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius," and gradually I became absorbed in its
contents. Here was a man who had known how to create for himself in his
own soul an oasis of rest, not by practising a selfish indifference to,
and isolation from, public matters--not by placing his hopes in some
future paradise, the compensation of terrestrial suffering, but by rising
superior to external events, and, whilst fulfilling his duty as emperor
and man, not allowing himself to be flustered or perturbed by the
inevitable. "Abolish opinion, you have abolished this complaint, 'Some one
has harmed me.' Suppress the complaint, 'Some one has harmed me,' and the
harm itself is suppressed." What wisdom in these words!

It was a long while since I had thus enjoyed a quiet read. For several
months past my life had been a ceaseless round of feverish activity.
Looking back, it seemed to me that I had allowed myself to be strangely
preoccupied and flustered by trifles. What were these important duties
which had so absorbed me as to leave me no time for thought, for study, no
time to live my own life? How had I come to give such undue importance to
the publication of a paper which, after all, was read by a very few, and
those few for the most part already blind believers in the ideas it
advocated? Yet I told myself that the _Tocsin_ had done good work,
and could yet do much. Besides, I had undertaken it, I must go on with it;
life without an object would be intolerable. The slow hours passed, and
when night came I felt thoroughly worn out and exhausted, and soon got to
sleep.

I awoke on Monday morning with a sense of impending misfortune hovering
over me. I had taken refuge in sleep the previous night from a host of
troublesome thoughts and perplexing doubts, and I now experienced the
hateful sensation of returning consciousness, when one does not yet
recollect fully the past, yet realises vaguely the re-awakening to
suffering and action. I wanted to get to the office early that morning,
for publishing day was near at hand and there was a lot of work to be
finished. I felt that the drudgery of composing would be a relief to my
over-strained nerves; so, without waiting for breakfast and the morning
paper which I generally scanned before leaving home, I dressed rapidly and
set out for the _Tocsin_. I had not gone many yards when my attention
was attracted by the large placards pasted on the boards outside a
newspaper shop:--

"Shocking outrage in Madrid. Attempt on the life of Spanish
Prime-Minister--Many victims. Arrest of Anarchist Assassin. London Police
on scent."

Giannoli! The name flashed across my brain as I rushed into the shop and
purchased the paper. My heart thumped with excitement as, standing in the
shadow of some houses at the corner of the street, I hastily opened and
folded the sheet and ran my eyes down the long column, freely interspersed
with headlines.

"On Sunday evening, at half-past six, when the fashionable crowd which
throngs the Prado at Madrid was at its thickest, and just as the Minister
Fernandez was driving by in his carriage, a man pushed his way through the
crowd, and shouting 'Long live Anarchy,' discharged at him three shots
from a revolver; the aim, however, was not precise, and one of the bullets
wounded, it is feared mortally, the secretary, Señor Esperandez, who was
seated beside his chief, whilst the Minister was shot in the arm. Several
people rushed forward to seize the miscreant, who defended himself
desperately, discharging the remaining chambers of the revolver amidst his
assailants, two of whom have sustained serious injuries. He was, however,
overcome and taken, handcuffed and bound, to the nearest police station.
On being interrogated he refused his name and all particulars as to
himself, only declaring that he attempted the life of the Minister
Fernandez on his own individual responsibility, that he had no
accomplices, and that his object was to revenge his comrades who had been
persecuted by order of the Minister. When informed that he had missed his
aim, and that Fernandez had escaped with a broken arm, whilst his
secretary was in danger of death, he expressed his regret at not having
succeeded in his object, saying that this was due to his wretched health,
which rendered his aim unsteady; but as to Señor Esperandez, he declared
that he considered him also responsible, inasmuch as he was willing to
associate himself with the oppressor of the people. Neither threats nor
persuasion could induce him to say more. The police, however, are making
active inquiries, and have ascertained so far (midnight of Sunday) that
the prisoner is an Italian Anarchist recently landed at Barcelona from
America, passing under the name of Paolo Costa. This name, however, is
considered to be false. He is a tall man, of rather distinguished
appearance. The police do not credit the idea that he has no accomplices,
and during the evening extensive arrests have been made in Madrid and
Barcelona. Over a hundred of the most noted Anarchists and Socialists in
these cities are now in prison."

Such was the brief outline of facts as given by the _Morning Post._
Of course I had not the slightest doubt as to the identity of the
prisoner; the state of weakness and ill-health which had caused him to
miss his aim was conclusive, added to the many other reasons I had for
supposing him to be Giannoli. This, then, was the deed he had been
contemplating! Only the day before I had been wondering why I had no news
of him; but a few hours previously he went forth to his death. For it
meant death, of course; of that I had no doubt. He would be garotted; I
only hoped that he might not be tortured first. I gave a hasty glance at
the other details given by the paper. A column was dedicated to the
virtues of the prime-minister. He was upheld as a model of the domestic
virtues (a few months back Continental papers had been full of a
scandalous trial in which Fernandez had been involved), and was
represented as the man who had saved Spain from ruin and disaster by his
firm repression of the revolutionary parties: by which euphonious phrase
the papers referred to the massacres of strikers which had taken place at
Barcelona and Valladolid, and the wholesale arrest and imprisonment of
Anarchists and Socialists in connection with a recent anti-clerical
movement which had convulsed the Peninsula.

These arrests had given rise to a great political trial for conspiracy
before a court-martial, which had ended in a sentence of death passed on
five of the prisoners, whilst the others were sentenced to terms of
imprisonment varying from thirty to five years. It was to revenge the
injustice and the sufferings caused by this policy that Giannoli had
attempted the life of the Spanish minister. Another paragraph caught my
eye:--

"London police hot on scent: raids and arrests."

"Our correspondent has interviewed a leading detective at Scotland Yard
who for some years past has been charged with the surveillance of
suspicious foreign Anarchists. This clever officer informs our
correspondent that he has no doubt the plot was hatched in London, and
thinks that he could name the author, an Italian Anarchist of desperate
antecedents who disappeared from London under mysterious circumstances
nearly seven months ago. London is a centre of Anarchist propaganda, and
foreign desperadoes of all nationalities flock hither to abuse the
hospitality and freedom which this government too rashly concedes them.
Englishmen will one day be roused from their fool's paradise to find that
too long have they nursed a viper in their bosom. We trust that this
lesson will not be wasted, and that the police will see to closing without
delay certain self-styled clubs and 'printing-offices' which are in
reality nothing but hotbeds of conspiracy and murder."

I hurried along as I read these last words. We were evidently once more
in for troublous times. The office of the _Tocsin_ was clearly
designated in the paragraph I have quoted; perhaps the office would be
raided; perhaps the Italian comrades who were staying there would be
arrested. I rapidly reviewed in my mind's eye the papers and letters which
were in the office, wondering whether anything incriminating would be
found; but I did not feel much perturbed on that score, as it was my
invariable custom to burn all papers of importance, and I felt certain
that nothing more compromising would be found than the Bleeding Lamb's
tract on the Seven-headed Beast, which, according to its author, would
"make the old Queen sit up a bit," and Gresham's treatise on the
persecutions of the Early Christians. I was glad to think that Kosinski
had settled to leave the country. I knew that Giannoli had left with him
much of his correspondence, and I trusted that this would not fall into
the hands of the police.

I had now nearly reached my destination and, as I turned up the corner of
Lysander Grove, I at once realised that something unusual had taken place
at the office. The shutters were still up at Mrs. Wattles's green-grocer's
shop, and that lady herself loomed large at the entrance to the courtyard
leading to the _Tocsin_, surrounded by her chief gossips and by a
dozen or two of dirty matrons. Several windows were up in the houses
opposite and slatternly-looking women were craning out and exchanging
observations. I hurried on and, pushing my way past Mrs. Wattles, who I
could see at a glance was in liquor, and heedless of her remarks, I ran
down the narrow courtyard to the office door which I found shut. I knocked
impatiently and loudly; the door opened and I was confronted by a
detective.

What I had expected had happened. The office had been raided, and was now
in the hands of the police. In answer to my inquiring look, the detective
requested me to come in and speak to the inspector. In the ground-floor
room three or four Italian comrades were gathered together. The one-eyed
baker, Beppe, was addressing the others in a loud voice; as far as I could
gather from the few words I caught, he was relating some prison
experiences. The group looked unusually animated and jolly; the incident
evidently reminded them of their own country. As soon as they saw me enter
they interrupted their talk, and Beppe stepped forward to shake hands, but
the officer of the law interposed: "Now, you fellows, stay there; the
young lady is going to speak to the inspector." I told Beppe I should soon
be down, and he retired, pulling a wry face at the detective, and making
some observation to his friends which made them all roar with laughter.
Upstairs a scene of wild disorder greeted my eye. Four or five policemen
were turning over heaps of old papers, searching through dusty cupboards
and shelves; heaps of pie lay about the floor--evidently some one had put
a foot through the form of type ready set for the forthcoming issue of the
_Tocsin_; on the "composing surface" stood a formidable array of pint
pots, with the contents of which the men in blue had been refreshing
themselves. On a packing-case in the middle of the room sat Short, his
billycock hat set far back on his long, greasy hair, smoking a clay pipe
with imperturbable calm; whilst little M'Dermott, spry as ever, watched
the proceedings, pulling faces at the policemen behind their backs, and
"kidding" them with extraordinary tales as to the fearful explosive
qualities of certain ginger-beer bottles which were ranged on a shelf. At
the editorial table, which was generally covered with a litter of proofs
and manuscript, more or less greasy and jammy, owing to our habit of
feeding in the office, sat the inspector, going through the heaps of
papers, pamphlets, and manuscript articles which were submitted to his
scrutiny by his satellites. I took in all this at a glance, and walking
straight up to the inspector, I demanded of him an explanation of this
unwarranted invasion of the office.

His first answer was an interrogation.

"You are Isabel Meredith, are you not?"

This opened up an explanation which was brief and conclusive. The
inspector showed me a search-warrant, duly signed by a magistrate, and
another warrant for the arrest of Kosinski, and informed me that the
office had been opened to him by Short, who had represented himself as one
of the proprietors. The primary object of the search was to see if
Kosinski, who was wanted by the police in connection with the Madrid
outrage, were not on the premises, and also to see if there were no
incriminating documents or explosive materials concealed there.

"And have you found anything very alarming?" I inquired sarcastically.

"No, miss," the inspector replied in the same tone; "the most dangerous
object in this place seems to be your printer" (he pointed at Short), "and
we have kept at a fairly safe distance from _him_. Still, of course,
I have to go through all these papers; they may yet give us a clue to the
whereabouts of Kosinski or your friend Giannoli;" and here he looked me
straight in the face.

"Maybe," I simply replied with a shrug. I felt perfectly tranquil on that
score, and had but small doubt that Kosinski was by now already on his way
out of the country, as he would judge from the papers that the police
would be on his track.

"And when will this search be over?" I inquired.

"Oh, I cannot exactly tell you. It will take me some days to go all
through these papers. We shall probably be here for two or three days."

I looked around me. Everything was disorganised. The type cases had all
been emptied into a heap in the middle of the room, the forms ready locked
up had been pied, the MSS. and papers sequestered. It was utterly hopeless
to think of bringing out the _Tocsin_. The scene reminded me of my
first experience of an Anarchist printing-office after the police raid on
the _Bomb_; but now I no longer had Armitage to encourage me with his
unswerving optimism and untiring energy, nor Kosinski to urge me on with
his contempt of dilettantism and half-hearted enthusiasm. True, Short was
there, much the same as in the old days; even his dog could be heard
snarling and growling when the policemen administered to him some sly
kick; but as I looked at the squalid and lethargic figure with its sallow,
unhealthy, repulsive face, I was overcome by a feeling of almost physical
nausea. I realised fully how loathsome this gutter Iago had become to me
during the past few months, during which I had had ample opportunity to
note his pettifogging envy and jealousy, his almost simian inquisitiveness
and prying curiosity. I felt I could not work with him; his presence had
become intolerable to me. I realised that this was the _finale_, the
destined end of the _Tocsin_ and of my active revolutionary
propaganda. I had changed. Why not let the dead bury their dead?

At this moment the policeman who had opened the office door to me came up
bringing a letter, which he handed to the inspector.

"It is for you, miss," that functionary said, reading the address, "but I
have orders to open all correspondence. You will excuse my complying with
them."

My heart stood still. Could it be from Kosinski or Giannoli? After a
moment the inspector handed the note to me. It was from the landlord--a
notice to quit. I walked up and showed it to Short.

"Well, what will you do?" he inquired. They were the first words we had
exchanged that morning.

"I shall leave," I replied.

"And how about the paper? Do you think of starting it again?"

"No, I do not think so; not for the present at any rate."

"And the 'plant'?"

"I shall leave that too. You can look after it, you and the comrades!"

"Oh, the comrades!" sneered Short, and returned to his pipe.

I turned once more to the inspector. "I am free to leave, I suppose?" I
inquired. "I cannot see that my presence here serves any purpose."

"Oh yes, miss, you can go if you like. The presence of the printer is
sufficient for us. I understand he is one of the proprietors?"

"Oh yes, he is a proprietor," I replied, and turned on my heel. M'Dermott
came up to me.

"Well, my dear," he said, "so you are leaving. Well, I don't blame you,
nor wish you to remain. After all, it is no use trying to tinker up our
rotten system, or to prop up society with such wretched supports as our
friend here," and he pointed at Short. "What we need is to get round them
by our insidious means, and then go in for wholesale assassination!"

I could not help smiling as the little man gave vent to this bloodthirsty
sentiment in an undertone; he wrung my hand warmly, and we parted.

"What do you intend doing with those Italians who stay here?" I inquired
of the inspector as the sound of a guitar proceeding from downstairs
recalled my thoughts to them.

"I think it best to detain them here until I have finished searching the
place thoroughly; then if I find nothing to incriminate them, they will be
free. You need not worry about them, miss, they do not seem likely to
suffer from depression."

The twanging of the guitar was now accompanied by Beppe's powerful
baritone voice, whilst the others joined in the chorus:

  "_Noi, profughi D'Italia...._"

I walked down the stairs.

"Good-bye, Comrades!"

"Good-bye, a rivederci!" and after giving one last look at the familiar
scene, I walked out.

As I made my way down the yard leading to the street, I encountered Mrs.
Wattles at the back door of her shop. She had now reached the maudlin
stage of intoxication. Her eyes were bleary, her mouth tremulous, her
complexion bloated and inflamed. There was something indefinite in her
appearance, suggesting the idea that her face had been boiled, and that
the features had run, losing all sharpness of outline and expression. She
fixed me with her fishy eye, and dabbing her face with the corner of her
apron began to blubber.

"S'elp me Gawd, miss," she began, "I never thought as I should come to
this! To have them narks under my very roof, abrazenin' it out! I always
knew as there was something wrong abart pore Mr. Janly, and many's the
time I've said to 'im, 'Mr. Janly, sir,' I've said, 'do take a little
something, yer look so pale.' But 'e always answered, 'No, Mrs. Wattles,
no; you've been a mother to me, Mrs. Wattles, and I know you're right, but
I can't do it. 'Ere's for 'alf a pint to drink my health, but I can't do
it.' And I dare say as it were them temp'rance scrupils like as brought
'im to 'is end."

At these tender recollections of Giannoli the good lady quite broke down.

"To think that it was I as let you that very shop two years last
Christmas, and that pore Mr. Cusings, as was sweet on you then--I've not
seen 'im lately--and now the coppers are under my very roof! It seems a
judgment on us, it really does. But I always told Wattles that if he went
on treatin' of 'is wedded wife more like a 'eathen than a Christian woman,
as a judgment would come on 'im, an' now my words is proved."

She seemed by now quite oblivious of my presence: a quivering shapeless
mass of gin-drenched humanity she collapsed on to the doorstep. And with
this for my last sight and recollection of the place which had witnessed
so much enthusiasm, so many generous hopes and aspirations, and where so
many illusions lay buried, I walked forth into the London street a sadder
if a wiser woman.


THE END





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