It was in the old days, when a certain famous anarchist club held its
meetings in a house in one of the dismal streets abutting on the
Tottenham Court Road. An evening paper had asked me to write an article
about the club. An Italian waiter, whom the proprietors of a West-End
_cafe_ were protecting from the Milan police, introduced me to it as his
guest; and there, in an atmosphere of pipes and lager-beer, I met
Stromboli. His full name, sprawling in true cosmopolitan fashion over
three languages, was Jean Antoine Stromboli Kosnapulski; but Stromboli
is as much of it as I have ever been able to recall without a special
effort of the memory. He was old, white-haired, white-bearded, with a
furrowed brow only half hidden by his broad-brimmed, unbrushed, soft
felt hat. He wore a coloured flannel shirt, with a turn-down flannel
collar, showing the strong line of his throat. Beneath bushy eyebrows
his eyes gleamed, keen and restless; and when I first saw him he was the
centre of a group of younger revolutionists, whom he was evidently
entertaining with animated reminiscences. This was the scrap of his
talk that reached my ears through the hubbub--
"Yes, my comrades, it was I--_moi qui vous parle_--who made the
revolution of 1848! It is not in the histories, you tell me? Then so
much the worse for the histories, I answer."
[Illustration: "'Yes, my comrades, it was I who made the revolution of
1848!'"]
One naturally desired the better acquaintance of an old man who talked
like that. My Milanese friend presented me to him with ceremony, as
though he were introducing two rival potentates. I bowed low, with a
due sense of the honour done to me, and was received with grave
condescension; and then I told Stromboli that I fancied that I had heard
his name before.
"In connection, if I am not mistaken," I added, "with some revolutionary
movement."
Stromboli's face lighted with a smile.
Whether it was a smile of vanity, or a smile of scorn for the ignorance
of the man who was not quite sure whether he had ever heard of him or
not, I cannot altogether determine; but there the smile was, and it
lasted through several sentences.
"It is not impossible," he said, "for I have done things--aye, and I
have suffered things! I have been condemned to death by Spaniards at
Santiago de Cuba! I checked the worst excesses of the Paris Commune!
And there are other stories. The revolutions, in short, have kept me
very busy."
"You speak," I protested, "as though to be a revolutionist were a
calling, a profession, a _metier_."
The last word seemed to please him; he smiled again as he rolled it over
on his tongue.
"_Un metier? Je le crois bien_. And why not? Is there no need for
'skilled labour' in the making of a revolution? No less, I take it,
than in the building of a battleship. Why, yes, then, if you choose to
put it so, I am a revolutionist by _metier_."
"But still----"
The eyes flashed, and the smile changed its character.
"A poor _metier_, do you think? Then think again. It has its hazards?
Granted. It is less safe than your _metier_ of writing for the
newspapers? Granted also. But at least it quickens the pulse and stirs
the blood. At the end of it, if one is still alive, one can at least
boast that one has lived. To have gambled with death in one's
youth--that is something worth remembering in one's old age. And I have
gambled with death wherever I could find a worthy stake to play for. If
I should ever tell my stories----"
But when a man talks in that way it needs little pressure to get the
stories told, and I had not pursued my acquaintance with Stromboli very
far before the pressure was applied.
"_Voyons!_" he said to me one day. "I have creditors; they ask for
money, a thing which I have had little leisure to amass. If there were
a way of turning stories into money!"
To his astonishment I answered that with some stories, at all events,
there was a way; and he forthwith told me the following, in order that
the experiment might be tried. I give it in his own words, and call
it--