[Gutenberg 43082] • Stromboli and the Guns

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-