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.