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.