"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.