The most amusing part of the story was that I really found for him the address of the Turkish embassy even before we had reached Charing Cross. The train stopped at some station on the way, and two elegant ladies entered our already full third-class compartment. Both had newspapers in their hands. One was English, and the other—a handsome woman, who spoke good French—pretended to be English. After exchanging a few words, the latter asked me à brûle pourpont: “What do you think of Count Ignatyev?” and immediately after that: “Are you soon going to kill the new Tsar?” I was clear as to her profession from these two questions, but thinking of my priest, I said to her: “Do you happen to know the address of the Turkish embassy?” “Street so-and-so, number so-and-so,” she replied without hesitation, like a schoolgirl in a class. “You could, I suppose, also give the address of the Russian embassy?” I asked her, and the address having been given with the same readiness, I communicated both to the priest. When we reached Charing Cross, the lady was so obsequiously anxious to attend to my luggage, and even to carry a heavy package herself with her gloved hands, that I finally told her, much to her surprise: “Enough of this: ladies don’t carry gentlemen’s luggage. Go away!”
But to return to my trustworthy French spy. “He alighted at Charing Cross,” he wrote in his report, “but for more than half an hour after the arrival of the train he did not leave the station, until he had ascertained that everyone else had left it. I kept aloof in the meantime, concealing myself behind a pillar. Having ascertained that all passengers had left the platform, they both suddenly jumped into a cab. I followed them nevertheless, and overheard the address which the cabman gave at the gate to the policeman—12, Street So-and-So—and ran after the cab. There were no cabs in the neighborhood; so I ran up to Trafalgar Square, where I got one. I then drove after him, and he alighted at the above address.”
Every fact of it is true again—the address and everything; but how mysterious it all reads. I had warned a Russian friend of my arrival, but there was a dense fog that morning, and he overslept. We waited for him half an hour, and then, leaving our luggage in the cloakroom, drove to his house.
“There they sat till two o’clock with drawn curtains, and then only a tall man came out of the house, and returned one hour later with their baggage.” Even the remark about the curtains was correct; we had to light the gas on account of the fog, and drew down the curtains to get rid of the ugly fog sight of a small Islington street wrapped in a dense fog.
When I was working with Elisée Reclus at Clarens, I used to go every fortnight to Geneva to see to the bringing out of Le Révolté. One day when I reached our printing-office, I was told that a Russian gentleman wanted to see me. He had already seen my friends, and had told them that he came to induce me to start a paper, like Le Révolté, in Russian. He offered for that purpose all the money that might be required. I went to meet him in a café, where he gave me a German name—Tohnlehm, let us say—and told me that he was a native of the Baltic provinces. He boasted of possessing a large fortune in certain estates and manufactures, and he was extremely angry against the Russian government for their Russianizing schemes. On the whole he produced a somewhat indeterminate impression, so that my friends insisted upon my accepting his offer; but I did not much like the man from first sight.
From the café he took me to his rooms in a hotel, and there he began to show less reserve, and to appear more like himself and still more unpleasant. “Don’t doubt my fortune,” he said to me, “I have also a capital invention. There’s a lot of money in it. I shall patent it, and get a considerable sum of money for it—all for the cause of the revolution in Russia.” And he showed me, to my astonishment, a
