It was Peter Kropotkin telling of his escape from the Petro-Paulovsky
fortress. Three crumbs on the table marked the relative position of the
outwitted guards and the fugitive prisoner; the speaker had broken them
from the bread on which he was lunching and dropped them on the table
with an amused smile. The suggested triangle had been the starting-point
of the life-long exile of the greatest man, save Tolstoy alone, that
Russia has produced; from that moment began the many foreign wanderings
and the taking of the simple, love-given title "Comrade," for which he
had abandoned the "Prince," which he despises.
We were three together in the plain little home of a London
workingman--Will Wess, a one-time shoemaker--Kropotkin, and I. We had
our "tea" in homely English fashion, with thin slices of buttered bread;
and we talked of things nearest our hearts, which, whenever two or three
Anarchists are gathered together, means present evidences of the growth
of liberty and what our comrades are doing in all lands. And as what
they do and say often leads them into prisons, the talk had naturally
fallen upon Kropotkin's experience and his daring escape, for which the
Russian government is chagrined unto this day.
Presently the old man glanced at the time, and jumped briskly to his
feet: "I am late. Good-by, Voltairine; good-by, Will. Is this the way to
the kitchen? I must say good-by to Mrs. Turner and Lizzie." And out to
the kitchen he went, unwilling, late though he was, to leave without a
hand-clasp to those who had so much as washed a dish for him. Such is
Kropotkin, a man whose personality is felt more than any other in the
Anarchist movement--at once the gentlest, the most kindly, and the most
invincible of men. Communist as well as Anarchist, his very heart-beats
are rhythmic with the great common pulse of work and life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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