The Bomb | Page 4

"She simply passed with the jail officials at first as 'Lingg's girl,' but
one day someone called her Ida Miller, and thereafter she was
recognized under that name. She was generally accompanied by young
Miss Engel, the daughter of the Anarchist Engel, and during the last
four months of her lover's incarceration she could be seen every
afternoon entering the jail. She was always readily admitted until the
day the bombs were found in Lingg's cell. After that neither she nor Mr.
and Mrs. Stein were admitted. While it has never been satisfactorily
proven who it was that introduced the bombs into the jail, it is likely
that they were smuggled into Lingg's hands by his sweetheart. She
enjoyed Lingg's fullest confidence, and obeyed his every wish.
"It is not known whether Miller is the real name of the girl, but it is
supposed to be Elise Friedel. She is a German, and was twenty-two
years of age at the time, her birthplace being Mannheim, which was
also Lingg's native town. She was tall, well-made, with fair complexion,
and dark eyes and hair."
Here ends the police account so far as it concerns us or throws light on
the characters of The Bomb. It is informative and fairly truthful but
plainly inspired by illiterate and brainless prejudice. Still it proves that
in my story I have kept closely to the facts.

FRANK HARRIS.
Chapter I
"Hold the high way and let thy spirit thee lead And Truth shal thee
deliver, it is no drede."
MY NAME is Rudolph Schnaubelt. I threw the bomb which killed
eight policemen and wounded sixty in Chicago in 1886. Now I lie here
in Reichholz, Bavaria, dying of consumption under a false name, in
peace at last.
But it is not about myself I want to write: I am finished. I got chilled to
the heart last winter, and grew steadily worse in those hateful, broad,
white Muenchener streets which are baked by the sun and swept by the
icy air from the Alps. Nature or man will soon deal with my refuse as
they please.
But there is one thing I must do before I go out, one thing I have
promised to do. I must tell the story of the man who spread terror
through America, the greatest man that ever lived, I think; a born rebel,
murderer and martyr. If I can give a fair portrait of Louis Lingg, the
Chicago Anarchist, as I knew him, show the body and soul and mighty
purpose of him, I shall have done more for men than when I threw the
bomb. . . .
How am I to tell the story? Is it possible to paint a great man of action
in words; show his cool calculation of forces, his unerring judgment,
and the tiger spring? The best thing I can do is to begin at the beginning,
and tell the tale quite simply and sincerely. "Truth," Lingg said to me
once, "is the skeleton, so to speak, of all great works of art." Besides,
memory is in itself an artist. It all happened long ago, and in time one
forgets the trivial and remembers the important.
It should be easy enough for me to paint this one man's portrait. I don't
mean that I am much of a writer; but I have read some of the great

writers, and know how they picture a man, and any weakness of mine is
more than made up for by the best model a writer ever had. God! if he
could come in here now and look at me with those eyes of his, and hold
out his hands, I'd rise from this bed and be well again; shake off the
cough and sweat and deadly weakness, shake off anything. He had
vitality enough in him to bring the dead to life, passion enough for a
hundred men. . . .
I learned so much from him, so much; even more, strange to say, since
I lost him than when I was with him. In these lonely latter months I
have read a good deal, thought a good deal; and all my reading has
been illumined by sayings of his which suddenly come back to my
mind, and make the dark ways plain. I have often wondered why I did
not appreciate this phrase or that when he used it. But memory
treasured it up, and when the time was ripe, or rather, when I was ripe
for it, I recalled it, and realized its significance; he is the spring of all
my growth.
The worst of it is that I shall have to talk about myself at first, and my
early life, and that will not be interesting; but I can't help it, for after all
I