Philistia | Page 3

I
can assure you--don't for heaven's sake go and unbutton your dust-coat.
If you do they'll see at once you're a wolf in sheep's clothing, and I
shouldn't be at all surprised if they were to turn and rend you. At least,
I'm sure Max would be very much annoyed with me for unsocially
introducing a plutocratic traitor into the bosom of the fold.'
They walked along briskly in the direction of Marylebone, and stopped
at last at a dull, yellow-washed house, which bore on its door a very
dingy brass plate, inscribed in red letters, 'M. et Mdlle. Tirard. Salon de
Danse.' Ernest opened the door without ringing, and turned down the
passage towards the salon. 'Remember,' he said, turning to Harry
Oswald by way of a last warning, with his hand on the inner
door-handle, 'coûte que coûte, my dear fellow, don't on any account
open your dust-coat. No anti-social opinions; and please bear in mind
that Max is, in his own way, a potentate.'
The big hall, badly lighted by a few contribution candles (for the whole
colony subscribed to the best of its ability for the support of the weekly
entertainment), was all alive with eager figures and the mingled busy
hum of earnest conversation. A few chairs ranged round the wall were
mostly occupied by Mdlle. Tirard and the other ladies of the Socialist
party; but the mass of the guests were men, and they were almost all
smoking, in utter indifference to the scanty presence of the fair sex. Not
that they were intentionally rude or boorish; that they never were;
except where an emperor or an aristocrat is concerned, there is no being
on earth more courteous, kindly, and considerate for the feelings of

others than your exiled Socialist. He has suffered much himself in his
own time, and so miseris succurrere discit. Emperors he mentally
classes with cobras, tarantulas, and scorpions, as outside the pale of
humanitarian sympathies altogether; but, with this slight political
exception, he is the broadest and tenderest and most catholic in his
feelings of all living breathing creatures. However, the ladies of his
party have all been brought up from their childhood onward in a
mingled atmosphere of smoke and democracy; so that he no more
thinks of abstaining from tobacco in their presence than he thinks of
commiserating the poor fish for being so dreadfully wet, or the
unfortunate mole for his unpleasantly slimy diet of live earthworms.
'Herr Schurz,' said Ernest, singling out the great leader in the gloom
immediately, 'I've brought my brother Herbert here, whom you know
already, to see you, as well as another Oxford friend of mind, Mr.
Harry Oswald, Fellow and Lecturer of Oriel. He's almost one of us at
heart, I'm happy to say, and at any rate I'm sure you'll be glad to make
his acquaintance.'
The little spare wizened-up grey man, in the threadbare brown
velveteen jacket, who stood in the middle of the hall, caught Ernest's
hand warmly, and held it for a moment fettered in his iron grip. There
was an honesty in that grip and in those hazy blue-spectacled eyes that
nobody could for a second misunderstand. If an emperor had been
introduced to Max Schurz he might have felt a little abashed one
minute at the old Socialist's royal disdain, but he could not have failed
to say to himself as he looked at him from head to foot, 'Here, at least,
is a true man.' So Harry Oswald felt, as the spare grey thinker took his
hand in his, and grasped it firmly with a kindly pressure, but less
friendly than that with which he had greeted his known admirer, Ernest
Le Breton. As for Herbert, he merely bowed to him politely from a
little distance; and Herbert, who had picked up at once with a Polish
exile in a corner, returned the bow frigidly without coming up to the
host himself at all for a moment's welcome.
'I'm always pleased to meet friends of the cause from Oxford,' Herr
Schurz said, in almost perfect English. 'We want recruits most of all

among the thinking classes. If we are ever to make headway against the
banded monopolies--against the place-holders, the land-grabbers, the
labour-taxers, the robbers of the poor--we must first secure the perfect
undivided confidence of the brain-workers, the thinkers, and the writers.
At present everything is against us; we are but a little leaven, trying
vainly in our helpless fashion to leaven the whole lump. The capitalist
journals carry off all the writing talent in the world; they are timid, as
capital must always be; they tremble for their tens of thousands a year,
and their vast circulations among the propertied classes. We cannot get
at the heart of the people, save by the