‘And yet, Herr Schurz,’ said Ernest gently, ‘you know we must not after all despair. Look at the history of your own people! When the cause of Jehovah seemed most hopeless, there were still seven thousand left in Israel who had not bowed the knee to Baal. We are gaining strength every day, while they are losing it.’
‘Ah yes, my friend. I know that too,’ the old man answered, with a solemn shake of the head; ‘but the wheels move slowly, they move slowly—very surely, but oh, so slowly. You are young, friend Ernest, and I am growing old. You look forward to the future with hope; I look back to the past with regret: so many years gone, so little, so very little done. It will come, it will come as surely as the next glacial period, but I shall not live to see it. I stand like Moses on Pisgah; I see the promised land before me; I look down upon the equally allotted vineyards, and the glebe flowing with milk and honey in the distance; but I shall not lead you into it; I shall not even lead you against the Canaanites; another than I must lead you in. But I am an old man, Mr. Oswald, an old man now, and I am talking all about myself—an anti-social trick we have inherited from our fathers. What is your friend’s special line at Oxford, did you say, Ernest?’
‘Oswald is a mathematician, sir,’ said Ernest, ‘perhaps the greatest mathematician among the younger men in the whole University.’
‘Ah! that is well. We want exact science. We want clear and definite thinking. Biologists and physicists and mathematicians, those are our best recruits, you may depend upon it. We need logic, not mere gas. Our French friends and our Irish friends—I have nothing in the world to say against them; they are useful men, ardent men, full of fire, full of enthusiasm, ready to do and dare anything—but they lack ballast. You can’t take the kingdom of heaven by storm. The social revolution is not to be accomplished by violence, it is not even to be carried by the most vivid eloquence; the victory will be in the end to the clearest brain and the subtlest intellect. The orthodox political economists are clever sophists; they mask and confuse the truth very speciously; we must have keen eyes and sharp noses to spy out and scent out their tortuous fallacies. I’m glad you’re a mathematician, Mr. Oswald. And so you have thought on social problems?’
‘I have read “Gold and the Proletariate,” ’ Oswald answered modestly, ‘and I learned much from it, and thought more. I won’t say you have quite converted me, Herr Schurz, but you have given me plenty of food for future reflection.’
‘That is well, said the old man, passing one skinny brown hand gently up and down over the other. ‘That is well. There’s no hurry. Don’t make up your mind too fast. Don’t jump at conclusions. It’s intellectual dishonesty to do that. Wait till you have convinced yourself. Spell out your problems slowly; they are not easy ones; try to see how the present complex system works; try to probe its inequalities and injustices; try to compare it with the ideal commonwealth: and you’ll find the light in the end, you’ll find the light.’
As he spoke, Herbert Le Breton lounged up quietly from his farther corner towards the little group. ‘Ah, your brother, Ernest!’ said Max Schurz, drawing himself up a little more stiffly; ‘he has found the light already, I believe, but he neglects it; still he is not with us, and he that is not with us is against us. You hold aloof always, Mr. Herbert, is it not so?’
‘Well, not quite aloof, Herr Schurz, I’m certain, but not on your side exactly either. I like to look on and hold the balance evenly, not to throw my own weight too lightly into either stale. The objective attitude of the mere spectator is after all the right one for an impartial philosopher to take up.’
‘Ah, Mr. Herbert, this philosophy of your Oxford contemplative Radicals is only another name for a kind of social selfishness, I fancy,’ said the old man solemnly. ‘It seems to me your head is with us, but your heart, your heart is elsewhere.’
Herbert Le Breton played a moment quietly with the Roman aureus of Domitian on his watch-chain; then he said slowly in his clear cold voice, ‘There may be something in that, no doubt, Herr Schurz, for each of us has his own game to play, and while the world remains unreformed, he must play it on his own gambit to a great extent, without reference to the independent game of others. We all agree that the board is too full of counters, and as each counter is not responsible for its own presence and position on the board, having been put there without previous consultation by the players, we must each do the best we can for ourselves in our own fashion. My sympathies, as you say, are on your side, but perhaps my interests lie the other way, and after all, till you start your millennium, we must all rattle along as well as we can in the box together, jarring against one another in our old ugly round of competition, and supply and demand, and survival of the fittest, and mutual accommodation, and all the rest of it, to the end of the chapter. Every man for himself and God for us all, you know. You have the logic, to be sure, Herr Schurz, but the monopolists have the law and the money.’
‘Ah, yes,’ said the old Socialist grimly; ‘Demas, Demas; he and his silver mine; you remember your Bunyan, don’t you? Well, all faiths and systems have their Demases. The cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches. He’s bursar of his college, isn’t he, Ernest? I thought so. “He had the bag, and bare what was put therein.” A dangerous office, isn’t it, Mr. Oswald? A very dangerous office. You can’t touch pitch or property without being defiled.’
‘You at least, sir, said Ernest, reverentially, ‘have kept yourself unspotted from the world.’
The old man sighed, and turned for a moment to speak in French to a tall, big-bearded new-comer who advanced to meet him. ‘Impossible!’ he said quickly; ‘I am truly distressed to hear it. It is very imprudent, very unnecessary.’
‘What is the news?’ asked Ernest, also in French.
The new-comer answered him with a marked South Russian accent. ‘There has been another attempt on the life of Alexander Nicolaiovitch.’
‘You don’t mean to say so!’ cried Ernest in surprise.
‘Yes, I do,’ replied the Russian, ‘and it has nearly succeeded too.’
‘An attempt on whom?’ asked Oswald, who was new to the peculiar vocabulary of the Socialists, and not particularly accustomed to following spoken French.
‘On Alexander Nicolaiovitch,’ answered the red-bearded stranger.
‘Not the Czar?’ Oswald inquired of Ernest.
‘Yes, the one whom you call Czar,’ said the stranger, quickly, in tolerable English. The confusion of tongues seemed to be treated as a small matter at Max Schurz’s receptions, for everybody appeared to speak all languages at once, in the true spirit of solidarity, as though Babel had never been.
Oswald did not attempt to conceal a slight gesture of horror. The tall Russian looked down upon him commiseratingly. ‘He is of the Few?’ he asked of Ernest, that being the slang of the initiated for a member of the aristocratic and capitalist oligarchy.
‘Not exactly,’ Ernest answered with a smile; ‘but he has not entirely learned the way we here regard these penal measures. His sympathies are one-sided as to Alexander, no doubt. He thinks merely of the hunted, wretched life the man bears about with him, and he forgets poor bleeding, groaning, down-trodden, long-suffering Russia. It is the common way of Englishmen.